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Marriage as a Strategy How to Achieve a Higher Social Status?

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:24:00 -0500

Marriage as a Strategy How to Achieve a Higher Social Status?

©Tessa Valo, 2007

Abstract: The aim of this brief article is to discuss the extent to which marriage can be conceived of and serve as a strategy how to achieve a higher status within a given social hierarchy. We will examine this topic through examples from several, in some respects radically different, social systems – from the nineteenth-century Cuba, traditional Hindu caste system, the social organization of Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea to the twentieth-century Italy. We will argue that though marriage can, in some cases, serve as an effective strategy how to achieve a higher status, it must always be accompanied by other salient factors relative to the respective social system - thus it can not serve as a mean how to achieve this aim alone, but must always - to definite extent - go hand in hand with other culturally approved ways which lead to this goal.

The classical descent theorists conceptualized marriage as a recognized relationship that has, as such, the potential to create legitimate heirs and successors and thus assure the continuity of the given social order as well as of their own selves (Yanagisako & Collier 1996:235). This aspect of marriage will turn out as a crucial one in our discussion of different marriage strategies; the moment of perpetuation of the given social order and hierarchy and of one’s position within it is always present, hypergamy - i.e. the practice of selecting a spouse with a higher social status than oneself – might be thus seen from this perspective rather as an exception to the rule (which, in a sense, strengthens it).

Our first example will take us to the nineteenth-century Cuba, where hypergamy in a form of interracial marriage, though not common, functioned as an effective mean how to climb up the social ladder. The social position of an individual in the nineteenth-century Cuba was first and foremost determined by his or her family origin – where African origin generally implied slavery and low status – but personal achievement could, to some extent, alter the ascriptive status (Martinez-Alier 1989). The social hierarchy in Cuba had a class rather than racial nature, though class was associated and expressed in racial terms[1] (the whiter the higher status and the other way round). Choosing physical appearance as a criterion to classify the society hierarchically was comprehensible in a system where slavery, i.e. low status, was associated with a dark skin color, and this criterion would work perfectly well if interracial marriages/cohabitation (together with immigration of Chinese and American Indians) would not occur and thus would not produce ambiguous uncategorizable cases. The intraracial marriage was, according to the official policy, an ideal; ethnic groups or rather groups of people sharing the same/similar phenotype and/or skin color were conceived as the basic endogamic units, where the hereditary principle determined their membership and perpetuation (Ibid. 134). Thus group exogamy as a rule took the form of hypergamy – either in a form of marriage or hypergamous free unions. What made the hypergamous (interracial) marriages and unions possible to occur was the fact that “consensus as to the legitimacy of the ‘fundamental’ nature of the social order was absent” (Ibid. 138) together with a certain idea of social mobility and first and foremost with the penetration of the primarily Christian notion of equality into the secular ideology. Hypergamous marriage, which meant social advancement for the inferior woman and most importantly for her offspring and no automatic loss of status on the part of the white man, was facilitated by the absence of generally approved and legitimized rigid social structure and hierarchy. The hypergamous marriage thus meant equality, though it was still an exception – here we can clearly see that marriage generally served (and serves) as a mean of reproduction and perpetuation of the already existing social hierarchy even though ways how to advance through marriage might be found especially in a situation of the emergence of ‘ambiguous cases’ which could undermine the legitimacy of the official vision of the social structure.

Now we will look closer at another example coming from the traditional Hindu society and its caste system as it is described by Dumont (1980). Dumont analyzes the hierarchical caste system and - importantly for our example - focuses on the deviations from the endogamic rule (which is understood more as an implication of hierarchy than as an independent principle), showing that these deviations (hypergamy) rather than disruption of the integrity of the social system, partake on its very spirit. He describes a practice of hypergamy encountered in north India, where there exists a slight status difference between spouses, an inferiority of wife’s family in relation to the husband’s, which is considered normal and does not even effect the offspring’s status (Dumont 1980:116; cf. Davis 1941; Khare 1972). The significant difference between the caste system, as described by Dumont, and the above presented example from the nineteenth-century Cuba lies in the fact that an Indian is ‘born into a caste and dies in it’ (though sub-castes can slightly modify their collective status). But what is more “in northern India, hypergamous marriage being the rule, it meant hierarchy carried into the most intimate spheres of the system” (Martinez-Alier 1989:139). Marriage thus again has the primary function of reproduction of the given social order and though hypergamy occurs, its function is in its consequences rather precisely the opposite than we would wait - it is an institutionalized part of the given social system.

Now we will have a closer look at a radically different social hierarchical system and at if there exists a possibility how to advance on the social ladder through marriage, namely that of Trobrianders of the Papua New Guinea. We will first focus our attention on the system of the social hierarchy of Trobrianders, especially on the chieftainship and the crucial role of yams (not only in relation to marriage). In the Trobriand system “a person’s right to sit higher than the rest comes from his birth and the authority brought by his ancestors”, but “how many people will actually sit under him comes from the authority he himself is able to summon” (Weiner 1987:103). Thus a person can have legitimacy, but even though he can lack power, therefore “every person, including chiefs, must work to develop power in their relationships with others” (Ibid. 103). The power of a Trobriand chief is highly localized and covers his own hamlet and other villages and hamlets only through individual matrilineages to which he is connected through his women or the same place of origin of the ancestors; the chief is thus in a need to expand this primary network and to seek support with hamlet leaders in different villages. Power is in the Trobriand society tightly connected with economy (or rather economic status) and economy means yams and yams can be highly effectively acquired through marriage, i.e. through yams produced for women by her matrilineal kin. Chief’s full yam house not only symbolizes that he is powerful but also assesses his strength and his success in the continual negotiations of his status and relations mainly with his kin as well as non-kin. Thus when there are good harvests chief can expand his wealth and in such way also his power, he can be generous and distribute yams as a payment for villagers’ work which in turn gives more glance to his status. As we have seen, chiefs have the privilege to be polygynous; this enables them to acquire more yams, thus more wealth and power than a common man could ever dream about. “Even if a hamlet leader is very strong and has five or six men making gardens for him, in addition to his wife’s yams, his accumulation is limited when compared to what a chief can expect” (Ibid. 106). Thus in this system “women that chiefs marry assume a role of great consequence in their political careers” (Ibid. 106), or rather – it is not only women but women and her matrilineal kinsmen that play the crucial role, since it is the alliances which are the most important and whose strength is expressed in the quantity and even quality of yams in chief’s yam house. Marriages are thus one way how to expand the chiefs network of allies and probably the most effective on which other means (derived from the amount of yams gathered) rest. The social hierarchy of Trobrianders thus rests on a combination of ascribed and achieved statuses; as a member of a given ascribed status one has definite rights and privileges which one must respect but on the other hand has also the possibility to improve ones standing through work in the yam gardens and possibly through profitable marriage. But even though a slight social mobility is possible through one’s activity, radical change in status is practically excluded, because for the first the rights and privileges ascribed to each status group themselves prevent the occurrence of such mobility by favouring the chiefs and leaders so that the commoner can never outdo them on the basis of his work and for the second, that the social relations expressed in and also dependent on the yam production and thus also wealth must be continually negotiated and reaffirmed (not less because of the perishable quality of yams). Even here we can see that marriage primarily serves as a mean of reproduction of the given social hierarchy; though for the women (and consequently also their kin) who marry the chief, this can mean an upward change in their status, this practice in its consequences only strengthens the social hierarchy, the social division and maintains the already existing social order.

Our last example comes from the twentieth-century Italy and its ‘bourgeois class’ of family firm owners in the district of Como (Yanagisako 2002). Before we proceed to the role marriage can play in this social system, we will first have a look at how firms are reproduced and under what conditions the upward social mobility can occur. Understandably all family firm owners aspire to move up the Como industrial hierarchy and even a high degree of upward mobility in the local systems of such firms is reported. The goal of reproduction and upward movement depends on successful transmission of the firm to the next generation and on the effective accumulation and reinvestment of the capital. The social hierarchy of the Como bourgeoisie is by no means rigid and impervious; it is the other way round. The character of the class is rather temporal (Yanagisako 2002:99). Though the class (especially the upper class) could be reproduced through marriage (in case of marrying out of the daughters of the family firm owners[2]), the main weight rested on the shoulders of the nuclear family and specifically its sons, who were trained to reproduce the social status and even to move the family up on the social ladder. But what is more, in the upper fraction of the Como bourgeoisie “strict boundaries are drawn between the family and in-laws, who are sometimes even excluded from holding shares in the firm […] sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, no matter how accomplished or skilled, are not considered viable candidates for firm management” (Ibid. 176). Here sentiments such as fear and distrust to in-laws that are conceived as having no personal attachment or bond established to the family firm and can thus represent a potential threat to the firm and its emergence, come into play. Marriage can not serve (at least for upper fraction of bourgeoisie) as an effective strategy of acquiring of a higher social status since that/it is dependent on considerably different factors such as capital accumulation and effective marketing strategies and development.

