Herzfeld, Michael. 2021. Subversive Archaism. Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 239 pp. Ppb.: $25.95. ISBN: 9781478017622.
Le chantier de l’État-Nation, où sont pétries la mémoire sociale « civique » en tant qu'ethnos et la mémoire « civile », homogénéisante et politiquement sélective propre aux politiques de patrimonialisation de l’État, est un sujet privilégié de Michael Herzfeld. Il a consacré plusieurs ouvrages à l’étude de cette tension, ses manifestations et les politiques qui en découlent. Ainsi, les dynamiques de masculinité analysées dans The Poetics of Manhood (1985) reflètent déjà la résistance à une normation éthique et esthétique de la modernité (au sens de Foucault) qui considère les habitants du village crétois de Glendi comme autant de survivances d'un temps révolu de voleurs de bétail et de vendetta. Dans la continuité de cette étude, The Body Impolitic. Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (2003) présente le clivage entre la notion de personne véhiculée par les valeurs de hiérarchie et d’évitement des artisans crétois de Rethemnos, et l’étiquette d'anti-modernes que l’État grec leur attribue, ceci écartant ces corps inamadoués, si l'on me permet ce néologisme, des hérauts du patrimoine culturel national. Changeant de terrain enfin, dans Evicted from Eternity. The Restructuring of Modern Rome (2009), M. Herzfeld montre comment les artisans et les anciens résidents du rione Monti sont laissés à une inexorable disparition au nom du processus de gentrification engagé par l'administration de la ville et d'un label de romanité forgé au goût du tourisme globalisé.
Avec Subversive Archaism, l'auteur revient à l'exploration de ces acteurs qui, suite à des parcours divers de contrôle politique, sont soumis à des dynamiques d'illégalisation en ce qu'ils deviennent les porteurs de corps et de principes obsolètes au regard des valeurs considérées par les élites politiques fondatrices du patrimoine culturel national. Ainsi, l'auteur met en dialogue les habitants de Zoniana (sic dans le volume, appelé Glendi dans The Poetics of Manhood) et les résidents informels du fort de Pom Mahakan, emplacement originaire du quartier royal de Bangkok. Après 26 ans de résistance, ces derniers ont été définitivement expulsés en 2018 sous prétexte de constituer un lacis social de désordre et d'illégalité. « Farewell Pom Mahakan. A living heritage is too good for a fake-preservist society » écrit à l’époque le journaliste Yiamyut Sutthichaya. M. Herzfeld montre bien que sur ces deux terrains, au-delà des prétendues raisons sécuritaires, le véritable enjeu politique du conflit tient à la perception de légitimité de la part de ces acteurs informels, considérés déviants et anachroniques, par rapport à une continuité avec un patrimoine de valeurs préexistantes à l’État non contaminées par l'influence occidentale. Un patrimoine qui témoigne d'une posture éthique alternative par rapport au code universaliste de l’État thaïlandais, et qui remet en discussion la prétention d'exclusivité et de « permanence absolue » de ce dernier. De surcroît, ces ‘déviants’ proclament leur appartenance à l’État, se révélant de fait comme des protubérances de ce dernier plutôt que des éléments étrangers qui en menaceraient l'existence.
Dans le cas de Zoniana, la logique segmentaire et patrilinéaire qui sous-tend l'opposition des habitants lors de cas de violence par la police locale, illustrée à l'aide d'une ethnographie méticuleuse dans le chapitre 4 du volume, « Cosmologies of the social », reflète les valeurs de masculinité des klephtes, un terme employé pour les voleurs de bétail dans lequel confluèrent aussi les « bandits » héros de la guérilla contre l'occupation ottomane. Cependant, ce système segmentaire reflèterait aussi les dynamiques internes à l'Union Européenne, en ramenant la prétendue Distinction de Bourdieu, se référant aux dédales de différenciation sociale qui sous-tendent la construction de valeurs de la bureaucratie occidentale (dans le cas grec surtout par rapport à l'implacabilité ambigüe de sa cognée financière) à sa propre contradiction intrinsèque. Cependant, par rapport à l'expérience de Pom Mahakan, bien que dans une même démarche de résistance, celle-ci enchâsse des valeurs profondément différentes. Alors qu'en Grèce la monarchie a toujours été considérée une institution étrangère, la « Thainess » de Pom Mahakan se centre autour du thammarat, le roi vertueux, et marque l'héritage du lien entre monarchie et bouddhisme. Là où, face au manque d'empathie du prathet, le système bureaucratique « crypto-colonial » en place, la vertu d'apparat prônée par l’élite politique se nourrit de l'esthétique occidentale, les habitants de Pom Mahakan, plus royalistes que le roi, revendiquent les anciennes valeurs muang (roi compassionnel et organisation politique décentrée). Les dynamiques électorales au sein de la communauté de Pom Mahakan montrent, toutefois, que cette quête traditionnaliste n'a pas été développée sans contradictions.
