Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Thai local imaginaries of corruption and good governance. In so doing it reveals both the imaginative power of vernacular languages and how an ethnographic theory of political concepts can contribute in getting political analysis out of present impasses.

Paper long abstract:

Over the course of the last two decades, political languages promoted by International Financial Institutions (IFI) have taken a life on their own among Thai urban middle classes. Words like corruption and good governance, apparently part of Euro-American political imaginations, have been translated and immersed into a vernacular conceptual landscape, in which they morphed and which they contribute to re-orient. As a result, demanding an end to corruption and advocating for good governance have become part of the ideological infrastructure supporting military coups and unelected officials.

This paper propose to explore this process ethnographically, both to reveal the imaginative power of vernacular languages of corruption and good governance and to show how an ethnographic theory of political concepts can contribute in getting political analysis out of present impasses. In particular, given the growing geo-political significance of these shifts and its effects on Thailand's relations with China, scores of political observers have been puzzling over the apparent paradox of people traditionally seen as the bedrock of democratic transition now ditching representative democracy. Through this analysis, I show that this paradox is nothing more than one of the observational distortions of political theory, one caused by the lack of ethnographic engagement with vernacular political languages and imaginations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines what an anthropology of conscience might offer political anthropology. It focuses on the lives of British pacifists during the Second World War, and asks what forms of relationships and persons claims of conscience help to produce.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines what an anthropology of conscience might offer political anthropology, and the anthropology of actually existing liberalism in particular. Freedom of conscience has been central to much liberal political theory, marking the grounds of individual moral autonomy, and mediating the relationship between state, faith and citizens. But there is nothing self-evident in the importance placed in conscience, the forms that it takes, or the issues that it is said to focus on. Rather than being a transcendental experience, or a universal moral quality of all humans, the meanings and implications of conscience need to be rooted in particular times and places. Even in liberal democracies, conscience can be fraught, enigmatic and contradictory. This paper focuses on the lives of British pacifists during the Second World War. As British citizens were mobilised to fight on a scale never seen before, over 60,000 people refused to take up arms in the name of their conscientious convictions. Whereas conscience is often associated with the ability to act for good in the world, refusing to fight fascism in the name of violence produced difficult questions. The paper therefore asks what forms of relationships, persons and experience claims of conscience help to produce. By focusing on the languages and imaginations through which conscience is expressed and understood, the paper hopes to build towards a comparative anthropology of political conviction.

Paper short abstract:

With statistics not currently kept on faith-based cases, and minimal Home Office guidance, how do UK Immigration and Asylum Tribunals wrestle with the idea of faith and conversion? What does it mean to have "genuine" belief?

Paper long abstract:

Far-right groups are increasingly using social media to create a counter-discourse that seeks to create a certain "ideal type" of asylum-seeker: one who lies, cheats, and is otherwise not "genuine" (Trilling 2013). According to those working within the United Kingdom's Immigration and Asylum Tribunals (IACs), more and more Iranians are claiming asylum in the UK on the basis of religious conversion.

Questions in an asylum tribunal are extremely complex, and often directed—repeatedly—towards whether or not an asylum-seeker has "genuine" faith.. What guides these questions, and what While there has been guidance on credibility (UK Home Office 2015), and case law on religious assessments (e.g. SA (Iran) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department 2012), there is not yet guidance on religion. Further, Statistics on asylum cases based on religion are impossible hard to come by: the UK Home Office has only in November 2017 begun releasing data on one kind of asylum claim (sexuality), with a 12% margin of error (Home Office 2017). With statistics not currently kept on faith-based cases, and minimal Home Office guidance, how do the IACs wrestle with the idea of faith and conversion? What does it mean to have "genuine" belief? Further, what kinds of communities are created around the discourse of faith and asylum (Anderson 2006)?

Relying on fieldwork in Manchester tribunals, I contend that political anthropology has the ability to provide nuance to monolithic Home Office considerations of "genuine"-ness, as well as public discourse of what constitutes a "genuine" asylum-seeker.

Paper short abstract:

This paper revisits concepts that used to be at the heart of political anthropology but that have since been discarded (such as 'stateless societies' and 'segmentation'), in the light of recent ethnographic material from Algeria, Mali and Chad.

