Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context: Essays from India and France 9781138376717, 0415401143

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction The Uses of Bourdieu's Social Theory: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
The Crisis of ‘Imperial Societies'
Thinking the State with Bourdieu and Foucault
Bourdieu's Theory of the Symbolic: Traditions and Innovations
The Field of Indian Knowledge in France in the 1930s as Reality and as Fiction
Literature and Politics: The French Literary Field during the German Occupation (1940-1944)
Symbolic Violence, Masculine Domination and Politicization of Gender: The Case of the Vichy Regime (France, 1940—1944)
Habitus, Performance and Women's Experience: Understanding Embodiment and Identity in Everyday Life
Pierre Bourdieu and Anthropology: From Kinship to Gift
Documents and Testimony: Violence, Witnessing and Subjectivity in the Bombay Riots, 1992-1993
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

ISBN 978-1-138-37671-7

9 781138 376717

Routledge

www.routledge.com

Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context

Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context Essays from India and France

Editors

Roland Lardinois Meenakshi Thapan

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

First published 2006 by Routledge 512 Mercantile House, 15 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 Simultaneously published in UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group Transferred to Digital Printing 2006 © Roland Lardinois / Meenakshi Thapan 2006 Typeset by Astricks, New Delhi www.astricks.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0-415-40114-3

Acknowledgements

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his volume is based on a workshop held at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics in February 2004. The workshop received support from both India and France. In France, we would like to express our thanks to the Maison des Sciences de l’ Homme (MSH) in Paris, particularly to its Chief Administrator at the time, Professor Maurice Aymard, and to Dr Gilles Tarabout who was in-charge of the Indo-French programme run conjointly with the MSH and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi. The workshop was also financially supported by the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Centre d’ Études de l’ Inde et de l’ Asie du Sud (CNRS) in Paris. In India, we would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the ICSSR and the University of Delhi. The French Embassy in New Delhi hosted a reception on the occasion and we thank Mr J.C. Tribolet and the Cultural Office of the Embassy of France in New Delhi for their warm support. We also thank the faculty and students of the Department of Sociology who hosted this workshop over two days with great interest and enthusiasm. The editors would particularly like to thank the authors for their patience and goodwill which has been of enormous help in the preparation of this volume. We are grateful to Saloni Zutshi who provided excellent research assistance during the preparation of the volume. We also acknowledge the keen editorial gaze of Vidya Rao and Nilanjan Sarkar; and finally, warm thanks to Omita Goyal at Routledge for taking us on with complete faith and certainty.

Contents Introduction The Uses of Bourdieu’s Social Theory: An Interdisciplinary Perspective Meenakshi Thapan and Roland Lardinois 1

The Crisis of ‘Imperial Societies’ Christophe Charle 56

Thinking the State with Bourdieu and Foucault U. Kalpagam 77

Bourdieu’s Theory of the Symbolic: Traditions and Innovations Sheena Jain 103

The Field of Indian Knowledge in France in the 1930s as Reality and as Fiction Roland Lardinois 129

Literature and Politics: The French Literary Field during the German Occupation (1940–1944) Gisèle Sapiro 154

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Symbolic Violence, Masculine Domination and Politicization of Gender: The Case of the Vichy Regime (France, 1940–1944) Francine Muel-Dreyfus 176

Habitus, Performance and Women’s Experience: Understanding Embodiment and Identity in Everyday Life Meenakshi Thapan 199

Pierre Bourdieu and Anthropology: From Kinship to Gift Alban Bensa 230

Documents and Testimony: Violence, Witnessing and Subjectivity in the Bombay Riots, 1992–1993 Deepak Mehta 259

Contributors 299

Index 302

Introduction The Uses of Bourdieu’s Social Theory: An Interdisciplinary Perspective


Meenakshi Thapan and Roland Lardinois

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his book intends to reflect an encounter between Indian and French scholars around the work of Pierre Bourdieu, its understanding and the practical uses of its tools and concepts in different case studies covering a range of ethnographic sites from rural to contemporary India, France, Melanesia, as well as an engagement with theoretical concerns and possibilities. Outside Europe, and particularly in the East, Bourdieu’s work is not as known, except perhaps in Japan, where he lectured, and his work is available in Japanese. Bourdieu never visited India but Indian scholars have been reading his work for a long time; most are unable to read him in French and rely mainly on English translations as indeed do large numbers of scholars across the world. Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in a small village in Béarn, in the Pyrennees region of south-western France. His father, the son of a sharecropper, was postmaster and then Head of a post office while his mother came from a family of farmers involved also in trading cloth. His rural and provincial origins were a serious handicap when he wished to enter the most prestigious academic institution in the highly competitive academic milieu of Paris, and he was indeed a sort of ‘miracle of the school system’, to use a phrase he coined when speaking of the children coming from a working class or peasant background like himself. After a brilliant performance in his secondary education in his

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native region, Bourdieu was admitted into a preparatory class in a well-known Parisian lycée, before entering, in 1951, the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, the institution that trained the élites amongst the cadre of teachers in France. Three years later, in 1954, he obtained the title of agrégé in Philosophy, considered in France to be the royal discipline amongst the humanities. After being accepted at the agrégation he became a lycée teacher at Moulins, a middle town of Central France (1954– 55). Having performed his obligatory military service in Algeria, where France was engaged in a colonial war, Bourdieu taught briefly at the University of Algiers (1958–60) before coming back to Paris. For a year (1960–61) he was Assistant (Lecturer) at the Sorbonne where Raymond Aron was a Professor. Later, he was appointed Maître de Conférence (Reader) at the University of Lille (1961–64), before being appointed, at the age of 34, to the post of Research Fellow (Directeur d’ Études) in the institution known today as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He remained there until his death. In 1981, he was appointed to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France (previously held by Raymond Aron), the most prestigious institution of higher learning in France. The Field of Sociology in France It is important that we first consider the social and intellectual context in which Pierre Bourdieu’s work has been produced, that is, the field of sociology in France in the second-half of the twentieth century. It is also necessary to account for the specific milieu in which his work is being received, that is, the field of social sciences in India since the 1980s when the English translations of Bourdieu’s works became easily accessible. Intellectual works circulate in contexts far removed from that of their production without importing their context. Moreover, they are received by scholars who read and use them according to their own queries which are often inherited from the history of social sciences within their national intellectual space, usually quite distant from the intellectual situation in which the works have

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been produced. Bourdieu was sharply critical of the manner in which ‘texts circulate without their context’ and wondered whether his work, or that of other French scholars like Foucault, Derrida or Lyotard could indeed be ‘incorporated’ into other academic fields outside France (Bourdieu 2000: 241). In an important paper, Bourdieu (2000) points to critical components of his work that are essential to any understanding or use of his work in international and vastly different academic contexts.1 In particular, he emphasizes his points of departure from other sociologists and from ‘structuralists’ and ‘postmodernists’, both of whom embody staggeringly different positions in the academic field. The first significant difference is that Bourdieu chose to leave, in the 1960s, ‘the superior caste of philosophy’ as he called it, for anthropology, the sociology of work and the sociology of education, the latter two fields being considered the ‘two most despised subsectors of a pariah discipline’ (ibid.: 243). Second, Bourdieu endeavoured to overcome the opposition, which is still prevalent in the social sciences, between objectivism and subjectivism. It is through his concept of ‘habitus’ that Bourdieu intended to give expression to the ‘overcoming of this antimony’ (ibid.: 244). Habitus, in its particular sociological usage, is a concept that derives from Bourdieu’s sociology, and is now the subject of understanding and criticism, and is much used as a conceptual tool.2 It is therefore necessary to locate our work in the context of his perspective on the universalization of his particular analyses, constructs and insights. This does not detract from the application of sociological concepts and tools to phenomena and approaches that may reflect diverse cultures and practices. Indeed Bourdieu himself has done this — for example, by using the same sociological conceptual categories in his analyses of Algerian and French societies. Here, we would like to outline a comparative view on the state of sociology in France and in India, which may contribute to a better understanding of Bourdieu in a dual context. To understand the position that Bourdieu progressively occupied in the field of French sociology, and more generally in the field

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of social sciences, we should recall some basic features of the discipline at the beginning of the 1950s. At this time, sociology was not yet fully recognized as a discipline. In fact, after the death of Émile Durkheim in 1917, although his intellectual legacy was taken up by some of his students like Marcel Mauss, the discipline as such did not attract young scholars in the 1920s and 1930s. Raymond Aron’s doctoral dissertation on German philosophy of history in 1938 may be seen as a landmark in the critique launched against Durkheim and his school, already accused of determinism and sociological reductionism.3 The legacy of Durkheimian sociology was not however completely lost. On the one hand, it still fed the historians gathered around the Annales school which had a fresh start after the Second World War through the transmission of their intellectual heritage from Lucien Febvre to Fernand Braudel. (At this time Braudel set up, with the financial support of the Ford Foundation, the Maison des Sciences de l’ Homme to further develop the VIth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études — the ancestor of EHESS — which, in the 1960s, became the centre for the social sciences in France.) On the other hand, Claude LéviStrauss, through Marcel Mauss, was also claiming his part of the Durkheimian legacy to ground his structural anthropology. It is not by chance that Lévi-Strauss found his most virulent critic in Jean-Paul Sartre. When Bourdieu entered the field of social sciences in the mid-1950s, the most intellectually promising discipline for a young agrégé of philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure was anthropology and not sociology; the latter was still much discredited as a discipline. The fieldwork experience in Algeria allowed Bourdieu to become a sociologist, when he understood that he could not study peasants in Kabylia, their social organisation and their mythology, without considering the practical conditions they were enduring — their enforced displacement in refugee camps by the French army involving the complete material and symbolic destruction of their pre-colonial social world (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964; Bourdieu 2003). In 1960, the empirical surveys on work and workers in urban Algeria conducted in collaboration

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with the statisticians Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet and Claude Seibel, then working at the Algerian Office of the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies, marked for Bourdieu the beginnings of a new practice of sociology using sophisticated statistical tools without giving up theoretical ambitions (Lebaron 2003). The following years saw the increasing involvement of Bourdieu with French statisticians (he even taught sociology, in the 1960s, at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l’ Administration in Paris). This ‘improbable encounter’ between statisticians and sociologists in the 1980s (Desrosières 2003) had a double legacy: it led to a sociology in which the statistical argument played a dominant role, and it also resulted in a reflexive analysis of the historical and social construction of the statistical tools currently used by scholars, particularly the census nomenclature. Both these are well illustrated by two of Bourdieu’s books: first, L’ Amour de l’ Art. Les musées d’ art et leur public (1966, trans. The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, 1990) in which an elementary probability model is used to express the statistical relationship between the frequency of visiting museums and the cultural capital of individuals, while La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (1979, trans. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1984) mobilized sophisticated Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The major pedagogical tool of what came to be called a sociological school (in the Durkheimian sense of the term), was published at the end of the 1960s and became, in France, the reference textbook for most sociologists, even those who disagreed with its editors Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron. The book — Le métier de sociologue (1968, trans. The Craft of Sociology, 1991) — referred to the works of many writers generally excluded from manuals and textbooks from Claude Bernard to Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Karl Marx to Louis Hjemslev, from Louis Aragon to Michael Polanyi. The editors’ painstaking introduction and their dense comments on the short abstracts in the volume, and the general organization of this material centred on the construction of the

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object in sociology, caused this book to become the prime intellectual capital required by sociologists wishing to break away from the literary uses of the commonplace which was, till then, often the stuff of the discipline. The publication of Le métier de sociologue should also be seen in the context of the social sciences series (Le Sens commun) that Bourdieu initiated with the Éditions de Minuit, an avant-garde literary publishing house. For this series, Bourdieu edited not only the basic texts of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, collected and introduced by Victor Karady, but he also published translations of major authors from other disciplines, notably Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Edward Sapir and Erving Goffman. If The Craft of Sociology became a kind of sociological manifesto of the discipline practiced by the scholars gathered around Pierre Bourdieu at the Centre for European Sociology, the launching of a new social sciences journal, Actes de la recherche en science sociales (1975), marked the beginning of a collective enterprise explicitly aimed at developing research projects using the same tools of knowledge and theoretical frameworks in a cumulative way, as Durkheim had done earlier by publishing L’ Année sociologique. However, from the beginning the aim of the journal was to devise new modes of expression in the social sciences, breaking away from other academic journals and institutions in many ways (Grignon 1976: 204–7). Given the diversity of modes of expression (articles, notes, brief remarks, interviews) and presentation (photos, quantitative data, graphic illustrations, etc.), coupled with the subversion of hierarchies of subjects in the academic scale of inquiry (it included in the first issues studies of the strip cartoon or the world of high fashion, subjects abandoned to the literate discourses of semiologists like Roland Barthes), Actes found a new readership crossing disciplinary boundaries. Amongst the many ways Bourdieu’s practice revolutionized social science, this one should be underlined. ‘Breaking with institutional divisions as with hierarchies, Actes contains articles which belong to different disciplines or which cannot easily be classified in one or other of the established categories’ (ibid.: 204). History, economic sociology, sociology

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of literature, linguistics and even philology find their way through to Actes. To fully understand the effect produced by the discovery of Bourdieu’s work on young sociologists who were attending his seminars in the middle of the 1970s, one should mention a less noticed feature. Reading his (collective) surveys, whether dealing with students and their relation to culture (The Inheritors), the social uses of photography (A Middle-brow Art) and the social differentiation of cultural practices (Distinction) gave us the feeling that our everyday life was entering the seminar room of the most innovative sociologist we have ever listened to in France. Bourdieu could reconcile the sociological legacy of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, mobilize the most sophisticated statistical tools of the French school of Correspondence Analysis, and deal with the colonial situation in Algeria, the aftermath of the events of 1968, or the matrimonial strategies of peasant families in south-western France at one and the same time. Moreover, he did this using a tone far distant from the abstract language of radical politics used by some scholars. Never forgetting his personal experience of social and cultural domination during his youth and after, Bourdieu could understand at first hand the harshness of the social constraints framing the social world, as Durkheim expressed it. One of the reasons for the success of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in the second half of the twentieth century (particularly amongst young scholars coming from middle-class families who were the beneficiaries of the democratization of the European school system which happened at the end of three decades of economic growth that followed the end of the Second World War), lies in the homology of their experiences of the social world that they find so accurately expressed in his sociology. Bourdieu: The Unconventional Sociologist As a sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu analysed with equal attention the elite and the working classes in France (1986), peasants in Algeria (1977, 1990), the field of literary and artistic production

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(1996), the relationship between language and power (1980, 1991), and other vastly differing subjects. His concern for the poor, voiceless and struggling in French society is reflected in his sociological study (undertaken with colleagues), of the new forms of social suffering characteristic of contemporary societies (1999). This well documented, deeply moving and poignant account of the everyday struggles of ordinary people also reflects Bourdieu’s acute sensitivity and humility towards the subjects of his study. He had always been concerned with problems of method and this is reflected in his discussion of the limits of ‘objectivism’ and his endeavour to provide an alternative to ‘objectivist’ and ‘phenomenological’ or ‘ethnomethodological’ modes of theoretical knowledge. In an early paper (1973), he had proposed a third mode of theoretical knowledge for understanding social reality, viz., ‘praxeological knowledge’, or knowledge between individual actors and objective structures. The subject (individual actors) and the object (objective structures), and the dialectical relationship between them, became Bourdieu’s central concern. He thus attempted to solve the eternal problem created by the opposing forces of essentialism and determinism primarily through the concept of ‘habitus’ which mediates between the subject and the object. Bourdieu’s quest for true sociological understanding sought to reject all conventional forms of the tools and techniques of science. It is almost as if Bourdieu had arrived at the ultimate modality of sociological knowing, one that signifies both compassion and love and might therefore be unacceptable to his critics: ‘At the risk of shocking both the rigorous methodologist and the inspired hermeneutic scholar, I would say that the interview can be considered a sort of spiritual exercise that, through forgetfulness of self, aims at a true conversion of the way we look at other people in the ordinary circumstances of life. The welcoming disposition, which leads one to make the respondent’s problems one’s own, the capacity to take that person and understand them just as they are in their distinctive necessity, is a sort of intellectual love . . . which Spinoza held to be the supreme form of knowledge’ (Bourdieu 1999: 614; emphases in original).