We have peeped into four different hierarchical social systems and looked at the possibility of marriage as a mean how to achieve a higher social status. In Cuba this strategy, though not broadly diffused, was effective, which was made possible by the non-rigidity and no generally shared legitimacy of the social hierarchical system. In the Hindu traditional society hypergamy, on the other hand, in fact strengthened and became a part of the given hierarchy and had no real consequences for the social status of the offspring. In Papua New Guinea marriage (and in case of the chief marriages) could serve the purpose of acquiring a higher social status but only within the limits given by the ascribed statuses. In the case of upper fraction of Como bourgeoisie advancement through profitable marriage alliances was for the family firms and their families not possible. We can thus conclude together with Bourdieu that

marriage strategies as such must not be seen in the abstract, unrelated to inheritance strategies, fertility strategies and even pedagogical strategies. In other words they must be seen as one element in the entire system of biological, cultural and social reproduction by which every group endeavors to pass on to the next generation the full measure of power and privilege it has itself inherited (Bourdieu 2002:558)

Resources

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002. Pierre Bourdieu on Marriage Strategies. Population and Development Review. 28(3):549-558.

Davis, Kingsley. 1941. Intermarriage in Caste Societies. American Anthropologist. 43(3):376-395.

Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. The University of Chicago Press.

Holy, Ladislav. 1996. Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. London: Pluto Press.

Khare, R. S. 1972. Hierarchy and Hypergamy: Some Interrelated Aspects among the Kanya-Kubja Brahmans. American Anthropologist. 74(3):611-628.

Leach, E. R. 1961. Rethinking Anthropology. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology. No. 22. London: Athlone Press.

Martinez-Alier, Verena. 1989. Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1974. Woman, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview. In: Rosaldo, M. & Lamphere, L. (eds.). Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford University Press. pp.17-42.

Weiner, Annette B. 1987. The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Thomson Wadsworth.

Yanagisako, Sylvia J., Collier Jane F. 1996. Comments on “Until Death Do Us Part”. American Ethnologist. 23(2):235-236.

Comaroff, J. 1992. Of Totemism and Ethnicity. In: Comaroff, John & Comaroff, Jean (eds.). Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Westview Press. Pp. 49-67.

Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko. 2002. Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton University Press.

[1] This may be paralleled with Comaroff’s statement about ethnicity: “The origins of ethnic groups and consciousness may lie in the structuring of inequality. But, once objectified as a ‘principle’ by which the division of labor is organized, ethnicity assumes the autonomous character of a prime mover in the unequal destinies of persons and populations. To wit, just as working class black Americans do not view their blackness as a function of their class position, but their class position as a function of their blackness” (Comaroff 1992:59).

[2] But it must be noted that here it comes just to reproduction of social status as such on the offspring, with no relation to the reproduction of firm and ‘family’ social status which is here crucial, since the woman becomes a part of the family of her husband and thus looses the relation to her own family of orientation.

Power, Resistance and their Religious Manifestations: The Cases of the Colonial and Postcolonial Period

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:23:00 -0500

Power, Resistance and their Religious Manifestations: The Cases of the Colonial and Postcolonial Period

©Tessa Valo, 2007

Introduction

As the title of this essay suggests, we will be concerned here with the fundamental relation between power, resistance, and the religious manifestations of these. Though power and resistance can take many forms and are as such to a definite degree present in almost any conceivable ritual practice, be it initiation ceremony chisungu or rites performed by the Christian Church, we will focus our attention on two more explicit examples of this interplay, which stem from the interaction of two different conceptual systems; these being the language game played by the colonizers and another played by the colonized. The situation of the colonial and postcolonial subject is in other words an example par excellence in relation to our object of interest. But before we can proceed to the concrete examples, a brief theoretical sketch is highly needed; we will operate here with three rather problematical notions, i.e. the notions of power, of resistance and of the “religious”, which all call for clarification, even though the space here is limited.

The concept of power (and consequently also the one of resistance) has become almost an obsession in social sciences of the last few decades[1] (especially with the help of its influential promotion by Foucault), and we thus have to be more careful when using it, not to fall in the realm of reductionism of such notions as ‘power is an aspect of every social relation and interaction’ or, as Walzer has called it, ‘micro-fascism of everyday life’ (cf. Brown 1996). There is, of course, no doubt that the whole of social life entails degrees of domination and subordination, but the institutions that on one hand dominate also on the other hand enable. Power and resistance are distinct but interdependent aspects of power relations. “Resistance imposes limits on power” (Barbalet 1985:531); “the influence on social relationships exerted by powerless agents derives precisely from their resistance to power. Resistance limits the effects of power and in doing so materially influences the ‘conditions of reproduction of those social systems’ in which those resisting power have its subordinate positions” (ibid.:542). One more aspect of power must be emphasized here – power depends on action[2]. Power is not a static entity, it has to be continually negotiated and constructed anew, it is a matter of social relationship - there is simply no power without those over which power is exercised. At this moment it may be of use to recall the fundamental relationship between society, action and religion as described by Durkheim, in his own words, “it is action that dominates religious life, for very reason that society is its source” (Durkheim 2002:48; emphasis mine). And it is precisely religion that can serve these two sides of the same coin, i.e. power and resistance – it is on one hand “world-maintaining” and on the other “world-shaking” (cf. Billings & Scott 1994:173), as it is capable of legitimating power as well as challenging it. In the analysis of the two examples that have been chosen (the one coming from the colonial South Africa and the other, more recent and actual, from the postcolonial India), we will focus more on the discursive (primary) level, where power and resistance are expressed through various religious metaphors, classifications and symbolism. One reason for focusing on the discursive level as on the primary one is that the fundamental struggle underlying all power relations evolves around meaning, i.e. the definition of the reality itself resp. around whose definition is to be established as the dominant, valid, and norm giving. What we have to bear in mind and what will prove as crucial is the fact that “powerless groups must learn to master the language of the powerful, and in this process they may have to alter their cultural identity substantially” (Eriksen 1991:274) together with the idea that “classifications are not otiose, they do something, they are necessary in organization” (Douglas 1999:196; emphasis mine). And again we have to bear in mind that religious symbols and religious expressions “cannot be understood independently of their historical relations with nonreligious symbols or of their articulations in and of social life, in which work and power are always crucial” (Asad 2002:129)[3]. The idea of religion itself is a part of particular history and discourse of knowledge and power; this point comes out clearly in our first example.

The Impact of Christian Missionary Activity on South Africans

Though the Christian missionary activity exercised (not only) over the South Africans presented itself in purely religious terms, the impact it had and the way it substantially changed the everyday life of the subjects of colonization shows, how it was in fact tightly bound with the discourse of modernity itself and how it stepped across the imaginary boundaries of the religious and affected every single sphere of life. “The Africans became drawn into conversations whose terms (central concepts and arguments) were set by Europeans” (Lambek 2002:493), they were forced to learn the language of the powerful, which led to inevitable alternation of their cultural identity, but which also, on the other hand, created a substantial space for resistance. In their article, which is our point of departure in this brief chapter, Jean and John Comaroff (1992[1989]) look closer at the case of the Tswana people of South Africa and analyze the impact of the Christian missionary activity, i.e. of the colonization of consciousness and the struggle over power and meaning. As in other places, colonizers tried to “gain control over both the material and semantic practices” – and one could argue that primarily and foremost over the semantic practices as they are constitutive of the material ones – “through which their would-be subjects produce and reproduce the very basis of their existence” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1992[1989]: 494). The aim of the colonization was to convert and to reform the Tswana, i.e. to convince them of the ideological content of Christianity by use of powerful symbolism and religious narrative and to impose the hegemonic practices not only in the realm of religion of the colonizing culture on the colonized. The response and consequently also resistance of Tswana to this double project was the strongest especially on the discursive and conceptual level. “The Tswana response to the mission encounter was an effort to fashion an awareness of, and gain conceptual mastery over a changing world” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1992[1989]:508). Since colonizing process is not a simple dialectic of domination and resistance, this effort (typical not only for the Tswana) can lead to different results, such as emergence of new techniques of empowerment, sources of new knowledge, movements such as cargo cults, etc. (cf. Turner 2002[1969]: 369). The response to the colonial encounter may be, and often was, expressed in religious terms, since religion disposes of powerful symbols that have not only the potential to legitimate the given power structure but also to express and gain support to resist it; these symbols are also to a large extent dynamic, able to serve the actual needs. One more feature is crucial here, typically to be able to resist and be at least to some extent effective in ones resistance, one has to adopt the language of the powerful and dominant and express the resistance in terms of the Other. The dominant and the dominated thus necessarily have to share, if not the entire, so at least a great part of the identical conceptual universe and the struggle is no longer a struggle between two radically opposed conceptual systems, but a struggle over meaning and definition of particular segments of reality, often expressed in religious terms and metaphors. The example of the encounter between Christian missionaries and the Tswana nicely shows how religion is embedded in particular history and discourse of power and knowledge and how for meaningful it must be reproduced together with a definite social organization and material structure[4], it can not be truly distinguished as a realm of its own. The power of the colonizers was thus not only manifested through religious expressions, but the religion itself was the power, since because of its nature it had the potential to change substantially the social structure, organization, identity and consciousness of the colonized.

