candea non-political and politics

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“Our Division of the Universe”: Making a Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics Author(s): Matei Candea Reviewed work(s): Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 309-334 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659748 . Accessed: 28/02/2012 14:31 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org

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  • Our Division of the Universe: Making a Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology ofPoliticsAuthor(s): Matei CandeaReviewed work(s):Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 309-334Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659748 .Accessed: 28/02/2012 14:31

    Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

    JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

    The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaboratingwith JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology.

    http://www.jstor.org

  • Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011 309

    2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2011/5203-0001$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/659748

    Our Division of the UniverseMaking a Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics

    by Matei Candea

    Anthropologys extremely successful efforts to expand the category of the political has left an-thropologists with a reticence when it comes to the definition of the political itself. The political isleft intentionally open-ended so as to enable critical engagement with an increasing range of topics,but this often entails an abandonment of the political as an ethnographic category. What, for instance,are we to make of claims by bilingual schoolteachers in Corsica that education and politicsshouldin some instances at leastbe kept separate? This article starts from an ethnographicexploration of the boundary between the political and the non-political in Corsican bilingualeducation, suggesting that there is more to it than straightforward antipolitics on the part of theFrench state. Drawing on the one hand on ethnographic evidence of the potentially productive andenabling effects of boundaries drawn between the political and the non-political and on the otherhand on Jacques Rancie`res performative definition of the political, this article suggests that anthro-pology might benefit from an explicit rethinking of what we mean by the politicaland where,if at all, and with what effects we might imagine it to end.

    We therefore have three characteristics that should serve to

    start our division of the universe into what is political and

    what is not. (Swartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966:7)

    Anthropologys definition of politics and its political content

    has almost invariably been so broad that politics may be

    found everywhere, underlying almost all the disciplines

    concerns. (Vincent 2002:1)

    Introduction: Dont ConfuseEducation and Politics

    The small town of Ajaccio in the south of Corsica could bea piece cut from the glitzy garment of the French Riviera.That, at least, was the less-than-complimentary view from thenorth of the island, where my doctoral research was con-ducted. However, when I first arrived in Ajaccio in March2002 for a prefieldwork trip, I was not yet a master of thecultural frames through which some northerners perceive theadministrative capital of Corsica. What was on my mind, asI strode toward the regional offices of the French ministry ofeducation, was how my proposed research project on bilingualschooling would be received by the local authorities.

    Matei Candea is Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the Departmentof Anthropology at Durham University (Dawson Building, SouthRoad, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom [[email protected]]). This paper was submitted 9 III 09 and accepted 5XI 09.

    Corsican bilingual education (see Jaffe 2003, 2005), whichwas given the go-ahead by the French education ministry in1995, was the latest and most extensive instance of a seachange in late-twentieth-century French educational policy.The complex role of schooling in French nation building hasbeen studied at length and has acquired a notoriety far beyondthe circles of academic history.1 With the rise of regionalistmovements in the 1970s, some of the more nuanced analysesof this process were muted by a simpler, more politicallyeffective narrative. According to this narrative, the Frenchstate school had been the uniform and centralized tool ofuniformity and centralization. It had methodically eradicatedlocal languages and local senses of belonging and replacedthem with French and French patriotism. The turn-of-the-century French public schoolheaded by the schoolmasters(instituteurs), the famous black hussars of the Republicwas often portrayed as the cultural arm of the internal co-lonialism (Hechter 1975) through which Paris subjected itsprovinces. Since the 1960saccording to this same narra-tivecommitted regionalists in Brittany, Corsica, and else-where had been fighting step by step to introduce regionalcontent into national education in order to reverse this cen-tury-long process of cultural erasure.

    I had, of course, come across a number of more nuancedretellings of this complex story, to which I return below (seeMcDonald 1989; Thiesse 1997; and for Corsica, Di Meglio

    1. See, e.g., Grew and Harrigan (1991), Noer (1988), Reed-Danahay(1996), Thiesse (1997), Weber (1976), and Zeldin (1980).

  • 310 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011

    2003; Jaffe 1999), but I was vividly aware of the saliency andpower of the simpler moral narrative outlined above. I there-fore expected a whiff of this strong brew of power and re-sistance at my first encounter with the local administratorsin charge of bilingual education. I was sorely disappointed.My first meeting with one of the Corsican administrators ofthe project set the tone for what would be a cordial and mostlyunproblematic welcome into the world of Corsican bilingualteaching. Bilingual education in Corsica had received exten-sive media and academic coverage, and my own appearancewas a comprehensive nonevent. One point, however, was clar-ified by my interlocutor from the outset: I was not to confuseeducation and politics.

    As a warning, the administrator recounted the followinganecdote. A few years previously, a Welsh television crew hadasked him to authorize and facilitate a documentary on bi-lingual education. This he did, opening up a classroom forthe crews benefit. The crew filmed the children learning Cor-sican songs and then interviewed the teacher in the school-yard. The first question they asked was So, when do youthink Corsica will finally be independent? At this point, theadministrator told me he had to intervene. I forbade theteacher from answering he said. He then made it clear tothe Welsh interviewer that they were in a school, and if hewanted to talk about such things, he would be happy to goto a cafe and do so. The crew finished filming and returnedto Wales. A few months later, the administrator continued,he received a copy of the documentary in which he discovered,to his horror and consternation, images of children learningCorsican mixed in with images of armed and masked Corsicannationalists, anti-French graffiti, and the wreckages of bombedhouses and public buildingsthe all-too-familiar iconogra-phy of violent opposition to the French state. Neither he norhis colleagues could understand the Welsh commentary, butit was clear to anyone involved in Corsican bilingual educationthat the documentary was treading roughshod over some im-portant boundaries.

    Post-60s political anthropologywhat Joan Vincent (1990:30, 2002:2) refers to as the third phase in anthropologysengagement with politics2has been grounded in an implicitrefusal to define the political. One symptom of this refusal isthe fact that anthropology (and the humanities and socialsciences more generally) has progressively discovered the pol-itics of culture (Handler 1984); gender (Gal and Kligman2000); food (Appadurai 1981); the body (Bordo 1994); cloth-

    2. Vincent distinguishes three phases in anthropologys engagementwith the political (although her exact periodization varies between Vin-cent 1990 and Vincent 2002). In the first phase, politics is a marginalsubject of interest for anthropologists, whereas the second marks thespecialization of political anthropology within a broad functional andstructural framework. The third, with which I am mostly concerned inthis article, follows from 1960s challenges to anthropology to break awayfrom business as usual . . . and confront the issues of the objectiveworld of national liberation movements, imperialism and colonialism,communism and growing global inequalities (Vincent 2002:3).

    ing (Miller 2005:8); knowledge (Marcus and Fischer 1999:xxii); comparison (Stoler 2001); symmetry (Pels 1996); belief(Huq 2006); taste (Bourdieu 1984); identity (Friedman 1992);race (Stoler 1989); friendship (Derrida 1997); language (Des-jarlais 1996); victimhood (Jeffery and Candea 2006); nature(Latour 2004b); space, time, and substance (Alonso 1994);and indeed the politics of life itself (Rose 2006).

    In and of itself, the multiplication of such politics oflocutions suggests the increasing difficulty of giving any par-ticularly sharp meaning to the first term: it is sometimesunclear in this context how examining the politics of Xdiffers from examining X itself.3 Defining the political wasonce a fairly standard preliminary procedure for authors whoproposed to use the concept but one that has gone intenselyout of fashion in recent political anthropology. One might betempted to argue that the political has become such a per-vasive explanatory form that some anthropologists have for-gotten to ask what politics means, but I think that there ismore to it that this. This lack of definition is constitutive ofpolitical anthropologys own hermeneutics of suspicion (Ri-coeur 1970), the implicit and often explicit principle that weshould refuse to predetermine where the political ends be-cause the political could be hiding in the most seeminglyanodyne, high-minded, or objective of places. Nothing shouldde facto be left off the hook of our critique, because anythingcould turn out to be political. In other words, the unbound-edness of the political cannot simply be put down to sloppythinking or oversight (although there has, of course, beensome of that); rather, the refusal to define the political is apurposeful methodology, one that, as I show below, reachesits apex with the popularization of antipolitics arguments.The problem, howeverand this is the crux of my argu-mentis that this leaves the political itself off the hook. Theone truth that cannot (should not) be historicized or subjectedto genealogy in political anthropology is the political itself.4

    As Vincent (2002) points out, today, political anthropol-ogists consider sensitiveness to the pervasiveness of powerand the political a prime strength (1). I broadly agree withthem, notwithstanding Marshall Sahlinss pithy strictures inWaiting for Foucault, Still (Power, power everywhere; Sah-lins 2002:20). My aim here is not, therefore, to belittle theconsiderable achievements of post-60s political anthropologybut rather to nudge the debate onward, toward the meth-odological value of redrawing the boundaries of the politi-cal.

