In search of certainty in revolutionary India

In this article, I focus on the dilemmas of a friend in Jharkhand who might have joined the revolutionary armed squads of the Maoist insurgency in India. I show how the question of why one supports a revolutionary movement, as well as the nature of that support, can change over time. In particular, I stress the importance of the dialectics between epistemological and ontological uncertainty and certainty, which may be central to the making of a revolutionary in a particular phase of a revolutionary movement. These dialectics are not just the result of an ontological uncertainty of ideological commitment to the movement, but are crucially also about the search for epistemological clarity in social relations imagined to be less opaque and hence more trustworthy. Doubt, an uncertainty about what one knows about one’s social relationships is characteristic of the epistemic murk that accompanies the breakdown of the normative order in the revolutionary situation analysed here. In this context, Maoist terror arises from the creation of epistemic clarity—the possibility that on the other side norms and relationships will be more certain. This is a certainty that is carved out of uncertainty and ambivalence, a certainty that denies or projects away uncertainty. Its weapon is paranoia, an ability to make enemies where there would be doubt, betrayal where there would be benefit of the doubt. The potential revolutionary is therefore not only unsure about his/her ideological commitments, but moreover, a crucial component of their predicament might be an uncertainty about the social relations in which they find themselves and the hope that revolutionary engagement might come with more guarantees. Becoming a revolutionary is also about being in search of certainty.     

‘Rules that apply in times of crisis’: time,agency, and norm‐remaking during Nepal's People's War

This article explores how people in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal adopted previously transgressive norms and practices during the decade of the People's War (1996‐2006). By examining the rise in practices of beef‐eating and inter‐caste commensality, this article suggests that the temporal dimension of wartime ‘when different rules apply’ was crucial in making people accept new ideas and break established norms on a scale atypical for the ‘normal’ times of peace. Analysing the agency of Maoist activists, who self‐consciously tried to implement a project of radical social transformation, and those people who were caught in the midst of the Maoist transformative endeavour, this article argues that the contours of the ‘new society’ emerged not only due to revolutionaries’ intentional actions but also because of the ‘exceptional’ nature of wartime, which forced people to radically re‐create their daily lives. By transgressing social norms, ‘ordinary’ people did not deliberately undermine the normative order, but rather responded to the constraints of wartime, when people's agency and ethical choices were mostly driven by the need to secure the survival of their families and ensure the continuity of life itself.     

Anti-‘anti-witchcraft’ and the Maoist insurgency in rural Maharashtra, India

Dealing effectively with malignant mystical attack is an important concern in central India. This paper examines the ways in which the connections and conflicts between the Maoist movement, the police, and marginalised villagers in the state of Maharashtra, India, has led to a crisis in the identification of malfeasants such as witches. In response to the presence of the Maoist insurgency, state actors have become more involved in people’s lives than ever before. Police and others attempt to regulate activities such as witch-detecting and ghost-finding, which they regard as evidence of ‘backwardness’. In many respects of course, the Maoist movement is itself a commentary on ‘backwardness’. The paper therefore offers an insight into the lives of people involved in and affected by the circulation of this concept and the forms of transformation that result.     

Untimeliness as Moral Indictment: Tamil Agricultural Labouring Women's Use of Lament as Life Narrative

How do Dalit women forge certain forms of critical perspectives in relation to their existence? This paper explores the very particular poetics that shape the women's responses to an invitation by the ethnographer to tell her their life stories. Their narratives made use of several dominant discourses in south India that ritually construct a woman's life as a teleology of an unfolding essence, an embodied force that comes into flower and fruition, and must be socially shaped and tended in order to bring about an auspicious confluence for both woman and the social order. The women also made use of the structure and tropes of several styles of performance that have tragedy at their emotional heart, and which gain their force against the normative construction of life cycle as temporality. By using these forms, women were able to bring into discourse several aspects of their experience of marriage that would otherwise gain no social recognition. In particular, they highlighted the prematurity of their marriage, having wed while still children themselves. The wider argument of this paper engages with two very different versions of agency—one predicated on the use of reason and consent by the individual, the other derived from an examination of the Dalit women's narratives.     