Hindu Religious Nationalism: A Love Affair between Power and Religion[5]

Our first example was concerned mainly with the relation between the religious expressions and the dominance and power of the colonizers; our second example will on the other hand focus more on the religious expressions manifesting resistance particularly to modernity and the notion of secular nationalism. Religion, on the global scale, gained recently a renewed potential as a cultural medium of protest; it has turned into a mean how to express political opposition and challenge, as in the case of India, even the legitimacy of the secular state (cf. Billings & Scott 1994:181-8). Similarly to our first case, the Indian nationalisms and Hindu nationalism in particular, were and are being formed in resistance to colonization but are also inevitably deeply affected by it. As we have already noted religious identities are historically produced, by particular social forces, i.e. by power (cf. Asad 1993[1982] and 2001); the formation of religious communities is affected by the state formation and by state practices (we can recall f. ex. the census practices and by its means imposed societal divisions during the colonial era, which largely affected the self-perceptions of the colonial subjects and led to the creation of strict border lines between diverse communities and became a base of identity and communalistic politics). But now let us turn our attention to a brief sketch of the Hindu nationalist movement itself. The primary objective of the Hindu nationalist movement is the unification of all Hindus into a single community that would serve as a foundation of a strong Hindu rashtra and that would ensure social cohesion in India. The Indian state, civil society and social formations should be according to this ideology “reorganized in a holistic and organic way along exclusively ‘Hindu’ precepts” (Bhatt; Mukta 2000:408). Hindutva thus aims at assimilation, dissolution of all religious pluralism and constitution of India as a religiously homogenous Hindu nation. This means for the Hindu nationalist movement overcoming of all the innumerable divisions of the Indian society (caste divisions which remain the strongest, family, gender, territory, rural-urban divisions etc.) and integrating all the marginal groups, such as untouchables and other backward classes, into the body of the Hindu society and simultaneously reinforcing and strengthening the division between non-Hindus, especially Muslims, and Hindus themselves; the definition of Hinduism - “the game of defining religion in this context is a highly political one” (Asad 2001:210). Severe boundaries are drawn between Hindus and Muslims, who are being constructed as the Other, as invaders, foreign transplants and as a great threat[6]. Muslims and secularism thus become the two main enemies and nationalism based on shared religious identity is the way how to express the opposition to both of these and how to gain power and support, for “since ritual creates domination, powerful groups and movements try to seize control over it and use it for their purposes” (van der Veer 1994:83). But the ideological background, symbolism and metaphors employed by Hindu nationalists and the arena where Hindu nationalists operate is much broader and can not be reduced to either the religious or the political field, though the religious metaphors have a certain privilege. The Hindu nationalism emerges in the sphere of the public and attacks directly and in different ways the representation and recognition of individuals and the creation and institutionalization of diverse communities.

Conclusion

As we have seen from our examples, power and resistance are inseparable, they are two sides of the same coin; they can be powerfully manifested under specific historical and social conditions through the religious expressions and symbolism. These three notions can thus become so tightly bound that it is almost impossible to distinguish where the one begins and ends and which one causes the other. They are under certain circumstances mutually dependent on each other for their own existence.

Resources:

Asad, Talal. 1993[1982]. The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category. In: Lambek (ed.). Pp: 114-132.

Asad, Talal. 2001. Reading a Modern Classic: W.C.Smith’s “The Meaning and End of Religion”. History of Religions. 40(3):205-222.

Barbalet, J.M. 1985. Power and Resistance. The British Journal of Sociology. 36(4):531-548

Billings, Dwight B. & Scott, Shaunna L. 1994. Religion and Political Legitimation. Annual Review of Sociology. 20:173-202.

Brown, Michael. 1996. On Resisting Resistance. American Anthropologist. 98(4):729-735.

Comaroff, Jean & Comaroff, John. 1992[1989]. The Colonization of Consciousness. In: Lambek (ed.). Pp: 493-510.

Bhatt, Chetan & Mukta, Parita. 2000. Hindutva in the West: mapping the antinomies of diaspora nationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 23(3):407-441.

Douglas, Mary. 1999. Land Animals, Pure and Impure. In: Michael Lambek (ed.). 2002. A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp: 194-209.

Durkheim, Emile. 1995[1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In: Lambek (ed.). Pp: 34-49.

Eriksen, T.H. 1991. Ethnicity versus Nationalism. Journal of Peace Research. Vol. 28. No. 3. pp. 263-278.

Friedland, Roger. 2001. Religious Nationalism and the Problem of Collective Representation. Annual Review of Sociology. 27:125-152.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973[1966]. Religion as a Cultural System. In: Lambek (ed.). Pp: 61-82.

Giddens, Anthony. 1976. New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson.

Lambek, Michael.(ed.). 2002. A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1961. The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action. In: Lambek (ed.). Pp: 330-339.

Tarrow, Sidney. 2006. Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge University Press.

Turner, Victor. 1969. Liminality and Communitas. In: Lambek (ed.). Pp: 358-374.

van der Veer, Peter. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. University of California Press.

Weber, Max. 1958[1904-5]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In: Lambek (ed.). Pp: 50-60.

[1] As Sahlins has rightly pointed out, power has become an ”intellectual black hole into which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked” (Sahlins 1993:15, cit. In: Brown 1996:133-4).

[2] ”Power refers to the transformative capacity of human action” (Giddens 1976: 110; emphasis in original).

[3] Simply put, there is no such distinctively religious realm of things separated from the cultural and social filling as Clifford Geertz would like to imagine (Geertz 1973[1966].).

[4] Here we can recall Webers famous study of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Weber 2002 [1958]:50-60).

[5] This chapter is partially based on my previously written essay on Hindu nationalism (“nr.451”. 2007. A Glimpse on the Hindu Nationalist Ideology & Religiopolitics. Unpublished manuscript).

[6] ”For people draw social lines, or oppose the attempt to do so, in particular contexts and for particular purposes.” (Asad 2001:210-1).

Indira Gandhi's India: From world's largest democracy to world's largest dictatorship and back

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:22:00 -0500

Indira Gandhi's India: From world's largest democracy to world's largest dictatorship and back

©Tessa Valo, 2007

tessa.valo@gmail.com

“India has the privilege of being the world’s largest composite society, and the home of many great and ancient faiths. Communalism is an evil which divides man and fragments society; it goes against our very genious and cultural heritage. It holds a threat to the  unit yand integrity of our country which must be our foremost concern.”

Indira Gandhi (Gandhi 1971:78)

”We should not hesitate to take steps which might be described as drastic. Some personal rights have to be kept in abeyance for the human rights of the nation: the right to live, the right to progress.”

Indira Gandhi (cit.in. Klieman 1981:254-5)

Since the proclamation of India´s independence in August 1947 and the creation of the Indian Constitution in 1950, which brought radically new features of the constitutional system of independent India, until the year 1967, there was only one party dominating the political scene and ruling in every state – obviously – the Congress. By the time of elections in 1967 the problems of the former Nehruian politics of rapid industrialization began to be felt, an acute food shortage and a severe foreign exchange crisis affected the country. The Congress managed to win only 54 per cent of the seats in parliament, which was - compared to former 74 per cent - a surprise also for the worst pessimists. The era of the Congress dominance was over and the question of centre-state relationships was felt more acutely than ever before. And precisely at this point Indira Gandhi comes into play. Not only was her new government contested by the state non-Congress governments but the Congress itself began to split and factionalize. In the limited space we have, we will try to give an overview over the two periods of Indira Gandhi’s rule, the first dating from 1966 to 1977, which includes a period of Emergency rule that will be of special interest for us here, and the second dating from 1980 to October, 31 1984, the day of Indira’s assassination.

