Resistance

Brown - the guerrilla leader's person and rhetoric lent itself to understanding in terms of the ?? and millenarian resistance that had been established over the previous two centuries (Brown 1996: 731). In other words, it rested on an articulation of two compatible, but far from mutually intelligible, worldviews.

local idioms of shamanistic prophecy

the concept of resistance has been applied to a broad spectrum of activities investigated by cultural anthropologists. e.g.

poetry among Bedouin women (Abu-Lughod, 1990), and love letters by Nepali youth (Ahearn, 2001

Resistance is a concept anthropologists and other social researchers conceive of in tandem with ??

power, domination, or hegemony

As everyday resistance seemed to proliferate, then, anthropologists began to ??

take a step back and cast a critical eye on this burgeoning field of work.

1960s - eschewed the prevailing view in 1950 - which was ?

that societies were rather static and maintained a basic equilibrium.

In Domination and the arts of resistance Scott introduced the idea of the 'hidden transcript' explain

the 'offstage' criticisms of the powerful that show that subordinate groups are not mystified or falsely conscious, as in classical conceptions of hegemony

In the original study, Brown and Fernández noted that once the insurgent campaign failed to prosper, substantial numbers of Asháninka did what ???

turned on its leaders and helped the Peruvian army hunt them down.

resistance studies - a fundamental question =

under what circumstances would people challenge hegemonic systems

why is the anti psychological stance problematic? How can actors protest and resist hegemonic powers if they are not endowed with internalized cultural ?? that motivate such actions?

understandings

Resistance is a perfect vehicle for the expression of moral fervour precisely because it is so ??, so easily left to the eye of the beholder. (Brown

vague

loosely structured actor - Ortner's concept - issues

vagueness of this concept

Brown - if we reduce everything to power relations then we are impoverishing anthropological theory and, worse still, ??? the complex and creative understandings of those for whom we presume to speak

violating

Brown - in first analysis Brown argues he failed to ask more searching questions about the personality and possible motives of the insurgent shaman because the 'resistance' was which were neatly subsumed by the assumption that.....

what mattered was the replication of a "millenarian tradition" of resistance

Paul Willis' Learning to labor (1977) studied -

white working class English school boys,

Scott's Domination and the arts of resistance (1990) introduced the concept of ?

'hidden transcripts'

Ortner 1989 solution to this inconsistency between dominant cultural beliefs and meanings and those held by particular individuals is to posit a ??

'loosely structured' actor

Marx ordained that the transition to socialism would proceed through revolution, and that this revolution would arise from below, from within the ranks of the ??

'lower classes'

Ortner (1989: 15, 197) has noted the 'inadequate theorizing of the actor' in her discussion of Sherpa society and the 'contradictions' between Sherpa culture (writ large) and individual actors' ....

'needs' and 'desires'.

Brown emphasises the need to move beyond a focus limited to relations of power and to examine the ??? of people who emerge as leaders.

'special motives'

Ortner (1995: 190) has criticized resistance studies for producing /?? (opposite of thick d) -

'thin description'

No strangers to the most brutal forms of colonial dispossession, indigenous Asháninkas resettled on missions and plantations had frequently lulled European overseers into thinking them "docile", only to mount ?? and disappear into the forest to await the next colonization push (Brown 1996: 730).

"murderous uprisings"

Wolf quote - (very true of resistance studies)

"the social sciences constitute one long dialogue with the ghost of Marx"

resistance studies 1950s - Argued = Turner developing Gluckman's ritualised resistance limininality -> anti structure -> communitias

- liminal phase of ritual status roles reversed, subjugated members of a society can assume powerful positions 'anti-structure' is allowed to prevail over 'structure' -> a temporarily egalitarian status of 'communitas' is reached.

Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline (1987) by who

Aihwa Ong

Turner -> Unlike Gluckman : Turner took this model and applied it to various social movements and cultural phenomena in other times and places, notably to secular contexts and to the groups in Europe and North America, such as the artists and poets of the ?? and their successors the 'hippies', citing ?? as the 'authentic voice of spontaneous communitas' (Turner 1969: 165).

