1.

11
Anthropology and the Political
Jennifer Curtis and Jonathan Spencer

As we put the last touches to this chapter, a wave of protests swept parts of North Africa and the Middle East, calling for the removal of autocratic and corrupt regimes and the return of a fully functioning democracy. What, we wondered, would anthropologists have to contribute to making sense of these events? Introducing a recent Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute on the theme Islam, Politics, Anthropology, the editors briefly consider political science literature on an emergent post-Islamist trend in Muslim politics (by the French scholars Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy). While acknowledging the usefulness of these analyses, the editors express some frustration with this argument:
But in any case, the attention to state power and to the formal politics of elections and political parties is entirely too limited from an anthropological perspective. Scholars such as Roy and Kepel fail to take seriously modes and spaces of political action beyond the purview of formal politics and the state; it is precisely in these areas that anthropology has been particularly skilled in applying its tools. (Soares and Osella 2009: S10)

In itself the statement is unremarkable, an invocation of disciplinary common sense: anthropologists know that politics cannot be reduced to the arena of formal politics and the state, and they know that they must take seriously manifestations of the political that escape the political scientists narrow restrictions. The problem which this chapter addresses is that this particular bit of common sense is not always shared by the people we research. Rather, like nave political scientists, people talk and act as if politics and the political really can be restricted to a bounded area of life,

and may have difficulty acknowledging the politics that anthropologists claim to have discovered in other areas of their collective life. In Egypt in 2011, while nervous external commentators scoured events for evidence of Muslim Brotherhood involvement, the protestors themselves (including members of the Muslim Brotherhood) insisted their actions were focused on specifically political goals (Roy 2011). The last three decades have seen a dramatic return of politics and the political as central issues of anthropological concern. Some of this can be explained as a consequence of anthropologists being forced to become more conscious of the political context of their research, and especially of the potential political consequences of their research and writings. But alongside this reflexive concern with engagement and its consequences, there has been an expansion of the category of the political itself, which has become so diffuse and nebulous in recent usage that more or less everything might count as political for anthropological purposes. The cost of this theoretical freedom is twofold: a loss of acuity in the analysis of actually existing politics, and an inability to engage with our informants own ideas about what might and might not count as political. This chapter will start by setting out the issue, using examples from some of the most celebrated ethnographies of recent years. It will then trace at least two separate genealogies one from earlier traditions of political anthropology, the other from French poststructural theory for the expanded sense of the political that took root in anthropology at some point in the 1980s. Finally, we will briefly review examples from our own research in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka to illustrate what we see as the ethnographic limitations of the new ubiquity of the political.

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Let us start with one of the best and most influential ethnographies of the 1990s, James Fergusons The Anti-Politics Machine (1990). The book is a critical analysis of a development project in Lesotho which, in Fergusons view, failed to meet its own explicit goals, but nevertheless succeeded in another unacknowledged goal, the expansion of the states control over its more peripheral citizens. The technocratic language of development interventions like this, Ferguson argues, systematically masks the consequences of development interventions while depoliticizing issues of inequality and powerlessness:
For while we have seen that development projects in Lesotho may end up working to expand the power of the state, and while they claim to address the problems of poverty and deprivation, in neither guise does the development industry allow its role to be formulated as political one. By uncompromisingly reducing poverty to a technical problem, and by promising technical solutions to the sufferings of powerless and oppressed people, the hegemonic problematic of development is the principal means through which the question of poverty is de-politicized in the world today. (Ferguson 1990: 256)

with Talal Asads critical perspective on liberal secularism. Women active in Egyptian piety movements should not be dismissed as dupes of religious patriarchy; rather, their actions can be interpreted as expressions of a certain agency, albeit a kind of agency not directed towards the sort of goal Western feminists and secular liberals might deem to be desirable. This reading is obviously controversial but it is carefully argued and firmly based in Mahmoods reflections on her ethnographic encounters with pietist women. Why, though, is the book entitled The Politics of Piety? What makes womens prayer groups political? The answer is provided in the closing pages of the book. The section in question is entitled Politics in unusual places:
The fact that the piety movement does not directly engage the state and its juridical discourses, however, should not lead us to think that it has no direct political implications. To the extent that all aspects of human life (whether they pertain to family, education, worship, welfare, commercial transactions, instances of birth and death, and on) have been brought under the regulatory apparatuses of the nation-state, the piety movements efforts to remake any of these activities will necessarily have political consequences. (Mahmood 2005: 193)