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It is this overt and courageous display of his convictions that sets Bourdieu apart from other sociologists. In 2000, Bourdieu was awarded the Huxley medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and delivered the Huxley Memorial Lecture on ‘Participant Objectivation’ (Bourdieu 2003). In this lecture, he made a direct attack on the traditional method of participant observation, the hallmark of British anthropology. Emphasizing the significance of the anthropologist’s habitus in the journey of understanding social reality, Bourdieu said, ‘Yet I am convinced that one knows the world better and better as one knows oneself better, that scientific knowledge and knowledge of oneself and of one’s own social unconscious advance hand in hand, and that primary experience transformed in and through scientific practice transforms scientific practice and conversely’ (ibid.: 289). Participant objectivation is the method Bourdieu uses to strive towards scientific objectivity through reflexivity, ‘an understanding which moves beyond the primary ethnographic experience, beyond the objectivation of that experience through scientific analysis . . . to a knowledge which reinterprets that objectivation of primary knowledge through an analysis of the academic and broader social environment within which and through which the ethnographer operates’ (Miller 2004: 77). The ethnographer is therefore required to look within, not only as an individual inhabiting a particular social and cultural space but also ‘her particular position in the microcosm of anthropologists’ (Bourdieu 2003: 283), viz., her position in the disciplinary field. In this manner, Bourdieu did not work or write to fit into a conventional sociological mould or seek merely to refine already existing theories or paradigms. Every piece of new work reflects a unique understanding of social problems and perspectives based on concepts he may have earlier defined or used but which nevertheless explain anew different phenomena in varied contexts and situations. He was not however a romantic or populist writer because he used these concepts for a very systematic, measured and rigorous analysis of social, cultural and political events and contexts as they unfolded before him. His was the

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gaze of the sociological connoisseur par excellence, theoretician, ethnographer, practitioner and activist. In the 1990s, Bourdieu increasingly engaged in political activism in France although a commentator has argued that this was merely ‘a change of form, but the content was always there’ (Wacquant 2002). His early work, whether on Algeria or on student life in France, also addressed the most topical issues of the time. It is just that in later years, Bourdieu ‘had a very keen sense that we lived in a pivotal conjuncture, that many of the institutions of social justice and social protection, embodied in the welfare state, could be destroyed in a few years’; he therefore began to address issues more directly (ibid.). In 1995, he supported striking railway workers against the French government’s reform of the social security system which, he asserted, gave the government authority in the world financial markets (Johnson 2002). He also defended immigrants, les sans papiers, who were present in France but could not justify their presence legally (ibid.). It is not surprising therefore that Bourdieu became ‘the intellectual reference’ for movements that opposed neo-liberalism and globalization that developed in the 1990s: ‘Ours is a Darwinian world of insecurity and stress’, wrote Bourdieu, ‘where the permanent threat of unemployment creates a permanent state of precariousness’ (quoted in Jeffries 2002). Bourdieu was one of the very few sociologists who, at the same time that he examined the external social reality, looked within, i.e., at his own discipline, with a critical eye and raised questions about the aims of sociology, its purpose and the task of sociologists in a socially unequal world (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Bourdieu 1993). He was also not afraid to examine the ‘intellectual field’ (1969) in which he himself was a somewhat controversial figure (in view of his critical selfreflection in a somewhat conservative French academy). His sharp, honest and fiercely critical focus on higher education resulted in his well-known work: Homo Academicus (1988). This book, like much of Bourdieu’s other works (for example, Distinction), also emphasizes the place of status and culture as a marker of social identity, struggle and change. Distinction

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(1979) is in fact outstanding in its analysis of contemporary French society, where he views habitus as shaping present-day taste and lifestyles, thereby creating ‘signs of distinction’ and resulting in the transformation of economic capital into symbolic capital. This book is considered one of twentieth century’s ten most important works of sociology by the International Sociology Association (Jeffries 2002). In his understanding and analysis of the forms of capital, viz. economic, cultural and social capital and their transformation into symbolic capital, Bourdieu also made an important contribution to our understanding of how the conversion of capital resulted in changes in social class, status, privilege and domination (1986). Most importantly, Bourdieu was a sociologist of education who took great pride in the discipline and sought to establish it at the centre of mainstream sociology. He wrote several books on the subject including his well-known work on students in France (1979). His most celebrated work on the subject was authored with Jean-Claude Passeron (1977) on the significance of education in social and cultural reproduction. Although the style is terse and somewhat complex, it is a magnificient piece of scholarly writing through which Bourdieu and Passeron establish the manner in which educational practices reproduce and thereby legitimize the ideologies of power and control. This work is significant because it is the first effort to identify and examine in great detail the social underpinnings of educational practices that serve to reproduce social relations of power. In another work, Bourdieu (1977) looks at Kabylia society in Algeria and engages in a discussion of some of his central concepts such as habitus, doxa, and symbolic capital within a theory of symbolic power. It is however in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture that Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) provide us with a comprehensive account of the foundations of a theory of ‘symbolic violence’ which is the crux of Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction. In a later work, Bourdieu (1996) examines the career trajectories of students from the grandes écoles into powerful positions in the civil service, business and politics, and indicates the

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emergence of a socially homogeneous ruling elite imbued, it has been suggested, ‘with a specifically French form of neoliberalism’ (Lane 2000: 170). In this manner, Bourdieu examines the direct link and relationship between the field of higher education and ‘the field of power’. This monumental work, which traces the evolution of French higher education from the 1960s to the 1980s, is also more specifically concerned with the way in which the business and the administrative elite ‘brought into the heart of the civil service the dogmas of business efficiency and the market which struck at the heart of a public service ethos’ (ibid.: 176). The field of power undoubtedly remains crucial to Bourdieu’s sociology that seeks to understand the complexity characteristic of the exercise of power and control in different social, cultural and political domains of everyday life. Bourdieu has been chastized by feminists (for example, Armangaud and Jasser 1995; Lovell 2000) for neglecting to address gender inequality directly, ignoring existing feminist work in France, and providing unsatisfactory explanations of gender inequality, even though domination has been an overarching concern in all his work. But one could argue that in fact Bourdieu’s explicit concern and analysis of gender politics is not restricted to his very recent work (2001) but is also present in earlier works (for example, 1977, 1979, 1990). An important aspect of Bourdieu’s contribution to feminist understanding lies in his recognition, like Foucault, that submission and resistance to domination are simultaneous moments, events, practices. Writing about the Kabylia society, Bourdieu perceptively comments that, Even when women do wield the real power . . . they can exercise it fully on condition that they leave the appearance of power, that is, its official manifestation, to the men; to have any power at all, women must make do with the unofficial power of the eminence grise, a dominated power which is opposed to official power in that it can operate only by proxy, under the cover of an official authority, as well as to the subversive refusal of the rule-breaker, in that it still serves the authority it uses (1977: 41).

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There is in this preliminary formulation an attempt to locate the exercise of power within an apparent neutrality that is both enabling and restricting or limiting for women as is indeed often the case in different forms of social organization. More recently, Bourdieu has pointed explicitly to this paradox, ‘Resistance may be alienating and submission may be liberating. Such is the paradox of the dominated, and there is no way out of it’ (1994: 155). Such a perspective indicates both the forms of oppression that women may experience as well as points to the possibilities for strategizing and the skilful manoeuvring they may engage in to achieve their goals. Class is essential to Bourdieu’s understanding of gender inequality. He was also very conscious of the different modalities of control that shape such inequalities in varied ways. For example, in contemporary social settings, changing modes of domination through the media, the ‘vendors of slimming aids’ and other agents of the ‘new petite bourgeoisie’ impose new uses of the body and create a new bodily hexis which ‘substituting seduction for repression, public relations for policing, advertising for authority, the velvet glove for the iron fist, pursues the symbolic integration of the dominated classes by imposing needs rather than inculcating norms’ (Bourdieu (1979) 1984: 153–54). In this manner, both material conditions and social, cultural and symbolic transformations effect new modes of domination that in subtle ways are the tools par excellence of reproducing gender politics in society. It is precisely in this context that feminists now recognize the significance of his contribution. Thus, Lovell remarks, ‘Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology has attracted a belated but growing, if critical, interest among feminists only in part because of his integrated approach to socio-economic class and culture’ (2004: 41).4 Bourdieu has been persistently critiqued for the lack of a consistent theory of change in his work, wherein although he asserts the necessity for the sociologist to empathize, associate and struggle with the oppressed, he perhaps views them as incapable of breaking the cycle of social reproduction and thereby fails to generate an adequate theory of resistance or

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transformation. The sociologist has to persevere to comprehensively read and understand the definitions and varied uses of the concepts employed by Bourdieu and not be diverted by their rather complex dissemination. We will then find, for example, that ‘habitus’ not only ‘structures structures’ but is also a ‘generative structure’ (McNay 1999: 100) capable, with individual perception and intervention, of modifying or challenging the dominant structures. Similarly, Bourdieu points out that as habitus is a product of history, it is an ‘open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133). The crucial criterion for change, Bourdieu argues, is individual awareness or knowledge of the conditioning nature of habitus and the function of other social categories (Thapan 1988a). It is in this sense that ‘knowledge of the social world, and, more precisely, the categories that make it possible, are the stakes par excellence, of political struggle, the inextricably theoretical and practical struggle for the power to conserve or transform the social world by conserving or transforming the categories through which it is perceived’ (Bourdieu 1985: 729). This is not to suggest however that Bourdieu provided perfect solutions to the enormous magnitude of social problems he sought to address and understand. It is only to emphasize the holistic nature of his sociological perspective and vision that was concerned with the problem of domination as much as with struggle, resistance and transformation. The Field of Sociology in India One cannot understand the reception of Bourdieu’s work in India without considering the particular position that sociology has occupied within the field of social sciences in India. There is a division between two sets of disciplines: on the one hand, anthropology (physical, cultural, social) is taught at faculties of sciences in India, while, on the other, sociology is taught, with other disciplines of social sciences, in the faculties of social

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sciences. However, social anthropology has influenced sociology since its inception in the second decade of the twentieth century. The relationship between sociology and social anthropology is in fact at the heart of the practice of sociology in India. However, efforts to establish joint departments of sociology and social anthropology have been unsuccessful (Béteille 2002a: 33). There is no single, autonomous field of sociology in India as it has been influenced by different perspectives and schools surrounding the work of scholars.5 The main centres where sociology developed were the University of Bombay where the first department of sociology was established in 1919 by the geographer Patrick Geddes, and University of Lucknow where a combined department of economics and sociology was started in 1921 by Radhakamal Mukherjee (who was later joined by D.P. Mukherji and D.N. Majumdar). A department of anthropology was established at the University of Calcutta in 1921. Among the Indian scholars who entered the field, some were trained in classical disciplines and the indological approach dominated the work of G.S. Ghurye and Irawarti Karve who developed an understanding of family and kinship. The indological method was later incorporated by Louis Dumont and D.F. Pocock in their programmatic statement when they launched the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS) in 1957, and this resulted in a lively and contentious debate in CIS in the years that followed. The indological approach is however markedly different from the historical approach which examines contemporary social concerns and processes in the context of their historical settings, especially colonialism. While many Indian sociologists have used this approach, it has been particularly favoured by Marxist scholars. An influential work in India that has used the historical approach from this perspective is that of A.R. Desai (1959) on the social background of Indian nationalism. Agrarian relations have also been significantly studied by using the historical approach (Béteille 2002a: 36). Scholars like Radhakamal Mukherjee used an interdisciplinary approach for the study of

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Indian society and especially advocated the use of economics and ecology for understanding different aspects of social reality. Such an approach has formed another stream in the history of Indian sociology. Publication of research emerging from this approach has appeared in the Sociological Bulletin and the Economic and Political Weekly of India rather than CIS which, for a long time, has had a different image because if its association with Louis Dumont.6 The oldest professional journal, Man in India, was started in 1922 and contains essays by archaeologists, physical and cultural anthropologists and sociologists (Béteille 2002a: 33). It is an indisputable fact that sociology in India has benefited from, most significantly, the contributions of descriptive and analytical ethnography that have been the preoccupation of a large number of scholars, beginning with S.C. Roy and including M.N. Srinivas (1952), Irawati Karve (1953), S.C. Dube (1960), André Béteille (1965), T.N. Madan (1965), Leela Dube (1986), among others.7 Sociology in the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by village studies, the study of religion and kinship, of caste and other forms of inequality. Although the work of Karve (1953) examined the links between culturally differing kinship rules and practices and their implications for women, it was only with the work of Leela Dube (for example, 1969, 1974, 1986, 1997) that women’s issues and gender relations became critical to anthropological research on kinship, caste, and sexuality. It was significant, in the context of the changing disciplinary boundaries of sociology in India, that M.N. Srinivas (1988) chose to speak on ‘The Changing Position of Indian Women’ at the Huxley Memorial Lecture. This paper, as well as Srinivas (1984) and the work of Leela Dube, provided the study of women’s issues an appropriate and legitimate space within the discipline of sociology /social anthropology.8 The establishment of a department of sociology at the University of Delhi within the Delhi School of Economics in 1959 by M.N. Srinivas was a major contributing factor to the development of the discipline. Srinivas, trained as a sociologist at Bombay and an anthropologist at Oxford, was interested in

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developing the discipline by encouraging different areas of research, using the anthropological technique of intensive fieldwork. Quantitative techniques and statistical methods have not been the forte of the research undertaken in the Department, which was recognized as a Centre for Advanced Study in Sociology in 1968 by the University Grants Commission. The interaction between economics and sociology is limited even within the Delhi School of Economics where the two departments are closely located. This, however, is more to do with the lack of an interdisciplinary approach in both disciplines rather than the emphasis on quantitative techniques in the one, and qualitative in the other.9 The Department of Sociology is characterized by research in a number of intersecting areas such as family and kinship, gender studies, textual and contextual studies of Hinduism and community power structures including local-level politics, trade unions and cooperatives. In recent years, new areas of research have emerged such as the sociology of the environment, the sociology of law, and studies regarding masculinity, and sociologists have been engaged in developing curricula around these areas. The tendency among Indian sociologists (Béteille 1972; Deshpande 2001; Dhanagare 1980; Gupta 1980; Thapan 1991) to agonize about their discipline reflects a search for identity, a preoccupation with ‘narcissistic self-examination’ and one that marks ‘sociology [as] a discipline ever in search of its “self ” ’ (Uberoi 2000: 18). Uberoi in fact suggests that this tendency to be concerned with critical questions concerning the subject matter of sociology, its method, its difference from economics on the one hand, and history on the other, reflects a ‘tension built into the practice of sociology (and not only Indian sociology), an identity crisis that is not shared by other social science disciplines’ (ibid.:19). It is this tension that pushes sociologists to engage in a continuous search for definitions and re-definitions about the nature of sociology in India.10 In this context, it is also pertinent to emphasize that there has been a somewhat marked ambivalence towards the reception of the work of Western sociologists on India. While the work of