Beat Generation, Bob Dylan

Scott's later work elaborating on the ideas of everyday resistance that he discussed in Weapons of the Weak

Domination and the arts of resistance (1990)

Which academic struggles to understand why the majority of Pewenche in southern Chile choose not to resist relocation so that a dam can be built on their land.

Fletcher (2001)

'everyday forms of resistance' - a concept inspired by

Foucault

BROWN CRITICAL of

Foucault

Could we be satisfied that resistance would somehow just occur - that social reproduction could become social transformation - regardless of people's states of conscious or unconscious dissatisfaction? Such broad theorizing by ??

Foucault

Resistance studies 1950s - Gluckman claimed what about resistance based on his work on fertility rituals among the Zulu Tsonga and Swasi people?

Social hierarchies are thus in fact protected, by socially sanctioned expressions of discontent, or at least by the recognition of the existence of inequality within a society and ritualized attempts to deal with it.

As whoo?? alleges in his curmudgeonly after-dinner address, power is the new functionalism, an intellectual black hole into which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked"

Sahlins

At first Brown argues internal 'treachery' within indigenous Ashaninka - in retrospect Brown argues that his acceptance of the resistance framework led him to ???

fail to ask more searching questions about the personality and possible motives of the insurgent shaman

resistance studies 1950s = Max Gluckman's Rituals of rebellion in South-east Africa (1954), focus on

fertility rituals and ceremonies humiliating royal leaders among Zulu, Tsonga, and Swazi peoples

Brown - Ashaninka's later did what

fought on both sides of the conflict

Aihwa Ong's Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline (1987) explores ??

gender and female sexuality as the site of both domination and of resistance, although often of an unwilled nature

1960s resistance anthropology inspired by Marxist and post-colonial perspectives - Marxist emphasis on modes of production informed a generation of political anthropologists who paid attention to what ??

how people's labour and material circumstances affected their social and cultural practices, beliefs, and relationships more broadly.

Paul Willis' Learning to labor (1977) analyses ?

how white working class rejection of the system of academic achievement offered by the formal education system contributes to the reproduction of their class position and future as working class labourers.

Paul Willis - The ways in which they resisted power became, with a bitter irony, a key part of why they continued to be oppressed by it. The question this interpretation raises, then, as with the anthropology of everyday resistance, is ??

is it really resistance?

Comaroff looked at for example how Zionist churches became part of the Tshidi community when they were merged into South Africa - examples he gave of subtle subversion

Zionist ritual dress adopted but transformed by Tshidi congregants, by changing its colours to those of pro-colonial symbols, or through Tshidi women wearing garments traditionally donned by male Protestant bishops.

Brownnoted that once the insurgent campaign failed to prosper, substantial numbers of Asháninka turned on its leaders and helped the Peruvian army hunt them down. At the time, it seemed possible to encompass this fact in the notion of resistance as simply ???

a manifestation of "internal" opposition to leadership

, Ong argues that Malay women factory workers' frequent spirit possessions on the factory floor were ??

a mode of defiance against their control by non-Malay male supervisors

Comaroff - Tshidi are a people who in their everyday production of goods and meanings simulatenously

acquiesce yet protest

Focault - discussion of large-scale social processes not ??

actual thoughts and motivations of individuals engaged in them

Paul Willis - Unlike Scott's 'hidden transcripts', though, Willis' emphasis on the lads' irreverent approach to authority and the political ramifications of their clowning around represented a more ?? take on resistance

ambivalent

Ong - Along with small acts that decrease the women's productivity, as in Scott's framing of the various acts and forms of speech that constitute hidden transcripts, the affliction of spirit possession and its temporary release of women from their workplace is interpreted as ??

an unconscious resistance against capitalist power and patriarchy

why did resistance studies become popular the late 1970s and early 1980s ? what was replacing functionalism??"