Paper long abstract:

At its inception, 'state-less societies' represented one of the 'problems' that anthropology was supposed to be good at. Indeed it has been argued that other key interests of the discipline - most notably kinship - derived from attempts to understand political structures in non-state societies. More recently, much of this interest has been decried as imperialist and overly functionalist, and the notion of state-less societies has fallen out of use - rightly so, as a definition by lack rarely has much purchase. Less justifiably perhaps, associated concepts, most notably that of 'segmentation', have equally been left by the wayside, although not much else seems to have been developed to replace it. Meanwhile, the anthropology of politics, where it has not been absorbed into reflections on 'power', has largely become the anthropology of the state, or, at best, of the margins or the breakdown of states. Although many of these studies are inherently critical, they leave little room for alternative concepts of politics. Drawing on recent works on non-state political systems and thought, this paper attempts to develop a way of thinking about politics without reducing it to question of power, drawing on examples from Berber-speaking Algeria, the border between Algeria and Mali, and northern Chad.

Paper short abstract:

A moral code referred to by fishermen in the Sundarbans as jongoler niyam, literally 'laws of the jungle,'is relegated by regional stakeholders to a depoliticized sphere of religion and ritual. Instead, I argue, if understood holistically, they are a form of alternative vernacular forest governance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, based on fieldwork in the Sundarbans mangrove forest of West Bengal, centers on a moral code referred to as jongoler niyam, literally 'laws of the jungle', followed by the fishing community whose livelihoods depend on the forests. This moral code is derived from religious beliefs around the forest goddess Bonbibi who preaches specific conduct centered around an ethic of restraint where one should take no more than one needs. This paper proposes that these 'laws of the jungle' are an alternative form of vernacular forest governance.

First, I contrast the prevailing political paradigms that seek to represent or control the fishing community, namely the conservationist and rights-based camps, with the 'laws of the jungle'. I show how the 'laws of the jungle' are antithetical to the surveillance, fines and fear enshrined in the State's conservation laws, but simultaneously also eschew the idea of universal entitlement advanced by forest rights activists. The 'laws of the jungle' have been largely ignored, in both language and imagination, by the prevailing political movements, which instead relegate them to a depoliticized sphere of religion and ritual.

I contend that these beliefs, if understood holistically, propose an alternative politics that hinge on governing the self. By extension, these beliefs provide a model for organizing social relations and protecting the environmental commons. By exploring the different political visions that forests allow for, I argue for anthropology's potential to escape the current "impasse" and contribute to new bases for political organization latent in peoples' everyday moralities.

Paper short abstract:

Few political anthropologists now take their object of study to be an 'ethnos' or culture. In the light of post-Weberian theories of power it is the political order that emerges as the most convenient unit for anthropological comparison,a project we might term 'kratography' rather than 'ethnography'

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology has inherited the term 'ethnography' from an earlier era, but for political anthropologists this has become an increasingly anachronistic expression, since few now take their object of study to be an 'ethnos' or culture as such. As Kuper (1999) notes among many others, by the late twentieth century the notion of bounded cultures as systemic wholes had been problematized and largely abandoned by social anthropologists. I argue that in the light of post-Weberian theories of power it is the political order that emerges as the most convenient unit for anthropological comparison, rather than the essentially 19th century concepts of a bounded culture or society. The study of such orders might be termed 'kratography' - the attempt to describe and analyse domains of power and the social forms that flow from them. A revisionist reading of classical ethnographies of the Nuer and Trobriand Islands places them in a new context: as kratographies these studies reveal the power relations and projects of governance backgrounded by their original settings.

Paper short abstract:

The elicitation of 'pity' among Amazonian Urarina is a deeply embodied as well as eminently political process. It grounds an everyday politics of redistribution that owes little to notions of fairness or equality.

Paper long abstract:

Egalitarianism as a political stance can often seem to imply relatively formal or explicit concepts of fairness, justice or equality among members of a circumscribed social space. Among Amazonian Urarina, however - who might well be described as 'egalitarian' - redistributive politics is primarily driven by elicitations of 'pity' or 'compassion' (caichaojoa), a positive form of attunement, closely linked to love and indignation, in which people are compelled to act by virtue of their emotional response to the perceived suffering of others. Rather than equality per se, the starting point of this process is precisely the difference, inequality or asymmetry between persons, and a relative absence of reciprocity. Elicitations of pity imply an absence of calculation and a willingness to 'forget' past judgements or grievances - though certainly not an absence of strategy, hence the relative preponderance of self-deprecating remarks and forms of humour. Pervasive in Urarina life, pity is thus a deeply embodied as well as eminently political emotion, though it points to a form of everyday politics that owes more to an ethics of care than an ethics of justice.