Earlier, in the Preface to the book, Ferguson glosses this act of depoliticization as everywhere whisking political realities out of sight, all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of expanding bureaucratic state power (Ferguson 1990: xv). We do not wish to detract from Fergusons central diagnosis: many development interventions do indeed attempt to translate potentially contentious political problems into the bland language of technical solutions. But we do need to ask, what makes some realities, in his word, political? Where will we find the real politics that is nullified by the anti-politics machine? The answer is not ethnographic: Fergusons book is not about what people in Lesotho do or say in the name of politics or the political: politics and the political describe what ought to be happening in this case arguments about distributive justice were it not for the obfuscatory fog of the development apparatus. They are not, in this analysis at least, descriptors of what is actually there. If we have to attach a label to the idea of politics here it would have to be normative. This curious status of politics and the political is even more striking in a more recent equally impressive and equally influential book, Saba Mahmoods Politics of Piety (2005). The book, as is well known, challenges conventional feminist expectations about women and Islam, by combining Foucauldian themes of ethical care

Again, the anthropologists idea of the political transcends the particularities of local context. It is not a concept whose purchase on the world is dependent on local definitions and meanings. Indeed, it would be fair to imagine that some women in this piety movement would be shocked and dismayed to hear their activities described as in any way political, with all that that would imply about the challenge their activity might present to the Egyptian powers-that-be. The reasoning here is strangely circular and not entirely coherent. The piety movement does not directly engage the state and therefore might be (mistakenly) thought of as non-political. But in so far as the modern state aspires to engage everything all aspects of human life so any effort to remake anything within its vast ambition will have political consequences. Everything is potentially political and politics is ubiquitous and inescapable.

POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: HISTORY AND GENEALOGY

How did we get to this position? Anthropologists show rare consensus in agreeing on 1940 as the date when an explicit political anthropology

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was created. African Political Systems, edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940), is often characterized as the sub-disciplines beginning (Kurtz 2001; Vincent 2002). Articles in this Fortes and Evans-Pritchard volume considered forms of political governance using categories of state and stateless, substituting kinship and lineage systems for state structures. As part of a functionalist approach, this early political anthropology considered formal properties of such systems sui generis. A brief comparison with Ferguson and Mahmood shows how much has changed. In his Preface to the volume, Radcliffe-Brown defines the political as follows:
The political organization of a society is that aspect of the total organization which is concerned with the control and regulation of physical force. This, it is suggested, provides for an objective study of human societies by the methods of natural science, the most satisfactory definition of the special class of social phenomena to the investigation of which this book is a contribution (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: xxiii).

Radcliffe-Brown famously dismissed the very idea of the state as a real entity worthy of study (1940: xxiii), while in the Introduction, the editors relegated issues of indirect rule to a set of administrative rather than anthropological problems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 1). For Mahmood and Ferguson, in the passages cited at least, the state is both real and malign, and most definitely worthy of study; administrative problems are precisely the kinds of problem their anthropology aspires to address; and the idea of politics extends far beyond the realm of physical force into all areas of life. Moreover, neither Ferguson nor Mahmood is concerned with the language of scientific neutrality, grappling instead with the tension generated between their academic commitment to critique and their personal commitment to a broadly progressive politics. The one thing that unites them with the anthropologists of the 1940s is the conviction that the study of politics must extend beyond the study of the state and the formal institutions of government. In this respect the versions of the political with which we introduced this chapter can be seen to be over-determined: at once inheritors of a long tradition of finding politics outside formal political structures, and drawing on a more recent radical genealogy which can be traced back to the critical movements of the 1960s. But this genealogy itself has different branches. One comes from British cultural Marxism, as exemplified by Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson; another