    My argument resonates with those of some recent voicesin anthropology that have expressed dissatisfaction with thelimitations of the Foucault-Agamben canon (see, e.g., Yurchak2008 and comment by Dominic Boyer). My aim, however, isto prompt a wholesale reconsideration of the political as

    3. This is not unlike (and indeed not unrelated to) the ubiquity ofthe locution the social construction of . . . (for which see Hacking2000).

    4. An important exception is Andrew Barrys Political Machines (2001).

  • Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 311

    an anthropological analytic. What does this term or conceptdo for us, what has it come to mean, and what kinds ofinsight does it enable or impede? In this respect, my argumentis in tune with a more general concern that critique in thesocial sciences has run out of steam (Latour 2004a).

    Principally, however, the argument emerges from the par-ticular ethnographic context adumbrated in my opening vi-gnette. This is in important ways an anthropological argumentfor, as well as from, ethnography. For as Jonathan Spencer(2007) recently pointed out, the particular deficit that hascrept into political anthropology is of an ethnographic nature.I argue that this ethnographic deficit is a direct consequenceof the expansion of the political as an analytical category. Thetheoretical openness to the pervasive nature of the politicalhas made it very difficult to see the political as an ethno-graphic category. Let me illustrate this by returning to myopening vignette.

    This situation might seem deceptively simple to interpret.Is this not, after all, a classic gatekeeper situation, one withwhich anthropologists are only too familiar? Here we have astate official, himself in a rather complex political positionwith regard to potentially conflicting loyalties, allowing meinto a politically sensitive research space but in return sug-gesting political limitations on the account I should produce.Many current anthropological observers would agree thatwhatever else it may be, his injunction not to confuse edu-cation and politics is an eminently political move in itself.The scene, then, clearly reveals the French schools role as anantipolitics machine (Ferguson 1994). There is value in thisinterpretation, and I flesh it out below. But the drawback ofsuch an analysis is that by itself it cannot take seriously whatthis man is actually saying.

    The educational officials attempt to separate two concep-tual spacesthe space of politics in which claims are made(violently or otherwise) on the French state and the other,non-political, space of education in which children areschooled and Corsican is taughtis entirely out of joint withthe sensibilities of political anthropology and its hermeneuticsof suspicion. Yet the price of this suspicion, which in and ofitself may be quite healthy, is ethnographic sensitivity. I amnot, of course, suggesting that we simply take the educationalofficers word for it, but neither should we rush to dismisshim. For if we redefine this educational officials separationof education from politics as in itself a political move, wehave de facto trumped and discarded his own interpretationof what he is up to. The problem is not simply that we aredisagreeing with him (there is nothing necessarily wrongabout that) but that redefining the whole situation as po-litical thereby renders the distinction he is attempting todraw unintelligible: we are unlikely ever to inquire what hemeans by the political (nor is it particularly clear what wemean by it either). We will have effectively given up on thepolitical as an ethnographic category.

    Politics, Limited

    The administrators statements bring to mind the kind ofclassic or limited definition of politics against which theanthropological study of politics has historically constituteditself; the political theorist Michael Oakeshott will serve as anavatar. For Oakeshott, political activity is one type of humanactivity that happens alongside and is distinct from otheractivities (he gives the examples of fishing, writing poetry,raising a family, etc.; Oakeshott 2006:3334). Oakeshott fur-ther specifies three conditions for the emergence of politicalactivity. First, political activity requires a particular socialsetup: the existence of a plurality of human beings associatedthrough common rules and norms yet divided by a diversityof sentiments, feelings, and beliefs. As he puts it, politics,from one important point of view, may be said to be theactivity in which a society deals with its diversities (Oakeshott2006:35). Thus far, however, almost anything could be polit-ical. Second, the really discriminating feature in Oakeshottsdefinition is that political activity requires a particular insti-tutional setup: a distinction between public and private anda government, a ruling authority that is concerned withpublic affairs. Here Oakeshott is in the tradition of those who,like Max Weber, understand by politics only the leadership,or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association,hence today, of a state (Weber 1998a [1918]:77). Third,Oakeshotts definition of politics requires a particular con-ceptual setup: a shared belief that government, law, and policy(or at least one of the three) are not fixed by nature or ne-cessity but amenable to change through human choice anddecision (Oakeshott 2006:36).

    Most readers will recognize in Oakeshotts definition pre-cisely the kind of limited notion of the political againstwhich political anthropology, particularly in its poststructur-alist incarnations, has developed its critique. There have ofcourse been attempts within anthropology to proceed to sim-ilar definitions of the political, notably Swartz, Turner, andTudens (1966) famous introduction to Political Anthropology,from which my title is drawn. And yet, as far back as Fortesand Evans-Pritchards African Political Systems (1940), eventhose anthropologists who considered the political as a dis-tinct domain have been wary of the patently Eurocentric ten-ure of most definitions of the political that they encounteredin political philosophy. Oakeshott (2006), who claims thatthere have been many peoples who have had no politics,and who are consequently innocent of political thought (34)and indeed that politics is, in the main, a European inven-tion (36), is unlikely to find much favor with anthropologistsof any generation. He is interesting for my purposes here,however, first because at least some of the people I workedwith in Corsica would, in the main, agree with him (although,of course, other people I worked with there would not), whichopens up a poignant conflict of interest between anthropol-ogys tradition of ethnographic attentiveness and its equallyentrenched suspicion of European political philosophy: what

  • 312 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011

    if Oakeshott were your informant? Second, Oakeshott is in-teresting because his limited notion of the political high-lights what I have described as the refusal to define the po-litical in recent anthropological work on the subject.

    Refusing to Define the Political

    As my earlier enumeration of politics of titles suggests, oneof the central projects of the anthropology of politics fromthe 1970s onward has been an extension of the concept ofthe political to fields that would not, in the above limiteddefinition, be considered political. This has served to highlightthe undeniable political importance of subjects that were tooeasily forgotten in an Oakeshott-style approach, but it hasalso led to a concomitant weakening of the meaning of thepolitical itself.

    Other factors have contributed to the undefinition of thepolitical in anthropology, notably the old suspicion againstpredetermined Eurocentric concepts mentioned above.Equally important was the problematization of the main cri-terion of the limited (let us call it Oakeshott-Weber) definitionof politics, namely, the state as a unitary and identifiableinstitution. We could perhaps trace this to Abramss Marxist-Engelsian critique of the state as an idea, a legitimating fictionof a common striving for the common good that obscuresthe reality of the mundane, interested, and often uncoordi-nated contests of power that make up the individual andinstitutional state system (Abrams 1977). In Abramss ac-count, the state is no longer either a legitimate collectiveagent or a set-apart or privileged space; it is revealed asbeing made up of the very same stuff as the rest of humanreality: power contests between human beings. Abrams thuscalls for a demystifying critique of the state idea. Along withthe material boundary between state and nonstate, what isimplicitly dissolved in Abramss account is the categoricalgrounds for a boundary between the (classically defined) po-litical and non-political. The state cannot be a criterionseparating properly political activity from other relations ofpower because it is a mere mask behind which we find nothingmore than relations of power.

    My argument here follows in the line of those who haveargued, contra Abrams, that anthropologists need to attendto the continuing effects in peoples everyday lives of the stateand of the production of a state-society boundary (Mitchell1991; Navaro-Yashin 2002). To follow this insight to its logicalend, however, means also attending to the ways in which aboundary between the political and the non-political (the kindthat Oakeshott talks about) can actually be realized. To saythis is to consider the non-political not as an ideological,discursive, or psychic effect of (implicitly more real or atleast prior) political processes but on precisely the same leveland with the same reality as the political itself. This is thepart that much recent political anthropology seems to forgetin its refusal to bound the political, to leave anything outsideit.

    For as a result of the expansion of the political in anthro-pological analysis, the non-political has tended to becomefigure rather than ground. While classic political theorists suchas Oakeshott marked out the political against the enormousbackground of everything that was not political (fishing, po-etry, raising a family, etc.), the anthropology of politics hasincreasingly begun to problematize this non-politicalground as an effect of politics itself. Indeed, a central featureof political anthropology has been its relentless questioningof the imagined safe havens in which politics supposedlydoes not operate. For the non-political is often claimed pre-cisely as a sphere in which we could feel safe and leave asideour critical acumen: in the non-political, we can bask in thereflected warmth of community or human emotion or exertourselves with a clear conscience in the disinterested pursuitof objective truth; in the non-political, we can rest on oursolid moral judgements about what is right, and we can followthe voice of our beliefs and enjoy beauty and partake of(high-)cultured entertainment. These various non-politicalspaces are those that anthropologists have progressively be-come suspicious of. Politics is there, too, says the realist.Politics should be there too, says the activist.

