Political Identity in a Postcolony

2020 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Kofi Takyi Asante
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Citizenship ◽  
Political Communities

This chapter examines contemporary constructions of citizenship identities in Ghana. Citizenship in former colonies could be conceptualised as structurally and substantively different from Western forms due to the articulation of pre-existing and European modes of political organisations and belongings. National citizenship was supposed to redirect all subnational allegiances to the state, but scholars argue that this does not always happen. In former colonies such as Ghana, the tension between ethnic and national identities are believed to be especially intense. In this chapter, the author argues that the popular dichotomy between ethnic and national identities is an elusive one. It fails to capture the ways in which citizens actually think of themselves as members of various political communities. This failure stems from the practice of unproblematically applying an ideal-typical conceptual dichotomy to the messiness realities of the social world.

The social uses of the law at a Soweto garbage dump: Reclaiming the law and the state in the informal economy

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Samson
Keyword(s):  
Informal Economy ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Legal Theory ◽  
The Law ◽  
Social Uses

The informal economy is typically understood as being outside the law. However, this article develops the concept ‘social uses of the law’ to interrogate how informal workers understand, engage and deploy the law, facilitating the development of more nuanced theorizations of both the informal economy and the law. The article explores how a legal victory over the Johannesburg Council by reclaimers of reusable and recyclable materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa shaped their subjectivities and became bound up in struggles between reclaimers at the dump. Engaging with critical legal theory, the author argues that in a social world where most people do not read, understand, or cite court rulings, the ‘social uses of the law’ can be of greater import than the actual judgement. This does not, however, render the state absent, as the assertion that the court sanctioned particular claims and rights is central to the reclaimers’ social uses of the law. Through the social uses of the law, these reclaimers force us to consider how and why the law, one of the cornerstones of state formation, cannot be separated from the informal ways it is understood and deployed. The article concludes by sketching a research agenda that can assist in developing a more relational understanding of the law and the informal economy.

Disrupting Sovereignty: Deleuze and Guattari on the War Machine

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-118
Author(s):  
Gavin Rae
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Ontological Difference ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
The Social ◽  
War Machine ◽  
Moving Fluid

This chapter engages with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s analysis of the war machine, suggesting that it contradicts Arendt’s analysis and offers the most radical critique within the radical-juridical paradigm. Premised on the notion that we must rethink sovereignty from ontological difference rather than unity, Deleuze and Guattari radically undermine the indivisibility that defines the classic-juridical conception. Far from being located in one individual or point, sovereignty is always tied to the State, which is a multiplicity that expresses the constantly moving, fluid, and dynamic field of difference. By thinking the social world in terms of heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari undermine the hierarchical conception of sovereignty underpinning the classic-juridical model, but continue to implicitly insist that State sovereignty is tied to the maintenance of juridical order; an order that is always threatened by or in conflict with the war machine that disrupts it. As a consequence, they conclude that sovereign order is always far more unstable and disordered than it appears to be.

scholarly journals The Mountain as Mandala: Kūkai’s Founding of Mt. Kōya

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Bushelle
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
Special Consideration ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Human Agent ◽  
The Social ◽  
Heian Court

This article considers the sociocultural significance of Kūkai’s understanding of Mt. Kōya as a mandala. Locating the context for his formulation of this understanding in his efforts to found Mt. Kōya in the mid-Kōnin era (809–823), it seeks to elucidate its disclosive function. The interpretation is put forward that Kūkai’s mandalic understanding of the mountains disclosed the possibility of a disembedded form of Buddhist life, one in which the human agent is understood to exist outside the social world of the Heian court and the divine cosmos on which it was believed to be grounded. Particular attention is paid to the sociopolitical effects of this disclosure, suggesting specifically that it contributed to the differentiation of religious authority from political power in Japan. To elucidate this process, Kūkai’s founding of Mt. Kōya is situated in a genealogy of monks who founded mountain temples that operated relatively autonomously vis-à-vis the state. Kūkai’s erstwhile collaborator, Saichō, is given special consideration.

scholarly journals TARSKY DISTRICT AND HIS EMPLOYEES IN THE FIRST THIRD OF THE XVIII CENTURY

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-81
Author(s):  
V. D. Puzanov
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Social Group ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Xviii Century ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Town