Dans un monde contemporain où les acteurs marginaux défient l'arène des stratégies de représentation nationale des États, et le cas des migrants transnationaux en est un exemple, Subversive Archaism constitue un outil de lecture précieux sur le lien entre légitimité, patrimonialisation et différenciation politique ainsi que sur la confrontation entre changement social et essentialisation dans l'incessante fabrique de l’État-Nation.
CRISTIANA PANELLA
Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale, Tervuren (Belgique)
Walter, Anna-Maria. 2021. Intimate Connections: Love and Marriage in Pakistan's High Mountains. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 244 pp. Pb.: US$37.95, ISBN: 9781978820487.
Tinder, Grindr and other dating apps weren't the first mobile technology to transform the ways love and relationships work. Ideas of love and partnership have always been in flux and affected by socio-technological innovations. Anna-Maria Walter's ethnography Intimate Connections is a detailed study of how the initial introduction of mobile phones impacted romantic relationships. The book describes the multi-faceted practices around romantic emotions and marriage in Northern Pakistan, and their relation to the use of mobile phones. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork living with different families in the multi-religious city of Gilgit (predominantly Shia, Ismaili and Sunni Muslim) between 2011 and 2014, Walter offers a nuanced picture of young women negotiating love, identity and family. The author sets out to conduct a feminist project, aiming to decentre the idea of ‘the Muslim woman’. By giving voice to Pakistani women to explain their own perspectives and by showing how a myriad of micro-transformations might lead to larger changes, Walter achieves this ambitious goal in an intimate narrative without buying into tropes of Western scholars claiming to ‘lift the veil’ of Muslim women's worlds. After positioning her book as a critique of an essentialising discourse on female agency and simplistic understandings of love and marriage, Walter provides four short ethnographic chapters that together form a prism of social–romantic dynamics during the arrival of new communication technologies.
Chapter 2 elaborates on the way sharm (modesty, respectability) emerges as a self-conscious set of feelings that women in Gilgit learn to embody from early on. While not ignoring patriarchal structures of inequality, Walter draws on her close-up ethnographic data to show how women navigate and re-make the relational spaces of ‘the public’ and ‘the household’, for example by controlling phone calls or practices of veiling that are considered both modest and following international fashion trends. Walter demonstrates that (appropriate) female behaviour at her fieldsite was far from fixed, with women taking control over the interpretation of their actions and changing it over the lifetime.
Chapter 3 examines how marriage is always embedded in wider state regulations, ‘traditional’ customs, religious conventions, financial and care constraints, as well as in norms like izzat (honour). Yet, the involved actors are not passively accepting conditions but shape them by creatively drawing on ambivalent norms and values. A marriage match, family planning or divorce are therefore never straightforward outcomes but the result of careful negotiations, refined reasonings and contingent choices.
Chapter 4 follows the mystical and more-than-human dimensions of love in Gilgit. Walter offers an in-depth analysis of old Shina (Gilgit's main regional language) stories about human–fairy relationships. The themes of these and other transnational folklore stories are not only found in Bollywood movies but also in the emotional frameworks of Gilgit's youth, for example the (male-gendered) passionate, idealised form of mystical longing and love (ishq). In combination with the rather female-connotated understanding of considerate love and compassion, the interplay of such different love and couple dynamics may lead to romance over the phone and ultimately marriage but – if matchmaking fails – may also result in (attempted) elopement or even suicide. Here, mobile phones are facilitating the exchange of text messages and calls, integrated in wider cultural narratives, socio-economic trends and gendered experiences of love.