The politics of race and sport: Resistance and domination in the 1968 African American Olympic protest movement

Using the case of the African American Olympic protest movement that grew out of the crisis of the civil rights struggle in the late 1960s, this article is an attempt to argue that work involving identity, culture and popular culture is crucial to the study of race and ethnicity in the contemporary world. A reconstruction of this movement demonstrates, first of all, how a cultural arena like sport can make it possible for otherwise powerless racial and ethnic minorities to draw attention to their cause. Of course, as with most insurgent movements, such initiatives ultimately (and often very quickly) come up against structural impediments that work to reject or absorb their challenge and reinforce the hegemony of the established regime. But the precise nature of the structural constraints operating in this particular case provides profound insight into the construction of social order in liberal democratic settings and the threat posed by cultural politics to this order. More specifically, I argue that athletic protest was overwhelmingly condemned and rejected because it threatened to rupture the homologies between sport culture and liberal democratic ideology that otherwise legitimated a fundamentally individualist, assimilationist vision of racial justice and civil rights in the United States. In more general theoretical terms, then, culturally‐oriented movements expose the ways in which domination itself is deeply structured in and through culture. The article concludes by suggesting that this, especially in an age when capital and power have discovered techniques to insulate themselves against traditional, materialist forms of resistance, is why cultural forums and identity politics have become primary sites of the struggle for hegemony.     

Caste differences in behavioral thresholds as a basis for polyethism during food recruitment in the ant,Pheidole pallidula (Nyl.) (Hymenoptera: Myrmicinae)

During foraging, societies of the polymorphic ant, Pheidole pallidula,display several collective patterns which differ in the ratio of recruited majors. The intensity of behavioral stimuli required to induce this majors' recruitment is determined by studying trail-laying and tactile invitations for the following two food recruitments: (I) the slow and weak recruitment of minors, without majors, to a pile of small, individually retrievable fruit flies and (2) the massive recruitment of both minors and majors to large, unretrievable cockroaches. The selective mobilization of majors only to large prey such as cockroaches is due both to their preferential invitation and to their higher behavioral threshold of response to recruiting stimuli. The experimental evidence of caste behavioral thresholds allow us to reconsider behavioral elasticity in the major caste as well as principles of division of labor in ant societies.     

Preferential policies and the movement of the disadvantaged: The case of the Scheduled Castes in India

This article examines the effect of state actions on the political behaviour of disadvantaged minorities. Most studies of political mobilization fail to inquire about the role of the state in the formation and maintenance of political groups. This article describes the process through which the polity constructs new forms of group awareness and political action among previously inarticulate, unorganized sections of society. More specifically, it is about the political mobilization of an oppressed minority in India, the Scheduled Castes ‐ a group composed of distinct caste groups with specific cultural and occupational characteristics but lumped under a single category by the state. Through a longitudinal study comparing two periods in a state's political history I show how progressive state intervention in the form of preferential policies increased the political organization and activism of this oppressed minority. The analysis is based on a survey of government documents; coding of newspaper reports; interviews with politicians, administrative and police officials, grass‐roots activists and organizational leaders of the movement.     

Awareness Programs and Change in Taste-Based Caste Prejudice

Becker''s theory of taste-based discrimination predicts that relative employment of the discriminated social group will improve if there is a decrease in the level of prejudice for the marginally discriminating employer. In this paper we experimentally test this prediction offered by Garry Becker in his seminal work on taste based discrimination, in the context of caste in India, with management students (potential employers in the near future) as subjects. First, we measure caste prejudice and show that awareness through a TV social program reduces implicit prejudice against the lower caste and the reduction is sustained over time. Second, we find that the treatment reduces the prejudice levels of those in the left tail of the prejudice distribution - the group which can potentially affect real outcomes as predicted by the theory. And finally, a larger share of the treatment group subjects exhibit favorable opinion about reservation in jobs for the lower caste.     

In-betweenness and crumbled hopes in Palestine: the global in the local of the occupied territories

Critical discussions among some in Palestinian studies describe foreign involvement in NGO development in the Occupied Territories since the 1990s as having been detrimental to Palestinian collective aspirations, and even a tool of imperialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip mobilized their own civilian organizations to build an infrastructure of resistance to the Israeli Occupation that gave birth to the Intifada Uprising in December 1987. Foreign governments and organizations were drawn to their struggle and in the 1990s billions of dollars of foreign aid from more than 40 nations and over two dozen multilateral organizations flowed through hundreds of local and foreign NGOs. But this investment in the “peace process” did not stop a worsening occupation, and a second al Aqsa Intifada began in the fall 2000. Palestinian civil society suffered crippling blows and foreign actors were reduced to disaster relief and harm reduction. This article presents three ethnographic portraits from 1992, 1995 and 2002, that examine these changes in Palestinian civil society and the scholarly criticisms of foreign involvement. This article argues that such involvement could put Palestinian participants in a dangerous in-between social position, but that these positions of contradiction are often preferable to the destruction of militarism.     