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Louis Dumont has been significant in foregrounding a particular approach in the study of Indian society, it also resulted in a serious debate in the pages of CIS and outside on the relevance and usefulness of this approach.11 The dual position of the Indian academic of simultaneously being an insider and an outsider with an inherited colonial capital (which can work either as an asset or as a liability) may perhaps explain this ambivalence on the part of Indian scholars. Uberoi (1968) has, for example, in an early and much cited paper, advocated the freedom of Indian scientific thought from its colonial influence and asserted the need for Indian contributions to the development of a universal science. Nonetheless, Béteille rightly points to the social and intellectual inequality structurally inscribed within the international field of social sciences divided between its relatively dominant and dominated poles, or so experienced, when he voices publicly what is often kept for private conversation: ‘The ablest among our social scientists are unable to discuss the works of western authorities without a sense of guilt’ (Béteille 2003: 417). This volume seeks to redress this lacuna by emphasizing the possibilities of this engagement at both the level of theoretical possibilities as well as that of practical concerns. An Indian Engagement with Bourdieu In India, Bourdieu has never occupied the iconic position he has held in France. His work has been read and taught in Indian universities and is part of the syllabi of many sociology departments, certainly in universities in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chandigarh, and Hyderabad amongst others. Some sociologists have used his work in their own research and writings, and many more have taught it. Their understanding and use of Bourdieu’s work encompasses a vast range of issues and fields. However, the work of Indian scholars does not necessarily draw on Bourdieu’s corpus of work in its entirety but refers to those aspects that are most useful in drawing out or explicating certain theoretical predicaments or providing nuanced understandings of the ethnographic material. But for some scholars, aspects of

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Bourdieu’s work have proved to be critical to their research and teaching. For example, Bourdieu’s significant contribution to the sociology of education, in moving away from Durkheim’s socialization perspective to one that emphasizes cultural reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), has been influential in the understanding of contemporary schooling practices. Other influential books in the teaching of Bourdieu in departments of sociology have been Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), Distinction (1979), The Logic of Practice (1990) and, more recently, Masculine Domination (2001). Field, Habitus and Capital There are several themes that emerge in the writings of scholars working on Indian society who have used Bourdieu’s conceptual tools and theoretical apparatus.12 It is apparent that the most significant engagement with Bourdieu takes place in the context of his writings on ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’. The varied ways in which Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’ and ‘capital’ have been used by scholars in vastly different ethnographic sites substantiates what this volume seeks to highlight, viz. the possibility of a successful and almost universal application of some of Bourdieu’s conceptual categories such as ‘habitus’ in the context of the family, gender, class and discursive practices.13 It is important that feminists and scholars working on issues relating to understanding gender and women have found Bourdieusian forms of analysis useful in their analysis of not just the continuity of patriarchal modes of representation and of oppression but also the possibilities of agential intervention and change. Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘field’ has been of particular help in the understanding of the field of sociology in India. Contributions on this theme by sociologists include Thapan (1991), John (2001), and Deshpande (2001) among others. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘intellectual field’ and ‘symbolic power’ to examine the ‘field’ of sociology in India, Thapan (1991) develops an argument along the lines that the term ‘field’ is used primarily in the sense of Bourdieu’s ‘intellectual field’ while going beyond its specific construction, the need for which

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Bourdieu himself had recognized, ‘as a relatively autonomous universe of specific relations’. It is viewed in relation to other fields, especially that of power, linking sociology with religious studies, economics, and politics in India. The ‘habitus’ of the practitioners, and the particular trajectories indicate the basic character of the field which is manifested in the relations, struggles and positions in the field. In this sense, the field is important not only in terms of the relations within it, the positions occupied by institutions and agents, etc. but also in terms of the struggles over the ‘reproduction or transformation of the “capital”’ within a particular field. Thus, ‘capital’ is referred to in relation to ‘field’, i.e., ‘intellectual field’, as used by Bourdieu, for whom capital exists and functions only in relation to the field and confers power on it. Further, this capital affords power to the participants, in varying degrees, depending on their position in the field. When a sociologist’s academic capital is reproduced through students who work on the former’s research area, the loyalty of the student acquired by the sociologist constitutes a valued form of capital. Bourdieu argues that in granting intellectual recognition to the sociologist, the students create his value and afford him power over them, while the sociologist in turn helps create their value. Thus, the student acts as a medium through whom academic capital may be reproduced, and academic power, i.e., ‘symbolic power’, using Bourdieu’s concept, may be exercised. This power is symbolic of a superior intellectual way of thinking and owing to its ‘misrecognition’ acquires its legitimacy and endows the individual with intellectual authority in a field riven with fissures, dilemmas and the tensions and pulls of competitive and contradictory intellectual positions. Mary E. John (2001) also uses Bourdieu’s concept of ‘intellectual field’ while examining the need for and evolution of the field of ‘women’s studies’ as a field in its own right within a broader intellectual field. John uses Bourdieu’s concept of ‘intellectual field’ to understand women’s studies in terms of its multilayered structure and argues that the boundaries of sociology and women’s studies are undefined, fluid and open-ended and can be

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seen as interactive domains within an ‘intellectual field’. She seeks to explore the obvious and more subtle relationship of power between different disciplines which she argues are not completely sealed from one another, especially the discipline of sociology, the content of which is vast and whose borders are fluid. Although John examines the ‘field’ in the context of certain disciplinary boundaries, positions and practices, for Bourdieu it was in the context of capital, habitus and the production and reproduction of knowledge that ‘field’ acquires significance and meaning. Bourdieu’s conceptual categories have often provided scholars with specific understandings of their particular problems and in this manner lay the ground for understanding a variety of sites and locations. Bourdieu’s notion of cultural reproduction is examined by Thapan (1988a) in order to understand pedagogic communication against the criticisms levelled by resistance theorists at theorists of cultural reproduction. The resistance theorists have argued that cultural reproduction presents a deterministic and dominating nature of structures that excludes the element of resistance, struggle and agency of individuals who, according to these theorists, engage in a dialectical relation with the larger structures. Thapan points out that this is a limited view of cultural reproduction since Bourdieu himself indicates the existence of the possibility for individual determination and transformation, even though it might be contained in nature. She notes that his notion of ‘habitus’ is a mediating concept between structures and practice and thus the relationship between the three is a dialectical rather than circular one. ‘Practice’ according to Bourdieu, as Thapan points out, is dialectically produced, and is formulated anew each time through the cycle of reproduction while those that are not reproduced indicate the possible intervention by individual action. ‘Habitus’, however, is critical to the logic of practice. Thapan’s emphasis, in her use of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, has been on that feature of habitus that incorporates the dimensions of both the social and the individual. The usefulness of habitus as a conceptual category lies in its encompassing of the individual and the social, the subjective

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and the objective, the possibilities for both reproduction and resistance existing simultaneously and through the habitus. André Béteille (2002b) applies Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’ while examining the role and influence of the Indian family in the reproduction of inequality. He argues that despite having become nuclear in their configuration, Indian families continue their involvement with the wider kin network. Unlike the west, the influence of the family on children in India continues through school, and even beyond it. It is possible to draw a link here with Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘habitus’ which, with the family, as one of its determining structures, shapes and structures the thoughts and actions of individuals (children) although Béteille does mention that an adult individual may overcome his family’s situation and his life may not completely depend on his family background or social environment. He however recognizes that the family successfully transmits its social and cultural capital to the younger generation, and is an institution within and through which an individual ‘acquires his capabilities and orientations as a member of the society’ (ibid. 2002b: 152). Béteille points out that in order to understand the reproduction of inequality, an account of the differences between families in India is required, such that it includes not merely the differences in means and motivations, i.e., wealth and income or economic resources but also, by extending the concept of capital, i.e., those with social and cultural capital. He argues that each family has a distinct way of life and is endowed with a different ‘stock of cultural capital’ in terms of knowledge, skills and tastes; it has its own ‘networks of relationships’, i.e., social capital, both acquired from the past and newly constructed. However, while Béteille uses Bourdieu’s concept of capital, he points out that Bourdieu does not clearly indicate a procedure for measuring the same and it becomes difficult to devise procedures for nationalizing, expropriating or redistributing social and cultural capital, unlike economic/material capital.14 The influence of Bourdieu’s concept of capital in the work of Indian scholars remains significant despite the perceived lack

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of a precise process of measuring non-economic forms of capital. Nanda (1992) borrows from and is in agreement with Bourdieu’s view that symbolic and cultural capital are as important as economic capital in that these are integral to the reproduction of the economic basis of existence. In this manner, he argues for a recognition of the economic component latent in the symbolic and cultural aspects of the traditional economy. Nanda seeks to examine the decline of the traditional basis of organization of work, i.e., customary cooperative labour, amongst the tribals of highland Orissa while simultaneously tracing the emergence of work based on hired wage labour. In analyzing work, Nanda also explores the practices and social relationships which result from the production of economic capital. Here he argues for the theoretical significance of the modes of perception and legitimation of different kinds of capital. Moreover, to view these as empathetic exchanges is a ‘misrecognition’, for the relations of reciprocity reproduce established relations through ceremonies and feasts that are integral not merely to the existence of the group, but are as vital to the reproduction of the economic bases of existence. Bourdieu argues, as Nanda notes, that such bases of production should be viewed as an economy in so much as it functions ‘in itself ’ and not ‘for itself ’, and that the emphasis on the symbolic aspect of the traditional economy must not serve to deny the economic ends towards which such a society is subjectively driven. Thus, the ‘archaic’ economy, Nanda argues, is an economy in itself within an economy for itself, the essence of the traditional economy lying in the manner in which the economic activity, according to Bourdieu, serves to hide its ‘objective meaning’. Not only is ‘cultural capital’ instrumental in reproducing economic capital, as argued by Nanda, but Satish Deshpande’s use of Bourdieu’s concept of capital in understanding the rise and significance of the middle class in independent India demonstrates the link between cultural capital and power. Deshpande (2003) attempts to look at class as a social science concept within which he seeks to address the significance of the middle class. The middle class along with the State apparatus it controls

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assumes the role of representing the ‘patriotic producers’ and is thus dependent, in Bourdieu’s terms, on ‘cultural capital’ and on the mechanisms through which it is reproduced. Carol Upadhya (1997) uses Bourdieu’s concept of capital to show that differentiation and domination can also be produced by the accumulation of social connections and ‘cultural’, ‘social’, ‘symbolic’ capital, i.e., education, knowledge, skills that are embodied as a part of one’s habitus, network of social relations and prestige attached to the class respectively, which can feed back into the reproduction of economic capital. Upadhya argues that the business class in Vishakhapatnam, which is the focus of her study, concerns itself with the enhancement of social status. In marriages, the status of the family is given significance over considerations of sub-caste and locality endogamy, although caste endogamy is still maintained. Dowry acts as a medium through which social status or symbolic capital is acquired, as the very act of giving dowry enhances the prestige of the giver, being an indicator of economic status, i.e., the extent to which he is worthy of credit. Upadhya points out that among the Kammas of Vishakhapatnam, mechanics of class domination involve struggles over cultural capital but, she argues, unlike Bourdieu, the educational strategies here have produced a new class order instead of reproducing the existing one, the former being based on the accumulation of a new form of capital derived from English medium and higher education, which was previously unfamiliar to the rural landed class. The possibilities for the transformation of habitus through the conversion of one kind of capital into another or the accumulation of different forms of capital is however not outside the domain of the reproduction of the dominant structures, as Upadhya’s study indicates. The question to be addressed is whether or not it is possible to actually move out of the cycle of reproduction through strategies and acts of resistance emerging from the same process of accumulation and transformation of capital. In his work on a weaver community, the Ansaris of Barabanki, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Mehta (1997) examines the Ansaris’ practices from a Bourdieusian perspective and points

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to the way in which Bourdieu does away with the divide between subjectivism and objectivism by proposing both the determining impact of the habitus as well as the generative schemes that lead to strategies which give rise to practices. In so much as the habitus generates practice, Mehta points out the dispositions that constitute certain non-discursive practices that are found in the constitution of the worker’s body in the act of weaving and the novice’s body in the ritual of circumcision. The Ansari weaver’s discourse about weaving itself proclaims its Islamic heritage as the sacred book of the weavers is voiced in the practices of weaving when prayers contained in the book are uttered by weavers. The Ansaris’ way of life cannot be understood in terms of the binaries of work-non work, instrumentalexpressive aspects of the craft, and discourse-practice, since the boundaries are not marked; this fluidity, Mehta argues, is most apparent in the ritual of circumcision and the weaving of cloth for the shroud. For Bourdieu, Mehta notes, the habitus — a system of lasting dispositions — is realized within the frame of the objective structure and while it is prior to actual practice it may be strategically manipulated in the event of practice. The variation in practices is understood in terms of the ‘practical taxonomies’ which reflect and are a ‘transmuted form’ of the actual divisions of the social order and help in its reproduction through ‘orchestrated practices’. He thus explains the relation between practice and objective structures, and argues that in practice the structures are internalized while the habitus is rendered external. Mehta seeks to study the community in the context of its habitus in terms of its modalities like the kinship structure and shows how both work and ritual are influenced by the kinship structure of the Ansaris. While weaving is framed by the kinship structure, it also acts as a framing device as the practice of making cloth demarcates its area and makes significant the work of making cloth for the shroud. In this context he argues, in Bourdieu’s terms, that practice is meaningful only in so far as it acquires its practical coherence in lieu of the fact that it is the ‘product of a single system of conceptual schemes imminent in it’.

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Undoubtedly, Bourdieu’s concept of capital, its uses and transformations and the multifaceted nature of ‘habitus’ as a conceptual tool with multifarious possibilities, in the context of postcolonial and contemporary India, have attracted sociologists who seek explanations of the complexities that characterize society. It is also possible that often there is a movement from Bourdieu’s concepts in their specificity to conceptual categories that take account of multiple possibilities. It is in this sense that feminists have turned to understanding habitus as a generative space that straddles the objective and the subjective, and constructs, reconstructs and creates the everyday world of subjects. Domination and Resistance in Feminist Analyses Bourdieu’s paramount concern with a different kind of sociology lay in his effort to simultaneously straddle the world of structures of society as well as the subjectivities of lived experience. Feminist sociologists in India have found Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ particularly useful in understanding the manner in which both compliance and resistance work together. Kalpagam (2000b) uses Bourdieu’s notion of ‘doxa’ and ‘habitus’ to explain the way in which women internalize their patriarchal oppression and subordinate status even as they attempt to overcome it through their individual acts of resistance. She urges feminism to consider the entire gamut of human relations within which women’s experience of subordination is located and account for their individual acts of resistance, in order to understand how women bring their experience from the doxic field to that of opinion. She notes that habitus in Bourdieu’s analysis serves to ensure a strict adherence by the agents to the established order, whereby the arbitrariness of the latter is naturalized in terms of a correspondence between the social and mental structures. Kalpagam argues that the only way women can neutralize negative effects of the dominant structures is by submitting to them so as to make use of them, since they cannot escape these structures, the latter being embedded in their very constitution.