Paper short abstract:

My paper explores political hermeneutics of Ukrainian parliamentary reporters in order to argue for a renewed, comparative attention to issues of political representation.

Paper long abstract:

Since speech is crucial for parliamentary politics, it is unsurprising that local assumptions about language, agency and representation inform political action and its interpretations. When an MPs speak in the Ukrainian parliament, few take their words at face value: what is suspicious is not only rhetoric, but the very origins of speech. My paper explores how journalists in Kiev interpret MPs' speech in a cultural context where political representation (both in the sense of depiction and delegation) is often seen as manipulative and manipulated.

Building on an ethnography of parliamentary reporters at work, I demonstrate how journalists approach opaque political speech through questioning and detecting its authorship. Political speech, here, is akin to ventriloquism: not only are words insincere, but speakers might be unwitting vessels for agency of hidden/distant actors, e.g. oligarchs and the president. This has consequences both for reporting and politics. While uncertainties around who is represented are inherent to parliamentary government, these journalists resolve them through vernacular notions of power and agency which lead them to postulate coherent accounts of a political order where most politicians are but unfree objects of external manipulation.

This leads me to suggest that questions of representation (e.g. how, and to what effect, someone/something comes to stand for someone/something else) should be central to comparative political anthropology. I suggest that for such comparison we need a notion of political representation that accommodates vernacular conceptions of agency and mediation, complicating the dialectic of depiction and delegation.

Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnography of moral engagement and disengagement in the relations between Gypsies and Gadge, the paper argues that, rather than disrupt sociality, 'inequality' and antagonism are in fact constitutive of it, as they delineate commonality from otherness, and thereby enable moral behavior.

Paper long abstract:

My attempt to enlist the sympathy of my future host by reminding her of her husband's friendship with a member of my family did not go down well. After a minute's reflection, she stated coldly: 'Yeah, I remember. We helped him a lot and now we're helping you. My husband likes to help the Gadge [non-Roma] and get nothing in return.' This sober enunciation of the interested behavior that suffuses the relations between Gypsies and Gadge sounded conspicuously at odds with the notions of mutuality, equality, and inclusion that civil society promotes as panacea for antagonistic ethnic relations.

The present paper argues that, rather than disrupt sociality, as goes the current assumption, 'inequality' and antagonism in fact constitute it, by enabling moral behavior. Building on fourteen months of field research with a group of former 'thieves', I describe how central the distinction from the Gadge is to them, in terms of the values that instill social life. Firstly, I discuss how Gypsy-Gadge antagonism enables the social reproduction of Gypsyness through so-called 'negative reciprocity' (Sahlins 1972: 195) such as theft or begging, made possible by the absence of moral obligations towards others. Secondly, I build on my informants' reflections on the anti-corruption protests taking place in Romania at the time of my fieldwork to propose that 'disengagement' is an equally valid form of political critique as the much more praised (but often hollow) notion of 'engagement', as it points to the lack of obligations and to the structural (im)possibility of meaningful action.

Paper short abstract:

Political anthropology was born out of the realization that something important can be learned about politics if we focus on the moral logic of social relations. How can a re-focus on relational logic help us understand people's political lives, whatever role 'the state' may now play in them?

Paper long abstract:

Political anthropology was born out of the realization that something important, perhaps essential, can be learned about politics if we focus on the moral logic of social relations: on the entitlements and obligations that these involve, the expectations that people attach to them. This insight was crucial to understanding 'stateless societies', which had no centralized apparatus of government and where the moral logic of relations between and within tribes, clans or age-sets helped make sense of what appeared from outside like political pandemonium. As anthropologists abandoned 'stateless societies' in favour of 'the state,' their interest in the moral logic of relations gave way to preoccupations with the institutions and processes of the state. Analytically, the language of relatedness gave way to the statist language of Western political theory. No doubt, and pace Scott, few people nowadays live in 'stateless societies', few do not have to reckon with the state, but this does not mean that all people everywhere now think and act politically through the categories of the modern, Euro-American state. But what if we focus on the moral logics of political relations, and the language that they are expressed in, whatever the state may be (or not be) in a given setting? How do these draw on the logics of otherwise social relations? What, if anything, makes these relations political? And how do these ideas interact with the relational logic of the modern state? I shall draw on my ethnography of Rajasthan to consider these questions.