comes from the post-structural currents in French social thought that developed out of the experience of the events of 1968 in particular. Of these post-structural currents, the single most influential figure is undoubtedly Michel Foucault. Anthropological interest in politics beyond the state could be justified in theory at least on empirical grounds (anthropologists had often worked in settings where the modern state had little presence or reach). The interests of Foucault and his contemporaries, however, were born of frustration with the suffocating political structures of De Gaulles Fifth Republic, coupled with disillusion with traditional workers movements, whose radical potential, it was felt, had been neutralized by the post-World War II culture of consumerism. In other words, while older political anthropology had been more or less indifferent to the state, Foucauldian influence was premised on political hostility to the state as a potential agent of change. It is again worth noting in passing that this premise is not necessarily shared by the people whose politics anthropologists describe and interpret, a point to which we shall return (cf. Spencer 2007: 140142). In the 1960s, decolonization, revolutions, and new social movements reoriented anthropological attention towards profound political changes and anthropologists began to reconsider past approaches in light of historical relationships between colonialism and anthropological practice. In this period of student movements and decolonization, the Vietnam War and the Cold War, considerations of power became central to the anthropology of the political. This emerged as a commitment to an explicit study of power, whether operating in processes or structures, amongst groups or individuals. Feminist anthropologists also took up the concept of power to correct prior depictions of non-Western societies as egalitarian (e.g. Friedl 1975). Here, anthropological holism was targeted for glossing over inequalities and hierarchies within primitive societies, and structural functionalism was targeted for its erasures of histories. Of this moment when Marxism and feminism converged to focus on power, Ortner writes:
The two together made it difficult for many anthropologists, myself included, to look at even the simplest society ever again without seeing a politics every bit as complex, and sometimes every bit as oppressive, as those of capitalism and colonialism. Moreover, as anthropologists of this persuasion began taking the historic turn, it seemed impossible to understand the histories of these societies, including (but not limited to) their histories under colonialism or capitalist penetration, without understanding how those external forces

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interacted with these internal politics. (Ortner 1995: 179)

In other words, the turn to power and the political in British and US anthropology has roots in early anthropological approaches, in 1960s radical critiques of the global political order, and in identity politics which had begun to identify the workings of power and inequality in, to borrow Mahmoods phrase, all aspects of human life.

FOUCAULT HISTORICIZED
In one popular version of the times, lifestyle and counter culture had eclipsed traditional political issues. By calling everything political, young protesters became less and less attuned to those political issues that had consumed them only a short time before (Klein 1972: 331). This was the moment at which Foucaults work started to be translated into English and started to make its mark across the humanities and social sciences in both Britain and America. Initially promoted by the anti-psychiatrists R.D. Laing and David Cooper, Foucault was not at first particularly noticed by anthropologists, although an early reviewer in Man concluded Social anthropologists should therefore be aware and beware of Foucault (Loudon 1974). For a long time they seem to have been neither aware nor beware. The early 1970s translations of Foucault were reviewed in Man but not in any of the US mainstream anthropology journals, but by the time of Geertzs 1978 review of Discipline and Punish (Geertz 2010 [1978]), Foucault was beginning to establish himself as a general intellectual presence in the United States, albeit still one of very marginal interest to most anthropologists. Asads 1979 Malinowski Lecture only references Foucault in a footnote, but his influence is apparent, not least in the eruption of the term discourse throughout the argument (Asad 1979; cf. Scott 2006: 271). His influence in anthropology mostly came mediated, for example through Stuart Hall and Birmingham Cultural Studies (e.g. Comaroff 1985), or as part of the mlange of new critical voices from literary theory invoked so breathlessly in Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). By 1993, it was sufficiently pervasive for Sahlins to use Foucaults name in the title of a satirical pamphlet, Waiting for Foucault, lampooning the new power functionalism that seemed to have taken over anthropology in the previous decade (Sahlins 1993). In a new history of Maoism in France, Richard Wolin (2010) has reconstructed much of the original context within which Foucault, and others, turned from conventional Marxism towards the

politics of the everyday. Wolin describes how the student movement of 1968 was a defining moment, as intellectuals embraced a critique of post-war politics that rejected structuralisms erasure of agency and embraced Maoism, on the way to rejecting the authoritarianism of the French Communist Party: a journey that in the course of the 1970s was to lead, somewhat counter-intuitively, to renewed engagement with Enlightenment conceptions of human rights. The influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, though undoubtedly based on an extraordinarily nave and inaccurate understanding of contemporary events in China, paradoxically helped a whole generation of intellectuals and activists to free themselves from the shackles of the kind of authoritarian Marxism represented by the powerful but senescent French Communist Party (PCF). The telos of this particular French journey away from authoritarian Marxism, the moment of the so-called nouveaux philosophes that followed the translation of Solzhenitsyn in the late 1970s, has had almost no impact on social and political analysis outside France, in stark contrast to the extraordinary influence of Foucault, Derrida, and latterly Deleuze and Guattari (Cusset 2008). The French children of Marx and Coca-Cola (Wolin 2010: 50) embraced cultural politics. Postwar capitalism and the autocratic Gaullist state were seen as invading and distorting every dimension of life; the student movement, and movements that followed, therefore turned attention to the politics of everyday life (see Debord 1994; de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1974). These new movements emphasized the politics of the personal, rejecting formal distinctions between public and private. Experiences of gender and sexuality, immigration and imprisonment became the focus for social movements and for social theory. Scholarship on social movements as sites of political practice emerged (e.g. Castells 1984; Touraine 1981). Touraine, Lefebvre and Ricoeur took part in the student protests. Foucault was teaching in Tunisia during 1968, where his own students were engaged in their own high-stakes political struggle. Upon returning to France, Foucault embraced activism at the new University of Vincennes. Wolin argues that, of French intellectuals, Foucault was most transformed by 1968 despite his own disappointment with the movements immediate outcome: Foucaults subsequent activism with the Prison Information Group was part of an intellectual shift: from the death of man to a new humanism (Wolin 2010: 178, 288289). This shift yielded key insights. Foucault came to argue that power is pervasive: Power is everywhere not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere

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(Foucault 1979: 63). Not confined to states and markets, power operates in a variety of sites schools, factories, hospitals, prisons, and throughout the quotidian spaces of life. Foucault characterizes his studies not as developing a theory of power, but an analytics of power: that is ... a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis (Foucault 1979: 82). Politics in classical formulations mask the power relations that are actually happening: right (not simply the laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, institutions, and regulations responsible for their application) transmits and puts into motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but of domination (Foucault 1980: 9596). A crucial vehicle for the subtle workings of power is discourse, which can be both an instrument and an effect of power .... Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart (Foucault 1979: 100101). Rather than a narrow sociolinguistic definition of discourse, Foucault fuses rhetoric, practices and forms of knowledge, which function in the fashion of Gramscian hegemony. Power is simultaneously concealed and revealed in discursive instruments and effects. Analytics are then a political act that unmasks and demystifies power. For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) demonstrates that the legacy of the French Enlightenment is not freedom, but techniques that produce, normalize and regulate subjects: indeed, discipline them into self-regulation (cf. Nord 1995 for a critique of this position). Foucaults propositions have methodological ramifications: analysis should not concern itself with the regulated and legitimate forms of power in their central locations, but with power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, with those points where it becomes capillary, that is, in its more regional and local forms and institutions (1980: 96). Furthermore, in these locations, resistance should be looked for as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their points of application and the methods used (Foucault 1982: 208). However, as Wolin (2010) concludes,
This notion of power as ubiquitous and its corollary notion of dispersed and local resistance were by no means Foucaults discovery alone. Such precepts were central to the ethos of post-1968 gauchisme. In the aftermath of the May events, the student activists became convinced that there was no such thing as second-order, or lesser, political struggles. (Wolin 2010: 328)

In other words, this powerful and enormously influential vision has to be seen as a product of very specific historical and political circumstances, and its uncritical application to all circumstances at all times, as has happened in the years since Foucaults death, raises questions which we will briefly consider at the end of this chapter.

REINTERPRETING FOUCAULT
When Michel Foucault died in 1984, Hobart (1984) published an obituary in RAIN, predicting that Foucaults work would profoundly reshape anthropology as a discipline. Foucaults perspective on power was attractive for political anthropology, because it resonated with prior imperatives to describe and analyse politics beyond the boundaries of states and to critique classical political theory. Indeed, Vincent argues that the success of Foucauldian approaches led to the demise of political anthropology as a distinct sub-discipline: A concern with the mechanics of power and the relation of power to knowledge (derived primarily from the writings of Michel Foucault) halted the involution of disciplinary and subfield specialization in its tracks (Vincent 1996: 433). In this spirit, we would argue that an understanding of power loosely based on Foucaults ideas came to stand in for any more specific definition of politics, and the conception of politics itself was at once broadened (because anything could now be political) and reduced (because only power counted). In this way the study of the political became something that everyone might be expected to pursue. Foucaults influence on anthropology has been immense. Geertz had started his early review of Foucault with the pithy observation that Foucaults leading ideas are not in themselves all that complex; just unusually difficult to render plausible (Geertz 2010 [1978]: 30). Yet, the generation of anthropologists setting out for the field as Geertz wrote, seem not to have experienced any difficulty at all. On the one hand, anthropologists like Paul Rabinow and James Faubion acted as key intermediaries in the process of editing and translation that made Foucaults work available to Anglophone readers. On the other hand, by the mid 1990s, simply naming Foucault, rather than citing his work directly, was sufficient to invoke the broad orientation of his work (e.g. Yanagisako and Delaney 1995: 16). The first wave of influence came in the florescence of studies of power and resistance, from the mid 1980s onward (e.g., Comaroff 1985; Ong 1987; Scott 1985). Sceptics who shared Sahlins disdain for the implicit