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In a similar vein, Rajni Palriwala (1996) highlights the deterministic nature of habitus even in contexts where negotiation and manipulation are possible. She, however, explores the reasons for a resuscitation of kinship and caste networks, despite the growing need for non-agricultural employment and security and the fact that these very structures appear to be oppressive for women. Although the joint family and extended kin networks are oppressive and reduce the bargaining power of these women, the latter gain strength in the everyday intra-household consumption, which they may manipulate to their benefit. However, in practice, the issues and options over which women appear to have authority remain fixed and predetermined by the ‘habitus’, from within which these women operate. As a unit of social support and sanction, these networks continue to hold ground and, in an attempt to ensure a secure base, these women serve to reinforce family ideology. Elsewhere, however, Palriwala (1990) argues that women can be seen as ‘active subjects’ who may self-consciously negotiate with the structures rather than merely being ‘passive carriers of social structure’. In this manner, Palriwala attempts to understand how autonomous and powerful women really are and to what extent the dominant structure and ideology impacts the self-image of these women. To this end, she refers to Bourdieu’s notion that the truth of any interaction cannot be grasped entirely from the interaction itself. Moreover, women may themselves consciously uphold, reaffirm and reproduce the traditional and cultural values and norms, i.e., the conditions of their oppression, which though they might be constraining, simultaneously afford them some respect and power over others. This informal power, however, at best implies only a negotiation with oppression. In a recent paper Thapan (2004) seeks to understand the reworking of gender in the specific modernity of the postcolonial world where the past and the present, the local and the global, the traditional and the modern are critical components. Thapan examines aspects of the Indian women’s magazine Femina to understand how body images serve to construct

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embodiment and womanhood through the medium of visual representation and textual discourse. She uses the conceptual category of ‘recolonization’ to understand relations of power and considers it not merely a process akin to globalization or westernization but a manifestation of ‘postcolonial’ habitus, the latter specifying a particular ‘historical and social condition that shapes habitus in diverse and particular ways through familial relations, schooling practices and other modalities of the social and political domain’ (ibid.: 412). She argues that the possibilities for resistance and transformation are embedded in the nature of habitus itself and further, that women in urban India both contest and submit to the images and constructs that impinge on their senses, emotions and material and social conditions in everyday life. The arguments made by Kalpagam, Palriwala, and Thapan point to the simultaneous presence of both domination as well as resistance and the variations in the possibilities of both, a point reiterated by Bourdieu in his understanding of power and the forms of resistance to it. The Chapters of the Book Drawing his historical hypothesis from the sociology of education and the sociology of the intellectuals elaborated by Bourdieu, Christophe Charle’s main area of research has been the social and cultural history of France during the nineteenth century. His work focuses on the modes of reproduction of the elites for which the school system plays a crucial function, particularly since the reforms introduced at the end of the nineteenth century which aimed at establishing this institution on new ground. Among his other books, Naissance des ‘intellectuels’ 1880–1900 (Charle 1990) is centred around the Dreyfus Affair (1898). This book was a landmark on the subject because for the first time in historiography, Charle sketched the historical genesis of this particular group and analyzed the social and political conditions which accounted for its birth as a collective category. More recently, he has developed a comparative understanding of the major crisis experienced during the first half of the twentieth century by the

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three dominant European societies, Great Britain, France and Germany, which he describes as ‘imperial societies’. This too draws its inspiration largely from Bourdieu’s work, both from the young Bourdieu as well as from the later one. First, a link may be made with Bourdieu’s sociology of Algeria published in the 1960s, where Bourdieu sketches out a sociology of colonial domination in the context of a colonial crisis, the war of independence fought against the colonial metropole, France, by the Algerian nationalists. An important aspect of Bourdieu’s work was the sociological understanding of colonial domination as being a multiple relation of domination, that is at the same time a political and an economic domination and also a cultural and a social one. Second, Charle’s project can also be connected with some of Bourdieu’s more recent thoughts on the ‘imperialism of the universal’ which can be clearly traced to his sociology of Algeria and colonialism. In his article in this volume, as in his book, the imperial societies, according to Christophe Charle, are characterized by four main features. First, they exercise a dual domination which is both territorial and cultural. Second, this dual domination is internal and external at the same time, as it is exercised, on the one hand, within the new territories conquered through the wars aimed at unifying a national space and, on the other, towards their overseas colonies. Third, within each of these societies, a large part of their metropolitan population shares the same national values based on the same language and the same culture transmitted for the first time in their history by a unified school system. And fourth, these societies also share the same kind of cultural imperialism which engage them to export their ‘universal’ values and ideals. These features enable us to distinguish these imperial societies both from old empires (be it Ottoman, Russian or Habsburg) and from weak European countries like Italy or even Spain, at that time. And they account for the national superiority complex that these imperial societies express, although being concurrent in exercising practically this superiority. From a sociological point of view, these societies may be understood as specific social spaces which can be compared to

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a field, in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. Each society developed what Charle calls a national habitus, typified for example through cultural emblems such as Kultur (for Germany) or Liberty, which can explain why in times of crisis the population largely accepted the conflict and supported the position of its elites in defending these so-called vital emblems. Charle also focuses on the crisis that these imperial societies or ‘enemy sisters’ faced during the first half of the twentieth century. This crisis is clearly a symptom of their decline at a time when two dominant superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, were emerging. But what is particular to these imperial societies is the fact that the elites not only refused to face their decline, but they managed to preserve their position within their national space. And at least for two of these societies, these refusals led the elites to some strong and brutal reactionary positions that ended with Nazism in Germany and the Vichy regime of Pétain in France. Looking at these imperial societies through Indian eyes, which is outside Charle’s project, it is clear that the decline of Great Britain as an imperial society is directly linked with the growth of the Indian national movement, particularly after the First World War. And whereas Great Britain had to define itself anew with the loss of its colonial territories, India was engaged in an internal process of nationalizing its political space, culture and values to become a powerful nation playing a leading role in Asia and the world. We suggest that Charle’s comparative history could therefore be taken further to encompass a comparative study of decolonization by studying the colonial projects developed by these imperial societies, at least in South and South-East Asia. That the French colonial empire ended only by wars of liberation ten years after the independence of India signifies the blindness of the French élites who appeared not to have understood what was really at stake between Great Britain and India around the Second World War. Kalpagam examines the relation between society and the State, arguing that the two must not be seen as separate and mutually exclusive spheres. Her article centres on the ethnographies of the State, examining the differences and similarities

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between the two perspectives that currently lend themselves to debates on the subject with the aim of understanding the Indian development experience. The first perspective, following Foucault, analyzes the manner in which the ‘practices and politics of life’ at the ‘margins’ — referred to as the spaces occupied by those who have not been sufficiently ‘socialized into the law’ or to those for whom state practices remain illegible — is shaped by and in turn shapes the practices of the State. The other perspective, following (to a great extent) Bourdieu’s analysis of the bureaucratic field, explores the role of the particular categories of state agents and the obstacles that they encounter in the process of carrying out their duties. Kalpagam examines how the two perspectives are integral to contemporary anthropological discourse, and also the way in which an analysis based on a combination of the two brings to light certain complex and unexplored dimensions of human experience, dimensions which for reasons of being self-evident have not made themselves apparent enough to be taken up for analysis. Kalpagam notes a shift in the way in which state power in pre-modern societies was seen by anthropologists as a centralized apparatus, as a distinct and separate entity from the society. The more recent perspectives, owing largely to the works of Foucault and Bourdieu, view the State and society in terms of the weakening distinction and greater permeability between the two. For Bourdieu, she points out, the State ‘exerts a permanent action of durable dispositions’: it structures the practices of all agents by uniformly imposing on them constraints and disciplines. Through the school system it imposes common categories of thought, appreciation and action. Through a gradual process of incorporation, the State thus becomes immanent to all its subjects. She notes that, for Bourdieu, the State categories are instituted in the habitus in that the State effects a cognitive unification by manifesting itself objectively in organizational structures and subjectively in the mental and social structures adapted to the former. The acts of institution, i.e., the practices and procedures of governance, which are the focus of Foucault’s concern (who finds the transformation of subjectivity through

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imposition of principles of common vision and division too simplistic) are not discussed by Bourdieu for whom they appear natural. For Bourdieu, unlike Foucault, the cognitive structures are not forms of consciousness and calculation but deeply buried dispositions of the body, i.e., an internalization by the subjects of these operations which are totalizing and objectifying.15 Kalpagam points out that while he recognizes the State’s role of totalization and codification, Bourdieu does not discuss the structuring of governmental practices by the State. He focuses on the role of the agents, on the way in which the particular agents use the power of abstraction and the effects of it. Moreover, Bourdieu views the bureaucratic field as a site of struggle between social agents which leads to a monopolization of the universal by the few who triumph. His perspective, however, Kalpagam argues, does not enable an understanding of ‘domination, hegemony and subjection through state power’. Foucault, on the other hand, concerns himself with the ‘dispersal of state power through capillaries’ and the ‘point at which power is applied’. Unlike Bourdieu, for him the state effects of universality are achieved through the modes of governance, not by an imposition of law but through calculated tactics used to artificially create the field so as to achieve intended results. Such subjection creates a subject who is ‘calculating’ and ‘calculable’. For Bourdieu, the actions of the agents are guided by an anticipation of the future based on a practical sense of previous experience through the implementation of schemes of habitus whereby the habitus is adapted to demands of the State such that the latter can manipulate hopes and expectations by presenting utopias as possibles so that the agent may feel free to explore improbable chances. Submission to state power is thus understood in terms of doxic submission.16 On the other hand, Foucault conceives the State as embodying governmentality, implying that the procedures, calculations, analysis and tactics, rather than the individual agents, gain significance. Kalpagam examines how the modern form of governance, in terms of its liberal governmentality, seeks to transform the conduct of citizens while constituting them as free and rights-

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bearing individuals who would aspire for the same goals as members of a national fraternity. Such production of homogeneous citizens out of diverse communities serves to erase their particularities. Apart from inflicting suffering on them, a displacement of their traditional cultures for the sake of modernity to redeem individuals also raises the hopes of alleviation of suffering and deprivation. Foucault’s perspective of modes of governance brings forth the dominating aspect of state power while that of Bourdieu’s suggests scope for forces that would work towards constructing a social order with collectives being oriented ‘towards rational pursuit of collectively defined and approved ends’. Kalpagam argues in the light of the two perspectives that the durable dispositions of those at the ‘margins’ may be different from others, and the ‘margin’ itself may be constituted by different people with those previously marginalized becoming incorporated in the mainstream. This homogenization of diverse peoples thus creates its own ‘margins’ of those who are yet to be homogenized or have not been sufficiently included and a consideration of the ethnographies of the state functionaries and institutions along with that of the way in which ‘margins’ shape and are shaped by governmental power would enable a better understanding of the Indian development experience by bringing forth more complex dimensions of human experience to be analyzed. While exploring the link between State and society, Kalpagam highlights the significance of the schemes of habitus in terms of the domination of the society and the latter’s doxic submission to the State. Sheena Jain in this volume further elaborates on Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and habitus. While looking at Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic, highlighting in the process the uniqueness of his theory despite its similarity and differences in relation to other analytical traditions. Jain argues that Bourdieu’s theory of practice complete with the concepts of habitus, fields, and capital, is influenced, in terms of its basic conceptual framework, by his understanding of the symbolic. It is his theory of the symbolic that forms the focus of her article in which she examines the many traditions of

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analysis that have informed Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic with the intention of exploring the ways in which it converges and diverges from these varied traditions, critically incorporating some of their aspects. Bourdieu argues that symbolic phenomena contribute to creating and are the products of the material and social environment within which human practice takes place. Symbolism is thus an intrinsic aspect of human practice. Bourdieu, as Jain sees it, speaks of the symbolic in terms of the mental structures which influence and are manifested in the objects, activities and institutions in the social world. Jain argues that Bourdieu’s approach is materialist in that it views subjectivity as being in a dialectical relation to the objective social structures, moving beyond the ‘immediate context of subjective experience in time and space’ although remaining materially and historically grounded. Bourdieu proposes that mental schemata are an embodiment of the social divisions in the subjective dispositions, i.e., the habitus of the agent; being genetically linked, the two are structurally homologous. By positing the habitus as being instituted in the bodies of individuals, Bourdieu transcends the line between the material and symbolic, the mind and body. Jain further points out that Bourdieu’s view implies the presence of the social in each individual. Rejecting Durkheim’s notion of collective consciousness and social consensus, and by introducing the dimension of power and differentiation, Bourdieu thus rejects the dichotomy between the individual and the social. Jain also elaborates on Bourdieu’s ideas that the fact that social formation has a structure implies that human practices too are structured. Since symbolic practices are a part of human practice, symbolic systems are also structured. Jain notes that he argues that symbolic systems provide meaning by structuring human practices including the construction of reality and the material and social environment in which the practice takes place, being efficacious only so long as they themselves are structured. Symbolic systems are a part of the social system and enable systematic comparisons between different systems by virtue of being related in terms of their isomorphic structures, a Bourdieusian insight, termed as ‘relational structuralism’.

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Despite the similarity in their structures, the symbolic system may differ from the objective structures in terms of their content, such that the symbolic component may transform or ‘overdetermine’ the social structure in reproducing it. However, the habitus (constituted by the symbolic system) generates practices that are, irrespective of the above fact, both objectively and subjectively compatible with the context in which they occur. The habitus for Bourdieu, Jain argues, is the underlying principle responsible for the unification of practices in different domains. It is only in terms of the notion of habitus, i.e., through the application of knowledge derived from the history and social structure of the objective world to which it is then applied, that the subjective experience and the ‘feeling of self evidence’ can be understood. Bourdieu thus transcends the subjectivity- objectivity divide arguing that objective relations exist and are actualized through an internalization of the objective conditions in the subjective dispositions which in turn reproduce the former. For Bourdieu, as Jain argues, the very functioning of symbolic systems ensures an acceptance of domination. This distinguishes his theory from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Jain points out that unlike the Durkheimian and structuralist traditions, Bourdieu recognizes the political functions of the symbolic systems. For him the symbolic systems, being structured systems, exert power on the underlying relations of power through the process of symbolic violence, i.e., through instituting a belief in the legitimacy of the relations of domination, owing to their structuring efficacy. Through an analysis of Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic in relation to phenomenology, the method of relational structuralism and various traditions of analysis, she attempts here to bring forth the reasons for Bourdieu’s rejection of the dichotomy between subjectivist and objectivist modes of analysis and the features that make his theory distinct. Through a comparative analysis of Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic, Jain draws attention to the fact that whether in terms of his borrowing or departing from other traditions of analysis,

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one cannot deny the specific aspects that make Bourdieu’s theory distinct from those that may have influenced its development. Bourdieu’s sociology involves a transgression of stringent disciplinary boundaries. Alban Bensa, whose paper follows Jain’s, shares Bourdieu’s engagement with anthropology to the extent that Bensa recognizes the significance of practical logic and strategy in his empirical study of the system of kinship and matrimonial alliances. The crossing of strong disciplinary boundaries has always been one of the major issues in Bourdieu’s sociology. Alban Bensa’s article examines Bourdieu’s relationship with anthropology, considering, as a case study, his research on kinship and gift. Bensa is familiar with this field of studies having done his fieldwork with the Kanak, a Melanesian society in New Caledonia. In the 1970s and 1980s the Kanak were still fighting for their independence from the French State, and this situation of political crisis, where Alban Bensa was more than a participant observer,17 can be related to the colonial situation observed by Bourdieu in Algeria, twenty years earlier in his first study on kinship. Confronted with the Muslim or Arab model of marriage observed in Kabylia, Bourdieu convincingly demonstrated that it is not to be understood as ‘a sort of scandal’ according to the pure logic of matrimonial exchange, as Lévi Strauss has argued, but that it should be referred to in its external economic and political functions. This leads Bourdieu to shift from the language of rule to the language of strategy. Then, he turns back to kinship in his own Béarnais’ society where there is also a form of marriage between cousins that obeys the logic of interest of the households involved in alliances. Therefore, he claimed, the strategies of reproduction of Béarnais’ families (including fecundity, education and schooling) have also to be related to their wider economic, social and political functions. But, asks Bourdieu, why is this kind of marriage considered a logical constraint in Béarnais’ society while it is seen in the Muslim world as a theoretical problem framed in an evolutionist view, being neither an elementary system nor a complex one? This questioning leads Bourdieu to an overall critique of kinship