Coming to Power and the Split of the Congress

Until the elections of 1967 the Congress represented a central integrating institution of India (Manor 2007:95), it knit together state and society, it occupied both left and right political spectrum. The party was internally pluralistic, which made it more flexible, representative, and as such it was always prepared to absorb diverse movements and groups, which would otherwise pose a threat to its power position. Thus, if there existed any opposition, it would have been found within the Congress itself and not outside. This fact together with the above mentioned consequences of Nehruian politics of rapid industrialization led to the defeat of the Congress in 1967 and its internal split in 1969. The Congress lost power in six states, the party competition grew rapidly, new opposition groups were established and the dissident Congressmen were playing their roles in the weakening party. The competition, which previously occurred silently within the Congress, transformed into an open stage interparty conflict. This period brought to life also a new phenomenon of so called “defectors” (Manor 2007:99), these were flowing both out and in the Congress party, though the number of those flowing out was much higher, causing even fall of the Congress governments in three states. This, together with Indira Gandhi´s radical views on economic policy, which included diverse land reforms, nationalization of banks, and restriction of monopolies, presented in July 1969 at the Bangalore session of the AICC to the Congress, led to the schism in the Congress in 1969, which “was a major shock to the political system in India” (Manor 2007:100). “The Syndicate […] began to feel that Prime Minister was moving away from the party control and trying to build up an autonomous centre of power” (Chatterjee 2007:18). After this act the opposition to Indira Gandhi inside the Congress was being formed and finally sixty-two Congress members of the Lok Sabha openly declared their opposition to the Prime Minister and formed their own block called the Congress (Organization) and joined the opposition. Indira Gandhi was left with a minority government which resulted in premature elections in 1971. Indira Gandhi started the most massive and populist election campaign in the history of India - under the slogan garibi hatao (remove poverty). It was also the first time when the national issues were the exclusive focus of the campaign (Chatterjee 2007:20). The great success in the elections together with the success in the Bangladesh war catapulted Indira Gandhi into a high position and she became generally acknowledged as the leader of one of the world's most powerful nations. The Congress politics and the party itself have under the rule of Mrs Gandhi undergone significant changes. Indira Gandhi “adopted a more confrontational posture, both towards opposition parties at the national level and towards opposition-controlled governments in various states. She also took a more aggressive line with her own party” (Manor 2007:101). She introduced the so-called “pyramidical decision-making structure in the party and the government” (Kochanek 1976), which was supposed to prevent all threats to her personal power. The intention was to centralize all decision making, weaken institutionalization and create a personalized regime. This resulted in the abandonment of intraparty democracy, positions in the Congress were appointed from above rather than by elections from below (Manor 2007:101). The Congress now derived its identity from the personality of the leader and this did not merely happen in symbolic terms, on the contrary, Congress was strongly centralized, directed from the central high command, the Chief Ministers which previously held high status and strong positions were now nominated from the centre and replaced according to the wish of the leader (Dua 1985). The Congress also adopted a “new rhetoric of the state socialism with the central executive structures of government playing the pivotal role” (Chatterjee 2007:22), whereas the local political structures were often being criticized. Another feature of the Congress party rule under Indira Gandhi was the orientation towards specific groups of population such as women, scheduled castes and tribes, and other minorities, and providing them with special welfare packages, which took on the form of a “gift” from Indira Gandhi and the centralized populist leadership (Chatterjee 2007:23). In spite of Indira's highly successful populist leadership, success in the Bangladesh war and the electoral victory this period was also marked by significant unrest from many sides. Not only was there the Congress opposition, but there was also a considerable unrest among the peasants in many backward agricultural parts of the country and there was also a widespread agitation against corruption in the government, which later became the popular anti-government movement. But the “total revolution” came with Jaya Prakash Narayan, the leader of a populist anti-government movement voicing the dissatisfaction with the ruling government of large sections of population. On 25 June 1975 declared Jaya Prakash Narayan that “the government had lost all moral claims to rule. That night a state of emergency was promulgated in India”. (Chatterjee 2007:25).

The Emergency: 1975-1977

The justification of the declaration of Emergency given by Mrs Gandhi was that the “attempt at an open political system had been undermined through indiscipline, irresponsibility and subversion, both in the press and in public life and that pluralistic politics had brought about little but corruption, elite domination, sedition and stagnation” (Blair 1980:244). The dilemma of 1975 was apparently between “efficiency” and “freedom” and no middle option was at sight – obviously the first option was chosen. The Indian Constitution did not prove as an impenetrable barrier against emergency authoritarianism - Mrs Gandhi claimed constitutional justification for all her actions, even for the suspension of civil rights. She tampered with the fundamental character of the constitution and by the time of November 1976 she virtually rewrote it, enlarging the power of Parliament and the prime minister at the expense of courts and presidency (Klieman 1981:248). “By the end of 1976 the Indian Constitution has become virtually a dead letter, the power given to Mrs Gandhi limitless, and the safeguards against tyranny destroyed” (Klieman 1981:249). The press was then one of the first targets of repression, on June 26 1975 the government introduces press censorship for the first time since the declaration of independence. In the Delhi district public meetings, demonstrations and printing and publication of materials likely to cause disharmony among different sections of society were strictly prohibited. The publication of opposition statements in Parliament was also prohibited. After some time the press under pressure assumed a more supportive role and following the monthly magazine Surya, published by the wife of Sanjay Gandhi dedicated to portraying positively the dynamics of changing India, started promoting government's point of view (Klieman 1981: 248-50). Bureaucracy also contributed great deal to the transformation of what used to be a pluralistic structure of participation into a centralized apparatus of power and control. The public reacted to political changes with almost total indifference. The economical changes were on the other hand applauded; Indira Gandhi's economical program was accompanied by almost immediate economic relief – prices stabilized, public services were improved, industrial production rose up. On the other hand in the agricultural area Emergency meant also a continuation of the status quo that benefited the bigger farmers, whereas in the industrial area the Emergency not only strengthened the status quo but also advantaged the dominant classes (Blair 1980:257). “In short, during the Indian Emergency the notion of an alert democratic citizenry did not hold up well when put to test. Contrary to the democratic assumption, individual and collective citizen adaptation to the permanent emergency state is a fairly easy process. There is seemingly no limit to public ingenuity or inventiveness in rationalizing the need for curtailed freedoms for strong, centralized government” (Klieman 1981:252). In this situation the result of the elections of 1977 might look as a surprise. The vote against Emergency was not primarily a vote motivated by abstract principles of democracy or by the issue whether the Emergency was constitutional or not, it was primarily a vote for social freedom as an elementary human need (for the support of this argument see Klieman 1981). What motivated and mobilized Indians against Gandhi's regime was the emergency government's birth-control (sterilization) program. Sterilization became the one really “popular” issue during the 1977 elections. “In 1976 birth-control clinics around the country performed 7 million sterilization operations […] 207 persons died during or after vasectomy operations performed between July 1975 and March 1977” (Klieman 1981:255). Indira's slogan garibi hatao (remove poverty), changed among villagers into the slogan Indira hatao, indiri bachao (abolish Indira and save your penis). The elections were thus influenced much deeper by the local concerns than by national issues and foreign policy. Although the emergency ended it left some permanent scars on Indian political system that it took long time to remove. The great task of the subsequent Janata Government was to dismantle the democratic regime and recover the democratic regime.

The Period of Conflict and Fragmentation: 1977 – 1984

The years from 1977-1984 were marked by conflict, decay and fragmentation and on the other hand also by political awakening of the mass of Indian voters and awareness of the role which elections and elected representatives play in the lives of ordinary people (Manor 2007:103). On the one hand India became more democratic, whereas on the other it passed through a period of institutional decay, where political institutions proved unable to respond adequately and effectively to the pressures from the society. The Janata Government proved unable to hold together and sank under the load of fragmentation. The Elections of 1980 catapulted Congress-I back to the power. The significant features of Indira Gandhi regime from 1980-84 were as following: The rule continued to be a centralized rule, where Indira and her central high command dominated almost in all spheres. The emphasis was as before given to centralization of powers in the hands of the central executive. In the economic area on the other hand a different path was followed, i.e. the emphasis was given to freeing of the private sector, liberalisation of imports and promotion of exports (Chatterjee 2007:31).The central government was acting in a rather authoritarian and personalized manner, which again led to the formation of a radical opposition and defeat of the Congress-I in some given states. In Punjab the extremist fringe of Akali Dal under the leadership of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale demanded more and more assertively a sovereign state of Khalistan and as a consequence the Indian army entered in June 1984 the Golden Temple in Amritsar and captured a great number of terrorists as well as left numerous dead behind including Bhindranwale. In October 1984 Indira Gandhi was killed by the members of her own security guard. Indira Gandhi's regime was followed by Rajiv Gandhi's regime, which brought more economical liberalization and more openness to privatization. Though there were some attempts to democratize the Congress party itself the old Congress structure based on personal loyalties soon reasserted.

Conclusion

“How will history judge Indira Gandhi? One can only guess, and I confess to being an admirer. Her flaws were obvious: her tendency to surround herself with nonthreatening nonentities, her occasional ruthlessness. She was political to her very soul; while campaigning on an “eliminate poverty” platform, she did little to stimulate economic growth that can alone reduce poverty in a developing economy. Politics interested her; economics was secondary. Grant all this, but examine the other side of the balance sheet. This fragile woman held India together” (Gupte 1985:19). What we can state with certainty is that Indira Gandhi will be remembered for promises, excitement, changes and unfulfilled expectations. She was unprecedented in centralizing the power and posing herself on the top of the decision-making pyramid, she tried perseveringly to modify the federal character of the party and government by strengthening their unitary tendencies and thereby reinforcing the centralization of power, and she unsuccessfully tried to change the support base of Congress from above by recruiting underrepresented sectors of society (Kochanek 1976:95). .