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functionalism in 1980s and 1990s resistance studies, could instead turn to Foucaults later work on ethics for inspiration (e.g. Laidlaw 2002). Saids Orientalism (1978), with its mix of humanistic and Foucauldian theory, made all anthropological efforts at representations of other people potentially readable as politically shaped, and often, politically motivated. If nothing else, this dark imprimatur at least rendered anthropological knowledge powerful for someone no small consolation for the members of a small and rather marginal intellectual community. For an analytics of power to define the domains and instruments of power, the analyst must discern its workings beyond the conventional institutions of political theory. Anthropological work on this strand of Foucauldian insight converged with ideational understandings of hegemony to problematize the study of political consciousness and political practices. Some anthropologists detected subtler expressions of domination and resistance, using phenomenological examples of religious and ritual practice to diagnose power via resistance (e.g. Comaroff 1985). Thus, embodiment became another early focus of Foucauldian enquiry. Others argued more vigorously for acknowledgement of actual, rather than false, consciousness. For example, Scott (1990) engages with Foucault to develop the concept of infrapolitics, where resistance to power is a crucial, unacknowledged form of politics. Indeed, Under the conditions of tyranny and persecution in which most historical subjects live, it is political life (201). Here, the politics of resistance produce hidden transcripts which analysts may not readily access, although subjects are conscious of them. A very similar mission to uncover the invisible politics of those excluded from the formal apparatus of government informed the early work of the Subaltern Studies group in India (e.g. Guha 1997). But the convergence of Foucauldian understanding of power with hegemony as ideology more often focused on how power does not work at the level of consciousness. For example, Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) argue that power presents, or rather hides, itself in the forms of everyday life ... these forms are not easily questioned (1991: 22; cf. Foucault 1979: 100101). Here, discerning power at its extremities leads anthropologists back to the concept of everyday life as the site of politics (cf. Foucault 1980: 96). Studying power, and concomitant relations of domination and resistance, was firmly established as a substitute for studying politics by the 1990s. Insights of New Left anthropologists had been transformed by 1980s critical theorists and become theoretical and methodological common sense. The nexus of power, politics and everyday life

preoccupied sub-disciplines from linguistic (e.g. Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990) to medical anthropology (e.g. Scheper-Hughes 1992). Assumptions about the ubiquity of the political had hidden themselves in the forms of anthropological everyday life, their unquestionability itself a manifestation of some kind of disciplinary doxa.

POLITICS AS A CATEGORY OF PRACTICE

Why should any of this matter? By the late 1970s political anthropology seemed to have completely run out of steam. If it has now conquered all, what is there to complain about? If we look at the kinds of topics that have occupied the anthropology of the political since the 1980s, the answer may become more apparent. If the 1980s themselves were the heyday of the anthropology of resistance, in which it became axiomatic to look for the workings of power in any and every setting open to anthropological interpretation, work since the 1980s has increasingly focused on the kinds of entity and ideas that 1940s anthropologists thought empirically irrelevant. There is now a growing and increasingly sophisticated anthropology of the state (e.g. Das and Poole 2003; Fuller and Benei 2001; Gupta 1995; Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Navarro-Yashin 2002), as well as an anthropology of nationalism (Eriksen 2010), of citizenship (Ong 1999, 2006), of political violence (Das 2007), of human rights (Cowan, Dembour and Wilson 2001), and of democracy (Bernard, Briquet and Pels 2007; Paley 2009). The influence of Foucault can be traced in at least four rather different strands of the new anthropology of the political. One, following Said, focuses on anthropology as itself part of a knowledgepower apparatus (Said 1989). A second, itself too ubiquitous to resist specific citation, draws on the diffuse sense of power popularized by Foucault in his 1970s work. A third develops and expands themes from Foucaults short essay on governmentality (e.g. Li 2007; cf. Foucault 1991). And a fourth has recently developed out of Foucaults late attention to the domain of ethics and the care of the self (Faubion 2011; Mahmood 2005). Other theoretical influences in the new anthropology of the political have included Pierre Bourdieus powerful synthesis of themes from Weber, Wittgenstein and phenomenology (Bourdieu 1990), as well as the rhizomic metaphors of Foucaults contemporaries Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Most recently, the gnomic arguments of Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 1998), who builds on themes from Foucault, Walter Benjamin and the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, have flooded the field, with Agambens