    Increasingly, such non-political spaces have come underscrutiny as the products of antipolitics or depoliticization.While such arguments are usually attributed to a Foucaultianturn in anthropology, a notable earlier use of the term de-politicization dates back to Carl Schmitts interwar essay TheConcept of the Political (Schmitt 2007 [1927]:2123), in whichhe challenges the supposedly apolitical nature of religion, cul-ture, economy, law, or science (2223) and vehemently rejectsuniversalism (5455), claims to impartiality (27), and appealsto humanity (54), justice, and freedom (66) as all being, bydefinition, political ploys that take the form of a depolitici-zation. The current popularity of antipolitics arguments inthe social sciences and humanities is not unrelated to therediscovery of Schmitt by radical critical theorists and phi-losophers in the 1990s (Agamben 1998; Mouffe 1993).5

    In anthropology, however, the depoliticization argumentfirst emerged through James Fergusons extremely influentialaccount of the development apparatus in Lesotho as

    an anti-politics machine, depoliticizing everything it

    touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight,

    all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-

    5. There has been much heated debate around the need to and pos-sibility of dissociating Schmitts theory from his involvement with theGerman National Socialist Party. Without reopening that particular canof worms, it remains the case that reading Schmitts The Concept of thePolitical from our present historical vantage point brings home ratherchillingly how indebted his arguments seem to be to a specific reactionagainst the purportedly impartial or universal justice of the victoriousallies in World War I (Schmitt 2007 [1927]:54, 73, nn.). Indeed, Schmitthimself explicitly relates his arguments to various historical momentswhen it became important for the German people to defend themselvesagainst an expanding enemy armed with a humanitarian ideology (66).

  • Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 313

    eminently political operation of expanding bureaucratic

    state power. (Ferguson 1994:xv)

    If we take this argument at face value, the non-political ishere the result of an eminently political operation on a pre-existing political reality. This double moveexpanding thepolitical, problematizing the non-politicalproduces a fig-ure-ground reversal (Wagner 1986:99). Politics is no longermerely a subset of human action (as in Oakeshott or Weber),the rest of which is presumably something other than political.Political reality is the ground from which everything (eventhe supposedly non-political) is madepolitically.

    It is notable but perhaps not surprising in this context thatwhile arguments about the political are a constant feature ofanthropological writing, definitions of the political are in-creasingly rare. Often, political anthropologists have arguedby implicit analogy to the classic, limited definition of politicswhile extending its purview. It is notable, for instance, thatneither James Ferguson in The Anti-Politics Machine (1994)nor Nikolas Rose in his excellent The Politics of Life Itself(2006) feels the need to open with a definition of politics.In a post-Foucaultian world in which everything is danger-ous (Foucault 1983:231), defining the political is coming toseem not a pointless or scholastic enterprise but a positivelyillicit or suspicious one. For to define the political, to boundit, also means defining something outside it, a non-politicalsomething anthropologists seem rather shy of doing, becauseit would expose them to the accusation of depoliticization.Not so the people whose lives we share and study, however.

    Politics, Alterity, and Argumentsfrom Ethnography

    An extremely powerful technique in anthropological con-frontations with political philosophy has been the foreground-ing of an ethnographic case that does not fit: a context inwhich supposedly universal or merely taken-for-granted con-cepts (the state, civil society, participatory democracy, thepublic sphere, etc.) are not analytically useful or are cast ina new and surprising light. Such an approach may seemtempting here, given the extensive anthropological literatureon the particularities of politics in Corsica, whose principalfocus has been on the interface between local systems ofpatron-client relations and national politics (Dressler-Holo-han 1993; Gil 1984; Olivesi 1983; Ravis-Giordani 1983:129141). From this literature, one could imagine an argumentresting on a reconstruction of an alternative Corsican politicalsensibility at odds with mainstream Euro-American politicaltheory; this would then allow one to claim that the educationaladministrators notion of politics would be irretrievablymangled by the imposition of our assumptions about thepolitical. However, this is not the approach taken here.

    For while the above analyses of Corsican politics have inthe main been sensitive and nuanced, it would be unwise touse this literature to overemphasize the distinctness of Cor-

    sican politics. As anthropologists such as Fernandez (1983)and Pina-Cabral (1989) have argued of the broader traditionof anthropological studies of patronage in the Mediterra-nean (Banfield 1958; Gellner and Waterbury 1977; Pitt-Rivers1954), culturalized distinctions between northern and south-ern European understandings of politics, when drawn rig-idly, tend to tell us more about northern Europeans self-image than they do about southern Europeans actualpractices.6 Indeed, such distinctions (between proper po-litical functioning and patronage, between civic sense andpersonal self-interest, between local and national politics) arethemselves part of the ethnography. To use them as analyticaldevices, therefore, is not simply insensitive; it is to miss alarge part of the picture. In the case I am concerned with,such distinctions have been central to French discourses aboutCorsica since the nineteenth century. Indeed, the discursiveconstruction of Corsica as a problematic internal other hasbeen a key part of the process of French nation building, towhich I return below (see also Candea 2010a, chap. 2). Inparticular, the definition of proper French political processand civic behavior has often relied on the externalization ofunwanted features (personal ties, interests, patronage, etc.),which could then be invoked as counterexamples else-whereCorsica being the usual suspect in these cases.7

    Today, such concerns still animate debates about the cat-egory of the political in Corsica, with distinctions drawn be-tween high and low politics (alta pulitica and bassa pu-litica or pulitichella; see Ravis-Giordani 1983:129141).

    6. This is perhaps most evident in Banfields (1958) infamous contrastsbetween the amoral familism of a southern Italian backward societyand proper American civic sense. As Fernandez (1983) puts it with moregeneral reference to anthropological attempts to locate a Mediterraneanculture complex, One must be aware how invidiously, if implicitly, thisconcurrent set of traits exalts the values of the northern core countriesand justifies the subordinate condition of the southern peripheries (168).

    7. In a typical instance of this kind of discursive work, French jour-nalist Paul Bourde wrote in 1887, The word politics no longer has thesame meaning in Corsica as on the continent. On the continent, Frenchvanity means that the voter who goes to add his ballot to the box isconvinced that he is deciding the question of the happiness of humanity;he gives his vote to the system of government which, in his mind, mustbring about universal virtue and happiness. The purely theoretical natureof his choice softens the bitterness of defeat. If his ideas fail to rally themajority, he tells himself that the world will only be happier sometimelater, and he returns, without grudge, to his own business. But in Corsica,politics and business are one and the same thing; on his ballot, the voteris risking his safety and his personal fortune. Victory brings immediateadvantages, and defeat carries the promise of unbearable vexations(Bourde 1999 [1887]:7980; except as noted in References Cited, alltranslations are my own). Explicitly, the aim of this passage is to describea strange Corsican approach to politics that deviates from the nationalnorm. But the effort that goes into defining this national norm (theFrench voters disinterested and idealistic engagement with politics) sug-gests that it, rather than the supposed Corsican particularity, is at thecenter of the account. Corsican political practices act as the framing devicefor the definition of proper French administrative functioning. In thisway, Bourde is externalizing a distinction between proper and improperpolitical practice that ran through contemporary French discussions ofmainland politics as well.

  • 314 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011

    Contrasts between selfish and selfless, concrete and abstract,interpersonal and impersonal, local and national do not, inother words, map two different political ontologies, one Cor-sican and one French or Euro-American. These contrasts andthe debates that emerge from them are the very fabric of whatthe political means in Corsica (as indeed they are in France).In this respect, and despite differences in tone and content,contemporary debates around the political in Corsica (andFrance) draw on the same enlightenment traditions and Eu-ropean canons of political philosophy (including Weber,Schmitt, etc.) against or with which anthropologists have tra-ditionally pitched their claims. Here, as in other respects, ourrepresentations are on the same level as peoples own per-ceptions of themselves (McDonald 1993:235; see also Reed-Danahay 1993).

    In particularand this is my main interest herefor manypeople I worked with in Corsica, it is rather important toremember that not everything is political, and the boundariesbetween what is and what is not political are an importantpart of reality even though they may disagree radically overwhere these boundaries actually are or should be. In this, theyaccord with the position of thinkers such as Oakeshott andWeber rather than with Foucault or Ferguson. Others, orindeed the same people at other moments, espouse a Fou-cault-like position according to which everything is political.

    In sum, my method here is to take the counterpoint ofclassic ethnographic theorizing. Rather than hold up alterityas a challenge to the canons of European political philosophy,I ask what happens to our critique of these canons when wetry to consider them with the same ethnographic sensitivityanthropologists traditionally accord to their fieldsites. Withthis in mind, let us go back to bilingual teaching.