analyses of power and hegemonic asymmetries replaced functionalism as the predominant theoretical framework for ethnography

1960 resistance studies inspired by

anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth centur

Theorizing resistance has been problematic from the start and, as I shall argue, a significant part of the problem resides in the ??? position taken by most cultural anthropologists.

anti-psychological

1950s resistance studies - Victor Turner did what

combined Gluckman's attention to the cathartic dimension of rituals of rebellion with his own interest in rites of passage

Brown -- Domination and subordination are, of course, key . But so are reciprocity, altruism, and the creative power of the imagination, forces that serve to remind us that society cannot be relegated to the ?? .

conceptual status of a penal colony

needed to get rid of Gramscian notions of cultural hegemony inorder to conceptualize hegemonic systems as?? and continually in need of being renewed, defended, and modified

dynamic

the 1980s and 1990s saw a wave of work focusing on resistance where it had not been seen before..... new type of resistance studies called

everyday resistance

Brown - reading the struggle through the framework of the oppressed Indians versus the oppressive government distracted him from???

examining the internal politics

Marxist 1960s anthropology - Taussig argued that plantation workers were doing what through the idiom of the pre-commoditized relationship with material objects they had as peasants, when workers and the material things they made and circulated were entwined with their very person

expressing and condemning the suffering brought about by the new economy

Brown - Led by a Castroite intellectual who "was a microcosm of the hopes and contradictions of Latin America's militant Left in the 1960s", the MIR mobilized the support of some ?? through one of their shamans.

Asháninka

Theorizing resistance has been problematic from the start. First, social theorists had to move beyond the ?? notion of cultural hegemony

Gramscian

who was key to 1980s and 1990s focus on everyday resistance

James Scott

Brown illustrates some of the limitations of the resistance literature through the example of his own research on Asháninka (Campa) indigenous groups embroiled in the struggle between the

MIR guerrilla and Peruvian state (backed by the US) in the 1960s.

Ong 1987 In tune with the influence of feminist theory on the anthropology of gender, kinship, and production, Ong describes

Malay women factory workers' frequent spirit possessions

Weapons of the weak (1985) by Scott based on fieldwork where

Malaysia

1960s resistance studies characterised by being

Marxist and post-colonial

Brown (1996) ethnography

Marxist guerrillas in eastern Peru

resistance studies become so popular in late 70s and 80s = (2002: 114) "diminished expectations" after the effervescence and exaggerated hopes for radical social change embodied in the antiwar and civil rights movements seemed to have been dashed by the triumph of Reaganism. According to?

Matthew Gutmann

1950s resistance studies key work =

Max Gluckman's Rituals of rebellion in South-east Africa (1954),

Famous Marxist work

Michael Taussig's The devil and commodity fetishism in South America(1980)

study of twelve white working class English school boys, 'the lads' by

Paul Willis

Paul Willis irony in his work ??

The ways in which they resisted power became, with a bitter irony, a key part of why they continued to be oppressed by it.

1950s resistance studies -> Gluckman's student ?

Victor Turner

James Scott's book fundamental to 1980s and 1990s interest in resistance

Weapons of the weak (1985)

Jean Comaroff described the role of the Tshidi as ?

determined yet determining

What does Ortner mean by thin description

inadequate discussion of the internal politics of dominant groups, their cultural richness, and the 'intentions, desires, fears . . .' of actors who are engaged in 'these dramas'

Brown points out the difficulties in studying resistance based on

intellectual bias

In Weapons of the Weak 1985 what did Scott claimed that although outwardly compliant with rich local landowners, poor villagers were not taken in by inequality and domination but rather chose when and how to express discontent through ???

low-level sabotage and private gossip that could be considered an everyday form of class struggle and resistance

Marxist resistance anthropology - By pointing to expressions of resistance on the part of workers, of more and less conscious forms, and with greater or lesser immediate impacts, this focus on resistance has attempted to lend ethnographic richness to broader theoretical framings of political economy, as well as to undermine ???