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studies where attention is drawn to the practical logic at work in the matrimonial exchanges, to the practical situation of speech in the uses of kinship terminology. In brief, it leads him to distinguish firmly between ‘official kinship’ and ‘practical kinship’. Bensa, who studied the systems of kinship and matrimonial alliances of the Kanaks (in collaboration with a linguist, Jean-Claude Rivière),18 is also able to state the practical logic at work when his informants discuss at length the distinctions they make between official and customary names, even contesting the information collected by previous colonial administrators or ethnologists. At this point, we can relate Bourdieu’s work to Veena Das’s article (1976), which also marks a break in this area of research. As in North Africa, ‘honour and shame’ are important moral values in Punjabi society. Starting from the distinction between ‘kinship as biology’ culturally expressed and ‘kinship as socially constructed nomos’, Veena Das argues that in Punjabi culture, social behaviour and symbols are masks which enable men to transcend natural forces in acquiring, maintaining or enhancing their honour. If not, ‘the negation of honour is expressed in shame or “loss of face”’. Drawing upon sociologists from the symbolic interactionism school like Alfred Schutz, Das was looking for a way out of a purely structuralist approach to kinship. Like Bourdieu, she stresses the point that the anthropologist, while looking at kinship terms, should record ‘the actual statements made by informants in real-life situations’ and not in ‘relatively context free’ ones. Bensa writes that as far as the work of Bourdieu’s innovative work on kinship is concerned, it ‘has hardly been discussed by French anthropologists’,19 more so the Arab models of marriage than the Béarnais society. It is almost as if the language of strategy might be used for complex societies such as the French one, and the language of rules assigned to elementary or less differentiated societies. Das’s departure from a formal structuralist approach and her agreement with Bourdieu on the significance of practical logic and a rejection of a context free, rule-based analysis, points to

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the possible applicability of his ideas in the Indian context while keeping in mind the specificity of the latter. Roland Lardinois, in his article in this volume, argues for a recognition of the distinct features of the various discourses on India produced within Europe, rejecting the perspective that views them as a single unified category. Dealing with the field of production of discourses on India in France in the 1920s and 1930s, Lardinois encounters some of the issues raised by Gisèle Sapiro (in this book). So far, studies of Orientalism look at this area as a more or less unified social and intellectual space without taking into account, first, the specificity of each national space (among the European countries) and, second, the internal differentiation within each of these national spaces. Moreover, these studies generally take for granted what are Orientalist studies and overlook the fierce debates over its definition, which is a stake within the field. Considering the universe of Indian scholarship in France in the inter-war period as an example, Lardinois questions the way we can empirically construct this particular social space. One of the major issues is whether we should restrict the area of Indian studies to the academic milieu, that is to the professional savants specialized in India’s antiquities, or we should also include the amateurs whose intellectual production is not strictly comparable with that of the erudites (Lardinois 2004). The position defended here is that as we cannot define a priori the limits of the space, and should consider all the agents who are involved in debates over India at the same time in a specific national space, whether they are savants or amateurs. To sustain his case, Lardinois begins with an analysis of a short novel published in 1938 by René Daumal (1908–1944). Daumal, a young poet writing in the wake of the Surrealists, and who Louis Dumont met briefly in the 1930s, was very attracted to Indian culture and esoterism, and was self-taught in Sanskrit. Lardinois shows that Daumal’s novel can be read as an ‘autobiographical fiction’ depicting the field of Indian studies in France. Then, confronting this fiction with the empirical construction of the field of Indian studies he has elaborated, Lardinois analyzes Daumal’s

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trajectory that leads him to his position in this space, from which we can understand his point of view over the field, as is expressed in the novel. This article may also be read as a contribution to the sociology of literature. Lardinois thus argues for a need to account for the specific context of the production of the field of Indian studies in France in relation to the literary field in the 1930s. Sapiro’s article, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship between the literary and the political field in France during the Second World War. The literary field cannot be analyzed in isolation from its specific contexts, it being related to the political one. The work of Gisèle Sapiro and Francine Muel-Dreyfus take as their starting point the 1940s. Both of them are concerned with what precisely happened in France during the German occupation: on the one hand, the political splits that divided the writers and, on the other, the policy towards — or more exactly, against — women conducted by the Vichy regime. Sapiro’s article refers to her larger work (1999), which is both a structural analysis of the literary field in the 1940s, and the history of the forces leading to the political positions which divided writers, as well as other groups of French élites, during the Second World War. The reactionary policy sustained by the Vichy regime against women is also a by-product of the same social forces which draw from the past. As Muel-Dreyfus shows, these forces go back to the defeat of France over Germany, in 1870, alluded to by Christophe Charle. Sapiro’s analysis of the literary field is grounded on a prosopographic study of 185 writers and on the uses of new archival materials, particularly the papers of literary academies, namely the Académie Française and the Académie Goncourt, and the archives of publishing houses like Gallimard and his leading literary journal, Nouvelle Revue Française. Sapiro’s work deals with the relations between the literary field and the political one, and the issue is to understand the limits of the autonomy of the literary field at a time of acute political crisis. Using a powerful statistical analysis, she shows that the different political positions of the writers during the war (for example collaborators opposed to resistants, supporters of the Vichy

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regime opposed to the Resistance sympathizers) have to be understood in relation to their positions in the literary field which acts as a kind of refracting mirror. In no way can these positions be related mechanically to the social origins of the writers. But there is a homology between the literary stances of these writers (whether they are novelists or poets, belong to the avant-garde or are popular writers, etc.) and their political positions. The comparison between the trajectories of François Mauriac and Henry Bordeaux, two novelist members of the Académie Française drawing from the same social origins, the catholic provincial bourgeoisie, and sharing a similar habitus, illuminate how each of them is pulled forward towards the Left (François Mauriac) or Right (Henry Bordeaux) of the political field according to the inner logic of their position inscribed within the literary field. Most of the popular novelists located at the pole of large-scale production who were strong supporters of the Vichy regime, like Henry Bordeaux, defended actively the policy nurtured by the Vichy government against women, which is the subject dealt with by Francine Muel-Dreyfus.20 The lengthy propaganda issued by the rightist National Revolution undertaken by the Vichy regime in the 1940s is a strong example of how a state policy aiming at redefining the ‘myth of the eternal feminine’ is socially produced, diffused and imposed upon the social world, and upon women (Muel-Dreyfus 2001). The originality and strength of Muel-Dreyfus’s work is to look towards the borders of historical sociology to the point where her argument encounters psychoanalysis theory.21 This approach is developed in all her work, whether in her study of the autobiographies of schoolmasters teaching in France at the turn of the nineteenth century, comparing them with the trajectories of social educators in the aftermath of the 1968 events, or, as in this book, in the social archetypes about women unveiling some deep parts of our collective social unconscious. Francine Muel-Dreyfus’ agenda can be related to Bourdieu’s earlier works. Grounded on an empirical analysis of a specific national context, Muel-Dreyfus’ study can be read as the socio-historical

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genesis of commonplaces on gender aiming at de-biologizing what is currently presented as natural and eternal schemes. Central to her concern is the notion of the culture of female submission and, more generally, the ‘culture of sacrifice’ which is imposed on women to whom only one legitimate place is allowed by the ideologues of the Vichy regime: the function of motherhood within the family they have to serve. In the aftermath of the defeat by the Germans in the 1940s (as in the 1870s) the women are collectively accounted responsible for the defeat. Although women have been slowly gaining access to the school system as well as to the economic market of jobs since the end of the nineteenth century, and particularly since the Great War for which they were heavily mobilized by the State, the Vichy regime pointed out these transformations, twenty years later, as being the causes of the defeat. The regime took all the necessary steps to revert this movement, denying women the benefits of their own history and painting them as socially and culturally backward. Francine Muel-Dreyfus thus examines the cultural and social factors behind the political submission of women in their particular national context. Women, she points out, find it difficult to break free from the legitimate position imposed on them by the political regime, in keeping with social and cultural schemes. Meenakshi Thapan, in her article, while arguing that social and cultural categories afford women the scope for resistance and agency, explores the binding aspect of the schemes of habitus in the manner in which it impacts the perceptions of the self of women. In her earlier work, Thapan (1988a) examines, in the context of pedagogic communication, the notion of habitus in so much as it offers the scope for resistance, struggle and agency of individuals with respect to the dominating and structuring structures. She points out that the habitus is not solely deterministic and essentializing but also allows for individual intervention although its scope may be limited. She explores elsewhere (2001) how the identity of adolescent women in urban India is constructed through an interplay of old and new modes of contact.

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This indicates a mix of fixity and conformity to traditional structures and a simultaneous questioning of the same, implying an act of resistance which, however, remains contained within the postcolonial habitus. In this volume, Thapan takes up this conceptual category of postcolonial habitus to understand how gender identities are constructed, performed, reconstructed and negotiated within the determining influence of the habitus while simultaneously exploring the specific historical and social context in which the habitus is created and reproduced and shaped by the family, schooling practices, etc. She also draws attention to the inventive capacity and the open and generative nature of the habitus, resistance or transformation being inherent in the very nature and working of the habitus. Thus Thapan seeks to understand the habitus in terms of both its ‘constancy’ and ‘stability’ (the agency being contained) in women’s experience as well as its ‘malleable’ nature (each attempt at breaking out of oppression). Thapan notes the way in which women perform their identity in terms of the expressions embodied in their construction as gendered beings. Performativity is integral to women’s selfconstruction, and recognition by class, location and culture is significant in the construction of subjectivity. Their experience of their own subjectivity, whether sexuality, bodily dispositions and appearance, while it is linked to their own perception of how the women want to be perceived by the world, at the same time makes significant the other’s view of the self. Thapan argues that self construction is also critical both in perception and practice as it allows for self expression. For example, by redefining beauty in ways that are different from an authenticconventional image, women exhibit their agency in consciously resisting tradition while the desire for approval by men and others continues to remain important. While women recognize the normalizing and disciplining strategies that impact their lives, they are thus aware of the choices available to them as they challenge, contest and attempt to transform the structures. Thapan also points out that women’s manner of articulation and style of performance of their identity corresponds to the

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class, family and community they belong to. For instance, upper class and educated women are more articulate about their oppression and more aware of their conflicts and dilemmas. It is within the family that a woman experiences embodied shame and dishonour, is constrained and oppressed and it is from within it, that by seeking another life and questioning her present state, by using aggressive and strong body stances, tone and voice, she manages to break away from traditionally defined image, roles, behaviour and needs, i.e., to transgress authority. It is thus from within the structuring structures that she attempts to resolve external conflicts, and she departs, in a sense, from the framework of the habitus and the constancy imposed by it. Thapan thus questions the extent to which the habitus functions as an open and generating structure, allowing for play, performance, and self construction, or whether these acts of resistance are a threat to Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus. Deepak Mehta’s article attempts to understand the modalities of communal violence in Bombay, the procedures that describe the relations of violence between Hindus and Muslims, the effect of violence on the survivors and how they deal with it, the means by which the State controls the riot and the way in which the past informs the present through representations that were formulated in the colonial archives and have persisted and have been implanted in public memory. While addressing contemporary concerns, the riot, he argues, is also dictated by and reveals the enduring animosity between Hindus and Muslims, located in history, in the past social organization. Mehta seeks to explore the manner in which the past, in terms of the discourse of the colonial archives, functions as a habitus (in Bourdieu’s terms) whereby the archive inflects the habitus or ‘assumed reality’ and continues to shape and influence the interior lives and actions of participants in violence. The discourse of the colonial archives, which was structured such that it constituted riot as an administrative practice, as an epidemic to be controlled, i.e., as a pathological object, functions as a habitus in that it informs the present writing of riots by the same structure — ‘cause, outbreak and commission of enquiry’.

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This phasing of a riot, as in colonial records, accords it temporality. Mehta points to the way in which riots are ordered and fixed in official discourse, the term epidemic carrying a material force built into it which demands state intervention and a need to define members of the city. This requires a monitoring of the boundaries of inside and outside in terms of the ‘diseasedviolent pauper immigrant’, thereby resulting in the spatialization of riot. Mehta argues that a certain element of repetition is thus accorded to the multiplicity of violent practices, in official discourse, which renders them regular by stripping them of the specific context and individual subjectivities, focusing on the anonymous, irrational character of violence thereby objectifying the subjective experience. Further, as he argues, the manner in which the riot is formulated in these postcolonial official documents as structured by the archives, in turn shapes the individual’s testimony, in that it mediates his memory of the violence. In the archive the individual subject is an ‘empty position, generalizable and framed within the already written’. The discourse may be strategically manipulated, in Bourdieu’s terms, to present the riot as a ‘repetition of an assumed world’, concealing accounts of participants which may reveal discontinuities. Following Bourdieu, Mehta argues that history functions as a habitus which strategically assumes a temporal stability between the internalization of the norms and their performance in practice, thereby ensuring a reproduction of the history of the riot in contemporary practice. The archives thus function as a habitus, in as much as the official discourse maintains internal coherence and is consistent vis-à-vis history. The testimonies of individuals, Mehta reveals, while being conditioned by the public documents, at the same time remain exterior to the latter. Unlike the official discourse which views the riot in terms of its formal, ceremonial aspects, as a carnival of murder and a public spectacle, the testimonies of individuals treat violence as lived experience rather than systematizing it. Further, Mehta argues that while the Srikrishna Commission views society as an object that needs to be governed, the riot brings

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society into crises since it remains outside the remit of the power of law. He adds that for Justice Srikrishna an illegitimate power issues from the riot through the actions of participants which challenge public authority and invite ‘counter-measures’ from the police and civil groups, thereby blurring the divide between State and civil society. Mehta points out that the Srikrishna Commission Report dignifies legitimacy in terms of domesticating violence, the cases reaching closure with a successful rehabilitation. He argues that the State acts as an agency for the perpetuation of violence as well as redefines violence through such bureaucratic procedures. On the other hand, the individual survivor exhibits agency in seeking to ‘re-dignify’ himself by referring to the dead as martyrs and through his everyday attempts to survive, and also through a refusal to revisit the experience in memory. For the individual, violence is evoked as a corporeal memory, visible in its effects which essentially remain outside the public documents and history, and are located in the social space of home and work. Mehta points out that as long as the effects of violence persist, any attempt by the individual to leave the past behind only serves to ‘make this violence contemporaneous’. It is in this sense, Mehta argues, that the habitus (discourse of the archives) falls short of explaining how violence is also a part of a structure of affects that continue to persist in everyday life. To conclude, the articles in this volume do not intend to cover all the sociological issues dealt with by Pierre Bourdieu, nor represent all Indian scholarship engaged with Bourdieu’s work. It would be fruitful to explore other case studies including, for example, the media, the practice and the reception of arts (visual art, cinema, music) or the sociology of the literary fields resorting either to the English medium or to Indian languages, not to mention the socio-linguistic situation in India, whose complexity and variety should attract the interest of sociologists and linguists alike. Certainly, the interdisciplinary approach, strongly advocated by Pierre Bourdieu, should appeal to a wider reception of his work outside the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology, particularly to historians and economists. In India,

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as in other countries, each discipline of social sciences is all too often entrenched within its methodological principles, which makes uneasy the crossing of department boundaries and the intellectual cooperation between disciplines. One of the intellectual stakes of Bourdieu’s academic life had been to defend the practice of a unified social science as the only way to overcome this structural division working within the field of social sciences. This book would also like to be viewed as a contribution, and an appeal, to go beyond the traditional limits imposed on the practice of the social sciences. Notes 1. In an earlier paper Bourdieu (1993), had already indicated the manner in which his work was being misunderstood or misinterpreted in the international circulation of ideas and had proposed the ‘sociogenetic point of view’ the most appropriate in developing an adequate understanding of his work. 2. See Calhoun (1993), Kauppi (2000), Hoy (1999), Lovell (2000; 2003), Butler (1990; 1997), Lawler (2004), Thapan (1988a) for discussion around and use of ‘habitus’. 3. The struggle against Durkheimian sociology which started at the end of the nineteenth century received fresh impetus after the Second World War when Jean-Paul Sartre joined the fight within the intellectual field claiming with others scholars and writers that ‘social facts are not things’ (Heilbron 1985; Sapiro 2004; Monnerot 1946). Of course, in the 1950s, some young sociologists working at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique were looking for new models, which were inspired by the empirical and statistical methods imported from the USA. But this applied sociology did not really succeed in re-establishing the previous legitimacy of the discipline (Heilbron 1991). 4. In a recent work, feminists have recently sought to not only examine Bourdieu’s understanding of the social but also to address it in a manner that charts new territories for feminists and also for social and cultural theory fields in general (see Adkins and Skeggs 2004). 5. The idea of different ‘schools’ of sociology within Indian sociology is however a disputed notion although there have been discussions about the ‘Lucknow school’ or regional sociologies in India (see Sundar, Deshpande, and Uberoi 2000).