    Bilingual Education in Corsica

    Recent historical sources on the turn-of-the-century expan-sion of French public schooling have tended to temper thefamiliar image of a relentless centralized drive to eradicateregional diversity in language and culture. Certainly, manypoliticians and educators bent on turning peasants intoFrenchmen (Weber 1976) saw themselves as continuing thework of revolutionaries such as Gregoire and Barre`re, forwhom the patois were instruments of damage and error(Bertrand Barre`re [1794], quoted in de Certeau, Julia, andRevel 1974:291ff.) that needed to be broken and replaced byFrench. However, there were also far more nuanced positions.Schoolteachers were admonished to study and try to under-stand their local surroundings (Thiesse 1997:1014, 103117).Some pedagogues and educational administrators, followingMichel Breal, suggested that schoolmasters use the local patoisin school as an aid to learning French (Boutan 1998; Chanet1996; Di Meglio 2003). During the first part of the twentiethcentury, school geography and history manuals were region-ally adapted to exalt the historical greatness and picturesquebeauty of the pupils region alongside that of France as a

    whole (Thiesse 1997). The state schools reproduced the dis-course of regionalist societies on the need to preserve andcherish local folklore (Thiesse 1997:104ff.). Patriotic feelingand an attachment to France, the great Fatherland, weretheorized by pedagogues as a secondary development follow-ing a primal attachment to ones region, ones little Father-land (Thiesse 1997:15ff.). These ambivalences do not, how-ever, change the fact that through the combined action ofschooling, military service, and the use of French in publicemployment, regional languages were progressively relegatedover the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tothe private sphere when they were not altogether extinguishedby the expansion of French (for an account of this processin Corsica, see Jaffe 1999).

    At the same time, as Anne-Marie Thiesse argues,

    the school of the [Third] Republic had made local iden-

    tities into heritage in a way that valorized the link between

    the individual and his immediate environment consistent

    with national integration. (Thiesse 1997:120)

    The subsequent move, in Fourth- and Fifth-Republic school-ing, away from the specific glorification of the regional tomore general panegyrics of an imagined French rurality dis-articulated the regional from the national while retaining thenostalgic imagery of a rural paradise lost. This, in part, laidthe ground for the revival of regionalism in the late 1960s,with its antagonistic framings of region versus France (Thiesse1997:120). This is the context that saw the emergence ofprivate schools run by associations of enthusiasts for theteaching of regional language and culture. These schoolswere often adamant about providing a radical alternative (po-litical and pedagogical) to the French state system (McDonald1989; Urla 1988). In Corsica, however, the main drive ofregional language teaching focused on the French publicschool system, the Education Nationale (Di Meglio 2003; Jaffe1999; Noer 1988). The main private educational association,Scola Corsa, organized optional Corsican lessons in publicschools during the 1970s, but there were never any indepen-dent schools as such. Even Scola Corsa slowly subsided asCorsican language militants concentrated on the French pub-lic school as a terrain for the teaching of Corsican.

    The gradual expansion of the teaching of Corsican in thepublic school followed a range of national legislative decisionsstarting in 1974, when the Deixonne law allowing the teachingof local languages and dialects was extended to Corsicanlanguage and culture (langue et culture Corse [LCC]). A yearlater, the limits of this new school subject were fixed to 1hour per week in primary school and up to 3 hours per weekin secondary school; in 1982, after the change to a socialistgovernment, this timetable was extended to 3 hours per weekfor all levels, and provision was made for a 3-year experimentin the use of Corsican as a teaching language, known as leCorse integre (integrated Corsican); in 1995, the journal ofthe Education Nationale laid out the official guidelines forthe creation of bilingual sites; in 2001, these guidelines were

  • Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 315

    updated, and a distinct recruitment path for regional-languageschoolteachers was created within the national administration(Di Meglio 2003; Jaffe 1999; Noer 1988).

    From the start, these legislative changesoriginally set inmotion by the demands of regionalists and nationalists inCorsica and elsewherewere matched and anticipated onthe ground (in the classic spatializing terminology so aptlydeconstructed by Ferguson and Gupta 2002) by a number ofschoolteachers who were also committed supporters of theCorsican language. Over the years, many of these teachersmoved up the administrative ladder, becoming inspectors,pedagogical advisors,8 teacher trainers, and regional ad-ministrators for LCC. When bilingual education was author-ized nationwide by the ministry in 1995, these LCC admin-istrators saw the potential of the new legislation and movedto open a few bilingual classes on the island. This involvednegotiations and information meetings with schoolteachers,parents, and sometimes local government officials. Theschools chosen for the opening of bilingual classes were thosein which the project would find teacher support, that is tosay, schools in which strongly committed teachers were al-ready using Corsican, often beyond the official mark of 3hours a week.

    While it would be misleading to refer to them as a close-knit community, teachers and administrators committed tofurthering LCC, even when they were not in direct contact,knew of each others teaching posts, news, and promotions.The local-level LCC administrators, such as inspectors andpedagogical advisors, who often paid formal and informalvisits to teachers in their schools, relayed this information,together with news about legal and administrative changesrelevant to the teaching of Corsican. These informal networksfound institutional support in the pedagogical meetings,training courses,9 and at the recently formed bilingual teach-ers association, A Sciolilingua.

    It is a common characterization in Corsica that teachersand educational administrators who are highly committed to

    8. Inspectors are nonteaching educational officers of various rankswithin the administration. One inspector oversees each district (circon-scription) within an academie. It is their responsibility to periodicallyinspect the work of every teacher in their district. Pedagogical advisorsare also nonteaching officers of lesser rank whose role is to keep teachersinformed on particular fields of education. Each academie has a numberof pedagogical advisors, for instance, for music, arts, sports, and, morerecently, regional languages.

    9. Pedagogical meetings were organized every term by pedagogicaladvisors for bilingual teachers from the district (circonscription). Theytook place in the district offices of the Education Nationale and lasteda few hours at most. Training courses, which could be held at districtlevel or at the level of the whole island, were part of the EducationNationales continuous training policy (la formation continue)theidea being to keep teachers up to date with new pedagogical developmentsand to give them a chance to gain new skills and advance their careers.Courses were organized every year in every academie on various sub-jectssports, music, sciences, and, in Corsica since the late 1970s, LCC.In 20022003, I attended a 1-week district-level training course and a 3-week regional-level one held at the Corsican university at Corte.

    Corsican language and culture are often broadly sympatheticto regionalism and in some cases to nationalist political pro-jects. Some, although by no means all, adhere to nationalisttrade unions, and some are members of nationalist parties.To give a sense of the latters representation in Corsican pol-itics, nationalist parties united under a single banner for thefirst time in 2004 and garnered 17.34% of votes, winning 8out of 51 seats at Corsicas local parliament (Assemblee Ter-ritoriale). There are, however, a multiplicity of ways of beingcommitted to Corsican culture and identity beyond the nar-row confines of nationalist party politics. Furthermore, themultiplicity and complexity of the Corsican regionalist/na-tionalist scene, both underground and official, and the widespectrum of their methods, aims, and discourses are such thatit would be quite absurd to deduce from a commitment tonationalism (let alone to Corsican culture) an acceptance ofarmed combat against the French state or a claim for theindependence of Corsica, as the Welsh TV crew seemed tohave done (for a comprehensive English-language study ofearly Corsican nationalism, see Loughlin 1989; for later de-velopments, see Hossay 2004).

    The constitution of this network of LCC teachers solidifiedin the 1990s at a time when, in the words of Janne Jensen(1999), the Corsican language had ceased to be a hot potatopolitically (85) to the extent that its existence, its positivestatus, and the need for the government not just to recognizeit and allow its teaching but even to be proactive about doingso, had all become fairly commonplace. In 2001, the Frenchsocialist minister for national education, Jack Lang, visited anumber of Corsican bilingual schools in person. In September2002, the school of the village I was working in received anofficial visit from the head of the regional assembly. Thesevisits and events, at which the health and progress of thebilingual project were officially celebrated, were echoed in theregional media.

    From the perspective of the bilingual teachers I workedwith, however, this image of a wide and triumphant proCorsican language consensus was deceptive, and the enemiesof the Corsican language were still out there. This was notjust a vague accusation; in private, bilingual teachers coulddraw quite precise pro-Corsican and anti-Corsican mapsof the island. Indeed, current official support could not simplyerase decades of a fraught sociolinguistic history, and theteaching of Corsican in schools still raised strong feelingsamong those parents, teachers, and educationalists who, inline with the educational discourses of their youth, consideredFrench to be the proper language of public schooling (seeJaffe 1999, 2007). It is against this complex background thatI return to the administrators injunction not to confuseeducation and politics, which we can now begin to unpack.

    French National Education as aPrepolitical Space

    The administrator was, first of all, referring to a specificity of

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    the French educational system. Given to a young researcherhailing from a British university, his injunction not to confuseeducation and politics was not framed as a universal truth somuch as a call to attend to and respect a national specificityin a move familiar to anthropologists, the Welsh crew wereoffered up as an example of the dangers of categorical mis-match (McDonald 1989): one might say that they had missedsomething very French.