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state of exception and bare life becoming the 2000s equivalents of Foucaults 1970s language of power/knowledge (Hansen and Stepputat 2005). Indeed, for some, Agambens work is an extreme example of analytically equating power with politics (Rancire 2004:302). Political anthropology in the 1940s had to look outside the institutional framework of Western politics in order to justify its very existence. If the Nuer, for example, lacked a centralized state, then it was up to the anthropologist to identify what for a Nuer might count as political. But if an anthropologist now defines her object of study as the state or citizenship, then inevitably she has to contend with the fact that the people she is studying have their own, often quite specific ideas, about what the state is or who might be a citizen. To take an old example from Spencers doctoral research in Sri Lanka: a man sits at his teashop reading a virulently anti-Tamil pamphlet, written and published by a high-profile member of the government. Spencer comments, I didnt know you were interested in politics. The man responds, This isnt about politics. This is about the national question. What is happening if the national question which is about to explode into civil war is declared outside the political? What does it say about politics? And about the nation? The answers to these questions have been explored elsewhere (Spencer 2008), but the questions bear reflection. In a recent article, Matei Candea explores similar questions. Corsican language activists working on a bilingual classroom project are horrified when a foreign TV crew starts to ask teachers obviously political questions about possible independence for Corsica: We are in a school, an education official explains, and such issues do not belong in the classroom (Candea 2011: 310). Candeas problem is that the space that might be considered political in much recent anthropology has expanded so much it is all but impossible to deal with statements like this. If we argue that protestations of being outside the political are always and everywhere really expressions of some pre-existing politics, we lose the capacity to make any kind of ethnographic sense of those statements. The point is not to veer in the opposite direction, and treat all statements by our interlocutors as unarguably true; rather, it is to treat statements about the limits of the political with the same respect we would accord any other ethnographic statement. So, in Candeas example, making sense of the statement involves a recapitulation of the history of the republican tradition in French education, in which keeping the school as a space outside politics allows for children to develop into politically active citizens later in life. Or that is the theory

which informs a long history of schooling in France. (A second, somewhat better-known strand, buttresses the resistance to the appearance of any sign of religion in the undisturbed environment of the classroom.) As a theory it is by no means uncontested, even by Candeas informants, but even those who see other motives at work in the initial example, themselves end up acknowledging some kind of legitimacy to the boundary between the world of politics and the world of schooling. What we gain by taking seriously this insistence on bounding off the political is the opportunity to recover the wider cultural logic within which it is located. We can later return to the immediate politics of the initial situation if we want to, but our understanding will undoubtedly be enriched by the refusal to take the easy path of denying even the possibility of a non-political space in the first place. Another example from Sri Lanka, where, in November 2008, three decades on and the war is ending. Spencer is in the last stages of a two-year collaborative project, researching the role of religious organizations and religious leaders during the long-running civil war. The project has been based in the east of the island, an area divided between Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. At this point, three members of the project team are in the town of Kattankudy, just south of Batticaloa, a town that prides itself on being the most Muslim place in Sri Lanka. Shahul Hasbullah from the University of Peradeniya has arranged a meeting with representatives from the Kattankudy Federation of Mosques and Muslim Institutions. With Bart Klem, another member of the research team, Hasbullah and Spencer had already toured the town in the company of the Mosque Federation Secretary, starting with the bullet-marked walls at the site of a 1990 massacre of men and boys by the secessionist LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam), and taking in both a demolished building by the beach, the headquarters of a controversial Sufi sect, attacked and partially destroyed in disturbances that followed the death of the sects leader, a man called Pahilwan, and the large, new central mosque being built by the followers of another Sufi leader, Rauf Mahlawi. Although conflict between Tamil paramilitaries and Muslims is a big part of the local story, there is obviously no shortage of conflict within the Muslim community itself (Klem 2011). The Mosque Federation meets in its own, newly constructed, building in the middle of town. At first there are only a handful of people at the meeting, but gradually the room fills up: urbane retired civil servants sit with bearded leaders of Jamaat-i-Islam, there is a local novelist, and an officer from the Muslim Peace Secretariat