In Chapter 5, Walter complicates the ostensibly oppositional categories of arranged and love marriage, especially since the use of mobile phones allows for more diverse forms of contact before marriage. This allows attraction (or sometimes aversion) to emerge without physical contact in the usually secluded time phases between engagement, official Islamic ceremony (nikah), traditional wedding (shadi) and moving into one household. Young couples draw on phone usage to reshape older notions of marriage, without completely ignoring predominant norms. Additionally, the chapter shows how young women convince relatives to arrange a marriage with a specific person they have already bonded with over the phone, thereby carefully navigating boundaries of what is considered to be appropriate.
Walter's ethnography draws on a variety of narrative strategies to illustrate the dynamics of love in all its socio-cultural depth. While one chapter centres on the exchange of flirtatious text messages, poems or pictures, another follows a reluctant fiancée unwilling to get married, and yet another chapter traces century-old transnational fairy tales in the contemporary moment. As a reader, one never gets bored in following Walter's narrative threads and wonders where it would have led nowadays, some ten years after her fieldwork ended, in a media-space reconfigured through apps like Tinder, TikTok and Snapchat. Contributing to debates around marriage, emotions and socio-technological change in South Asia and beyond, Intimate Connections is a fascinating book that deserves to be read widely – not just by those of us using dating apps.
QUIRIN RIEDER
University of Vienna (Austria)
Segalen, Martine. 2022. Destins Français. Essai d'auto-ethnographie familiale. Paris: CREAPHIS Editions. 314 pp. Pb.: €12.00, ISBN: 9782354281823.
This is a book one cannot stop reading: an account by one of the more respected authorities on European kinship and marriage of her own family history. We follow the story of two Jewish family lines (the Appels and the Blochs) in their search for safety and citizenship from the early nineteenth century to the end of the 1950s. Theirs is a French destiny – as the title lets us know. So, in that regard, the book is a story of ultimate success, if it were not for the sense that grows as we approach the end of the book that, after all, antisemitism may not have vanished from Europe. Ultimately, the question is left discreetly unanswered, as indeed it has to remain.
The Appels ran away from the pogroms of Russian-occupied Poland to settle in Paris in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the Blochs, originally from Germany, underwent the troubled history of all Alsatian Jews. On her mother's side of the family, Martine Segalen (b. Appel, 1940–2021) was distantly related to Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. The book traces a history of marriages and how marital alliance met the challenges of class and ethnicity. It is a history of hatters, tailors and furriers (then, later, doctors and bankers) who, through hard work and tight familial cooperation, managed to survive the more tragic episodes of discrimination, despoliation and genocide.
At the end of the book, it climaxes in two deeply personal moments. The first is reproduced on the book's cover. On Liberation Day, a diffident-looking four-year-old Martine meets her mother again, after having lived in semi-hiding with her Catholic grandmother for the two years of her parents’ internment in the camp of Drancy. The second is represented in one of the last photographs in the book (of her own marriage), when Martine meets her own life partner on a bench at the university in Paris (Sciences Po). The way the book integrates, analyses and situates photography into its analytical web is as exemplary as the way in which personal account is at all moments framed by Segalen's solid historical and anthropological erudition.
This posthumously published study crowns a lifetime of fascination with the theme of marital alliance and the way it structures primary solidarities (e.g. Mari et femme dans la société paysanne 1980; Sociologie de la famille 1981; Quinze générations de bas bretons 1985; Nanterriens 1990; Éloge du marriage 2003). Segalen sees herself, in this regard, as following the work of Alain Girard, the sociologist/demographer who published pioneering work on marriage choice (1964). Nevertheless, as she clearly states at the end of the book (p. 312), her persistent need to integrate history and sociological analysis with a lifetime of ethnographic (face-to-face) research means that she was always ultimately a social anthropologist.
Segalen applies to her own genealogy her lifetime habit of empirical precision and thoroughly researched evidence-gathering. The book exudes verisimilitude and, in that regard, it definitely represents a high point in a relatively new narrative style that has emerged in anthropology, where the subject and object of the analysis often turn out to be more interconnected than had previously been the custom (e.g. Behar 1996; Jenkins 1999; Okely and Callaway 1992; Pina-Cabral 2023; Reed-Danahay 1997). The reading becomes especially poignant when the narrative comes closer to the author's own personal experiences or to moments of moral doubt in her ancestors’ lives. She systematically applies to her narrative the almost aristocratic sense of decorum that all of us who knew her personally learnt to cherish; particularly, as we soon discovered that this apparent coolness combined with a deep strain of human generosity. At the end of her life, in her work as editor of the journal Ethnologie Française, she often exercised this almost innocent enthusiasm that she experienced for other people's work – such a rare trait among academics.