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6. The Sociological Bulletin was started by G.S. Ghurye, who also founded the Indian Sociological Society in 1952. The Economic and Political Weekly started by Sachin Chaudhuri, an economist, is not an academic journal as such but publishes a range of articles by economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and others. See Thapan (1988b) for an analysis of Indian sociology contained in the pages of CIS. 7. For a review and summary of the substantive studies of Indian society, see Béteille (2002a: 40 ff). 8. John (2001), however, is rather critical of the limited nature of the encounter between sociology and women’s studies. See also Rege (2003). 9. More recently, however, an economist from the Department of Economics presented a paper on ‘Reconciling the Qualitative with the Quantitative: An Economist’s Perspectives’ in a workshop on ‘Qualitative Research Methods in the Social Sciences’ in the Department of Sociology in March 2005. In December 2005, a workshop was organized at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi with the London School of Economics, at which three economists from the Delhi School of Economics presented papers on different themes. 10. This has resulted in numerous events such as special sessions of the annual All India Sociological Conference, several publications, including the forum ‘For a Sociology of India’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology and at least two symposia in recent years, on ‘Recasting Sociology’ at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in March 1997, and on ‘Knowledge, Institutions, Practices: The Formation of Indian Anthropology and Sociology’ at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, in April 2000. 11. See for example Béteille (1969, 1987), Madan (1966, 1971), Reichle (1985), Tambiah (1987), Thapan (1988b). 12. The writings of some Indian sociologists and research papers in the two premier journals of sociology in India, Contributions to Indian Sociology and Sociological Bulletin have been examined. 13. Cf. Calhoun (1993) who recognizes the universality of habitus but questions the ‘transhistoricity’ of capital. 14. While Béteille suggests a lacuna in the possibilities of measuring social and cultural capital, one method that is extensively used by Bourdieu is Correspondence Analysis, as in Distinction (1979) and The State Nobility (1996). 15. In an earlier paper, Kalpagam (2000a) argues that the use of classificatory models, objectification and enumeration, i.e., statistical knowledge, serves to transform ‘otherness’ to difference so as to make it ‘commensurable and comparable’ implying a universalization by removing particularities.

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The ‘ethnographic sites’ themselves have undergone change such that they can no longer be conceived in terms of ‘cultural wholes’. 16. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and habitus, the effect of which is to ensure an adherence of the mental structures of the agents to the established order or the social structures, Kalpagam (2000b), attempts to explore why a majority of women do not identify themselves as feminists since they internalize patriarchy and their resultant subordinate position. She explains how the agreement between a gendered habitus (gender habitus by extension of the concept of class habitus while being encompassed by the latter) and the sexual asymmetries in the social world implies that women may defend or justify forms of aggression which victimize them, since the only way in which they can neutralize the negative effects of the dominant classification is by submitting to them so as to make use of them (ibid.). 17. See Bensa and Bourdieu (1985). 18. See Bensa and Rivière (1982). 19. An example, among many, is his lengthy book on marriage and kinship, supposed to be the most comprehensive synthesis ‘embracing all known societies in the world’ where Maurice Godelier mentions Bourdieu only once, in passing; see Godelier (2004). 20. See also Muel-Dreyfus (2001). 21. See Muel-Dreyfus (2003).

References Adkins, Lisa and Beverley Skeggs. 2004. Feminism after Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review. Armangaud, F. and G. Jasser. (1993) 1995. ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Grand Temoin?’, Nouvelles Questions Feministes. 14 (3): 83–88. Abridged trans. by Christine Delphy, ‘Liberty, Equality . . . but most of all Fraternity’, Trouble and Strife 31 (Summer): 43–49. Bensa, Alban and Pierre Bourdieu. 1985. ‘Quand les Canaques prennent la parole’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 56 (March): 69–83. ——— and J.-C. Rivière. 1982. Les chemins de l’ alliance. L’ organisation sociale et ses représentations en Nouvelle-Calédonie. Paris: Selaf. Béteille, André. 1965. Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Béteille, André. 1969. ‘The Politics of “Non-Antagonistic” Strata’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 3: 17–31. ———. 1972. ‘The Problem’, Seminar 157 (12 September): 10–14. ———. 1987. ‘Reply to Dumont’, Current Anthropology, 28 (5): 672– 77. ———. 2002a. Sociology: Essays on Approach and Method. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002b. Equality and Universality: Essays in Social and Political Theory, pp. 136–63. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. ‘Newness in Sociological Enquiry’. In Maitrayee Chaudhuri (ed.), The Practice of Sociology in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 403–19. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1966) 1990. L’ amour de l’ art, les musées d’ art et leur public. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by C. Beattie and N. Merriman, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1969. ‘Intellectual Field and Creative Project.’ Social Science Information, 8 (2): 89–119. ———. (1972) 1977. Esquisse d’ une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ ethnologie kabyle, Geneva: Librarie Droz. Trans. R. Nice, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1979) 1984/1986. La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. R. Nice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press; pbk London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1980. ‘Le Nord et le Midi. Contribution à une analyse de l’ effet Montesquieu’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 35: 21–25. ———. 1982. ‘Les rites d’ institution’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 43: 58–63. Trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson, ‘Rites of Institution’. In Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and Introduction by J.B. Thompson. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 117–26. ———. (1984/2001) 1985/1991. ‘Espace social et genèse des “classes” ’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 52–53: 3–12/ In idem (ed.), Langage et pouvoir symbolique, Paris: Seuil, pp. 293323. Trans. by R. Nice, ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.’ Theory and Society, 14: 723–44; also in Social Science Information, 24 (2): 195–220. Rpt in Language and Symbolic

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Power, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson, ed. and Introduction by J.B. Thomson. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 229-51. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1984) 1988. Homo academicus, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by P. Collier, Homo academicus, Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (1980) 1990. Le sens pratique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by R. Nice, The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (1988, new edn) 1991. L’ ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by P. Collier, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1993. ‘Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works’. In Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moshe Postone (eds), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 263–75. ———. 1987 (1990). Choses dites. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. L. Wacquant, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (1989) 1996. La noblesse d’ État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by L.C. Clough, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. ‘Passport to Duke’ in N. Brown and I. Szeman (eds), Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. (1998) 2001. La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by R. Nice, Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2003. ‘Participant Objectivation’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 9 (2): 281–94. Bourdieu, Pierre and J.-C. Passeron. (1970) 1977. La reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d’ enseignment. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by R. Nice, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications. Bourdieu, Pierre et al. (1993) 1999. La misère du monde. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by P. Parkhurst Ferguson, S. Emanuel, J. Johnson, and S.T. Waryn, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, J.-C. Chamboredon, and J.-C. Passeron. (1968) 1991. Le métier de sociologue. Paris: Mouton-Bordas. Trans. by

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R. Nice, The Craft of Sociology, (ed.) B. Krais. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bourdieu, Pierre and A. Sayad. (1964) 1996. Le déracinement. La crise de l’ agriculture traditionelle en Algérie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic J. Wacquant. 1992. Réponses. Pour une anthro- pologie reflexive. Trans. by L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Calhoun, C. 1993. ‘Habitus, Field and Capital: The Question of Historical Specificity’. In C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma and M. Postone (eds), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press. Charle, Christophe. 1987. Les élites de la République 1880–1900 (The Elites of the Republic 1880–1900). Paris: Fayard. ———. 1990. Naissance des ‘intellectuels’ 1880–1990 (The Emergence of the ‘Intellectuals’, 1880–1990). Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Das, Veena. 1976. ‘Masks and Faces: An Essay on Punjabi Kinship’, Contributions to India Sociology (n.s.), 10 (1): 1–30. Daumal, René. (1938) 2003. La Grand Beuverie. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. A Night of Serious Drinking by David Cowhard and E.A. Lovatt, with an Introduction by Kathleen F. Rosenblatt. New York: Tusk Ivories. Delsaut, Yvette and Marie-Christine Rivière. 2002. Bibliographie des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu, suivi d’ un entretien entre Pierre Bourdieu et Yvette Delsaut sur l’ esprit de la recherche. Paris: Le Temps des Cerises. Desai, A.R. 1959. Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Popular Book Depot. Deshpande, Satish. 2001. ‘Disciplinary Predicaments: Sociology and Anthropology in Postcolonial India’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2 (2): 247–60. ———. 2003. Contemporary India: A Sociological View. New Delhi: Penguin. Desrosières, A. 2003. ‘Une recontre improbable et ses deux héritages’. In Pierre Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave (eds), Travailler avec Bourdieu. Paris: Flammarion, pp. 209–18. Dhanagare, D.N. 1980. ‘Search for Identity’, Seminar 254: 23–26.

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Dube, Leela. 1969. ‘Inheritance of Property in a Matrilineal Muslim Society’. Delhi: All India Sociological Conference. Mimeograph. ———. 1974. Sociology of Kinship: An Analytical Survey of Literature. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. ———. (1986), 1989a. ‘Introduction’. In Leela Dube, E. Leacock, and S. Ardener (eds), Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1994, 1998. ‘Conflict and Compromise: Devolution and Disposal of Property in a Matrilineal Muslim Society’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29 (21): 1273–84; also in A.M. Shah, B.S. Baviskar, and E.A. Ramaswamy (eds), Social Structure and Change, Vol. 5 (Essays in Honour of M.N. Srinivas). New Delhi: Sage Publications. ———. 1997. Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia. Tokyo: United University Press and New Delhi: Vistaar Publications. Encrevé, Pierre and Rose-Marie Lagrave. 2003. Travailler avec Bourdieu. Paris: Flammarion. Godelier, Maurice. 2004. Métamorphoses de la parenté. Paris: Fayard. Grignon, Claude. 1976. ‘An Experimental French Journal: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales’, International Social Sciences Journal, 28(1): 202–7. Gupta, Dipankar. 1980. ‘The Sociological Imagination’, Seminar 254: 27–32. Hoy, David Couzens. 1999. ‘Critical Resistance: Foucault and Bourdieu’. In Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (eds), Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture. New York: Routledge. Heilbron, J. 1985. ‘Les métamorphoses du durkheimisme, 1920–1940’. In Revue Française de sociologie, 26: 203–37. ———. 1991. ‘Pionniers par défaut? Les débuts de la recherche au Centre d’ études sociologiques (1946–1960)’. In Revue française de sociologie, 32: 365–79. Jeffries, S. 2002. ‘Obituary: Pierre Bourdieu’. Guardian Unlimited, 28 January (books.guardian.co.uk) John, Mary E. 2001. ‘The Encounter of Sociology and Women’s Studies: Questions from the Borders.’ Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), 35 (2): 237–58.

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Johnson, D. 2002. ‘Obituary: Pierre Bourdieu’, Guardian Unlimited, 28 January (books.guardian.co.uk) Kalpagam, U. 2000a. ‘The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge’, History of the Human Sciences, 13(2): 37–55. Kalpagam, U. 2000b. ‘Life Experiences, Resistance and Feminist Consciousness’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 7 (2): 167–84. Karve, I. 1953, 1965. Kinship Organization in India. Poona: Deccan College Research Institute and Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Kauppe, Niilo. 2000. The Politics of Embodiment: Habits, Power and Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory. Frankfurt (M): Peter Lang Publishers Inc. Lane, Jeremy F. 2000. Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press. Lardinois, Roland. 2004. ‘Orientalistes et orientalisme en France dans l’ entre-deux-guerres’. In Johan Heilbron, Rémi Lenoir, and Gisèle Sapiro (eds), with the collaboration of Pascale Pargamin, Pour une histoire des sciences sociales. Hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, Paris: Fayard, pp. 349–65. Lawler, Steph. 2004. ‘Rules of Engagement: Habitus, Power and Resistance’. In Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (eds), Feminism after Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing & The Sociological Review. Lebaron, F. 2003. ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Economic Models Against Economism’. In Theory and Society, 32 (5–6): 551–65. Lovell, Terry. 2000. ‘Thinking Feminism With and Against Bourdieu’, Feminist Theory, 1 (1): 11–32. ———. 2003. ‘Resisting with Authority: Historical Specificity, Agency and the Performative Self.’ Theory, Culture and Society. 20 (1): 1–18. ———. 2004. ‘Bourdieu, Class and Gender: “The Return of the Living Dead?” ’. In Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (eds), Feminism after Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing & The Sociological Review. Madan, T.N. 1965. Family and Kinship in India: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1966. ‘For a Sociology of India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 9: 9–16. ———. 1971. ‘Introduction’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, (n.s.) 5: 1–13.