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(a spin-off from the 2002 Cease Fire Agreement). Eventually, there are about 20 participants, all male (although womens groups are also affiliated to the Federation we are assured), and predominantly middle-aged. The conversation moves back and forth between English and Tamil. As the evening progresses, the atmosphere relaxes and the comments become franker. The novelist starts us off: we have a solid organization and structure here, but such organizations are absent in other towns. Islam is a way of life and this organization responds to problems in an Islamic way. If there is a problem with other communities, people are selected to go to their areas and talk to their leaders and intellectuals. The Mosque Federation itself was founded in 1985 in order to express a common opinion when there is a problem. Among its accomplishments, we are told, is the observation of Fridays as public holidays within Kattankudy itself: Even in political problems, this organization guides politicians. So when they come to Kattankudy, they come here first. In Tamil areas, we are told, the key decisions are made by armed groups. Here there are no armed groups. To organize paramilitaries, one man says, you need jungle, because in a city like this people will give information to the police. If someone comes to search, there is no place to hide here. Recently, the TMVP (the political party that has grown out of a breakaway faction of the LTTE) has deliberately tried to provoke conflict with Muslims in order to win influence in Tamil areas. In national politics, extremist groups are gaining influence and questioning the rights of Muslims. Someone quotes a recent interview with the Head of the Army in which he had asserted that Sri Lanka belongs to the Sinhala people, while minorities are just guests in the country. In this context, if there is any problem in Kattankudy, the national press will claim that Jihadi groups are getting involved. Towards the end of what has become a long discussion, the novelist returns to the theme of politics. This town is the most Muslim town in the country, he says. There are no bars, no liquor stores, no video shops and no theatre. But there are 60 mosques. This organization was the first of its kind in the country other areas followed afterwards. Earlier, the leaders of the community were trustees of the mosques, and these positions were based on the kudi (matriclan) structure: each kudi provided one trustee. Crucially, in this organization there is no politics. It does not involve politicians. And that is why it is strong. Consider the implications. The Mosque Federations are remarkable organizations that came into existence in Muslim parts of the island during the 30-year civil war. They are quite obviously organized in direct response to the threat

posed by Tamil paramilitaries, and possibly by agents of the Sinhala-dominated state. Their growth occurred in parallel with the emergence of a major Muslim political party, but their members are at pains to distance the Federation from the politicians. To simplify a much more complicated story: the claim to stand outside the world of politics is a crucial precondition for the construction of local solidarity. If the federations were to be taken over by politics as represented by the workings of local big-men politicians they could not survive. That at least is their understanding of their dilemma. Another example is drawn from Curtiss fieldwork with the Belfast Pride Festival in Northern Ireland. On 31 July 2010, three clergymen and parishioners from their churches walked as an official contingent in the annual Belfast Pride parade. The next day, at an ecumenical church service, seven members of the clergy took part. The officiating minister began his sermon by paraphrasing Gandhi, Christs message was good but those Christians sure are hard to take! (Fieldnotes, 31/8/10). Addressing the gay and straight congregants, he spoke of how Christianity has been used to justify inequality, to oppose the enfranchisement of women, to preserve apartheid and slavery and to oppose interracial marriage. But he argued that even in Belfast, there have always been other voices within Christianity. He spoke of Christian abolitionists who barred slave trading companies from Belfasts port, and invoked the eighteenth-century tradition of dissent in Ireland. He then asked each congregant to regard the stones they had been given when entering the church. He reminded them of stoning as punishment for those who transgressed sexual norms, in the past and present. Invoking a Biblical exhortation to let he who is without sin cast the first stone, he asked congregants to build relationships, rather than destroy them, and to lay their stones in a circle on the altar. One by one, people filed to the front and laid down the stones; later, when the minister asked congregants to embrace one another, I turned to an older man beside me, a long-standing gay rights activist. He wept as he put his arms around me, and whispered, Happy Pride. This was the first religious service hosted by a church as part of the festival. But Christian churches had begun to engage with the festival two years earlier, in 2008, joining an increasingly heated public debate about sexuality and Christianity. While obviously political, these debates must also be considered with reference to religious debates about the nature and role of Christianity because for the protagonists, this dimension, religion itself, was a central priority.

