Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Moyukh Chatterjee

I

Whether it is a riot, election rally, political protest, or more concretely whether it is July 1983 Colombo or January 6^th Washington D.C 2021, Jonathan Spencer’s work asks anthropologists to give an account of the frisson of the political—the intensities and intimacies, the pain and pleasure, the ludicrous and the deadly—produced by politics not as mere paraphernalia to understand ostensibly solid, stable, even hallowed political concepts like “the state” or “democracy,” but as “sites for the production and reproduction of the political itself” (Spencer 2007, 78)

This line of reasoning, namely that any political anthropology, which does not pay attention to the exuberance and unboundedness of politics fails to do justice to the political is a thread that runs through Spencer’s work. I was struck by his attention to what I have called the frisson of the political.

But if we take this approach to politics and the political, anthropologists are in the difficult position of not knowing in advance the meaning, or rather value and significance, of terms like elections, justice, and democracy before their performance, capture, and dissemination. It is this not knowing what will come forth from a coup d’état, a political assassination, a riot, or a political protest that may make the anthropological approach to politics distinctive. At least, this is my way of understanding Spencer’s call to take a “radically empirical approach” (Spencer 1997) to post-colonial politics.[1]  Put in another way, I want to ask what is the problem that the “radically empirical approach” to politics tries to address?

In his 1995 Malinowski Memorial lecture that discusses vicissitudes of political anthropology in the context of the shift from colonial to post-colonial rule, Spencer (1997) writes “the anthropological study of actually existing politics has been hindered by an excess of certainty” (13).

In the essay, Spencer traces the sources within the tradition of political anthropology that create this excess of certainty. First, there are structural and structural functionalist accounts of politics obsessed with “formalization, typologies, models, and definitions” (Spencer 1997, 6). This extreme formalization is only one side of the coin though. Spencer suggests that the second strand of excessive certainty comes with an obsession with domination/resistance (in the wake of a flurry of work that applies Foucault’s work on power and knowledge across world contexts). The point is that both these strands can eviscerate the political from politics. Both these approaches seem to remove the thrill, messiness, and unpredictability of the political and confuse, for instance, the aspiration of colonial states (and for that matter modern states) to dominate and order the world with their rather limited ability to do so. So, one way the anthropology of statecraft has over the years reinvigorated the study of politics is to focus on the irrational aspects of statecraft, the madness, paranoia, and magic of the state (Arextaga 2003, Coronil 1997, Nugent 2015, Taussig 1999).

To illustrate the effects of “excessive certainty” in anthropological thinking around politics, let me very briefly take you back to Clifford Geertz’s essay on “The Integrative Revolution” (Geertz 1973). Geertz is writing about new states like Egypt and India which are going through a period of decolonization when nationalist leaders like Nehru are trying to transform an anti-colonial movement into a project of state formation. When the colonial flag has been lowered, according to Geertz, the post colony is wracked by two opposing forces—“primordial sentiments” and “civil sentiments.” Or as Spencer puts it, “the pull of primordial attachments’ versus the virtue of ‘civil sentiments’—on the one side the imperatives of blood and belonging, ethnicity, language, and race, and on the other the sanitized attractions of a modern state” (Spencer 1997, 7). The problem with this formulation is not simply that primordial attachments is not simply a problem of “new states.” To be fair, Geertz acknowledges this himself in a footnote that mentions that by the 1970s, any argument about the uniqueness of primordial attachments in the post-colony seems to be dissolving considering events in “Canada, Belgium and Ulster” (Geertz, 1973, 261). The problem, according to Spencer, is that Geertz spends far too much time unpacking the primordial—blood, belonging, and ethnicity—but assumes that we already know the civil. That the civil, is merely the absence of the primordial.

No doubt this broader idea about the movement of history sums up a line of thinking that far exceeds Geertz, namely that when societies become modern, the primordial takes the backseat. This is not merely an anthropological fantasy; it was an idea shared by postcolonial leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, who described dams and power plants as “temples” of modern India.  Geertz writes, “national unity is maintained not by calls to blood and land but by a vague, intermittent, and routine allegiance to a civil state, supplemented to a greater or lesser extent by governmental use of police powers and ideological exhortation” (Geertz 1973, 260). Now, I hardly want to chastise Geertz (or Nehru) for not predicting the rise of Trump, Erdogan, and Modi, but I think Spencer’s argument that political anthropology’s tendency to sequester these two domains—as if primordial attachments became political only in places like India and Sri Lanka, and that there was some indestructible wall between the primordial and the civil—has not helped us understand their relationship within political structures of modernity. Or put differently, such binaries within anthropological discourse, framing the postcolonial as either the domain of cultural difference or the domain of civil incompleteness have disallowed anthropology to generate new concepts to study postcolonial politics.