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The Crisis of ‘Imperial Societies’


Christophe Charle Il ne s’agit pas de célébrer les héros disparus, ce qui, comme tout rite de deuil, revient à les faire disparaître une seconde fois, en acceptant le fait de leur disparition. Il s’agit de reprendre le combat où ils l’ ont laissé, sans oublier la violence qui les a vaincus, et qu’il faut essayer de comprendre. Bourdieu (1987)

I

n order to explain the link between the theme of my article and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I would like to iterate some aspects of his intellectual project which converge with mine, both with regards to themes and concepts, and also method of analysis.1 When Bourdieu decided to turn his intellectual activity from philosophy to sociology, it was due to his Algerian fieldwork experience. In his books Algérie 60 (1977) and Sociologie de l’ Algérie (1958), he described the transformations of the colonial system in a revolutionary era and the effects of the war (1954–62) on the traditional Algerian way of life. That is precisely what I call here an ‘imperial society’ founded on a twin domination: political (and economic), but symbolic and cultural too. Later in his academic life, Pierre Bourdieu came back to these themes when he tried to found an European intellectual network to create a critical counter-point to neo-liberal symbolic and economic domination. He defined this new domination as an ‘impérialisme de l’ universel’, i.e., the international domination by the USA which is presented as a rational and universal

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one and which therefore cannot be contested without risk of being charged with being ‘irrational’ or ‘backward’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999: 41–58). This position was similar to what French governments had claimed at the turn of the nineteenth century when they justified their conquests as bringing ‘liberty’ and ‘enlightenment’ to other peoples, which some liberal élites in Italy, Spain or Germany had accepted as the truth. During the course of the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom too had tried to develop its imperial domination thanks to the spread of free trade, presented as the only rational way of entering into and maintaining relations between countries. However, in fact it was the best way for a country with imperial designs to develop its own national interests. A final, more personal, point. I finished my book (Charle 2001) which is summed up in my contribution in the autumn of 2000. Pierre Bourdieu very kindly found the time to read the manuscript. Perhaps he found it interesting because both the theme and the method have strong links with his own approach. In a way, ‘imperial societies’, as I conceived them, mobilize the relational way of thinking about social links. This is central to Bourdieu’s work, as is the notion of ‘habitus’, transposed at a national level, and also the concept of symbolic violence. These concepts make it possible to understand why so many people accepted with relative passivity, and sometimes even with enthusiasm, the terrible wars of the twentieth century. Introduction My aim in this article is to explain my project, including part of the hypothesis and the concepts that underlie my book (Charle 2001: 11). What I want to understand is a classic historiographical question, one that has already been addressed by a number of important and diverse scholars including Lenin (1947), Hobsbawm (1987; 1994), Mayer (1981) and the like. The question concerns not just the ‘origins of the First World War’ or the ‘Age of Catastrophes’, nor simply ‘The Thirty Years War’ of the twentieth century’ (to use an expression coined by Général de Gaulle

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and quoted by Arno Mayer), or even the ‘Age of Totalitarianism’. It is a far more naïve and simple question, not blurred by retrospective problematics linked to ideological preferences. The question was originally raised by Romain Rolland, the first intellectual who refused to accept the collective hysteria at the beginning of the crisis that beset ‘imperial’ societies. Rolland says: Ainsi, les trois plus grands peuples d’ Occident, les gardiens de la civilisation, s’acharnent à leur ruine et appellent à la rescousse, les Cosaques, les Turcs, les Japonais, les Cinghalais, les Soudanais, les Sénégalais, les Marocains, les Égyptiens, les Sikhs et les Cipayes, les barbares du pôle et ceux de l’ équateur, les âmes et les peaux de toutes les couleurs (Rolland 1915: 12). And thus the three greatest nations of the West the guardians of civilisation, rush headlong to their ruin, calling in to their aid Cossacks, Turks, Japanese, Cingalese, Soudanese, Senegalese, Moroccans, Egyptians, Sikhs and Sepoys — barbarians from the poles and those from the equator, souls and bodies of all colours (trans. Ogden 1916: 41).

In spite of his obsolete rhetoric, the cosmopolitan intellectual who refused to be mobilized in what he considered to be a European civil war reminds us that the crux of the enigma of the crisis that was initiated in August 1914 and lasted till 1945, (perhaps even later) may be found in the difficulties evinced by France, the UK and Germany in the 1950s-60s in dealing with their recent past. This enigma is not the war, or the apparent futility of its origin, or even the classic question of who bears primary responsibility for it. The enigma is this: why did these ‘three keepers of civilization’, as Rolland calls them, rush into total war and return to the barbarian practices that the nineteenth century, in its secular effort, wanted to banish? Why could this first confrontation not be ended properly, and why did it lead to a second and more total one? And why was this second round linked to regressive regimes such as those of the Nazis and of Vichy? Why did it lead to a decline of the first industrial power — the UK? It is all these questions that I apprehend in the expression ‘the crisis of imperial societies’.

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I shall address four major points here. The first is to explain what I mean by ‘imperial societies’. The second is to determine the origins of imperial societies. In the third section, I ask: Why are these societies what we might call ‘enemy-sisters’? And finally, I specify, which crisis? Imperial Societies All of the authors I mentioned at the beginning while introducing my problem also employ concepts like ‘empire’ or ‘imperialism’. They affirm, in spite of their divergences (be they Marxists, Leninists or Liberals), that all European countries implied in the conflict and more generally in the crisis of the Age of Extremes shared the same will for power and domination that pushed the international crisis of the summer of 1914 to those very extremes. My first hypothesis, which is expressed by the new meaning I give to the expression ‘imperial society’, is that the usual point of view is too global and misses the specificity of some of the participants in the confrontation. Terms as equivocal as ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, for example, hide the deep differences between the types of societies and types of imperialisms involved in the struggle in 1914. More importantly, these common words simplify the social and cultural basis of a war without precedent. Other confrontations of empires did not lead to these extremes. The new specificity of three of these empires — France, the UK and Germany — is that they happened to be, concurrently (and for the first time in their history) mature and fully established nations. It is because these three nation–empires chose to enter into a conflict, which, at the beginning, concerned only two old, classic empires, Russia and Austria, that the conflict led to extremes. Only these imperial societies, these nation-empires, could really impose a total and long-lasting mobilization of all their inner material, social and cultural forces on their own populations. And because they could succeed in this huge effort (a surprise to even their own governments), the war became a total war, and their allies, the old empires, collapsed in this new type of war.

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I call these three nations — France, the UK and Germany — ‘imperial societies’. They truly qualify for this concept, to which I will return shortly. With somewhat equivalent demographic, economic, and financial capacities, they were among the four or five most powerful nations of the world in the first half of the century. (This was not true earlier or later.) Furthermore, they also dominated the diplomatic and cultural scenes. Of greater importance than this more-or-less equivalent potential (a key factor in the balance and competition between them, but also an element contributing to the impossibility of a true, decisive, and quick victory), these societies were imperial because they exercised a twin domination: first, a territorial one, like classic empires, over colonies and/or over portions of their national territory occupied by minorities of another national origin. And second, a cultural domination, because their national culture had universalist ambitions and their idiom was used widely beyond their national limits — and this is not true of other empires. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain occupied a somewhat similar position in the world, but lost it definitively when it was defeated by the United States in 1898 and deprived of its last colonies. At the same time, Latin America was pulled into France’s cultural orbit from the second half of the nineteenth century, right up until the Second World War (Rolland 2000). Recently unified, Italy also aspired to recover the cultural hegemony it had enjoyed during the Renaissance and cultivated the myth of a new imperial domination along the lines of the Roman Empire. (Fulfilling these two ambitions would become the programme of the Fascists.) Yet, at the turn of the century, this unfinished nation was unable to really imitate the three imperial societies, as we can see by Italy’s failure to colonize East Africa, and by the difficulties it experienced in choosing a camp in 1914 and mobilizing its population thereafter. The third characteristic unique to imperial societies (compared to other empires or weaker and divided nations, such as Spain or Italy), is that the large majority of the metropolitan population shared a national ideal based on a common culture

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and language transmitted, for the first time, by a universal school system. This is not true of the other three European empires: Austria, Turkey, and Russia. They were composed of various populations, speaking different languages and with very low or uneven literacy levels and diverging national aspirations. This explains, in part, why these empires could not resist being pulled into the centrifugal force inherent in the shock of the world wars. With a low level of literacy (and cultural consciousness) in the south, Italy was also strongly destabilized by this traumatic experience. Even if acute internal schisms appeared after 1916, owing to the sacrifices asked of their populations (and particularly their working classes or their younger generations subjected to overwork or heavy casualties), the three imperial societies resisted and were able to use the war and its memory as a new weapon in the ‘nationalization of the masses’, to invoke George Mosse’s famous phrase (1975). The origins of the strong rivalry among the imperial societies points to their fourth specificity. They justified their colonial enterprises or their will for international domination by an obligation to civilize ‘primitive’ peoples or to export their values, represented as superior, to other cultures. This cultural imperialism (masked in early modern times by religious conversion) is a new phenomenon. Previous imperialisms were primarily political and/or economic regimes of domination but preserved the primary cultural features of their dominated or exploited peoples. The cultural and economic influence of these three imperial societies also appears in their informal empire, which includes their language, their way of life, and the artistic, scientific, and technical inventions that influenced large parts of Europe and of the civilized world. Examples of this influence include British sports, French fashion, luxury products and literature, or German music, science, and technology. In each case this multiple domination resulted in a national superiority complex, more acute than the more general European superiority complex apparent at the beginning of the twentieth century. This feeling of superiority was not limited to the governments, the ruling classes or the privileged strata who were the principal

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beneficiaries of this multidimensional domination. It also influenced — more generally — the whole society, since the complex appeared in common representations (racism, xenophobia, and stereotypes of neighbouring or rival countries). Moreover, the complex provided social opportunities for middle classes that their peers in non-imperial societies lacked. For example, there was the possibility of emigration to colonies or countries influenced by their culture, which gave them a chance for social mobility or facilitated adaptation to a foreign environment, providing them with the distinctive resource of having mastered a dominant language spoken by world and European élites, as well as with the cultural and political prestige of being a member of a chosen nation. (As we learn from contemporary school texts or popular literature, the UK, France, and Germany shared this belief in several ways.) Obviously, there are also significant historical differences between these three imperial societies. The UK and France had built their empires before 1900. After this date, they were challenged by competition from recently-formed nations like Germany and Italy, as well as from non-European countries like the USA and Japan. Germany, the ‘delayed nation’, occupies an intermediate position between the older imperial societies and eastern empires. Over a period of thirty years, imperial Germany had succeeded in accumulating the economic, cultural, and political resources necessary to the constitution of a similar empire, one more or less equivalent to those of older nations. Furthermore, Germany laid the foundations for social institutions that aimed to integrate the popular classes into dominant bourgeois society, and in so doing, became a model for other industrial nations. In spite of its failures (such as the lack of political reforms and a real parliament) and mistakes (like the arrogance of its martial caste), the German governing class followed this route to supremacy stubbornly before and after the First World War. The ruling class, though, oscillated between two imperial options: an overseas empire before 1914, created by colonial conquests in Africa and in the Pacific, penetration into the Ottoman Empire and the protection of German-speaking emigrants in the

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USA and Brazil; or a European one, made possible by the extension of the German zone of influence in central and eastern Europe and based on German language, the cultural and scientific prestige of German universities, the political domination of western Poland, and industrial exports in backward countries. Let us now turn to the origins and historical dynamics of imperial societies. Origins of Imperial Societies History explains the specific dynamics inherent in the three imperial societies that led to their confrontation. The three old Empires that collapsed during the Era of Catastrophes were the products of territorial accumulation by a dynasty over a long period — the Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg — had emerged gradually from their origins in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The three imperial societies resulted from different constitutive processes. The common matrix (with variations) of the UK and France was that of a small nation-state becoming a greater nation by absorbing peripheral regions, claiming its place in the sun with the traditional empires of the early modern period. They forged their mutual identity in their bilateral conflict for European and worldwide hegemony during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Brewer 1989; Colley 1992). German imperial society, on the contrary, originated in the shrinking and collapse of a former empire (the Holy German Empire destroyed by French national imperialism under Napoleon), then progressively mutated into a new national monarchy. This new monarchy was influenced — positively or negatively — by both the French monarchy (unification through wars and annexations, revolutionary attempts) and the British one, preserving some polycentrism and regional autonomies for recently unified territories, as well as some traditional institutions. But it continued to aspire to imperial grandeur (that of its past and that of its western challengers), as the pan-German movement or the desire to maintain an ethnic link with German expatriates demonstrates.

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These converging processes of emergence explain both why the three states and their national communities were articulated in a similar way, and why this similarity led to competition and antagonism. Unlike in traditional empires, where identity stemmed from feudal links with the monarch or dominant power or religion and thus allowed for the preservation of some heterogeneity or inner diversity among the composing elements, national identity in each of these three nations was shaped through conflicts with the neighbour nation. Struggles between these nations lasted from the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century (cf. Fashoda in 1898) between France and England, and from the end of the eighteenth through the twentieth century between France and Germany. The epic length of these conflicts forced these nations to foster greater internal unification in order to accomplish three objectives: to balance political forces competing for state power; to extract the growing financial resources necessary for warfare; and to diminish any potential centrifugal forces aligned with enemies or advocating civil war. Unlike empires that exploited larger and larger territories and various colonized peoples, the two older nations were obliged to ask their own native populations for relatively greater sacrifices (human or financial) resulting in, for example, the mutual exhaustion of France and England after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. This recurrent pattern of war obliged the different regimes to permanently mobilize resources and populations to this end. Defence was designated a vital priority. It was no longer the specific province of specialized minorities, but everybody’s business, and armies became a microcosm of society. These paroxysmal phases of conflict left sites of memory and commemoration (such as heroes, national memorials, generations marked by a conflict, and transmitting the memory of war). They also resulted in reflexes of national union around an event, models of collective mobilization, stereotypes of the enemy (which helped to foster internal unification) as well as institutional and cultural inventions that developed the capacity for national mobilization in similar circumstances like drafts, paramilitary forces,

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a national history disseminated by the school system, a national religion, and political reforms after national crises (Nora 1984– 92; Samuel 1989; François and Schulze 2001–2). These national crises often entailed mobilizing against internecine division by extending new rights in order to gain the loyalties of peripheral regions (as in the case of Scotland) or of less privileged peoples. For example, after 1870, France imitated Prussian schools and military politics, Germany inaugurated both a new social policy and a moral and religious intervention of the state in schools, and England instituted the progressive extension of the franchise to working classes, social measures after the relative failure of the Boer War, and the cult of empire and monarchy. Enemy Sisters In 1914, observers identified these three national and imperial societies with the other empires because of the large territories they had conquered in Africa or Asia. But Lenin’s and Hobson’s theses notwithstanding, this new imperialism had varying and often divergent origins that could not be reduced to economic interests. First, these overseas conquests were the continuation of the traditional mutual rivalries (France/UK in Egypt, France/Germany in Morocco, Germany/UK with the fleet policy of William II) and not a new version of traditional empires. This point is underscored by the debates held in each nation over the ends of colonialism. Polemicists hostile to colonialism accused pro-imperialists of weakening the nation, wasting military resources that could be more useful against its European rival, or overlooking internal problems for the sake of foolish and costly adventures. Pro-imperialists had to respond on the same grounds; for them, imperialism was a national enterprise, protecting markets (and thereby the national economy and employment in national industries), offering opportunities for expatriation of ambitious individuals, creating wealth profiting the whole community, and developing the influence of national culture (called civilizations) abroad. Discourses of national greatness were thus transmuted into an imperial discourse. In

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France, colonies would supply the demographic pool lacking in the métropole for a national conscription against a prolific Germany. In the UK, national industry, at the end of nineteenth century, would obtain protected markets without requiring a completely protectionist policy. In Germany, the construction of the fleet and the colonial policy were new attempts to rejuvenate the national unity forged during the wars of unification, since German workers, German peasants and German élites could, according to the official propaganda, find benefits in this Weltpolitik: jobs, economic prosperity, new careers (Korinman 1999; Girault 1988: 111–27, especially 120–21). In addition to these debates over imperialism, there was a more discreet one about international pre-eminence on cultural grounds, a dispute that did not exist in classic empires. At the end of the nineteenth century, this cultural conflict appeared in the scientific arena. Struggles included the battle to obtain archeological sites in Greece and the Near East, the linguistic war at scientific conferences over which of the three languages would be the most used by ‘small’ nations (Gran-Aymerich 1988: ch. 6), and the race for scientific legitimacy that transformed the first few Nobel prizes into chauvinistic contests. Art was also enlisted in this cultural war, evident in the campaigns to protect national artistic masterpieces and in the capital cities’ museum policies (Rasmussen 1996; Crawford 1988). In literature, both classic and contemporary writers were engaged in the national competition for international preeminence (Charle 1988: 177–99; Casanova 1999). It was also a period when universities in each country strove to attract foreign students: they wished to advertise their international reputations and their ability to disseminate their national culture in other countries. France was the first to have a systematic policy with the École d’ Athènes’ foundation in 1846, a weapon against British and German influence in the new kingdom of Greece. Britain and Germany followed its example after 1870 (Gaehtgens 1992; Réunion des Musées Nationaux 1993; Monnier 1996; Singaravélou 1999; Valenti 1999). These examples show that the notion of imperial society is a tool that allows us to explain the global problem at stake in