    In recent years, debates around the French state school asa supposedly neutral space have centered mostly around re-ligion, following the famous law banning the wearing of re-ligious symbols (Bowen 2006; Silverstein 2004). Yet the muchpublicized French concerns with secularism (lacite) are onlyone element, albeit a central one, in broader conceptualiza-tions of the state school as a neutral space. Thus, the 2003report on religious symbols on which the controversial de-cision was based justified lacite in terms of the followingbroader principles:

    Pupils must be able to learn and construct themselves in a

    serene climate so as to attain autonomy of judgement. The

    States duty is to shield their minds from the violence and

    fury of society: although it should not be a sterile environ-

    ment, the school must not become the echoing chamber

    for the passions of the world, lest it fail in its educational

    mission. (Stasi 2003:14)

    The passions of the world include not only the specter, everpresent to French educationalists, of religious fundamental-isms but also the cut and thrust of party politics. Further-more, schoolteachers and educational administrators, likeother civil servants (fonctionnaires), are under what is knownas the obligation of reserve. As the government Web sitedetailing the rights and duties of civil servants, puts it, Theprinciple according to which the public service shall be neutralforbids the civil servant from making his office the instru-ment of any form of propaganda (http://www.fonction-publique.gouv.fr).

    The flip side of the civil servants obligation of reserveis his legally guaranteed right to freedom of opinion, be itpolitical, philosophical, or religious. The law known as Loi lePors (1983) states this explicitly: Freedom of opinion is guar-anteed to civil servants (La liberte dopinion est garantie auxfonctionnaires). As a reward for enforcing the states contain-ment of the political, the state employee him- or herself isentitled to a space of private interiority within which thepolitical can be given free reign.

    The principle behind this containment of the political isas old as the definition of the national French schoolingsystem itself. Jules Ferry, a Comtian positivist and the min-ister of education who in 18821883 passed the famous lawsdeclaring school to be mandatory, free of charge, and secularfor 613-year-olds, wrote the following in 1881, in a famousopen letter to schoolteachers:

    One terrain, gentlemen, on which I allow and indeed rec-

    ommend that you hold firmly to your right is that of ev-

    eryday militant politics. Do not allow yourselves to be made

    into political agents. . . . Were you to encounter indiscreet

    administrators or, what is more likely, overly pressing can-

    didates, you would answer Our minister does not wish it.

    (quoted in Ozouf and Ozouf 2001:141)

    This rejection of politics by a minister may seem coun-terintuitive if not outright laughable from the purview of apost-Foucaultian hermeneutics of suspicion. But in keepingwith what I wrote above, I would like to suspend that criticalreflex for a moment and examine this ethnographically as acultural logic of sorts. Such a willing suspension of disbeliefis one of anthropologys most trusted methodswe shouldbe prepared to apply it to what is familiar as well as to whatis alien. How does this claim to separate the political fromthe educational make sense in its own terms? I will argue thatthe consistency of this view for its proponents is that theschool is not so much non-political as it is prepolitical.The abstention from politics is integral, in this view, to therole of the school in framing and constituting the politicalitself.

    Examined ethnographically, the logic here is replete withpsychological and developmental assumptions entwined withan Oakeshott-style political philosophy: the space of the po-litical is understood to be a space of debate in which rational,autonomous actors pursue their divergent interests and goalswithin a broadly common framework; the formation of aproperly political subject requires an extended operation onthe malleable mind of the child who must, on the one hand,be formed to this common framework but must not, onthe other, be prematurely foreclosed by an early indoctri-nation into one or other political ideology. This is not unlikeWebers delimitation of the educators role in science as avocation: not to instill particular values or propound specificpolitical projects but rather to furnish students with the fac-tual knowledge and the critical tools they need to contextu-alize, analyze, refine, and in the end better pursue whicheverprojects and values they choose to pursue (Weber 1998b[1918]).

    The school thus emerges as a veritable political machine(Barry 2001), one that makes possible the political (later) bysuspending it (now).10 Its aim is, in principle, to produce

    10. Described in this way, the state-driven suspension of the politicalseems like the perfect instance of Agambens (1998) state of exception:the sovereign suspension of the political that founds the political order.I have more to say about Agamben later in the article, but suffice it tosay for now that this model does not account for the temporal, durationalaspect of the phenomenon I am describing. The Agambenian sovereigndecision is profoundly antidurational: it is both an instantaneous, arbi-trary, foundational act and also permanently present, always justifyingand enabling sovereignty, its precedence logical rather than veritably tem-poral. By contrast, the French schools suspension of the political happensin the extended yet limited durational time frame of teaching, forming,and informing. It is neither instantaneous nor eternal: from the point ofview of the individual pupil passing through it, it lasts for a while andthen stops. In this sense, it differs also from the kind of suspension ofthe political proposed by Jameson (2004; see Yurchak 2008:213). Jame-

  • Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 317

    politically active citizens: votersbut not voters of a specificparty. As Barry (2001) reminds us, the political actor doesnot come isolated into the political arena any more than theconsumer comes isolated into the market place. They comewith a whole array of material devices and forms of knowledgewhich serve to frame political action (86).

    The French school has been configured for more than acentury to function as one such framing device: as the nine-teenth-century schoolteacher and later senator Jean Mace(18151894), founder of the influential league for schooling(Ligue de lenseignement), famously noted, the schoolteachersrole is to form electors, not to influence elections (quotedin Ozouf and Ozouf 2001:144). Notwithstanding the extensivechanges in French education in the intervening century (Prost1992), much of this logic remains in present-day definitionsof school as a neutral spacenot sterile, because the flameof reason must be fed some limited and controlled amountof contention, but protected from the passions of the worldthat could so easily snuff it out.

    To return to my own specific case, the administrators dis-tinction between politics and education was thus drawingon a century-old history of French national education. It isinsofar as the school protects children from a prematureentry into politics that it can form and shape them intoadequately prepared citizens who can then enter the politicalarena armed with a range of prepolitical skills and knowl-edges that are better left to the positive purview of pedagogicalscience than to the vagaries of political decision.11 In otherwords (and I am still speaking ethnographically), a distinctionbetween the political and the non-political is crucial in en-abling the political itself.

    Critique Is in the Field

    Now for the critical reflex. Any anthropologist who has readJames Fergusons (1994) excellent dissection of developmentwill recognize in the above an antipolitics machine, an ex-tremely well-honed mechanism for the containment of thepolitical that naturalizes and removes from political conten-tion the framework within which politics is then supposed tooperate, the kinds of actors who are supposed to participatein it, and the range of matters to which it applies. But hereagain, the critique can be found ethnographically. For in-stance, Stephane, a bilingual schoolteacher to whom I men-

    sons suspension of the political (which as Yurchak points out, chimesin with Rancie`res visions of politics as a foundational, utopian act) refersto what one can only call a revolutionary refusal to play the game ofpolitics and accept the existing political regime. I refer to the space ofthe school as prepolitical rather than antipolitical in order to point tothis processual aspect.

    11. The fact that Emile Durkheim had a more than accessory handin honing and disseminating such French definitions of national edu-cation in the early twentieth century opens up a series of links to fas-cinating recent explorations into sociology, positivism, and the contain-ment of politics that I unfortunately do not have space to pursue here(Karsenti 2006; Latour 2005b).

    tioned the educational administrators comment, respondedprecisely in this Foucaultian vein. He noted that in the Cor-sican context, it was very clear that political was being usedby the administrator as a code word for nationalist. Hecomplained that being opposed to nationalism would not becounted as political whereas supporting it would, and hedenounced the double standards according to which defini-tions of the political are drawn up. Shoring up these doublestandards, in his view, was the entire setup of the Frenchstates apolitical school. Stephane thus provides us with anindigenous critique of the antipolitical mechanism ofFrench state education that closely parallels the hermeneuticsof suspicion to which political anthropology is accustomed.

    Yet even Stephane, while he was keen to denounce any falseclaims to impartiality and was intimately convinced that ev-erything is political, still described his own teaching practicein terms that reintroduced some measure of distinction fromthe rest of his political engagement. Although he was a mil-itant for the Corsican Green Party, Stephane noted that agood teacher does not proselytize. Those opposed to na-tionalism had no qualms proselytizing in their classrooms(under cover of supposedly not being political), he claimed,but not so he. But then what is proselytizing if not confusingpolitics and education? The rivers of French political theoryrun deep.