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Although these are not new debates, they were profoundly reshaped by the now-notorious Iris Robinson, Member of Parliament from Northern Ireland and wife of Peter Robinson, First Minister of Northern Ireland. Mrs Robinson said much about homosexuality in the summer of 2008; most of her commentary was justified with reference to her deeply held faith. These remarks became a catalyst for local discussion of the proper domains of religion and politics a perennially vexing issue in both of Irelands jurisdictions and these debates centred on how to practice religion, rather than simply communal politics. After her infamous remarks, new voices joined the discussion of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) equality, including trade unions and political parties that had previously been silent, while long-standing opponents began to modulate their critiques. Several groups expressed their support for gay rights by participating in Belfasts annual Pride Festival; members of Christian communities were also inspired to take part. Most notably, a minister from All Souls NonSubscribing Presbyterian Church (Unitarian) became the first religious official to walk in the parade following the furore surrounding Mrs Robinson. Pride parades as a strategy to make LGBTQ communities visible have been examined by anthropologists in particular cities like Vienna (Bunzl 2004), Madrid (Enguix 2009) and San Francisco (Howe 2001). Although Pride is an international movement, parades are inflected with local significance and enmeshed in local concerns. In Belfast, most LGBTQ civil rights issues were settled law in 2008; civil partnerships were legal, discrimination in services and employment was illegal (with exemptions for religious organizations) and the new policing service liaised with local LGBTQ organizations. Broader political issues appeared settled as well, with power-sharing and devolution in place. What remained unsettled was how to practice faith in the post-conflict era. Until 2008, religious people were visible only in protests of the stereotypical hellfire and brimstone variety, beginning with the first parade in 1991. At the first parades starting-point in Donegall Street, activists tried to tie a pink balloon to an elderly protester wearing a sandwich board that announced the end of days. One of those organizers told me, I thought, Hes gonna drop dead from the weight of that sandwich board. Thats a really good start to the first gay pride parade, killing some old man (Interview, 31/5/2010). At the 2010 festival, a protest representative also took part in an official event an Amnesty International-sponsored discussion at the Europa Hotel. Posing with other panellists

beneath the festivals rainbow logo, an organizer remarked to him: You know, this is the first time Ive met you when you werent shouting at me in the street. I like you a lot better when youre not shouting at me. At the nexus of politics and religion, it is how boundaries and their contents shift that is salient as their makers define them. In Belfast, Pride as a political project fits a soixante-huitard (1968-er) definition of a new social movement, directed to changing society rather than the state (Touraine 1988). Here, distinctions between religion and politics are not tactics subservient to broader political logics, but are integral to its existence. As both a cultural and political project, Belfast Pride requires careful distinctions about how it is not politics with a capital P (as some struggle to categorize their efforts); certainly these distinctions have an instrumental effect, since they distance the festival from particular parties and stances, while permitting collectivity around the dimension of sexuality rather than the usual political categories. However, interpreting this manoeuvre as mere pragmatism dismisses, and misses, the point: that multiple subjectivities coexist alongside potent shared experiences amongst LGBTQ people. The exclusivities of nation and sect that dominate even the power-sharing structures have created political parties and churches that cannot embrace, or in some instances acknowledge, the multiple processes of subjectivity at work simultaneously for Pride participants. Self-understanding emerges from experiential distinctions of religion and politics, as does the broader project of seeking acceptance, interlocution and redress within the domain of religion. In this instance, as in so many others, religion offers a redemption that actually existing politics no longer attempts to promise. In many ways the spirit of this particular example is very close to the spirit of Mahmoods celebrated account of the pietist movement. The difference is that our response to the common desire to take other peoples religious commitments seriously allows us also to take seriously the boundary-work that the same people might do to keep religion free of what might be thought to be the contaminating effect of the political. Similarly, our own political commitment to those ideals of distributive justice, which inform Fergusons comments on the political realities that development interventions actively suppress, should not blind us to the fact that a rather large amount of actually existing politics in Northern Ireland addresses other issues like sodomy in Iris Robinsons case. This does not make the politics less real. In the Kattankudy case, Soares and Osellas dissatisfaction with political scientists concentration on parties and elections and the state glosses over the fact that many

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Muslims both now and in the past have been concerned about maintaining boundaries between religious and political forms of authority (Hefner 2004). This does not mean that they are therefore trapped by the discourse of liberal secularism. Far from it the unruly big-man politics of Eastern Sri Lanka, from which the Kattankudy Mosque Federation sought to distance itself, can be characterized in many ways, but textbook liberalism is not one of them. These examples engage with ethnographic meanings of politics. In an important set of analyses of nationalism and identity politics, Rogers Brubaker, drawing on Bourdieu, makes a crucial distinction between categories of practice and categories of analysis: the idea of the nation or of identity is extremely important as a category of practice, and one task for the analyst is to seek to understand the ways in which the idea of the nation or the idea of identity becomes produced and reproduced as a commonsense part of peoples understanding of the world and their place in it (Brubaker 1996; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). But, for this very reason, the same ideas are problematic if unreflexively adopted as categories of analysis. In our examples we have treated politics and the political as first and foremost categories of practice: the delineation of the political emerges from, and produces, particular historical circumstances, particular cultural logics, and finally, particular subjectivities. As analysts, of course, we have our categories to approach these issues; but the replacement of ethnographic categories with analytical ones usually is accompanied by some reasoned or even apologetic recognition of the move. It is, perhaps, time for anthropologists to acknowledge the limits, as well as the breadth, of their understanding of the political.

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