Introduction

Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Tobias Kelly

The essays in this forum celebrate Jonathan Spencer’s many contributions to anthropology, and were originally presented at a workshop held in Edinburgh in October 2023.[1] Over his career Jonathan has produced an influential body of work on political anthropology and the anthropology of violence.  Above all though the work has been marked by an intense commitment to  research about Sri Lanka, across five decades, and shows the benefit of that commitment in terms of collaborations and insights.

Many of the presentations in this forum were asked to respond to Jonathan’s now seminal 1997 article Postcolonialism and the Political Imagination. The article provided a startling and original review of the state of political anthropology in the mid- 1990s, and set out some exciting new directions, focusing on how and why the political actually matters to people. The essay was an important move away from political anthropology’s tradition of using idealized concepts of politics, towards foregrounding experiences and everyday articulations of the “political.” At the same time, Jonathan asked us to think about the ways in which colonialism left behind a vocabulary for talking about and experiencing the world, creating new imaginations of how we might, or might not, live together.  In doing so, Jonathan insisted that politics, and our analysis of politics, is always uncertain, but this uncertainty should be our starting point, not our conclusion. In many ways, the backwards looking parts of the article describes a political anthropology that no longer exists, but if that is so, it is probably because the article itself played an important part in (re)opening up the subdiscipline. Participants in the workshop were therefore asked to reflect on what has happened to political anthropology in the nearly three decades since the article was first written, on the exciting new lines on enquiry, on the dead ends, and on the paths not taken.

A concern with the workings of politics and the political has run throughout Jonathan’s research and writing, in a way that has resisted any simplified conflation of politics with power, and without spreading the concept of politics so far that it becomes meaningless. His work has consistently encouraged us to stay attuned to how people actually think and feel about the political. As such, the work is deeply empirical, not in the sense of naive positivism, but rather in terms of an insistence that theory should be used above all to help us understand our collective lives. And if so much of politics is unruly, fraught and unpredictable, a profound sensitivity to such tumult has been central to his work.  As Moyukh Chatterjee reminds us in his contribution to this forum, Jonathan has always been alive to the “frisson of the political—the intensities and intimacies, the pain and pleasure, the ludicrous and the deadly.” Importantly, for Jonathan, this “frisson” is not merely the icing on the cake, decorating the “real” politics of institutions, states, and structures, but is where the political takes shape and is formed.

As many of the essays in this forum reflect, Jonathan’s writing is shaped by the violence of the Sri Lankan civil war, beginning with the reverberations of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in the southern Sinhalese majority village where he was conducting fieldwork at the time. Throughout, he has insisted on seeing violence as transformative and deeply political in its causes and consequences, while opening up how we think about the politics of the politics of violence. In doing so, he has been centrally concerned to avoid sensationalism. This has meant paying attention to the categories through which we apprehend violence, without turning violence into an analytical fetish or abstraction. It has meant avoiding over-determination of violence, seeing violence as everywhere and in everything. And it has meant paying attention to the conditions under which we might, under the right circumstances, reject violence. Above all, this has been done by always placing violence within the warp and weft of political contestation and representation.

Jonathan’s distinct approach to politics, and Sri Lankan politics in particular, was originally reflected in his important monograph A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble: Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka (1990). The book set out to explore the background to the tensions and bloodshed of Sri Lankan politics in the 1980s through the study of one village, examining the high rates of political participation and the role of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. In many ways it was one of the last of the classic “village studies” but did so in a way that opened up new questions about democracy and nationalism that would play an important role in much of the political anthropology that followed.

The next monograph, Anthropology, Politics, and the State (2007), broadened its vision across South Asia, while examining the ambiguous energies released by electoral democracy.  Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque (2014) followed, a collaborative ethnography that explored the apparently contradictory role of religious actors as a source of both reconciliation and conflict in Sri Lanka. More recent work has focused on histories of Sri Lankan radicalism as well as forms of urban transformation across South Asia, with at least one other collaborative volume in the works. Across this time, Jonathan has also published influential articles on nationalism, anthropology as a form of writing, non-violence, and counter-politics, amongst others.

Although deeply rooted in Sri Lanka, Jonathan’s writing is also illuminating much more widely. In my own work, his insights were crucial in helping me begin to understand the politics of Occupied Palestine during the second intifada: this was a situation where politics (and power even) was clearly everywhere, but where political institutions, whilst omnipresent, were also fragmented and unresponsive, if not also repressive; where alongside considerable cynicism and despair, there was also a remarkable faith in the capacity of politics to still change things for the better.

Jonathan’s work has always been deeply humanistic, both in the sense that it has seen anthropology as part of the humanities and the social sciences, and in the sense that it is deeply attuned and sensitive to the hopes, fears and foibles that make us human in all our diversity. The writing has also always been intellectually capacious, using theory to try and understand the world in which we live, rather than treating theory as a game of one upmanship, drawing on writers from Castoriadas to Freud, from Mouffe to Obeyeskere, but also taking inspiration from the pianist Thelonious Monk and the novelist Ali Smith. This is a body of work that stands out for what was once described as “suspiciously” good prose. It is shot through with a very particular ethnographic ear, an ability to make startling analytical connections and a very particular sense of humour.

The contributions to this forum are testament to the ways in which collaborating with and supporting colleagues, particularly junior colleagues, has been central to Jonathan’s career, through teaching mentoring, supervision, or co-authoring. I was lucky enough to be taught by Jonathan as an undergraduate student in the mid-1990s. Thirty years later I can still remember the astonishing ways in which his courses opened me up to new ways of looking at the world. These early inspirations have continued, as I have been lucky enough to be mentored by and collaborated with Jonathan across the subsequent three decades. Such collaboration has been central to Jonathan’s academic ethos. Perhaps most significantly, as Harini Amarasuriya writes about in this forum, there is a whole generation of scholars on Sri Lanka whose careers have been shaped by Jonathan’s support. Overall, he has supervised over 30 PhD students, with a strong center of gravity towards Sri Lanka, many of whom have gone onto make important marks of their own in anthropology and beyond, and some of whom are included in this forum and the workshop that proceeded it.

Postcolonialism and the Political Imagination is remarkable in is prescience, for the ways in which it prefigured many of the waves and currents within political anthropology, ranging from the anthropology of elections and democracy, to the role of the imagination in our analysis and political life more broadly. In 2024, a year when over 50 countries—with more than half the world’s population—will hold national elections, it is worth paying particular attention Spencer’s (1997) arguments about the necessary uncertainty of democracy, as elections represent new possibilities for “intense moral evaluation, the articulation of collective images of nation and community, and sometimes plain old public entertainment” (9).  And in doing so, his work encourages us to ask where we might all find sources of hope and critique by engaging and learning from each other in the necessarily uncertain tasks of collective living.

Tobias Kelly is Professor of Political and legal Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He writes on questions of political violence, human rights and policing. He is just starting a new project on the lives of private investigators and the secrets they try to uncover.

Notes

[1] Alongside the essay presented here, Chris Fuller, Yael Navaro, and Sharika Thiranagama also gave presentations.

Works Cited

Spencer, Jonathan. 1990. A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble: Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka. Oxford University Press.

—. 2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge University Press.

—. 1997. “Post-colonialism and the Political Imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(1): 1-19.

Spencer, Jonathan, Jonathan Goodhand, Shahul Hassbullah, Bart Klem, Benedict Korf, and Kalinga Tudor Silva. 2014. Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque: A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace. London: Pluto.