Resources

1. Blair, W. Harry. 1980. Mrs Gandhi's Emergency, The Indian Elections of 1977, Pluralism and Marxism, Problems with Paradigms. Modern Asian Studies. 14(2):237-271.

2. Bose, S.; Jalal, A. 2004. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. London: Routledge.

3. Butler, D.; Lahiri, A.; Roy, P. 2007. India Decides: Elections 1952-1995. In: State and Politics in India. Chatterjee, P. (ed.). Oxford University Press. p.125-177.

4. Chatterjee, Partha. 2006. Introduction: A Political History of Independent India. In: State and Politics in India. Chatterjee, P. (ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 1-41.

5. Dua, Bhagwan D. 1985. Federalism or Patrimonialism: The Making and Unmaking of Chief Ministers in India. Asian Survey. 25(8):793-804.

6. Gandhi, Indira. 1971. Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi. Publications Division. New Delhi.

7. Gupte, Pranay. 1985. Vengeance: India after Assassination of Indira Gandhi. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, London.

8. Klieman, Aaron S. 1981. Indira's India: Democracy and Crisis Government. Political Science Quarterly. 96(2):241-259.

9. Kochanek, S.A. 1976. Mrs. Gandhi's Pyramid: The New Congress. In: Indira Gandhi's India. A Political System Reappraised. Westview Press, p. 93-124.

10. Kohli, Atul. 1988. The NTR Phenomenon in Andhra Pradesh. Political Change in South Indian State. Asian Survey. 28(10):991-1017.

11. Manor, James. 2007. Parties and the Party System. In: State and Politics in India. Chatterjee, P. (ed.). Oxford University Press. p.92-125.

12. Mansingh, Surjit. 1984. India's Search for Power: Indira Gandhi's Foreign Policy, 1966-1982. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

13. Price, Pamela. 2005. Ideological Language in Post-Colonial (South) India: Aspects of a Political Language. In: Rethinking Indian Political Institutions. Crispin Bates & Subho Baso (eds.). p. 39-62.

14. Ruud, A. E.; Mageli, E.; Price, P. 2006. Indias historie med Pakistan og Bangladesh. Oslo: Cappelen, Akademisk forlag.

Caste as Reflected in the Indian Politics after Independence

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:00:00 -0500

©Tessa Valo, 2007

Introduction: Caste Politics

Though the idea that caste is a part of a natural and moral order of things, that it is a hereditary quality which once for all defines ones position and occupational affiliation and which is associated with a particular law of conduct is rejected both by intellectuals and political leaders, caste is in Indian post independence politics continually used and abused in different ways. On one hand there is a struggle for equality but on the other hand group and caste identities are sharpened and boundaries between groups reinforced. As paradoxical as it may seem, this contradiction is already present in the Indian constitution, which on one hand calls for equality of opportunity and status for all citizens irrespective of caste, sex, religion etc. and on the other hand has a full package of reservations prepared for scheduled castes and tribes, OBCs etc. There is thus an inevitable tension emerging between two basic notions – the notion of individual and the notion of group rights. This tension runs through the whole Indian politics like a red thread, which can be observed in different states in diverse variations according to the composition of society and other important traits, but the principle remains basically the same. “Caste as […] a lived-in social reality is very much alive” (Weiner 2001:195), not only because of its long historical continuity, but precisely also because it is generously nurtured by the political processes and political mobilization which appeals to caste membership. Caste is used “as an instrument for social change. Caste is not disappearing, nor is ‘casteism’ – the political use of caste – for what is emerging in India is a social and political system which institutionalizes and transforms but does not abolish caste” (Weiner 2001:196). The Indian political parties are well aware that to build the electoral support and vote banks it is necessary to appeal to particular castes, tribes and religious communities. The caste rhetoric emerged especially in the context of mobilization of the lower castes especially by the India National Congress, which introduced the system of affirmative action – reservations – for scheduled castes and tribes. The caste thus became especially salient in mobilizing and organizing lower castes - with a long history of social, political and economical discrimination – in their struggle for equality, same opportunities and incorporation into the political system and processes of decision making. “Caste, once an instrument for the maintenance of hierarchy, is, paradoxically, seen as a vehicle for egalitarianism between castes, though not within them.” (Weiner 2001:209). But which type of identity is politically salient of course varies – in a land as great, as stratified, and as pluralistic and heterogeneous as India – over time and territory. While caste identities and Hindu nationalism are now particularly salient in the north of India, regional and linguistic identities are strong in Assam and the states of northeast, class identity and membership serves as a basis for mobilization and political action in Kerala and West Bengal. “Caste has become more salient as a political identity and as an institutionalized element of civil society” (Weiner 2001:220). Not only is caste institutionalized in politics through the system of reservations, which guarantee seats in government, access to educational institutions and employment in the administrative (which is a way how to get into position of political power) for selected – large – segments of society, but caste-based organizations are also emerging within the framework of the civil society. The particular group rights remain a source of conflict between those who support them and those who oppose them – while the forward castes oriented more towards the equality of opportunity than equality of outcome together with Hindu nationalist, who perceive the reservations as creating fission and conflicts within the Indian society which they are trying to unite under the ideology of Hindutva (and thus weakening it in the face of the threat of the Muslim Other), oppose the system of reservations, lower and middle classes mainly support the system of reservations and perceive it as a matter of social justice for victims of the Brahmin dominated caste system. But we must note that the system of reservations has helped mainly those forward within lower castes and was practically incapable of substantially changing the position of the backward in the lower castes. As Weiner notes, “material benefits to the lower castes have largely gone to their more advanced members, some castes (Yadavs, for example) have befitted substantially, others hardly at all, there are growing class divisions within each of the lower castes as the more successful individuals obtain positions in government while others receive few if any benefits” (Weiner 2001: 223). We must also make the point, though we do not have the place to elaborate on it here, that caste was and is linked in diverse ways to the former monarchical structures that are reflected in the patron-client relationships that substantially affect the Indian political scenes (Price 1989) and that questions of honor – again interlinked with the idea of caste in diverse ways – are another essential part of the Indian politics (Price1996 & undated manuscript). After this short introduction we will have a brief look at three examples of the role and meanings of caste in the Indian politics in three states – in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

The Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu

The case of Tamil Nadu serves as a good example for conceptualizing caste in a different way than it is traditionally understood, i.e. as a peculiar social institution and a distinguishing feature of the Indian society. This idea is in this context rejected as an orientalist construction and different ways of explanation are sought – the focus is instead on the idea of kingship, which is understood as a more significant influence forming social and political relations (Price 1989; Inden 1986). David Mosse, who did fieldwork among untouchables in Tamil Nadu, thus observes – contrary to the orientalist presupposition – that untouchables understood their own position and status not as a result of some inherent, inborn lowness, but as a result of specific historical conditions (Price 1989:569). The model implicit in the intercaste relations in Tamil Nadu is thus one of kingship – where the status of the overlord is bound to his practical capacity to command the labor of others (the possibility to claim kingly status is thus potentially open to all castemen who have acquired land) and where untouchables serve “as feudal retainers, and symbols of public honor and prestige for their high-caste overlords” (Mosse, cit. in Price 1989:569). Tamil Nadu was one of the first states to witness mobilization of low castes and substantial changes which both reached its peak between 1949 and 1967, when the political party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) which administered the movement won control of the government of Madras. Tamil nationalists (and the DMK speakers) constructed a new conception of Tamil nationalist cosmology which included the notion of honor which was related to the belief that all castes are equal and rejected the idea of ones superiority as based on ones caste status (Price 1996). The Tamil nationalism was thus focused on two main themes – equality and the special nature of Tamils as a people. Another important focus of the Tamil nationalist movement was the emphasis put on education as a mean of promotion of equality – open to all. On the other hand though the Dravidian movement was ideologically committed to the abolition of the caste system, in practice it used caste as a means of political mobilization and thus increasing rather than decreasing its (not only political) significance (Weiner 2001). But it must be admitted that a certain “transition had taken place in people’s conceptions from focus on a hierarchical nature of caste structures to a view of castes as embodying different substances” (Price 1996:366). Though human beings are considered as primarily equal, this fact does not deny the importance of ones rank or prestige, on the other hand, though “the DMK was against caste order […] other orders were suggested in the vision” (Price 1996:373), these developed around a specific notion of dignity, that could be potentially achieved by anyone regardless of caste (though before it was related to ones wealth, authority, caste membership etc.). “The focus on personal status and authority in a domain that one finds in this area is a function of the political particularism of social segmentation, the many informal units (including caste) within which much activity takes place. […] these small-scale sociopolitical units (segments) reproduce themselves partly through the utilization of ideologies which focus on the maintenance of relations of respect/honor for the person or persons who administer the affairs of the unit and manage both its infernal disputes and relationships with the world outside” (Price 1996:378).