The article examines the situation of Tara uyezd and service people who lived in the town of Tara in the first third of the 18th century. The research relies on such archival materials as responses of officials of Tara uyezd who completed to Prof. G.F. Miller’s questionnaire, books and tables of Siberian prikaz on the servitors in Siberia, and materials from the Senate fund. The article provides data on the town of Tara and Tara uyezd in the 1730s. Tara had a near-border position. A large Oirat state -Dzungar Khanate - was located to the south of Tara, and noble Oirat nomads collected tribute from the Turkic population of the uyezd. The reforms of Peter I made profound changes in the social world of Siberia. In the first third of the 18th century, the composition of the uyezd’s population was significantly altered. A new social group raznochintsy was formed of the relatives of servitors and clergy, and a large part of Tara’s service people were transferred to the garrison regiments of Siberia and the Orenburg governorate. The conflict between Tara’s horse Cossacks and captain Yakov Cheredov is indicative and important for understanding the service in favor of the state at that time. The Cheredovs were a deep-rooted clan of Russian service people who had lived in Tara since its founding. The Cheredovs held a number of important offices in Tara, and many of them became Boyar scions and nobles. After the 1722 Tara Rebellion, in which the Cheredovs played a significant role, they lost their privileged position and became raznochintsy . The ‘old’ service people who were nobles, Boyar scions and Cossacks remained the main military force in Siberian uyezds after the reforms. However, their dependence on the state increased. New garrison regiments in the region were formed in the 1730s, mostly of ‘old’ service people.

Citizenship

Anthropology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sian Lazar
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Citizenship ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Under Construction ◽  
The Relationship

At its most fundamental, citizenship means political belonging, and to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community. Anthropological work on the theme of citizenship tends to break open the classic version of citizenship as a universal legal status belonging to citizens of a given nation-state. Instead, it recognizes the differentiated nature of political membership, and the ways that citizenship acts as an ordering and disciplining device as well as a mechanism for making claims upon different kinds of political communities. These may include the state but they are not limited to it. In dialogue with political theorists, anthropologists of citizenship have argued that the constitution of any given community requires a considerable amount of work, and that meaningful membership is more than the possession of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship may be formal or substantive, full or partial, and it is always under construction, as citizens and noncitizens claim inclusion and effective participation in political life. That may be articulated through languages of rights but may also be conducted—and contested—through other kinds of everyday or insurgent political practices. One of the main focuses of ethnographic study of the practices of citizenship has therefore been on how people relate to the state, bringing out the relationship between people and state bureaucracies and between people and law. Another aspect is the scale at which relevant political communities operate, as anthropologists have added to the discussion of national citizenship with studies of cosmopolitan, transnational, or global citizenships and of local, city-based formations. Citizenship is a complex bundle of practices of encounter between the state and citizens at different scales or levels. Because citizenship practices are also the means by which societies organize inclusion and exclusion, the figure of the noncitizen is crucial to the construction of citizenship. Noncitizens might be conceptualized as strangers, migrants, or refugees, and these individuals always raise questions about the definitions of political communities and their borders. Central to all these processes of inclusion, exclusion, encounter, and claims-making is the way that people (citizens and noncitizens) build their own political agency and subjecthood under what constraints and in what realms of life, including the most intimate.

scholarly journals Law, Nation and Race: Exploring Law’s Cultural Power in Delimiting Belonging in English Courtrooms

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Aliverti
Keyword(s):  
Legal Culture ◽  
Social World ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
The Law ◽  
Shed Light

This article explores the place of law and legality in the formation of British national identity and its reproduction (and contestation) inside the courtroom. It draws on sociolegal scholarship on legal culture, legal consciousness and ‘law and colonialism’ to shed light on the cultural power of the law to forge national subjectivities. The law does more than adjudicating justice and imposing sanctions. Its symbolic power lies in its capacity to construct legal subjectivities, of both individuals and nations. Through the law and its categories, people make sense of the social world and their position in it. The law can articulate national identities by expressing who we are and who we would like to be as a nation. By exploring the place of the law in discourses of British nationhood, this article contributes to our understanding of the ideological role of the law in reifying racial and global hierarchies. It also sheds light on how the boundaries of belonging can be unsettled through law’s power.

scholarly journals The Field of Fields. The State According to Pierre Bourdieu

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 010
Author(s):  
Francisco Villacorta Baños
Keyword(s):  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Generic Level ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Analytical Potential ◽  
The Social ◽  
Level Of Significance

A book published in 2012 included the publication of the lecture course on the State delivered by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège de France. The course was given at a time when Bourdieu’s work had reached full maturity, and it completed, at the most generic level of significance —in the “geometral of all perspectives”— the analytical potential opened up by the main categories he used to approach the social world: habitus, field and, above all, capital or symbolic power, the true core of uncontested legitimacy and of the omnipresent domination that the state has acquired in the contemporary world.