    Whereas Stephanes reaction to the administrators sepa-ration of education and politics was one of suspicion,another, much more sympathetic reading was given by Pascal,the bilingual schoolteacher of the village of Crucetta withwhom I worked most closely throughout my time in Corsica.12

    Like Stephane, Pascal pointed out that political here meantnationalist, but he went on to explain that keeping politicsand education separate was important in the fraught contextin which Corsican bilingual schoolteachers (and LCC teachersmore generally) worked. For a prime accusation that theiropponents leveled at LCC teachers, both in overt confron-tation and through widespread gossip and insinuation, wasprecisely that they confused education and politics. In Cru-cetta, the village in which I did most of my fieldwork, wildrumors ran about the educational practices of Pascal the bi-lingual schoolteacher: was he teaching entirely in Corsican,ignoring French-speaking children who did not understand?was he promoting nationalist agendas and indoctrinating hispupils in antistate rhetoric? Parents who befriended me in thevillage often asked me to report back to them on such matters,and these rumors continued to run no matter how often Iexplained that, on the contrary, Pascal adhered meticulouslyto the official 50%/50% bilingual timetable, made sure all thechildren understood by repeating the most difficult Corsicanwords and phrases in French, and steered clear of any dis-cussion of party politics in the classroom.

    Bilingual schoolteachers were extremely vulnerable to such

    12. Names of people and places are pseudonyms except for the regionalcapital Ajaccio.

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    accusations, however, by virtue of being intricately enmeshedin the often contradictory associations and processes de-scribed above: employees of the French state performing astate-sponsored project that itself had been carried by thedemands of antistate nationalists with whom some of theteachers had more than passing sympathies. The Welsh TVcrew, following their own agenda and probably with somedegree of naive sympathy, had collapsed this complex land-scape into a straightforward tale of educational-political ac-tion, showing bombs and grammar to be part of the sameproject. Opponents of bilingual education in Corsica oftendid the same, with much less naivete and much more directimpact.

    The force of the accusation that LCC enthusiasts confusededucation and politics can be understood only in the contextof the particularly strong distinction between these two realmsinstituted by the French state, and the LCC enthusiasts de-fense was mostly couched in the same official language. Nearlythe entirety of Pascals beginning-of-year meeting with parentsconsisted of his explanation of the solid pedagogical basis ofthe bilingual method, drawing evidence from linguists, psy-chologists, and pedagogues to the effect that early bilingualismis good for a childs intellectual development. On one oc-casion, my presence in the room was explicitly pointed to asan indication of the scientific interest that the bilingual projectwas attracting. No mention was made of political projects orclaims (nationalist or otherwise), and when the choice ofCorsican (over English, for instance) was justified, it was pri-marily in terms of the long-standing pedagogical principlethat a child should be coaxed from the known into the un-known, from immediate reality to abstract principle, frompatrimonial attachments to universal openness.13

    At the same time, Pascal made no secret in the village ofhis personal attachment to Corsican nationalism. As he him-self put it, I dont hide my flag in my pocket, and he claimednever to have obeyed the official injunction to vote in theprivacy of the booth (isoloir). However, such considerationswere explicitly excluded from this particular setting; here thefocus was on educational matters. When we discussed theadministrators injunction to separate education and politics,Pascal made it clear that this separation was much more thana ploy: it entitled him to a measure of personal freedom, thefreedom to vote the way he did and yet to be able to teachwithout the political dogmatism of some convinced nation-alists: Children, after all, are a different audience, he noted.

    In Stephane and Pascal we have, in effect, two differentresponses to the accusation that bilingual teaching is overlypolitical (read nationalist). Stephane challenges the sep-aration between politics and education, whereas Pascal provesthat he is enforcing it. Before we are tempted to conclude

    13. This pedagogical principle, which is at least as old as RousseausEmile (Thiesse 1997:17, 63), was reflected in an Education Nationalecatchphrase popular at the time of my fieldwork: anchoring oneself soas to be more open (sancrer pour mieux souvrir).

    which is the more mystified or counterhegemonic of thesetwo strategies, it would be worthwhile to consider two things.First, Stephanes rejection is far from absolute: because he stillwishes after all to critique the propaganda put forward bycolleagues of opposing political persuasions, he must retainsome basic features of the notion that there should be a limitto the political; hence his strictures against proselytism. Sec-ond, Pascals upholding of a separation between politics andeducation can be a most enabling way of pursuing a politicalproject, a dichotomy necessary to attain a unity of purpose.

    What this section shows is that debates around the political,where it is, and where it ends, are intrinsic to this as to manyother contexts in which anthropologists work. Politics thusmust be retained as an ethnographic category, which willsometimes entail a suspension of a critical reflex that comesall too easily to anthropologists today. With the political, aswith everything else, we should be prepared, as Bruno Latour(2005a) puts it, to allow actors to deploy their own contro-versies and not to interrupt them on the assumption that weare much better placed than they to know what the politicalis to begin with. Crediting people with the capacity to thinkthrough their own problems need not entail a loss of criticaledge. Indeed, we will usually find that critique is already thereethnographically, and we may find comfort for our own crit-ical impulses in those of the people we work with.14

    On the other hand, allowing actors to deploy their owncontroversies can introduce elements that a premature criticalreflex might have made us miss, such as, here, the notion ofthe productive (rather than merely repressive) potential of adistinction between the political and the non-political. Par-adoxically, the French national education system emerges asboth a politics and an antipolitics machine, a mechanism thatby containing politics also enables it in a range of differentways. This is only a special case of Foucaults famous pointabout the productive nature of power, but applied to politicsitself, it is a special case that could turn the entire traditionof critical sociology on its head.

    Necessary Dichotomies

    We employ a dualism of models merely in order to reach

    toward a process that would negate any model. [Dualisms]

    are the enemy, the necessary enemy, the piece of furniture

    we are forever moving. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980:31)

    In contexts other than those described above, Pascal acknowl-edged, indeed defended, the fact that his educational practice

    14. I draw my inspiration here from a comment by the late SusanBenson, made some years ago to an undergraduate caught in the throesof the relativism-versus-critique debate: if you disagree with somethingthe people you work with are doing, you will almost invariably find thatsomeone else there disagrees with it, too, albeit on their own terms andfor different reasons. Critique is, in other words, immanent in the eth-nographic context, which is why there is no contradiction in practicebetween relativism and engagement.

  • Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 319

    was informed by his personal political convictions. Yet at nopoint did he collapse this distinction. The separation betweenpolitics and education was not merely a mask that allowedhim to counter accusations; it was intrinsic to his own def-initions and justifications of his practice, particularly by op-position to that of other teachers. Pascal, who had been acommitted advocate of the Corsican language since the 1970s,was sometimes gently critical of the newly qualified teachersof the younger generation. He felt that because they had comethrough a system in which teaching Corsican in school anduniversity was already an established reality, they lacked theirforebears sense of militant engagement. While he consideredthese youngsters too institutionalized and academic, however,Pascal was equally dismissive of those of his own generationwho had not grounded their enthusiasm for Corsican lan-guage and culture in solid pedagogical bases and who, likethe independent Breton schoolteachers in the 1970s (Mc-Donald 1989), had turned their teaching into an antistruc-tural, carnivalesque experience premised on an explicitly po-liticized rejection of French educational norms. Baking cakesand singing Corsican songs was all very well, but only if itwas grounded in a solid pedagogy (for a complex accountof the interplay of politics and pedagogy in the bilingual class-room, see Jaffe 2003).

    Pascal also distinguished education from politics in his dis-cussion of trade unions. Although, as we have seen, he wasa convinced nationalist, he did not subscribe to the nationalistunion Syndicat des Travailleurs Corses (Syndicate of CorsicanWorkers; STC) in part because his experience as a teachermade him dubious of their hard-line position on language.He recalled an STC demand, long before the establishmentof bilingual education, that all teaching be done entirely inCorsican. He commented wryly that they make me laugh,explaining that no teacher at the time could have done it evenif any child could have understood it. Even today, he oftensaid, bilingualism cannot be decreed; however desirable apolitical move, teaching bilingually requires a level of skill,on the part of both the teachers and the pupils, that can onlybe the result of patient and painstaking applicationthe kindof skill he had spent a lifetime acquiring. In sum, one mightsay, to borrow Bruno Latours characterization of the specificpower of modernity,15 that it was Pascals painstaking pu-rification of politics from education that allowed him to soeffectively translate them into each other in his own practice(Latour 1993).