The Case of Karnataka and Devaraj Urs

What distinguishes Karnataka from other Indian states is a comparatively higher social cohesion of its society and the fact that though we can find there a significant Muslim minority, clashes between Hindus and Muslims have been very rare. The social changes in the pre-Independence period were rather mild and Karnataka stepped into the post-Independence period without almost any change in patterns of land control and local power. At the local level the most villages have been dominated by two powerful minorities – the vokkaligas and the lingayats – who were mainly peasant proprietors whose wealth came mainly from crop cultivation. These two caste-based segments of society control a great portion of land around the villages; they serve as patrons and money-lenders for their clients and have a relatively high position in the caste system and they also dominate politics at the state level and other supra-levels (Manor 1989). “‘Politics’ still means power relations among persons and groups within the village or circle of villages” (Manor 1989:332). Though the dominance in Karnataka is less oppressive than in other parts of India, “Karnataka’s poorer villagers do perceive inequalities and exploitation are to a large extent products of class differences, but they tend to express this in the language heavily laced with caste clichés” (Manor 1989: 333). Caste is thus a crucial element in the system of dominance that can be observed in Karnataka and is continually reinforced by the present economic inequalities – caste and class differences thus interplay at various levels. A slight change in this trend came with the Chief Minister Devaraj Urs who brought more people from disadvantaged groups into the Congress party (during the elections of 1972) and thus disrupted the control of the dominant groups over the society and control of state politics. He also developed a series of development projects for disadvantaged groups – especially children; and provided houses to the poor. But “his programmes penetrated downward to the grassroots only imperfectly, intermittently and unevenly […]. The result of all this therefore fell short of major social change” (Manor 1989:350). An important point that should be mentioned here about Devaraj Urs is that he adapted the Congress machine politics to modestly progressive purposes (Manor 1989:352). Urs also tried to stimulate caste sentiments in order to develop new political base, he tried to revive old forgotten identities or create them anew and appeal to them. Thus he established diverse caste and group associations, he thus strengthened what he considered as well-rooted divisions in the concrete realities of village life and did not expect them to change in a short time and so he tried to get use of the rising political awareness of the depressed and weak castes. But lingayats and vokkaligas still enjoy and maintain the traditional dominance over the village. “They remain dominant at the local level and there is precious little evidence to suggest that any serious challenge is likely to arise soon to their position, or to the relative cohesion of rural society in Karnataka which is bound up with that system of dominance” (Manor 1989: 357).

Andhra Pradesh and the NTR Phenomenon

Though the trajectories and the situation of the state of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka appear to be similar, there are significant differences. There is a higher level of social tension in Andhra Pradesh. This fact made it much more difficult to create broad coalitions of support among diverse social groups (Manor 2004:274) and the politics itself - especially in the era of N. T. Rama Rao (NTR) and his party Telugu Desam (TDP) – did not appeal to and represent (and did not even have the potential to do so) concrete social groups. NTR as a popular (and populist leader) dominated the government and its “ministers and legislators had few opportunities to channel goods and services to the social groups from which they came and which the TDP needed to cultivate. An interesting example of the caste politics in Andhra Pradesh also in relation to the NTR is the case of Guntur. There exists an enduring conflict between Reddis and Kammas. “The Kammas dominate the district in social and economic spheres” (Kohli 1988:1003). The emergence of NTR (himself being Kamma chief minister; 1983) in this district is conceived as a defeat of Reddis and the emergence of “Kamma raj”. The political structure in Andhra Pradesh thus enabled these caste divisions to be expressed through different parties – the two competing castes allied with two rival parties. NTR thus hardened the caste cleavage already existing.

As we have seen, caste interplays with politics in numerous ways. And though we have not elaborated the examples in detail, we have given an idea of how caste and caste sentiments can be used for political purposes, generating or partially solving conflicts, creating more tensions or on the other hand also tempering them. None of the examples can be generalized and none of them can be considered as representative, but they all shed at least a bit of light on the highly complex position of caste in Indian politics.

Resources:

Gould, Harold A. 2003. Political Self-Destruction in Karnataka, 1999. In: Roy, R. & Wallace, P. (eds.). India’s 1999 Elections and 20^th Century Politics. SAGE Publications. Pp. 94-116.

Kohli, Atul. 1988. The NTR Phenomenon in Andhra Pradesh. Political Change in South Indian State. Asian Survey. 28(10):991-1017.

Manor, James. 1989. Karnataka: Caste, Class, Dominance and Politics in a Cohesive Society. In: Framkel, F.R. & Rao, M.S.A. (eds.). Dominance and State Power in Modern India. Decline of a Social Order. Oxford University Press. Pp. 322-361.

Manor, James. 2004. Explaining Political Trajectories in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. In: Jenkins, R. (ed.). Regional Reflections. Comparing Politics Across India’s States. Oxford University press. Pp. 255-284.

Mooij, Jos. 2003. Policy Processes in Andhra Pradesh. In: Smart Governance? Politics in the Policy Process in Andhra Pradesh, India. Overseas Development Institute. Pp. 10-20.

Price, Pamela. 1989. Kingly Models in Indian Political Behavior. Asian Survey. A Monthly Review of Contemporary Asian Affairs. 29(6):559-572.

Price, Pamela. 1996. Revolution and Rank in Tamil Nationalism. Journal of Asian Studies. 55(2):359-383.

Price, Pamela. Ideological Elements in Political Instability in Karnataka: Janata Dal in the late 1990s. Manuscript, University of Oslo.

Suri, K.C. 2002. Politics of Pragmatism. In: Working Paper 180. Democratic Process in Andhra Pradesh, India. Overseas Development Institute. Pp. 37-45.

Weiner, Myron. 2001. The Struggle for Equality: Caste in Indian Politics. In: Kohli, A. (ed.). The Success of India’s Democracy. Cambridge University Press.

Inden, Ronald. 1986. Orientalist Constructions of India. Modern Asian Studies. 20(3):401-446.

Anthropology in the Era of Postnationalism?

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:53:00 -0500

Critical Comments on Arjun Appadurai

©Tessa Valo, 2007

Antimotto: “Within the boundaries of the tribe the writ of the same culture runs from the end to end” (Malinowski 1944, quoted in Buzard 2003:63)

The relationship between the notion of globalization and social scientists has in the recent decades admonished of about that of a magnet and iron nails; the massive explosion of globalization studies does not evade anthropology as a discipline, on the contrary, it strikes right into its heart and provokes burning discussions aiming at rethinking of its traditional categories and proposing of new theoretical and conceptual tools with greater heuristic potential as well as rethinking of its methodology and its place in the world of transnational flows. Particularly, the characteristic features of globalization[1] stimulated anthropologist’s new interest in the cultural dimension of globalization and incited the re-examination of the concept of culture and the way globalization is “creating new cultural configurations through which people are living out new subjectivities and social relations” (Moore 1999:11). As well as the theorization of the consequences of the weakening and changing position of the nation-state within the world system (cf. Chatterjee 1998, Appadurai 2005). These and related questions stimulated also Arjun Appadurai to take part in the course of this kind of anthropological inquiry and to develop new theoretical tools as well as to rethink traditional anthropological notions through the prism of a transnational, or rather postnational approach (Appadurai 2005:9). But before discussing further Appadurai’s theoretical perspective and the questions it poses for the anthropological practice, let me first present some of my brief notes on globalization that will later inform the background of the argument.

Global? Local?

There are several points we should take notice of when discussing globalization, firstly, not everybody is a migrant, a refugee[2], a member of a diaspora, an expatriate, a cosmopolitan academic, a businessman or whatever the good old examples of the grand narrative of globalization consist of; the vast majority of the world’s population is bound to the local community - though of course it can be said that, what is imagined as global, has impact on and redefines that what is imagined as local – but it remains a social fact that the “global interconnectedness is extremely uneven” (Fuller & Assayag 2005:1). Secondly, I argue that to speak of global and local sensu stricto does not make a good sense; there exists no either-global-or-local but always both-and; global and local (if we are still forced to think in these categories) are mutually affected, constituted, reinforced and influenced and thus come into being only through a dialectic relationship; anything which can be imagined as global is necessarily in a certain sense localized. In another words, what is traditionally associated with the notion of the global (i.e. statehood, monetary economies, citizenship, modern mass media, migration etc.) is always actually realized at the local level and is “embedded in the locally constituted life-worlds and power relations” for “whether it is ideas or substances that flow, or both, they have origins and destinations, and the flows are instigated by people” (Eriksen 2003:4). Or to put it differently, “denotations may be global. But connotation is always local: meaning is never inherent in a sign, it is always filtered through a culturally endowed eye or ear” (Comaroff 1996:17). And it is the understanding of the meaning, of those culturally endowed eyes and ears through which people perceive the world, interpret their and others actions within it and make sense of themselves, what is ab initio the main concern of anthropology.

