Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

John Borneman

I’m very honored to participate in Jonathan Spencer’s “Retirement Event.” My own “retirement event,” as it is called in the invitation, occurred a bit over a year ago, but I resist, as I suspect Jonathan will, to think of myself as similar to a used car that no longer runs. Today I am asked to speak about the political. When I think of politicians who work within and often define the political domain, I can only wish a speedy retirement for all those politicians in our respective countries, the United States and Great Britain, who cannot let go of the power and status they have accumulated even though they have little to contribute today. I would hope that we in the academic sphere differ from them and consciously inhabit the process of slowly becoming ancestors, a process that has been well-studied by anthropologists, even though we’re in store for many unpleasant surprises. There is perhaps no longer an elegant word to express this phase of life Jonathan now enters. A deinstitutionalized person? A senior? Old fogey? Old fart? It’s best, I think, to leave the term indeterminate.

I want to situate myself in relation to Jonathan’s plea, in his 1997 essay on “Postcolonialism and the Political Imagination,” for a radical empiricism. His task, he writes, is “the empirical dissolution of the certainties of some kinds of modern social inquiry in the unexpectedness of actually existing politics” (15). I share with Jonathan a conviction in the importance of the empirical for research in political anthropology. We also have a connection with Sri Lankan-educated mentors. One of my advisors in Harvard graduate school was Stanley Tambiah, who Jonathan befriended and learned from at the University of Chicago years before I met him. And several decades later, after I moved to Princeton, I developed a relationship with Gannanath Obeysechere, who Jonathan also engaged many years before I did. Tambiah was a structuralist and political anthropologist; Gannanath was psychoanalytically oriented. While Jonathan has worked largely, like Tambiah, on theories of the political, I have been more taken with the content of the political through psychoanalytic theories, similar to Obeysechere. All approaches of all four of us are ultimately different, though I see them as more complementary than opposed.

Both Tambiah and Obeysechere were intellectual titans who also embodied the privileges bestowed upon upper-caste Sinhalese and Tamils by the British in the colonial period. Especially in education, they both experienced the benefits of colonial rule and its positive legacy after independence. This made for them an experience of the postcolonial quite different than the picture we get today from most postcolonial theory. For one, it was a relatively peaceful period. When the civil war broke out in 1983, Jonathan was in the midst of fieldwork. By then Tambiah and Obeysechere had become American professors and were settled in the U.S. From afar they began a dialogue to understand the violence of the war, even though their very dissimilar theoretical approaches to South Asia had kept them apart.

Jonathan’s query of “Postcolonialism and the Political Imagination” which he explicitly addresses in his 1995 Malinowski Memorial Lecture, is informed by the violence of the civil war in Sri Lanka. That war may have its origins in the politics of the colonial period, but the subsequent violence and instability can be explained, Jonathan argues, only in terms of transformations of the relation of colonizer to colonized, and within the internal schisms that developed and ripened following Sri Lankan independence and the introduction of democratic representation. Jonathan expresses this influence obliquely: he writes, “the political structure of colonial rule shaped the social imagination of both colonizer and colonized, leaving behind a vocabulary of social types and political possibilities which continues to haunt us thirty, forty or fifty years later” (2). We might add, just as the majoritarian-democratic structures propagated in the Cold War shaped and continues to shape South Asia.

Jonathan acknowledges this with a caveat: “The facts of colonization—and the facts of decolonization—do not in themselves serve to constitute a homogeneous theoretical object, ‘post-colonial culture’ or ‘post-colonial society’” (2). That is, he warns against the tendency to reduce the present to a single postcolonial, to the single modifier of either culture or society. When he further criticizes political anthropologists for “an early excess of certainty,” he is criticizing the moral certainty in the use of categories of the political, most recently those offered by the theory of the postcolonial (8). One of the ways this moral certainty might be challenged is more study of postcolonial states, not merely in terms of their past relations with colonial powers but of how the political imagination of those states and actors within them has shifted since they shed their colonized status.