scholarly journals Indigenous health and nursing in Roraima in the 1970s

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 848-853
Author(s):  
Raphael Florindo Amorim ◽  
Jacquelaine Alves Machado ◽  
Keythluci Faria Trigueiro da Silva ◽  
Fernando Porto
Keyword(s):  
Health Problem ◽  
Indigenous Health ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
World Theory ◽  
The Government

ABSTRACT Objective: To analyze the strategies undertaken by the government to address the health problem in Boa Vista/Roraima. Method: A study using the microhistory approach, with documentary sources from journalistic material of the 1970s through the triangulation technique: texts, images and context, with analysis from the perspective of the Social World Theory. Results: It was evidenced that the strategies undertaken by the government occurred in favor of the exploration of isolated areas in Roraima that demanded settlement processes, construction of villages and a highway to enable the interconnection of the state with other regions of Brazil, with a smoke screen symbolic effect produced by nurses on indigenous health. Conclusion: There was governmental manipulation, when the symbolic power was unveiled, making it possible to see and believe that nursing needs to guide political issues rather than being ruled.

Stop Understanding “Power” Through the “State”: Gouvernementalité, Governmentality Studies, and the Fate of Michel Foucault’s Analytics of Power in Russian Translations

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-220 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
English Language ◽  
The State ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science In Russia ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Governmentality Studies

Gouvernementalité is a neologism that was coined by Michel Foucault in 1978, and soon followed by “governmentality” in English. It has become one of the key concepts in the social sciences. Those terms both refer to the novel perspective that Foucault arrived at to understand and analyze the phenomenon of power or, more specifically, various types of power relations typical of different cultures and political communities. Over the past several decades, that perspective has provided the methodological basis for an emerging interdisciplinary field called Governmentality Studies in the English-language social sciences. One purpose of this approach is to reassess the genealogy and specific features of modern societies and modern states without conceptualizing “power” through the “state” as traditional political philosophy has done. However, contemporary social science in Russia has largely been deprived of the opportunity to use Foucault’s conceptual instruments and research methods because of problems with translation among other barriers. The article 1) summarizes the Foucauldian critique and analysis of power embedded in the concept of gouvernementalité and compares that approach with traditional paradigms in political philosophy, 2) highlights how that concept has been used over the years in Foucault’s works dealing with power relations and the topic of the ethical subject, 3) demonstrates that current Russian translations of Foucault’s primary texts incorporating the term gouvernementalité are not merely imprecise, but exemplify what the French call contresens - interpretations that directly contradict the essence of the original. As a corpus, the available translations do not convey Foucault’s thought, but rather bar Russian-speaking readers from his conceptual and exploratory perspective

scholarly journals Kayiak Beterang Ritual: The First Social Life Learning of the Serawai Girls

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarwit Sarwono ◽  
Ngudining Rahayu ◽  
Agus Joko Purwadi ◽  
Noermanzah
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Social World ◽  
The State ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Museum ◽  
The Village

This article is intended to discuss a text in the ulu manuscripts, numbered MNB 07.18, preserved in the State Museum of Bengkulu. The manuscript is a bamboo log, 58 cm in length and 7.8 cm in diameter, consisting of 16 lines. The manuscript belongs to the Ser awai ethnic, originating from the village of Jambat Akar, Seluma Regency and received by the State Museum of Bengkulu on January 12, 1998. The text en titled arawan bujang ataw gadis (hereinafter caled ABG text), contains spells or incantations of kayiak bet erang social rites among the Serawai ethnic of Bengkulu. This ritual serves to establish the position of a girl to be able to enter to the social life on the laman libagh, i.e the social world of Serawai ethnic. In that world and in the social interaction, a girl is obliged to master rejung, able to andun dance and merejung as well. The social function of andun dance and merejung , among others, is to find a lover (santing) who will later become her life partner as a family and to actualize her social rig hts and obligations. The kayiak beterang rite applies to girls aged 5-7 years, the age before adolescence, or the period before getting the first menstruation. The rite is led by a midwif e covering a series of actions, that are (a) purifying, (b) traditional dressing, (c) andun dancing and merejung, (d) enjoying meals with family and invitations. The ABG text is based on the knowledge and cultural experience of the scriber and was written to recontextualize and transform the social rite of the kayiak beterang.

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