Conceptualizing the Postnational

Arjun Appadurai, joining the discussion on what Harvey (2001) coined with the term ‘space-time compression’ and what others formulated in the language of transnational flows, diasporas, or globalization, developed concepts that would enable an anthropological approach to the issues of modernity, globalization, public culture and consumption. In the next section we are going to review several of the underlying premises of Appadurai’s approach that is aiming at the redefinition of the field of anthropological inquiry and research in relation to the above mentioned debates that play also an enormous role in lives of the people we study. Later we will build further on this part when discussing the production of locality and neighborhood and their heuristic potential for the current anthropological research.

There are two crucial notions upon which Appadurai’s theorizing is premised and which are always, in one form or another, present. It is media and migration[3] – viewing them as interconnected, Appadurai explores their “joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (Appadurai 2005:3; emphasis in original) and tries to develop a “general theory of global cultural processes” (Ibid.:46). The work of the imagination is viewed as a “space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern” (Ibid.: 4). As an anthropologist he sets out to investigate the cultural dimension of globalization and fully acknowledging the fact that “the transnational flow of universalizing signs demands their domestication, that they be made meaningful and salient to homespun realities” (Comaroff 1996:174), he focuses on the production of locality and neighborhood in a globalizing world, viewing the locality as an “inherently fragile social achievement […] ephemeral unless hard and regular work is undertaken to produce and maintain its materiality” (Appadurai2005:179;180). Now let us turn our attention for a little while to the notion of cultural which Appadurai proposes instead of using the concept of culture.

Appadurai resists, and has several good reasons to do so, the noun form of culture, and proposes instead its adjectival form, i.e. cultural. The noun form of culture necessarily implies a certain reification and substantiation, making culture a part of the same discursive realm as race and implying the idea of certain social groups as cultures (cf. Ibid.:12-14). The cultural on the other hand “moves one into a realm of differences, contrasts and comparisons that is more helpful” (Ibid.:12) and thus presents a more suitable heuristic device which can be used when talking about difference (Ibid.:13). One is at this point tempted to say – so far so good. After a promising start Appadurai proceeds and suggests “that we regard as cultural only those differences that either express, or set the groundwork for, the mobilization of group identities” (Ibid.:13), even though aware of certain problems this view presents, he goes on further moving to “the idea of culture as involving the naturalized organization of certain differences in the interests of group identity”, i.e. towards the “instrumental conception of ethnicity” or else “culture as group identity based on difference” (Ibid.:14-15; emphasis mine). And proceeding further to the discussion of culturalism, which he understands as a “conscious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or transnational politics” (Ibid.:15) he implicitly crowns the shift from understanding culture or let us say cultural as a category of analysis (and a heuristic device) to understanding culture in terms of a category of practice[4]. Understanding culture in terms of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity[5] seems as nothing more than replicating the culture as a category of practice i.e. the way culture is used (and misused) in the culturalistic discourses and identity politics[6]. Such a notion of culture should be in my view rather the object of our inquiry and analysis than the means of understanding it. This excursus in Appadurai’s notion of cultural had one particular objective, and that is to turn our attention to its certain inner dissonance and to bear it in our minds; since if we are to think further about the cultural dimension of the production of locality and neighborhood we are as anthropologists obliged to rethink this particular notion of cultural, which I view as unsatisfactory for any project trying to unravel the cultural dimension of globalization[7].

The perspective premised on the ideas of motion and mediation - global processes of migration and communication - necessarily leads to the conceptualization of identities as deterritorialized, to the idea of culturally hybridized world and to thinking “beyond nation” (Ibid.:158-177), and rather in terms of translocalities - no wonder then that “the nation-state, as a complex modern political form” is for Appadurai “on its last legs” (Ibid.:19). Appadurai is thus concerned with “what locality might mean in a situation where the nation-state faces particular sorts of transnational destabilization” (Ibid.:178). Let us thus first have a closer look on the condition of the nation-state in the globalized world.

The emergence of global economy is continually diminishing the importance of and destroying anything that might be perceived as national economy (cf. Comaroff 1996); the processes of migration and the presence of alien population within the nation-state together with various transnational and subnational movements present a threat to its categories and legitimacy based on one-territory-one-people principle and moreover the global mass mediation enabling people to imagine a spectrum of possible realities and opportunities (and motivating them to action) makes it more and more difficult for the nation-state to virtually police its borders and produce reliable citizens. But the fact that globalization threatens to disintegrate the nation-state at least to a certain degree, does not mean that the nation-state is not responding to this threat. On the contrary, for the first, we can observe national governments making great “efforts to (re)assert their sovereignty and control” (Comaroff 1996:173) – just think of the recent discussions about European identity, which more than often end up with the search for and reassertion of the national and debates on the national cultural heritage; and for the second, an emergence of the identity politics, politics of difference, new patriotisms and ethnonationalisms (cf. Comaroff 1996; Appadurai 2005) in which the “ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps ever more salient” (Gupta & Ferguson 2006:611, cf. Olwig 2002). These processes, which can be understood as two sides of the same coin, present a special challenge for anthropology and its practice. What is needed is a framework connecting the large-scale and small-scale processes and conceptualizing their dialectical relationship. Arjun Appadurai presents in the “Production of Locality” such a framework, which enables the anthropologists to build further on, or eventually rethink the previous research.

The Production of Locality and Neighborhood

Appadurai, not taking locality as something already present and given or simply as a site of social action, focuses on the locality as something that has to be produced. He shows us how rituals and other social actions can be reinterpreted and rethought as localizing practices which aim at the production and reproduction of locality and of ‘reliably local subjects’, i.e. “actors who properly belong to a situated community of kin, neighbors, friends and enemies” (Appadurai 2005:179). In other words, he demonstrates how former anthropological research can be understood in terms of socialization of space and time, as analysis of the social techniques of the production of the ‘natives’ and production of particular localities and neighborhoods, documenting “the myriad ways in which small-scale societies do not and cannot take locality as given” (Ibid.:180). Locality is for Appadurai “primarily relational and contextual” (Ibid.:178) and can be conceived of as a certain phenomenological quality, as an aspect of social life, not as an easy achievement, on the contrary, as something that has to be continually reproduced, build anew and “maintained carefully against various kinds of odds” (Ibid.:179). Neighborhoods on the other hand “refer to the actually existing social forms in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized. Neighborhoods, in this usage, are situated communities characterized by their actuality, whether spatial or virtual, and their potential for social reproduction” (Ibid.:179). Neighborhoods can thus be seen as referring to the micro-structures of everyday life and to the particular Lebenswelts, to the everyday processes on the micro-scale, i.e. to the complex structure of local conditions, daily interactions and social relationships, the structures of feeling, myths and rituals, representations and other aspects of social life that play an important role in the organization of life of a community. The concept of neighborhood in other words emphasizes the importance of situatedness[8] in contemporary globalized world (be it a physical or virtual one). Local knowledge is thus about “producing reliably local subjects as well as about producing reliably local neighborhoods within which such subjects can be recognized and organized” (Ibid.:181). Moreover Appadurai understands the relationship between the production of local subjects and neighborhoods as historical and dialectical in its nature.

But the relationship between locality and the neighborhood is much more complex and intricate since locality can not be separated from the actual setting, i.e. the neighborhood – it is the neighborhood which has the potential for social reproduction and it is the social action of the local (and situated) subjects that in a sense produces the locality. Here Appadurai approaches the crucial notion of context. Neighborhood is necessarily grounded in diverse historical trajectories and forces and is unthinkable without its contextual dimension. “Neighborhoods are what they are because they are opposed to […] already produced neighborhoods” (Ibid.:183). Neighborhoods are thus contexts for social action, but they also require contexts, i.e. other neighborhoods or ethnoscapes. Neighborhood thus provides a setting, a meaningful frame for human action; “a neighborhood is a multiplex interpretative site” (Ibid.:184). The context-generative dimension of neighborhood serves to Appadurai as a springboard for theorizing the relationship between the local and the global realities and providing a framework well-suited for bridging the large-scale and small-scale processes, since “the way in which neighborhoods are produced and reproduced requires the continuous construction, both practical and discursive, of an ethnoscape (necessarily nonlocal) against which local practices and projects are imagined to take place” (Ibid.:184). The context of the production of locality in a world marked by migration and mass mediation has itself markedly changed and this fact has crucial consequences for the role and practice of anthropology. And thus, before we proceed to a further and more critically oriented discussion of the concepts of locality and neighborhood in relation to the anthropological fieldwork and research, let us first sketch in general terms the challenges anthropologists face in the changed world.