Jonathan continues, arguing that areas of uncertainty excluded from the purview of the postcolonial are some of the more fruitful areas for understanding the political imagination of a certain time or period. One of the them that he engages is the contemporary settings of violence and the implications of this violence for democratic rule. In this line of argument, Jonathan’s essay is prescient. Moral and theoretical certainty about the postcolonial is even more of pronounced today than it was 28 years ago when Jonathan wrote this essay, running with the enthusiasm of a race horse wearing blinders.

His alternative is more empirical research, which I would gloss as more on-site ethnographic work. This is an indirect response to his sense of vacating the production of “thought appropriate for anthropological analysis in general” (6). Anthropological analysis means, if I understand him correctly, theories that account for the diversity of the empirical despite an appearance of uniformity of origins. He adds, “claims for political and theoretical importance sometimes mask the limited empirical terrain that is being traversed” (14). By that, he means, stated with his customary humor, that we have “rather more re- readings of Fanon than analyses of the tragedy of recent Algerian politics, and much more on Conrad than on post-colonial Zaire” (14). Again, this is quite prescient. In my recent experience, Fanon is not cited for the insights he offered in his time, at the height of independence movements, not historicized but used as a hammer to claim universal significance of his work, across time and cultural spaces. This use of Fanon eschews learning from the empirical, foreclosing insights from new experience or theories.

What of Jonathan’s critique of the political imagination? He cautions us that “the political” is not concentrated in state institutions, not, as in political science, an “apparently bounded and structured social unit” (9). The political is to be found, he writes, in the cultural domain. He briefly references the work of Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault. Since he wrote this essay, some anthropologists have indeed followed Clifford Geertz and taken up the state as “rituals and symbols,” and even more have followed the image of the Foucauldian Leviathan, an abstraction, an oppressive surveillance apparatus, a disciplinary regime. Regardless of approach, anthropologists have followed the direction Jonathan pointed us and in become more alert to the shifting domain of the political, which is cultural and historical to the core. Whether the economic in one place, land rights in Tanzania, vegetarianism in India, or ethnicity, race, taxation, sexuality, women’s reproductive capacities, religious freedom, minerals and oil­­––there are an infinite number of issues unconnected to the traditional political field that can become the focus of the domain of the political.

Jonathan’s work in Sri Lanka takes him to nationalism, the process of making and dissolving a people, a form of group belonging with a history of violence. Critical of the Foucauldian premise that power is everywhere, he turns to a specific ritual, elections, and to the electoral process. To my knowledge, he was ahead of the curve here. Today elections are ubiquitous as a ritual of representation and as a means of legitimizing an allocation of power and distribution of authority. This is the dynamic that Jonathan focuses on.

To theorize elections not in their execution in specific places but as a ritual that proposes an ideal type for the political, we might think of the staging of a sacrifice and the willingness of the loser to accept defeat for the sake of a group. Elections create a loss, and part of their legitimacy is that the losers accept their own loss as having a ritual necessity. Electoral rituals in a democratic system have a singular function: they bring about the periodic dissolution of the people, replaced by a new or renewed people. Through the ritual, a ruling party legitimizes its power, its ability to define the political and to represent the people. On the day of elections, the people have dissolved and a newly legitimized body takes power. If one person or party rules without the possibility of turn-taking in creating a winner and a loser, the entire system of rule becomes more autocratic, less democratic.

That is the idea. In practice, challenges to the execution of these principles abound, and have often been forms of culturally specific resistances. Consider the difference between majoritarian democracies and those ruled by minorities. Irrespective of the differences between presidential and parliamentarian systems, majoritarian democracies have problems recognizing limits to their power. Consider the neo-fascist regimes of Modi’s Hindutva movement, Orban’s Hungary, Xi’s China, or Putin’s Russia as advanced forms of contemporary fascism. Advanced in the way they have used majority rule to pervert the rule of law and centralize power. Whereas minority-ruled regimes have problems establishing trust and the legitimacy of their representation, majoritarian regimes tend to equate themselves with the people and therefore assume and enforce the power of their numbers.

Another important distinction is between law and norms. All types of democratic regimes are theoretically limited by the rule of law, a set of principles that are the precondition for democracy. For example, principles such as separation of powers, equality before the law, due process, nonretroactive application of the law. Culturally specific norms, what in the past we have called tradition, operate through consensus, consensus on how to overcome differences and arrive agreement. Anthropologists can be study this process empirically but today rarely do. The execution of these principles is always flawed and today challenged wherever there is a growing belief in law as an instrument of power. Such limits are a matter of interpretation, and the respect for norms tends to limit interpretations that overturn consensus. Power in both majority and minority-ruled regimes can easily become itself its own goal, in which case norms are not assumed and they are likely to limit the exercise of power.