This book is of profound import for anyone interested in the study of kinship and marriage in Europe or among Jewish people. But its readership promises to be far broader, since historians of the family, of migration or of Judaism in Europe will find its material centrally relevant. In particular, the way the book examines the long-term process of becoming French will be of central concern for people studying nationality and nationalism in Europe. Its use of photography and archive in the study of family history is also exemplary. Finally, however, Martine's posthumous offer is so well written and the material so rich that I think it will fascinate many readers well beyond the social sciences.
JOÃO PINA-CABRAL
Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Lazarev, Egor. 2023. State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 321 pp. Hb.: £75.00, ISBN: 9781009245951.
It is more than lip service when the author of this book, the political scientist Egor Lazarev, declares his dedication to anthropological fieldwork. Working on the intersection between law and politics in Chechnya, Lazarev has spent plenty of time in situ, interviewing people and taking part in their daily routines. As a means of preparation, he took seminars on legal anthropology with Sally Eagle Merry at NYU.
Lazarev focuses on what he calls lawfare, a term that captures state-making by legal practices. The choice of this term is original yet unfortunate, as the term's (rare) usage usually refers to the instrumentalisation of legal procedures for means of war-like expansion – such as the massive distribution of Russian passports in the annexed parts of Ukraine. However tricky the term, it allows him to cover the broad range of state politics and legal practices ‘from below’. Methodologically, this translates into a healthy mix of macro and micro data, for example based on statistics, policy papers, interviews and observations. In other words, this is a truly interdisciplinary work that combines the rigidity of political science with the intimacy fostered by social anthropology.
Chechnya, a republic of the Russian Federation, is as striking case of legal pluralism because three legal systems coexist and are officially acknowledged: (1) state law, which is essentially Russian law and the same all over the Russian Federation; (2) customary law (adat), which is widely shared in the highland Caucasus and had been prevalent in Chechnya before its forceful integration into the Russian orbit; and (3) religious law (sharia), which is more codified than customary law and based on the scriptures of Islam. According to Lazarev, adat is mostly supported by older people and sharia by younger people. State law is often represented and administered by former combatants in the two wars that Russia waged on Chechnya after the breakdown of the Soviet Union; those people often interpret state law for their own purposes and enact law enforcement in rather brutal ways, thus seriously undermining its status and reputation.
The first part of the book outlines the theoretical framework of the study and introduces Chechnya as a fieldsite. The following part provides an overview on the interplay of legal and political practices in three periods: Chechnya under Russian imperial and Soviet rule, during the independence period and in postwar Chechnya. In Chapter 5, Lazarev convincingly demonstrates how the official endorsement of adat and sharia provides room for manoeuvre for the Chechen powerholders, in particular the cruel head of the republic, Ramzan Kadirov. On the one hand, state law integrates Chechnya into the legal realm of the Russian Federation; on the other hand, the additional layers of law underpin a relational form of Chechen sovereignty. But legal pluralism not only provides agency to those in power but also to ordinary citizens – albeit to a lesser extent.
This is well illustrated in the third and last part of the book. Chapter 8 juxtaposes how conflicts around car accidents or divorces would be settled differently according to state law, sharia or adat. In the case of divorce, customary law is the most patriarchal and favours the rights of the husband over the children; sharia allows for negotiations; and state law highlights the role of the mother in the life of the children. Thus, the choice of legal system to settle a dispute has a significant impact on the consequences. Women actively make use of this choice as an expression of agency, as is expressed in statistical data on court cases. They more often refer to state law than men, especially in those parts of Chechnya that have been heavily destroyed during the two Chechen wars.
This could be interpreted as a sign of Chechen women's agency as well as a productive flexibility of lawfare in Chechnya. Yet, we have to keep in mind that quite a few family disputes do not become visible because they are forcefully limited to the sphere of the family. And it is here that power is exerted on women to such an extent that they do not really have a choice which legal system to refer to. Taking this into consideration requires a more intimate form of ethnography – a difficult and even dangerous task in Chechnya nowadays. Focusing on court cases as the author does is a revealing yet rather limited perspective. But it is no surprise that an anthropologist (me) calls for more anthropology. What is more surprising, and interesting, is that a political scientist (the author) not only takes anthropology seriously but also grounds his research in fieldwork. This turns the book into a great example of how anthropology may enrich political and legal studies.