The Myth of Maria and the imagining of sexual trafficking in Brazil

Based upon the contradictory definitions of the crime, the Brazilian movement against trafficking in persons situates itself as a “struggle against modern slavery.” Within this moralistic context, the movement has frequently utilized invented statistics and apocalyptic declarations regarding trafficking in order to achieve greater “advocacy value” among members of the Brazilian public. A key component of this discursive formation has been the creation and promulgation of a mythological view of a “typical” trafficking victim’s experience: what we call “The Myth of Maria, an exemplary trafficking victim.” The present article seeks to follow the history of the Myth of Maria, developing an initial chronology mapped out and analyzed by Adriana Piscitelli in 2004 and extending this into the post-2006 period when Brazil established its first national policies and plans to combat trafficking in persons. We then analyze how the myth ignores many of the realities revealed by the past decade of ethnographic research into trafficking in Brazil. Finally, we conclude with a structuralist hypothesis (drawn from the field of feminist anthropology) regarding the Myth’s continuing unabated popularity among almost all actors in the political field of anti-trafficking policy.     

Higaûnon Resistance and Ethnic Politics in Northern Mindanao1

The root causes of armed aggression among Higaûnon people in northern Mindanao, Philippines, have changed over the centuries. Prior to the 20th century, its primary aim was raiding for slaves and for redress of personal grievances. At the turn of the 20th century, armed aggression became tied to the loss of ancestral lands, an issue which grew more acute as Mindanao became the target of government resettlement policies and economic ventures. In the 1970s, Higaûnon aggression culminated in the ‘Higaûnon War’ against commercial logging on their ancestral lands. Rhetoric employed in this ‘war’ changed over the years, from limited personal grievances to Marxist ideology to radical environmentalism, all of which have engendered violent responses from the government. Recently, Higaûnons have conflated environmentalist rhetoric with expressions of their ethnic identity, and emphasised their economic as well as cultural dependence on the land. This peaceful strategy has produced some positive results but, because of continuing land insecurity, it has not completely eliminated the prospect of armed aggression in the future.     

N30 + 10: global civil society,a decade after the battle of Seattle

Critical discussions among some in Palestinian studies describe foreign involvement in NGO development in the Occupied Territories since the 1990s as having been detrimental to Palestinian collective aspirations, and even a tool of imperialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip mobilized their own civilian organizations to build an infrastructure of resistance to the Israeli Occupation that gave birth to the Intifada Uprising in December 1987. Foreign governments and organizations were drawn to their struggle and in the 1990s billions of dollars of foreign aid from more than 40 nations and over two dozen multilateral organizations flowed through hundreds of local and foreign NGOs. But this investment in the “peace process” did not stop a worsening occupation, and a second al Aqsa Intifada began in the fall 2000. Palestinian civil society suffered crippling blows and foreign actors were reduced to disaster relief and harm reduction. This article presents three ethnographic portraits from 1992, 1995 and 2002, that examine these changes in Palestinian civil society and the scholarly criticisms of foreign involvement. This article argues that such involvement could put Palestinian participants in a dangerous in-between social position, but that these positions of contradiction are often preferable to the destruction of militarism.     

The 'home' in homeland: gender,national space,and Inkatha's politics of ethnicity

In South Africa, a country in which the manipulation of ethnicity was at the heart of the government's attempts to establish control over the majority African population, ethnic mobilization during the liberation struggle was singularly unsuccessful. The one exception was Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's controversial Inkatha movement. This article suggests that one of the reasons for Inkatha's successes was the astute way in which the organization and, in particular, Buthelezi played on gendered notions of 'home' and 'homeland'. Historically, apartheid constructed notions of home and space differently for women and men and Inkatha was able to draw upon and manipulate these differences to produce a powerfully felt response. Thus, for men, many of them migrant workers in South Africa's cities, the notion of 'home' implied a return to patriarchal values and male domestic control in a historically constituted 'homeland'; for women, Buthelezi emphasized the new 'modern' opportunities opened up by the KwaZulu homeland, and the importance of their 'God-given' gifts of motherhood.     