    15. In positing the intertwined processes of purification and trans-lation as the characteristic hallmark of modernity, Latour (1991) suggeststhat the power of the moderns has rested precisely in the explicitpurification of nature from society and of humans from nonhumans,which covered (and thereby allowed) an implicit translation resultingin new hybrids: The moderns believe that their expansion is due solelyto the careful separation of nature and society, . . . while in actual fact,they succeeded because they mixed much larger masses of humans andnon-humans, without bracketing anything off, and allowing themselvesany potential combination! (61)

    Nor was this a purely individual concern. Among them-selves, bilingual teachers were constantly rethinking the sep-aration between political engagement and pedagogical prac-tice. The association A Sciolilingua is a case in point. ASciolilingua (the tongue twister) aimed to provide a forumfor bilingual teachers outside of the structures of the Edu-cation Nationale. It had been created by two highly committedteachers of Corsican who had been actively engaged in thepromotion of Corsican throughout their careers and were,like Pascal, among the earliest practitioners of bilingualism.Many members of A Sciolilingua were also members of thenationalist trade union STC. Like trade union meetings, ASciolilingua meetings took place in the classroom of one oranother of the members outside of school hours. Discussionsin A Sciolilingua meetings were often critical of the admin-istration and the ministry in a way that was generally moresubmerged in other public contexts, such as the pedagogicalcourses. As a result, in A Sciolilingua, as in trade union meet-ings, the position of Corsican enthusiasts and former teacherswho were now administrators could sometimes be revealedas slightly ambiguous.

    However, any practical link between the association andthe trade union was explicitly rejected by one of the founders,who explained that la revendication (antagonistic politicizeddemands, characteristic of trade unions) was contrary tolesprit associatif (the spirit of association). Although A Scioli-linguas founders were keen to be identified as outside theofficial system, their main aim was to encourage discussionand cooperation among bilingual teachers and facilitate thesharing of pedagogical experiences and practices, to comple-ment, in other words, rather than directly challenge the Ed-ucation Nationale.

    Furthermore, the notion that a specific category of actionthat concerned, as Weber (1998a [1918]) would have put it,the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of . . .[the] state (77) was to be kept separate from education itselfwas nowhere more crucial than when the teachers flirted withthis boundary, as they occasionally did. In one training sem-inar for bilingual schoolteachers, for instance, the fairly senioradministrator suggested in his opening addressostensiblyas a pedagogical pointthat it would be easier to create aCorsican environment for pupils if the school personnel(including teaching assistants, administrative staff, janitors,etc.) were all Corsican speakers. This comment held powerfulimplications in the context of many Corsican nationalistscontroversial demand for affirmative action on the Corsicanjob market (a claim referred to as the Corsicanization ofjobs); in the current sociolinguistic landscape of Corsica, torestrict jobs to Corsican speakers would mean restrictingthem, in practice, to Corsicans, something that the Frenchstate in 2003 (and indeed now) was highly unlikely to allow.The reference, however veiled, was not lost on those present,and hence, at the administrators suggestion, there were know-ing smiles, hums, and one or two comments of dream on!

    On the same occasion, the district primary-school inspector

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    suggested that the teachers work of today might lead to-morrow to what he referred to in a very roundabout way aslinguistic results in institutional terms (des retombees lin-guistiques au niveau institutionnel). Here, the reference wasto the nationalist demand for the promotion of Corsican tothe status of an official language on a par with French in allpublic institutions (Jaffe 1999). The inspector immediatelyqualified this by saying its not necessarily what were after.

    The extremely powerful distinction between education andpolitics that runs implicitly through these examples both in-hibits and permits such subtle challenges and repositionings.Once again, purification and translation are conjoined. It isthe separation between education and politics that enablesthe smuggling of positions from one side to the other: ishaving a Corsican-speaking team a pedagogical question oris it a political one? If enough people speak Corsican as aresult of effective schooling, will this amount to a politicaloutcome? As issues are shifted subtly from one side to theother of this border between the political and the educational,the border itself is shifted and transformed.

    My argument here dovetails, up to a point, with that of arecent paper by Alexei Yurchak (2008). Yurchak shows howRussian Necrorealist artists during the Soviet years subvertedthe power of the state, opening up zones of freedom at thevery heart of the state of exception, by engaging in what heterms a politics of indistinction based on a suspension ofthe political. The result is a powerful challenge to Agambensformulations about bare life: While the states bio-politics isthe mechanism that enables the creation of the subject-citizen,there are contexts in which it cannot fully account for thatsubject (Yurchak 2008:221). I would go farther, however;there are contexts in which it does not try. The Necrorealistsdescribed by Yurchak managed to subvert the states attemptsat total control, producing what Boyer in his comment onthe piece calls zones of subjectivity and agency (Yurchak2008:216) by constituting themselves simultaneously as po-litical and nonpolitical subjects (Yurchak 2008:214). By con-trast, the bilingual teachers do not need to do this; this doubleposition is already institutionally set up for them. By natu-ralizing the prepolitical authority of the educational whileenshrining the right of the civil servant to personal politicalpositioning, French national education produces teachers assubjects who are empowered and limited in specific ways:empowered insofar as they can draw on the uncontested au-thority of the prepolitical (as educational experts) while re-taining the right to an unquestioned interior political space;limited insofar as their legitimacy rests on the interdiction totransgress this boundary. But in the context of multiple andshifting attachments, conflicting pressures and demands, thevery work that is constantly necessary in order to hold apartpolitics and education leads teachers to reconfigure thatboundary itself (cf. Yarrow 2008b for a similar argument re-garding productive dualisms in development). The Frencheducational system as a politics machine opens up some

    zones of subjectivity and agency for both its teachers andits pupils in the very act of closing others.

    This, in sum, is the ethnographic observation: bilingualschoolteachers are sometimes acting politically and sometimesnot while all the while reflecting on and inflecting what thisdifference entails. We may be tempted to step back from thisas anthropologists and redescribe this entire metaprocess aspolitical. I think that we should resist this temptation. Forif we redefine, for instance, everything Pascal is doing as po-litical (including his constant work on his own Corsican lan-guage skills, his study of pedagogical principles, or the atten-tion he pays to making sure weaker pupils keep up), wethereby remove the very thing that gives his practical inter-ventions their power and effect.16

    Conclusion: Taking Politics Seriously

    It should not be forgotten that there is a specificity to pol-

    itics. Max Webers sense of the importance of considering

    the particular characteristics of politics as a vocation has

    often been forgotten in the effort to expand our sense of

    politics. (Barry 2001:86)

    The expansion of the political and the concomitant suspiciontoward the non-political in anthropology are in themselvesvery productive moves. One of the most fundamental insightsof post-Foucaultian anthropology is that non-political spacehas to be produced, that there is nothing natural, basic, orunquestionable about the kinds of spaces that are routinelyclaimed to lie outside of politics. The non-political is an out-come of action rather than some natural backdrop for it.

    The pitfall in this denaturalization of the non-political,however, lies in a concomitant naturalization of the political.Often, the price to pay for insight into the non-political isan assumption about the ontological status of politics as thereally real ground of reality. If politics simply becomes thenew real against which the (always ultimately illusory) pro-duction of the non-political is to be studied, then we havejust exchanged one set of blinkers for another. To leave un-questioned the ontological status of political realities whenwe happily dissect that of figures of the non-political such asethics, objectivity, economics, or taste seems rather strange.Why does politics deserve this privileged treatment? Whycan it not actually be an ethnographic object in its own right?Or in other words, why could we not, as anthropologists,refrain from establishing the political as either figure orground but rather attend to it as the people we work withmake it appear?

    Such an ethnography of politics might find an uneasy andpartial ally in the French philosopher Jacques Rancie`re (2004;also Nordmann 2006). Rancie`re claims that political philos-ophy negates politics insofar as it seeks to ground political

    16. This is why I would not extend to this case Yurchaks thought-provoking coinage of a politics of indistinction.

  • Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 321

    action definitionally, once and for all, in a specific distributionof reality. If this takes care of Oakeshott (and the Frencheducational systems neutral school), Rancie`re is no kinderto the inspiration behind much of the anthropology of pol-itics. He criticizes the metapolitics of suspicion that fromMarx through Althusser and Bourdieu (and we might addAbrams and others) has concentrated on revealing the wayideals of equality are perverted and negated by an unequalsocial reality. For Rancie`re, for whom the performative as-sertion of equality is the first sign of politics, the often well-intentioned hermeneutics of suspicion that denounce falseclaims to equality have an effect exactly the opposite of whatthey propose to achieve: they cancel politics by constantlyreducing the possibility of equality to the reality of inequality.This sociological account of politics, which has lost anyredemptive purpose, merely enshrines inequality by redes-cribing it.

    By contrast to both classical political theory and the her-meneutics of suspicion, Rancie`re defines politics recursivelyas the redrawing of the demarcation itself:

    Political action consists in showing as political what was

    viewed as social, economic, or domestic. It consists

    in blurring the boundaries. It is what happens whenever

    domestic agentsworkers or women, for instancere-

    configure their quarrel as a quarrel concerning the common,

    that is, concerning what place belongs or does not belong

    to it and who is able or unable to make enunciations and

    demonstrations about the common. It should be clear there-

    fore that there is politics when there is a disagreement about

    what is politics, when the boundary separating the political

    from the social or the public from the domestic is put into

    question. Politics is a way of repartitioning the political from

    the non-political. This is why it generally occurs out of

    place, in a place which was not supposed to be political.