Anthropology in the Changing World

The anthropological field, the defining element of anthropology as a discipline, which has normalized and bounded its practice, has markedly changed in the last decades. “The field sites in which contemporary anthropologists work are shaped by the geopolitics of the postcolonial, imperial world” (Gupta & Ferguson 1997:10). The current world of postcolonialism, multiculturalism and transnational flows thus not only changed the conditions of cross-cultural encounters but also affected the “ethnological imagination’s understanding of mediation in a culturally pluralized world” (Kurasawa 2004:170). The old traditional categories presupposing the isomorphic relationship between territory, culture, nation-state and society together with “our spatially centered, conventionally derived constructs will not do any more” (Comaroff 1996:170). The changing socio-cultural reality thus calls for new linguistic tropes, analytical perspectives and changed methodological approaches. The above mentioned necessarily leads us to the problem of place in anthropology and its ethnographies, i.e. to the problem of how fieldwork locations “often come to be identified with the groups that inhabit them” (Appadurai 1988:16). The idea that culture is naturally a property of spatially localized people as well as the idea that to study it we just have to ‘go there’ can not serve us any longer and has been also criticized numerous times (see e.g. Appadurai 1988, 2006, Clifford 1986, Gupta & Ferguson 1997, 2006). To put it differently, “cultures are becoming both deterritorialized and reterritorialized: they are no longer predicated on particular spatial co-ordinates” (Moore 1999:11). This rejection of the traditional categories and concepts that no longer make good sense in the perspective of the changed socio-cultural situation leads us to the questioning of the traditional conception of field and fieldwork, i.e. of the defining element of anthropology itself. To put it differently, in the current world marked by migration and mass mediation “the ‘ethno’ in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology have to respond” (Appadurai 1991:191, quoted in Gupta & Ferguson 1997:3). Or else, Gupta & Ferguson ask: “what are we to do with a discipline that loudly rejects received ideas of ‘the local,’ even while ever more firmly insisting on a method that takes it for granted?” (Gupta & Ferguson 1997:4) and we might add – in which the imagination of cultural areas is still implicitly present, structuring the ways we conceive of people and groups of people we study. The rejection of the world composed of territorially bounded cultures and peoples thus challenges the idea of moving in and out of the field (cf. Gupta & Ferguson 1997). The field is now virtually everywhere and we can no longer escape it and pretend that we are ‘out of the field’. This situation results in rethinking of the field and fieldwork in terms of notions related to that of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 2006) and multi-local field studies (Hannerz 2002) which “pay attention to the interlocking of multiple social-political sites and locations” (Gupta & Ferguson 1997:37). It is no longer possible to get a complete picture of some kinds of activities from a local viewpoint (if it ever was), the ‘local’ is produced by distant influences, it can be in a sense produced ‘elsewhere’, and to understand the local we have to broaden our horizons and open up for new places, sites and connections and even nonlocal (in a geographical sense) definitions of the field. The field can consist of several localities, which through their networks and certain interdependence form one coherent field (cf. Hannerz 2002). The field is thus not disappearing or is not in a crisis, it just has to adapt itself to new conditions; the field as a local or multi-local site has to be related dialectically to the larger spatial arenas. The field that crosses several localities and works at several sites is especially well-suited for certain problem areas connected with the effects of migration, globalization and mass mediation, such as “tracking movements and migrants transnationally in diaspora and exile, or the history of the circulation of objects and techniques, or studying the relationships of dispersed communities and networks that define well-designated macro-processes in the global flow of capital and expertise” (Marcus 2006:618). But multi-sited, multi-local or translocal must not necessarily mean that the anthropologist works (physically) in several localities, it is the connection of the global meanings and their appropriation in the production of concrete localities and the focus on the connections between localities and the production of meanings what makes the given perspective translocal.

The Production of Locality and Neighborhood: Critical Comments

Appadurai poses the question of what happens to the production of locality in contemporary world and of what might “locality mean in a world where spatial localization, quotidian interaction, and social scale are not always isomorphic” (Appadurai 2005:179), in the era of the weakening of the nation-state etc. He relates these questions to the problem of nationalism and identity politics, or new patriotisms. This line of thinking seems especially interesting. But there are several problems I would like to discuss before returning to this point. For the first, there is a certain problem I have with the concept of neighborhood. When thinking about its possible applications I feel more than confused about the difference the concept of neighborhood makes – in a certain sense - in relation to that of say ‘culture’, and I deal in fact with the same kind of problem Appadurai himself had with the concept of ‘culture’, namely that of substantiation and that of drawing boundaries. If neighborhoods are referring to ‘situated communities characterized by their actuality’, then I have to ask: how are we to delineate them or else where are the boundaries that neighborhoods and localities so sorely try to guard (- supposing that they could be in the end certainly defined as fluid, fuzzy or blended, in the popular diction of last decades)? How are we to define community (- a question mysteriously missing in Appadurai’s theorizing)? Does the existence of a particular neighborhood depend on the perception of particular actors within or outside it? Is it thus as relational and contextual as locality (possibly not as a substantive social form…)? How large can a neighborhood be (a question related closely related to that of a community, not knowing what a community stands for, how can I guess what everything can be meant with a neighborhood)? Are all answers to these questions context-dependent (if it is so – dependent on which or whose context)? And if we are to accept the game of the neighborhoods, then we have to ask the question: who? – i.e. for whom is this or that neighborhood a meaningful context, and moreover who is producing the concrete neighborhood? Though Appadurai states that “the production of a neighborhood is inherently colonizing, in the sense that it involves the assertion of socially (often ritually) organized power over places that are viewed as potentially chaotic or rebellious”[9] and that the “production of a neighborhood is inherently an exercise of power over some sort of hostile or recalcitrant environment, which may take the form of another neighborhood” (Ibid.:184), I feel the question of power as seriously undertheorized, we must ask more explicitly who creates neighborhoods, what is needed for a neighborhood to be produced, for whom are they a meaningful context and who participates on the context-generative aspect of neighborhoods and we have to go even further. Because these and related questions concerning the power to define and produce neighborhood or a locality are of special importance in relation to the emergent identity politics and ethnonationalisms.

As we have seen, the concept of neighborhood raises in my view more questions than it solves, therefore I am going to focus rather on the idea of production of locality, which is in my eyes a much more potent notion. But here arises a problem - as presented by Appadurai, locality can not be separated from the concept of neighborhood. Therefore I suggest replacing the concept of neighborhood with a network approach, i.e. with the concept of networks[10]. Through the application of the network approach the abyss between the virtual and ‘real’ neighborhoods would disappear as well as the problem posed by the definition of community and the problem of boundaries. The notion of networks is also well-suited to grasping the character of the contemporary world, since inherent to this notion is the idea of process, and on the other hand more stable networks can be conceptualized in terms of structure. The network approach also has the potential to bridge small-scale and large-scale processes and map with more precision the connections and interconnections that are of relevance for the concrete research problem. The idea of the production of locality, that I view as highly theoretically potent, could be connected with the network approach, this would lead in my perspective to a more theoretical precission which I am sometimes missing in Appadurai’s writing[11] and would be also more productive at the practical level of anthropological research, since the concept of neighborhood seems to me too confused for me to be able to apply it analytically in a particular case study. On the other hand the application of the notion of the production of locality particularly in relation to the politics of identity could raise new questions and motivate new perspectives on how particular localities are discursively produced, from what kind of material, what is made important, what is deleted, how the locality is in the discursive practices of identity politicians inscribed on the bodies of the subjects that are being in a certain sense localized, no less in relation to the global surroundings. These could be used e.g. in multi-sited studies on the workings of identity politics in diasporas and ‘at home’.

Appadurai’s work thus brings us in the realm of many fruitful ideas and makes us definitely think about the changed situation of the contemporary world and motivates us to a much deeper recognition of the certain undeniable facts of globalization and their incorporation in our thinking, practice and theorizing; on the other hand we must avoid taking the presented notions uncritically and overenthusiastically. As we have seen, certain concepts viewed from a different perspective raise more questions than they are able to solve.

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[1] The symptoms of the changed character of the current world can be, borrowing from Comaroff (1996:167) summarized as follows – “(1) accelerated process of globalization accompanied by a dramatic growth of transnational institutions, movements and diasporas; (2) the weakening of the nation-state; (3) the rise of a (re)new(ed) politics of identity couched less in the language of nineteenth-century European modernity than in the rhetoric of alternative modernities; (4) a crisis of representation in human sciences”. For more on crisis of representation in human sciences see Marcus & Fischer 1999:7-17.

[2] But there is no doubt that refugee – representing the avant-garde of his people (Arendt in Agamben 2003:19) - can be conceptualized as a category or example par excellence through which the crisis of nation-state and related processes can be perceived; but we must be aware of that such an analysis leads more to a prognosis than to a diagnosis, opening up possible scenarios of the imagined postnational future. “[A refugee] is a limit concept t