FLORIAN MUEHLFRIED
Ilia State University (Georgia)
Campbell, Stephen. 2022. Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 210 pp. Hb.: US$51.95, ISBN: 9781501764882.
In the footsteps of J. K. Gibson-Graham, there continues to be a persistent current within anthropology of discovering practices that defy capitalist reason and are thereby interpreted as being ‘outside’ of capitalism. In this book, Stephen Campbell provides gripping ethnographic stories from fieldwork with residents of a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Yangon (Myanmar) that, in combination with powerful analytical insights, make it difficult not to become convinced that such ‘ontologically autonomous’ phenomena are better seen as ‘coconstituted through the reciprocal relations in which they are embedded’ (p. 145). The book provides an excellent demonstration of the methodology involved in practising relational anthropology, whereby objects of anthropological investigation can never be understood outside of their changing social and political context and whereby dichotomies are taken not as mutually exclusive elements but as a unity of opposites. In this way, it arrives at a powerful argument about how unfree, informal and otherwise ‘non-normative’ labour arrangements are in fact capitalism's ‘integral margin’, the ground on which liberal political order stands.
Following a critique of the transition narrative of Myanmar's famous ‘democratic opening’ in 2011 (lasting until 2021), the book delivers its main analytical critique in a series of chapters that each focus on different case studies of working-life trajec- tories of people in the slum. A chapter on the labour involved in the slum's making powerfully exposes the longer-term contradictions of squatting – and of ‘guerrilla gardening’ – whereby what is initially a challenge to existing property regimes over time also can become the basis for establishing relations of extraction, exploitation and rule. These political alternatives are thus exposed as a mere fetish when abstracted from their constitutive context.
Other chapters feature the production of foodstuffs in small ‘home factories’, workers loading and unloading commodities, people collecting waste and, of course, young women working in the transnationally owned garment factories. Every time, we see unregulated forms of labour closely tied to official circuits of capital accumulation and moreover find that people's choice for one over the other type of labour is always context-dependent and ambiguous. In discussion with Kathleen Millar's work on informal waste collection, for instance, Campbell argues that indeed we may acknowledge that desire – rather than narrow economistic motivations – can lead one to opt either for waste collection or garment work, but that such desire is in fact always inextricably intertwined with scarcity. In similar methodological vein, a chapter focusing on workers in the horrifically violent raft shrimp-fishing industry convincingly argues that slave and other forms of extremely coerced labour are best conceptualised not as disconnected from so-called ‘free labour’ – nor as being merely more overt forms of the kind of subjugation that determines any form of labour – but rather as being co-constitutive in that Myanmar's raft fishing industry is part of the unfree ground subsidising certain degrees of liberal freedom elsewhere.
The chapter ‘Debt collection as labor discipline’ is particularly interesting because it adds an original line of argument to Campbell's general critique of too narrow, liberal conceptions of capitalism and connects well to the larger Frontlines of Value project that the book is part of. Here, Campbell provides rich ethnographic substantiation of the argument that financialisation – rather than being a shift away from labour as the basis of profits – in fact is closely interrelated to the multiplication of informal and precarious (‘nonnormative’) forms of labour and that it is precisely the proliferation of household indebtedness that continues to fuel the extraction of value from labour in these nonnormative labour arrangements. Financial capital may thus be ‘fictitious’ but as an ‘anticipatory relation’ it remains tied to labour in production.
The book thus cuts through various complicated debates on the nature of changing capitalist relations today, each time with great precision and clarity. Methodological emphasis is on the interconnectedness of supposedly distinct realms and forms of surplus extraction. Contradictions are the catalysts of social change and ambiguity is inherent in people's everyday choices. We get beautiful ethnographic insights into working lives and struggles in Myanmar but also analyses that are of relevance far beyond that case. The book is moreover a delightful proof that it is still possible to avoid conceptual self-aggrandisement and polemic, to criticise other anthropologists with nuance and respect, and to just not needlessly write oneself into the ethnographic narrative. Part of me fears that considering the way academia works today, these qualities of the book will in fact prevent it from gaining the prominence that it should. But I very much hope to be proven wrong because this book is radically inspiring for political anthropologists, exceptionally useful for teaching and deserving of a large readership.
LUISA STEUR
University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)