    (Rancie`re 2003:3)17

    One could draw various conclusions from this passage, oneof which would involve enlarg[ing] our definition of politicsto the point where it accepts its own suspension (Latour2005a:35), which would lead us once again to the conclusionthat everything is political, including the non-political. How-ever, what I wish to retain from the above is not this butrather the implied reality and concreteness of the non-politicalas an actually existing condition for and outcome of politicalaction. And at the risk of departing quite radically from whatI think is Rancie`res own intention here,18 I will draw thesymmetrical conclusion: that the political is itself a result andcondition of non-political action. The political and the non-political emerge as opposed performative projects rather thanas figure and ground (Jeffery and Candea 2006). As Andrew

    17. By this definition, political anthropologys expansion of the po-litical is indeed a political act as long as it is an always-recommenceddemonstration and does not become a de facto analytical truism.

    18. Those interested in a more faithful anthropological treatment ofRancie`re should read the above-mentioned article by Yurchak (2008).

    Barry (2001) puts it, Those engaged in politics are necessarilyconcerned with the tension and the relation between politicaland antipolitical activity; between the politicisation and thedepoliticisation of other realms (4). Claims about the polit-ical or non-political nature of various spaces are an intrinsicpart of the performative process that make such spaces existor inexist (Bourdieu 1980; cf. Austin 1975; Mol 1999).

    Suddenly, what the educational official was saying beginsto make more sense. What as a descriptive statement seemedeither obviously naive or obviously deceitful (how could youseparate education from politics?) is perfectly cogent as partof a performative project. The educational official was ob-viously aware both that one could very well connect andindeed mix up education and politics (this is what the Welshfilmmakers did) and that when this is done by people withsome measure of representational power, such as filmmakersor anthropologists, it could have severe negative effects onthe very intricately balanced project he was involved in. Failingto respect the boundary he was indicating would not be somuch a descriptive mistake as an adverse performative in-tervention on his lived reality.

    My proposal, then, is that anthropology keep in view bothdepoliticization and politicization, both antipolitics machinesand politics machines of various kinds. This requires us totake seriously the achieved spaces of the non-political in whichthe people we work with have invested themselves. What welose thereby in instant, out-of-the-box critique we gain inethnographic sensitivity. Why does this matter? Because (andhere is the coda) much of what I have said about bilingualteachers applies also to anthropologists. Post-60s political an-thropology has accustomed us to think of the discipline asan intrinsically political or critical project; for such a projectto have any effect, however, anthropology still must retain itsdistinctive ability to separate (at least momentarily) ethno-graphic sensitivity from critical intent.

    Comments

    Michael CarrithersDepartment of Anthropology, Durham University, SouthRoad, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom([email protected]). 3 VIII 10

    Some years ago I was in the audience at a local rally againstone of the United States foreign wars when a speakerwhowas, like me, a studenturged a plan for more united andvigorous antiwar action, and he capped his argument withthese words: If youre not part of the solution, youre partof the problem! Judging by the applause around me, thisshot hit the bulls-eye, and it may even have led to moreconcerted action. But for me the speakers words led to im-mediate prereflective distaste and rejection and later to a line

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    of somber reflection that Candeas lucid and engaging ar-gument has revived for me.

    Candeas argument has many strands: it can be read asmethodological, arguing for ethnographic openness againstprepackaged theorizing, or it can be read asI hesitate touse the wordpolitical, arguing for discursive-political equal-ity between the ethnographer interpreting subjects lives andthe subjects interpreting their own lives. Orand this is whatdraws Candeas argument together with my own reflectionshis argument can be read as moral, a matter of evaluatingactions toward others in the light of a moral aesthetic standard(Carrithers 1992). Candea expresses this moral judgmentwhen, at the end of his essay, he again raises the educationalofficials hard-won distinction between education and politics.One could, implies Candea, reinterpret the officers dis-tinction as being itself political and therefore a sort of self-misunderstanding. But that would be wrong, argues Candea,for such a reinterpretation would not be so much a descrip-tive mistake as an adverse performative intervention on [theeducational officials] lived reality. Similarly, the antiwarspeakers presumption that if I did not agree with his plan Iwould be part of the problem was an adverse performativeintervention on my lived reality (although the word chutz-pah comes to mind more readily).

    Let me call the argument shared by these two cases thejujitsu trope. I choose the term to suggest that it projects,in the first place, a twist, a flip, a total reinterpretation of asituation. So it has an effect that appears in so many settings:in Marxist explanations, in Foucaultian ones, in psychoana-lytic redescriptions, or indeed in many religious descriptionsof apparently everyday life. In all these cases ones immediateunderstanding is overturned by some other, allegedly morepenetrating, understanding. But the act of interpretative flip-ping does something else as well: it reinterprets the interloc-utors in the speech situation. Thus, if I have the nerve to tellyou that what you thought was a simple dream in fact has asexual meaning revealing your secret desires, or that youravowedly non-political ideas are in fact entirely political, Ihave not only made an assertion about reality but have alsomade myself into the defining authority over your reality. Ihave flipped you, my interlocutor, from equal conversationalpartner to passive recipient of my wisdom. And it is just thisimplicit moveimplicit because, if it were explicit, it wouldnever work so wellthat I rejected when I rejected the antiwarspeakers presumption and that Candea rejects when he res-cues the educational officers actual views from distortingreinterpretation. Similarly, the Welsh filmmakers, who showedthe teaching of Corsican mixed with violent nationalism andthereby perverted the education officials careful distinctions,may be judged morally as breaking the trust between officialand film crew.

    Another of Candeas examples, however, presents a moredifficult case, and that is Fergusons (1994) anti-politics ma-chine. Ferguson argues that as a result of the discourse ofdevelopment in Lesotho, state power ends up or turns out

    to be much extended, although that was not the stated aimof the discourse. The argument owes much to Foucault inthree senses: (1) there is a systematic effect achieved throughdiscourse, (2) the effecting system is impersonal, and (3) theapparently non-political discourse can be flipped to show thereality of its pervasively political nature. Candea evaluatesFergusons argument as excellent, and we could conceivablyinfer that excellence to be morally positive in that Fergusonuses the jujitsu trope on behalf of those victimized by bu-reaucratic power.

    But I suspect that this excellence cannot, in fact, be moralin nature. For Ferguson takes great pains to show the system-atic and impersonal effects of discourse such that any actualrelation of persons that might be called moral is effaced.In fact, to add morality would be to do injustice to Fergusonsargument, and I imagine that neither Candea nor I wouldtake so immoral a step. Rather, the excellence of Fergusonsargument is incommensurable with the moralizing argumentwith which Candea ends his own (excellent) reasoning. Nev-ertheless, the two styles of thought must be entertained to-gether, which can be done only through irony. But then, asI have pointed out in this journal (Carrithers 2005), irony isthe natural, indeed desirable position of anthropologists. Foras Kenneth Burke observes, irony is a perspective of per-spectives among which none of the participating sub-perspectives can be treated as either precisely right or pre-cisely wrong. They are all voices, or personalities, or positions,integrally affecting one another (Burke 1969 [1945]:512).

    Charlie GalibertCentre Interdisciplinaire Recits, Cultures, Langues et Socie-tes, Universite de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, Campus Carlone,98 Boulevard Herriot, 06204 Nice Cedex 3, France([email protected]). 23 VIII 10

    Matei Candeas article approaches the question of the anthro-pological definition of politics (and of doing politics) eth-nographically through an exploration of the boundaries be-tween spaces involved in the order of the political in bilingualeducation as it is practiced in Corsica within the legislative andpedagogical frameworks of the Education National. This in-teresting distinction provides me with an occasion to reflect onthe kind of Mediterraneanist analyses whose popularity haveled some to suggest the existence of fundamental north/southcultural oppositions or perhaps even a clash between two dif-ferent political ontologies: the one Mediterranean and theother European or Euro-American.

    Anthropologys return from its distant and exotic fields tothe local and the nearby is seen as having led to a fetishizationof the local object through the invention of an infra-Europeancultural area, the Mediterranean, under the influence ofAmerican anthropologys interest in peasant communities,values of honor and shame, and small-scale local commu-

  • Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 323

    nities. In the synthesis of their review of the anthropologyof the Mediterranean (Albera, Block, and Bromberger 2001),Bromberger and Durand (2001:742743) note the family re-semblances that make such diverse (and in some cases evencontradictory/opposed) societies comparable, complementingthe picture drawn by geographers and ethnohistorians.

    Lenclud (1977), in his Corsican fieldwork, had alreadynoted that his anthropological approach to Corsica had to bedetermined by the phenomena he proposed to study. Theconstant practice of detac