modernist accounts that anticipate such developments as inevitable and universally similar.

resistance studies 1950s -> Gluckman = fertility rituals humiliating beards among Zulu Tsonga and Swasi people had what function

moments in which social taboos can be broken and rebellious drives aired so that all involved - both the weak and the powerful - can continue in their assigned social roles without revolution

Brown argues that there is intellectual bias in studying resistence because their is always what attached ?

moralism

Fletcher (2001) I argue that resistance studies' current critique finds the bulk of its substance in deficiencies of the 'everyday forms of resistance' paradigm presently dominating the field and offer a tentative outline of ways in which the field might be reconceived so as to transcend this paradigm and direct the study of resistance into ??

more productive arenas.

Resistance refers to efforts by those ?? to push back through protest and other forms of opposition against social policies or practices they find oppressive, imposing, or unjust.

not in power or who are subjects of power

Ortner's loosely structured actor = -

one whose thoughts, feelings, and actions are constrained but not determined by culture.

Gramscian notion of cultural hegemony =

ongoing systems of dominance and subordination shape people's cultural beliefs and practices so that they become complicit in their own subordination

Ortner (1995: 183) rightly recognizes the need for resistance studies to address issues of 'consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity', she and other cultural theorists have not ??

provided an adequate theory for doing so

Brown - By finding grassroots resistance in Mexican telenovelas or the household rituals of the Japanese, we reassure ourselves that the pursuit of what might seem to be esoteric ethnographic detail is really a form of highminded ???

public service

In the concise but somewhat tautological language of Foucault (1978: 93), '[W]here there is power, there is ??'.

resistance

Willis - The question this Willis' study raises, then, as with the anthropology of everyday resistance, is, is it really resistance? why does Willis' work make, the sense of the term becomes less clear, particularly for anthropologists interested in being true to their ethnographic material rather than only advancing a theoretical or political argument.

resistance is either not named as such by those engaging in it and contributes only to reinforcing domination

Brown regarded alliance between communist guerrillas and Ashaninkas as " a classic case of

resistance to the oppressive conditions of eastern Peru

Foucault issues with theorising - no explanatory power - suggested what about resistance?

resistance would somehow just occur - that social reproduction could become social transformation - regardless of people's states of conscious or unconscious dissatisfaction

Due to the influence of Marx resistance studies at first focused primarily on??

resolution and large scale collective mobilisation

In his initial analysis of this case, which had a tragic ending in the deaths of all the active participants and a good deal of "collateral damage" to nonparticipant Asháninkas, Brown and his coauthor Eduardo Fernández explained the MIR Asháninka alliance as a result of ???

the guerrilla leader's person and rhetoric

Jean Comaroff everyday forms of resistance - what did he study

the incorporation of the Tswana chiefdom into the South African State

when did resistance studies become popular

the late 1970s and early 1980s

Resistence studies up until 1950s - attention to resistance was framed in the terms of the dominant political anthropology of the time which emphasized ??

the maintenance of social order and avoided questions of oppression and conflict

post - 1960s resistance anthropology -Taussig's work focused on

the rapid change from peasantry to work on sugarcane plantations in Colombia

'everyday forms of resistance' focus upon small acts of defiance that do not constitute a social movement but that suggest a person's or small set of persons' dissatisfaction with ??

the status quo

Resistance studies 1950s - anthropologists who did analyze points of friction tended to depict them as ??

the temporary release of social tensions

Brown argues researchers project ??? by calling some acts resistance

their own values

Point of Marxist works like Taussig's - ( at least partly)

to disturb a historical narrative that sees the growth of global capitalism and its attendant securing of hegemony as a linear process.

post. -1960s marxist anthropology - what did Taussig describe happened in the rapid change from peasantry to work on sugarcane plantations in Colombia

workers' beliefs about money earned as wages and their integration of these with the Christian symbol of the devil expressed an indigenous critique of both capitalism and the religion of the Spanish colonizers