Jonathan was right in insisting that anthropologists focus on the empirical in fieldwork, but he did not engage law as a normative system and precondition for democracy. Principles such as turn-taking or respect for the rule of law are “normative,” usually assumed instead of debated, hence often not well-understood by local actors themselves. Their normative nature makes them not less powerful than empirical facts but more meaningful—more like, say, religion than economics.

Principles retain an aspiration to the transcendental. The power of the norm resides not in what is explicitly said or written but in implicit, unquantifiable understandings, often unconsciously held. With organized religions forsaking their own principles today to act more and more like mere institutions of power, there is a space here for appeal to legal principles as beliefs that anchor democratic institutions. After the unification of Germany, in 1992, Jürgen Habermas argued something similar with his conceptual Verfassungspatriotismus, loyalty to the constitution. Rather than an ethnic understanding of patriotism, Habermas argued for shared political values, like pluralism, democracy, and freedom of opinion. This entails the belief, for instance, that law serves a certain vision of humans, not as we are but as we aspire to be in a democratic order. Evidence of belief is not directly observable; it must be found elsewhere, like in the unconscious.

This is all to say that while the empirical is necessary it is not sufficient for political anthropology. What of the political unconscious, that which is foreclosed or repressed in thought but actually motivates much action without the awareness of the actor? How can we pay more attention to the unconscious in action and situate it in what Jonathan calls the political imagination?

One site would be the place of legal accountability in social repair after violence. A correlate question would be to imagine reconciliation after violent conflict. What is foreclosed in an empirical approach is usually this imagination of the future. Many people who have suffered from violence in their communities have only an experience of its repetition. They have neither imagined an alternative nor have an experience of one. Anthropology might suggest alternatives through comparative research, which then might explore not only legal accountability but other forms of redress. What is possible then becomes a necessary supplement to think through in the documentation of what is.

One need not go outside Europe to find societies where cycles of political violence end, where the psychological motivation to reconcile, to render no longer opposed, is grounded in a future imagination of accountability, reciprocal care, or caring for the enemy. France and Germany after World War II, for example. Or Israel and Egypt. Or for several brief decades, China and the West.

For an understanding of the political imagination, one need not always draw from the present or the recent past. Spacio-temporal formations, what used to be the focus of cultures, also brings to light differences in the imagination of the political. Anthropological history offers many insights not shared by other disciplines because of comparisons, however difficult they are to make when the units are not exactly comparable

One lasting insight that I often return to is the finding that kinship was the first political organization, the first site of politics: who gets what when where and how. We know this through the study of populations that other disciplines, assuming evolutionary developments, have ignored. We also know that even today kinship remains an originating domain throughout life, it is the group into which we are born and grow up, and we never completely leave the systems of desire, care, and antagonism experienced in this originary group.

The creation of higher-level organizations like the United Nations, the nation-state, or local political parties build on fantasies of kin, of caring and cruel kin, of relations of exploitation and of reciprocity. More attention should be paid to how this link is nonetheless often relegated to the unconscious. Understanding the links between corruption and kinship, dynastic authority and electoral candidates, or migration and relations to foreigners, attunes us to shifts in the political imaginations.

In all of these questions, and many more, Jonathan has engaged and offered us accounts that help make our descriptions and analyses richer.

John Borneman is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in Germany, Central Europe, Lebanon, and Syria.  He has written widely on issues of intimacy, kinship, sexuality, nationality, justice, and law. He has been guest professor in Sweden, Norway, and France, and Senior Fulbright Professor at Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin and the University of Aleppo in Syria. His most recent publications include Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (2007), Political Crime and the Memory of Loss (2011), and Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Sex Molesters (2015). 

Works Cited

Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. “Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität.” In Faktizität und Geltung. Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp.

Spencer, Jonathan. 1997. “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(1 ):1-19.  https://doi-org.libproxy.wustl.edu/10.2307/3034362.