For example, the Partition of India and Pakistan, which uprooted fifteen million people and left more than a million dead, becomes in Geertz’s account an operationalization of a primordial attachment to religion, an extreme case of what one’s attachment to religion can lead to. And yet, this understanding of the Partition eviscerates the political from the event. In what way, if ever, the fear of being rendered a minority a “religious” fear? What if we choose to take a “radically empirical” approach to the mass political violence of the Partition and see it as the operationalization not of religion but modern state formation, an extreme case of what accompanies the making of modern nations and the invention of permanent majorities and minorities.[2]  In fact, the recent history of anti-minority pogroms in India are better understood as operationalizations of the partition logic, of purifying communities and neighborhoods of the internal enemy, a fantasy of creating a space of permanent majoritarian supremacy. Young men who have joined Hindu supremacist groups in India are eager to create a Hindu nation because for them it is the only way to feel safe (Chatterjee 2018). Their project can hardly be labeled as straightforwardly religious in any sense since it is premised on the use and abuse of the modern bureaucracy, courts, and electoral institutions (Chatterjee 2023).

One way to move past the primordial/civil binary, or the excessive certainty that accompanies analyses that use this binary, is to move towards the postcolonial as ground to build new theoretical frameworks to understand global politics. For example, in a 2004 essay on migration and modernity, Spencer uses historical and ethnographic evidence to show that migration and its management by authorities was hardly inaugurated by globalization, and in that sense, it is not sufficient to analyse migration as a peculiarly modern phenomenon.

Instead, there have been many waves of migration in premodern and postcolonial Sri Lanka. But what is modern and perhaps irreducibly political is the colonial and then postcolonial state’s will to manage this movement by purifying it. Reading the essay, I understood that this purification is based on racial logics that are at the heart of Europe and its relationship with its internal (Jews) and external enemy (Muslim).[3]  In suggesting that the colonial state prevent immigration from India in the aftermath of anti-Muslim violence in 1915, the Sinhala Buddhist activist Anagarika Dharampala writes, “The Muhammedans, an alien people, who in the early part of the 19^th century were common traders, by Shylockian methods became prosperous like the Jews. The Sinhalese, sons of the soil, whose ancestors for 2,358 years had shed rivers of blood to keep the country free from alien invaders, who had constructed vast tanks to irrigate millions of acres: Today they are in the eyes of the British only vagabonds” (quoted in Spencer 2004, 11).

But there is a twist. Even as ideologues and state actors lean on racism and racial logics to purify immigration, they must at the same time embed this purification within a space where migrants and the immigrant form the bedrock of the colonial and postcolonial economy. Spencer’s focus on the history of the will to purify in Sri Lanka is helpful both to understand contemporary anti-Muslim politics in Sri Lanka but also that the contradiction between the economic need for migrants and the political need to control this movement is “solved” by the logic of purification. If I apply this impossible work of purification to contemporary British politics, it seems that the political-racial logic of purification allows U.K. to perform sovereignty at the borders (“Stop the Boats”) even as the global-economic model of capital takes away control and power from them in other domains. In this light, Sri Lanka’s impossible work of purification is a form of governance that cannot be contained as the return of the repressed in the post-colony; indeed, this “impossible” work of purification may work to shore up the state’s powerlessness.

And here I feel that recent work by Frank Cody (2023) on media and popular sovereignty in Tamil Nadu, Nusrat Chowdhury (2023) on crowd politics in Bangladesh, and Lisa Mitchell (2023) on democracy in India—to name only a few that come to mind—are changing how we study the political in South Asia and also offering new ways of rendering politics and democracy intelligible. And that this is happening today through an anthropological re-examination of some of the keywords of mass politics is a testament to Spencer’s argument that the anthropologist must ask, each time anew, what is the political here?

II

Let me now turn now to a second important strand in Spencer’s work, namely on violence, which is a shared preoccupation, since I have also spent the last decade or so tracking the afterlives of anti-Muslim violence in India.

In his book on anthropology, politics and the state, Jonathan writes,“rather too much conversation has probably been provoked by the spectacle of political violence” (2007, 5) And it is precisely this movement away from the spectacle that has produced a remarkable body of recent anthropological work on violence. To take just two examples, Veena Das’s Life and Words (2007) and Tobias Kelly’s The Other Side of Silence (2011), are ethnographies that turn away from the spectacle of mass violence and torture to instead track the embeddedness of violence in language and law.

And it was precisely this discomfort with the spectacle of violence and its link with the suffering body that led me to approach violence obliquely; I followed the work of human rights activists fighting impunity, read police first information reports, and observed legal rituals in courts that transformed political violence into political order. To me it seemed that the truly political aspect of violence was not only what it destroyed, but what it transformed. In the courtroom, on the street, inside the police station, within police archives and mainstream media, anti-Muslim violence was used by policemen, politicians, judges, lawyers, right-wing activists, and the wider public to transform the Muslim into a permanent outsider. The flip side of this was the construction of a wounded but triumphant religious identity, a new “Hindu unity” forged through violence. In this sense, political violence against Muslims could not be reduced to the cultural logic of “communalism” and “religious difference” because it was inseparable from state formation. Rather, I wanted to understand how it animates and shapes the making of an explicitly Hindu supremacist state. Perhaps this was my way of paying attention to the political dimensions of violent events.