Debt revolts: Ecuadorian foreclosed families at the PAH in Barcelona

Can present day grassroots direct actions be considered revolutionary? In this paper, I argue that seemingly “reformist” demands can be considered revolutionary in today’s neoliberal capitalism. At the turn of the twenty-first century, working class Ecuadorian migrants in Barcelona were trying to join the global middle classes via subprime mortgage loans and despite their precarious jobs. Following the collapse of Spain’s housing bubble, unemployed, defaulting on their mortgages, and risking home eviction, they turned to housing activism. They joined the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and became daily protestors for the right to housing and against indebtedness. Looking at PAH approaches that encouraged debt default among low-income families, strategies to reconvert repossessed homes by rescued banks into social housing units, or the effective occupation of buildings that belonged to these banks by the PAH to house evicted families, I claim that these moments represent revolutionary instances of a broader fight against indebtedness taking place globally which can be considered—as many did at the PAH—a fight against capitalism at large. In this paper I illustrate how people who had seldom participated in social mobilization became part of a small Barcelonan movement for the right to housing that grew exponentially throughout Spain succeeding in canceling thousands of mortgage debts and stopping equally as many evictions. PAH’s spaces of encounter and action made possible a cross-class alliance upheld by weekly assemblies and near daily direct actions against financial institutions and a pro-austerity central government. These moments demonstrate the ability of everyday people to reclaim housing, redefine the narrative of indebtedness, and—in the case of Barcelona—it even made possible taking control of City Hall.     

‘The muck of the past’: revolution,social transformation,and the Maoists in India

This article analyses revolutionary social change by exploring how people attempt to create a radically different future by taking action in the present, and the challenges that beset this transformation. Examining the relationship between the future, the present, and the past, the article takes the case of the spread of armed underground Maoist guerrillas in India to ask two questions: First, why does India hang on to this form of utopianism when the rest of the world appears to have abandoned it? Second, how and why does the ‘muck of the past’ influence the production of a radically different future? In answering these questions, this article suggests that for both processes of radical social change and our theories of them, we need to reinsert our analyses of politico‐economic conditions into our ideologies of social change.     

Working-class royalty: bees beat the caste system

The struggle among social classes or castes is well known in humans. Here, we show that caste inequality similarly affects societies of ants, bees and wasps, where castes are morphologically distinct and workers have greatly reduced reproductive potential compared with queens. In social insects, an individual normally has no control over its own fate, whether queen or worker, as this is socially determined during rearing. Here, for the first time, we quantify a strategy for overcoming social control. In the stingless bee Schwarziana quadripunctata, some individuals reared in worker cells avoid a worker fate by developing into fully functional dwarf queens.     

The first collective protest of black African migrants in postcolonial France (1960–1975): a struggle for housing and rights

The study of the political activism of black African diasporas in France after the independence era remains a neglected area of research. This paper fills a gap in the literature by exploring the first notable postcolonial protests in the country by sub-Saharan migrants. The struggle of black African workers against their dire housing conditions opened up a ‘cycle of collective action’ that led to the better-known Sonacotra migrant hostels (foyers) rent strike of 1975–1980. Even before the Sonacotra strike, however, black African workers had been able to call on the authorities from both their origin and residence countries and to mobilize transnational networks in order to support their demands. This article provides the first comprehensive historical study of this decisive period. It highlights how ethnic ties are intertwined with political and social ones, focusing on the solidarities that these migrants developed in political networks and in their neighbourhoods.     

From Moral Protest to Religious Politics: Ethical Demands and Beur Political Action in France

This paper traces the responses of Muslim youths ('Beurs') to their marginalisation in France. The Beur movement acquired national significance via the politicisation of moral protest in the early 1980s. In spite of early successes, the movement stumbled when the 'politics of austerity' adopted by the French state amplified a social crisis for which migrants became the scapegoats. The Beur movement, like other youth movements of the period, expressed a search for solidarity and a stress on ethical demands. Beurs' disenchantment when their civic elan ran out in the face of everyday difficulties led some to transfer their search for solidarity to the terrain of Islam. Islam, the paper argues, often appears to provide answers to the particular complex of politico-ethical demands for social justice and dignity that the Beur movement expressed. However, the Islamist re-conversion of some Beur militants is to be read as the result of a particular conjunction of multiple power relations which would integrate economic, social, cultural and gender dimensions. It is not necessarily indicative of a failure of the politics of moral protest to promote progressive transformational politics.     

Territorial shift in the yellow-handed titi monkey (Callicebus torquatus)

In this study, the ranging pattern of a single group of monogamous and territorial Callicebus torquatus was recorded over a 7-year period from 1974 to 1980. Data on ranging pattern were recorded by direct observation; daily movement patterns were plotted on an accurate, scaled map of the territory. Data were obtained during 1–3-month studies each year from 1974 to 1978 and in 1980, as well as during a 12-month study in 1979-1980. These studies show that the exclusive territory maintained by the group was not spatially stable over the 7-year period. The group gradually moved its territory to the northeast, to the extent that the territory used in 1980 was completely noncoincident with the territory used in 1974 by the same group. Analysis of the ranging pattern from the 12-month study indicates that the group did not exhibit seasonal preferences for different parts of its range. Seasonal ranging patterns, therefore, are not likely to account for the observed territorial shift. It is suggested that territorial shifting may be related to the need for monogamous groups to find new territories for their offspring.