“I turn away from earlier anthropological work with its focus on victims, or its search for some chimerical cultural logic at work in the violence and insist instead on the irreducibly political dimensions of the events of July 1983 (not to mention most of the violence in the years that followed” (Spencer 2007, 16-17).

In my interpretation, the “irreducibly political dimensions of violence” raise paradoxical questions about the political itself. Take for example far-right Hindu nationalist politics in India. Far-right politics in India, like in other parts of the world, has emerged alongside democratic politics, but its ambition seems to go beyond democracy, and even politics, if politics is understood as a struggle to capture state power. So even though Hindu supremacy emerges from within democratic politics in India—including the paraphernalia of free and fair elections, multiple political parties, and the building of a vast infrastructure of educational and cultural organizations—Hindu supremacists view politics and the political as only a means (politics being one amongst many domains) to construct and define “the people.” There is a somewhat easy solution to this problem of understanding the ability of Hindu supremacists to both mobilize and disregard politics. It would be easy to simply name the government of the day, whether it is Modi or Trump or Erdogan, totalitarian or authoritarian, and hence protect our concept of democracy from the unboundedness of the political.

But an anthropological perspective, perhaps because of what Spencer calls its “radical empiricism” cannot rest with this solution. Because, as Spencer puts it, “The political is productive as destructive. Violence is an obvious mark of destruction, although it often creates the possibility for altered forms of subjectivity and solidarity in its wake” (2017, 17).

In conclusion, I want to say that despite Spencer’s (1997) pronouncement that political anthropology, turned into a study of dry structures and even drier action sets became “the subdiscipline that died of boredom” (5), the best proof that political anthropology need not be dull is to re-read Spencer’s oeuvre because it is a reminder of the openings created by the political. Openings created by the frisson of the political.

As Spencer (2003) puts it, “the carnivalesque space of the political is a space of possibility and license: license to argue, and license to joke, and license to experiment with challenges to the order of things. It is, for this reason, also a space of danger, anxiety, and concern (28).” Here Spencer gives us two ways of thinking about the role of violence within the political—the productive and the performative. Let me turn back to my opening comments about the unboundedness and exuberance that characterizes the political. To my mind, this means taking seriously Joel Robbins’s critique of anthropology’s focus on “the suffering subject” (2013). To me, the suffering slot is inadequate to understand the politics of the present. By the present, I have in mind the global rise of popular and populist far-right regimes across the global north and south. It will not be enough to respond to this frightening development through an exercise in formalist labelling and definitions or as the breakdown of the civil in the face of the primordial; instead, I suggest an anthropological attention to the transformation of the political by far-right politics across world-contexts; transformation of not only the content of politics but its form and affect in ways that allow a new kind of political experience. This exercise will not be the about the horror of violent states or a lament about the crisis of democracy, rather it will tell us how democracy can end democracy.

Moyukh Chatterjee is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Edinburgh. He has recently published Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities (Duke University Press, 2023). His work on law, violence and justice has appeared in the American Ethnologist, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, and the Economic and Political Weekly.

Notes

[1] What is the relationship between the “radically empirical” and the ordinary empirical and their relationship with anthropological theory is a worthwhile subject for further discussion but which I do not broach here for reasons of space. If it is anthropological common-sense today that a purely empirical approach to any object is impossible because objects (and subjects) are discursive and historical, and therefore inherited within theoretical formations, then it seems to me that a radically empirical approach may mean something akin to questioning and challenging what lies inside and outside the political domain itself. I am thinking here of feminist scholarship’s questioning of separating politics from domains like religion, kinship, and gender (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995).

[2] Talal Asad (2020) has described the violence of the Partition as “the kind that is always a possibility and often a reality within modern nation-states” (2).

[3] See Gil Anidjar (2003), for a history and genealogy of this formulation.

Works Cited

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Asad, T.  2020.  “Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion.” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 11(1):  1-7.

Chatterjee, Moyukh. 2018. “The Ordinary Life of Hindu Supremacy.” Economic and Political Weekly Engage. January 25, 2018. Accessed January 21, 2024:   https://www.epw.in/engage/article/ordinary-life-hindu-supremacy.

Chatterjee, M. 2023. Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press.

Chowdhury, N.S.  2019. Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press.

Cody, F.  2023.  The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Coronil, F. 1997.  The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chcago:  University of Chicago Press.

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

—.  2003. “Appalling Fascination. The Emerging Anthropology of «the Political» in Postcolonial South Asia.” Journal des anthropologues. Association française des anthropologues 92-93:  31-49. https://doi.org/10.4000/jda.2042.

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Yanagisako, S. and Delaney, C.  1995. “Naturalizing Power.” In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, edited by Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, 1-22. New York:  Routledge.