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the crisis that begins in 1914. It gives a specific world view to the separate groups comprising each nation, distinct from both non-imperial societies and classical empires, and differing from each other in each of the three national situations. It may be comparable to an invisible frontier in the American meaning of the term: a possible solution to internal contradictions or problems, problems that were unsolvable in other nations because they lacked this twin imperial domination. For France, imperial society offered the hope of compensating demographic decline and the relative weakness of industrial growth, and thus of continuing to be a great power taken into consideration by larger or stronger countries. For Great Britain, imperial society maintained the illusion of relative independence from Europe and the possibility for social mobility outside the motherland without changing social rules or class structures. Obviously, this benefited the dominant classes more, but the middle classes, workers, and peasants did derive some indirect gains. Imperial Germany, on the other hand, was an incomplete imperial society, and the historical gap explains why Germany played a central role at the beginning of the 1914 crisis. It also explains why the Weimar Republic, frustrated by its unequal status, ended in a new regime whose programme was clearly to succeed in what the Kaiser’s regime had failed to achieve earlier. Instead of accepting the status of an ordinary nation, a large fraction of Germans, destabilized by the economic crisis, preferred to believe those who promised to build a new empire again, even if it meant eliminating all the elements accused of bearing responsibility for the previous disaster (Jews, Marxists, etc.). At this point, it is necessary to dispel a possible misunderstanding concerning the use of this concept. One common fault of macro-historical comparisons is to create large classifications that overlook specificities that need to be explained. Thus, in this case, French or even foreign historians of France might be surprised that I include France in this group of societies. After all, France was marked by the political struggles of the nineteenth century and by a triple aspiration of secularization, democracy, and even the elimination of aristocracy, while Britain and

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Germany remained, on the eve of the First World War, stratified, aristocratic, societies with strong links between Church and State. Is this specificity not more important to an understanding of the social dynamics of France than the common features I mentioned earlier? I am certainly aware of this difference, having written elsewhere (Charle 1994) about some of the specificities of French society (élites, intellectuals, the university, and so on). Nevertheless, this comparative endeavour has the great virtue of forcing us to displace our usual Francocentric viewpoint and of highlighting what the historical vulgate neglects or understates. For example: • The French Republic, where political rights for women were concerned, was conservative when compared to the British monarchy where certain categories of women had achieved some type of franchise; • French democracy was corrupted by lobbies as influential as some of the minorities that dominated the German empire; • Secularization did not prevent the erection of strong social, regional, and sexist barriers, incompatible in principle with this notion; and • Human rights were completely overlooked in the colonies and very restricted for immigrants, who suffered owing to a backward social policy. Another response to the specificities of French society and political situation is to note that in an European context dominated by monarchies and empires, where France’s principal rivals were globally more powerful, the Third Republic élites were forced to imitate some of the policies and strategies of their aristocratic neighbours. Among imperial societies, France was the product of a defeat that dissolved the universalist pride inherited from the French Revolution (a pride briefly restored by the imperial and national diplomacy of Napoleon III) and that brought deep disillusion as new nations emerged. Obsessed by this defeat, republican governments employed a two-pronged strategy inspired by the rival

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powers: they attempted to integrate heterogeneous populations using the school system and conscription (similar to efforts in Prussia and imperial Germany), and they founded a financial and overseas empire competitive with the UK. This strategy was combined with the traditional monarchic international policy of the Ancien Régime, based on a new alliance aimed at isolating the dominant European power, Germany. Even the anti-clerical politics leading to the separation of Church and State was a paradoxical contribution to national unity since it weakened the sway of the Catholic Church, linked to Ultramontane influences. This analysis shows that the notion of imperial society must not be taken as an ‘essence’ or a stable framework. It is instead a complex of different and moving forces, changing in each context, but always in interaction with the forces present in other imperial societies. It may be compared to a field in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. This double dimension (internal and external, material and cultural) is specific and gives it a greater analytical interest than the more one-dimensional (and restrictive) concepts like aristocratic society, industrial society, imperialist society, balance of power, etc., concepts often used to analyze the European context of 1914. These terms reduce reality to a particular group’s viewpoint (diplomats, businessmen, politicians) — making it unrepresentative — or to that of a tiny minority of decision-makers. For example, two of these societies, France and Germany, were also agrarian societies, and their rural forces played an important role in social conflicts. Britain, unquestionably industrial, was perhaps also just as much a service society, and British historians have recently insisted on the weight of the City and related forces to explain some of Britain’s strategic economic choices (Cain and Hopkins 1993a; 1993b; Cassis 1994; Schneer 1999). All these groups were influenced by the imperial dimension in combination with national achievement. Which Crisis? I must now return to the term ‘crisis’. It does not simply refer to an historical fact already analyzed in many writings. What

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we have here is the fact that these three countries declined and came under the influence of two new super powers, losing not only their colonial but also their cultural empires that were the foundations of their specific national pride. What is unique to the crisis of imperial societies is that, unlike other nations shaken by war and social upheavals, in this case either élites or large segments of each society refused to accept the diagnosis of definitive decline. In fact, they tried to preserve or restore the former situation. In their refusal to adapt, groups not only invoked general causes (such as mistakes by or short-sightedness of the élites, economic difficulties, struggles with social and radical movements, or panic in the middle class) but also middle- or short-range changes, initiated by 4 years of total war. These changes were numerous and included a crisis in urban structures, tensions between city and country, changes in familial structures induced by mobilization and exceptionally high mortality rates for young men, changing relations between the sexes due to war losses and mobilization of women for wartime jobs, new tensions between generations (those touched and untouched by war), necessary reforms in education after a new life experience incompatible with traditions, the decline of economic power and of the state’s legitimacy and authority due to obvious policy or management errors during the military crisis, or deep anxiety about the future after such a traumatic experience. All of these mutations contributed to a pessimistic mood among ruling élites (enhanced by the victory of communism in Russia, which represented a possible future for other countries if they failed to restore the old order) and to the extension of a new radical sentiment among middle and popular classes, urban or rural. This pessimistic stance explains why minorities who sought a reformist solution to all of the problems found themselves in a difficult situation, like the Labour party in Britain, enlightened élites asking for reforms or reformist socialists in France, or the Social Democrats in Germany. A simple revival or restoration was not possible because of the multiplicity of the social and cultural changes that followed war. Moreover, these changes were not entirely compatible, nor

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could they converge to build a coherent new order. On the contrary, in the two most shaken societies, France and Germany, they contributed to the generation of a brutal, voluntary, and regressive reaction, relatively quickly in Germany with extreme right movements and Nazism, a little later in France with rightist or fascist leagues followed by the Vichy new order. Though specific and born in different contexts (social crisis on one side, military crisis on the other), both regimes shared the desire to purge from their societies those novelties linked with the previous national crisis: minorities, the extreme left, emancipated women, and so on (Burleigh and Wippermann 1991). To understand the violence and multidimensional character of the crisis, it is necessary to recall an historical fact, often forgotten because of the division of labour between historians of domestic politics and foreign affairs and specialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the process of building the three imperial societies took three quarters of a century in France and a half-century in the UK and Germany, while the central crisis lasted only twenty years. This temporal difference is one of the key reasons why the crisis could not be overcome smoothly. At the height of the crisis, the three societies were being ruled by generations who were adults or who had come of age during either the society’s highest point or its last phase of emergence. For these leaders or central groups of imperial societies, it was quite impossible to accept the new, inverted society born from war’s upheavals, a society where outsiders or dominated groups obtained new rights or powers or even, as in the new Bolshevik society and its European imitations, claimed to be the new rulers. Among élites and intellectuals there were, truly, many Cassandras or think tanks proposing decisive adaptations of imperial societies. They were partially inspired from an American model that seemed to be the future of modern Europe. But these innovators and reformists, opposed to mainstream opinion, remained an isolated and contested minority. Faced with the reactionary attitude of older élites, encouraged by their objective decline, a larger part of the popular classes adopted a

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new subversive attitude linked to the want, deprivation, and suffering they experienced during the First World War. Many people were mobilized on the front or in civil activities linked to national defence on the basis of ‘sacred union’. After this drama, a simple return to normalcy or a programme of limited change was unthinkable. Political and economic leaders of the three nations were very conscious of and anxious about this new situation. In this extremely tense situation, which led to a lack of agreement even about the rules of the social game, the crisis of imperial societies became a multidimensional phenomenon. In each case, the crisis was resolved in different ways, depending upon the élites’ capacity to adapt, and upon the degree of opposition. In the UK a provisional compromise was forged, but only at the cost of a reluctance to battle authoritarian regimes and a relative failure to prevent a new total war. Moreover, this solution did not keep dominated groups from being the primary victims of an aging economy’s hardships. In the other two societies, we see a double failure, internal and external, both intricately related. This does not mean, even in the German case (where the situation was the most desperate because of the defeat and the loss of an imperial society’s main attributes) that nothing other than the Nazi seizure of power could have succeeded. At the same time, my interpretation, even if it seeks social bases for other changes, does not exclude the specific effects of other factors, such as political choices, cultural and educative national features, the influence of external models, etc. To be more concrete, it would be necessary at this point to discuss one of the historical situations in more depth, to demonstrate how I try to mobilize these different terms. It would also be necessary to develop another concept, what I call ‘national habitus’, an identity principle specific to each imperial society, constructed by the societies through an interactive and mutual process of rivalry parallel to the history of their relations. This national habitus means that each population in general believed not only in defending itself against foreign aggression but at

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the same time associated this patriotic defence with a specific social ideal judged superior to that of its enemy. In France, it was equality against aristocratic nations. In the UK, liberty against militarist and protectionist powers’ will of domination; in Germany, it was Kultur and social protection of the state against Russian barbarity, or against the anarchic individualism of France or England. Even if these stereotypes were products of propaganda, the success of the mobilization efforts in August 1914 (a success that was not certain even for the élites of each country) indicates that the national habitus that had been gradually disseminated at the end of nineteenth century was now an efficient guideline in a crisis situation. It was one of the mediations that explains why the mass majority of the populations in 1914 supported mobilizations for an accessory cause (the ‘Great Illusion’ of Jean Renoir’s film), sincerely believing — and this without strong short-term preparations — that their country was right, and that the ‘enemy’ was a true menace to their identity and way of life. The true paradox at the beginning of the crisis is that each nation, even countries that were eventually in an aggressive position, in its large majority had the impression to act in legitimate defence and to struggle for its survival and identity. It would be necessary to analyze how this representation was produced, diffused, and accepted in depth in each imperial society, largely before the opening of the dramatic sequence of July 1914. It is too simple to identify this phenomenon with ‘the spread of nationalism’, social Darwinism, or militarism (or ‘war culture’), neither is it possible to equate it to a ‘natural’ reflex. It was a social, political, and cultural construct but one which succeeded thanks to social and cultural transformations independent of the will of élites or organized groups. I define this through the notion of national habitus. Since the historiography of each nation has been influenced for a long time by this self-representation (be it in a positive or negative stance), the true difficulty of my enterprise is to change our own national viewpoint which remains influenced, willy-nilly, by the historiography which formed us in each national context. So

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the general methodological conclusion, I would suggest at the end of this provisory sketch, is to form groups of historians of different national origins to study these phenomena and to try and put into question this inherited national bias by a collective self analysis. Hopefully this would lead to a European historical viewpoint — a perspective that eludes us till today.2 Notes 1. I have limited my references to the minimum since the complete bibliography may be found in Charle (2001). 2. Even an unorthodox attempt like that of Ferguson (1999) remains deeply embedded in the confrontation of national viewpoints. Criticizing the responsibilities of his own country, UK, the author adopts arguments borrowed from other national historiographies which have already used these critical arguments after 1918; cf. this rather optimistic sentence: ‘if a war had been fought, but without Britain and America, the victorious Germans might have created a version of the European Union, eight decades ahead of schedule’, ibid.: 458. It is only through an analysis in terms of the ‘field’ in Bourdieu’s sense of the word that it is possible to escape these pitfalls and adopt a ‘transnational’ prospect freed from nationalist or Marxist limitations.

References Bourdieu, P. 1958 (1962). Sociologie de l’ Algérie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Trans. by A.C.M. Ross, The Algerians. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1977 (1979). Algérie 60, structures, économiques et structures temporelles. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by R. Nice, Algeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’ homme. ———. 1987. ‘L’ assassinat de Maurice Halbwachs.’ Visages de la Résistance. Dossier de la revue Liberté de l’ espirit. 16 (Autumn): 161–68. Bourdieu, P. and L.J. Wacquant. 1998 (1999). ‘Sur les ruses de la raison impérialiste.’ Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. 121–22 (March): 109–18. Trans. by Derek Robbins and Loïc Wacquant,

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‘On the Cunning Imperialist Reason’. Theory, Culture and Society, 16 (1): 41–58. Brewer, John. 1989. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783. New York: A.A. Knopf. Burleigh, Michael and W. Wipperman. 1991. The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cain, P.J. and A.G. Hopkins. 1993a. British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion (1688–1914). London: Longman. ———. 1993b. British Imperialism: Crisis and Destruction (1914– 1990). London: Longman. Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2005. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Cassis, Youssef. 1994. City Bankers (1890–1914). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charle, Christophe. 1994. A Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Berghahn. ———. 1998. Paris fin de siècle: Culture et politique. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2001. La crise des sociétés impériales (1900–1940). Essai d’ histoire sociale comparée de l’ Allemagne, de la France et de la Grande Bretagne. Paris: Seuil. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons Forging the Nation: 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press. Crawford, E. (1984) 1988. The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution: The Science Prizes, 1901–1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’ homme. Trans. La Fondation des prix Nobel scientifiques, 1901–1915. Paris: Belin. François, E. and Hagen Schulze (eds). 2001–2. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. 3 vols. Munich: Beck. Ferguson, Niall. 1999. The Pity of War. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gaehtgens, Th. W. 1992. Die Berliner Museuminsel in Deutschen Kaiserreich. Berlin: Deutsche Kunstverlag. Girault, R. (1981) 1988. ‘Développement économique et impérialisme.’ Etre historien des relations internationales. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Gran-Aymerich, Eve. 1988. Naissance de l’ archéologie moderne: 1798– 1945. Paris: CNRS Éditions.

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Hobsbawm, E.J. 1987. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1994. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph. Korinman, M. 1999. Deutschland über alles, les pangermanismes: 1890– 1945. Paris: Fayard. Lenin, V.I. 1947. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Mayer, Arno J. 1981. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. New York: Pantheon Books. Monnier, G. 1996. L’ Art et ses institutions en France de la Révolution à nos jours. Paris: Gallimard. Mosse, George L. 1975. The Nationalization of the Masses. New York: Howard Fertig. Nora, P. (ed.). 1984–92. Les Lieux de mémoire. 7 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Rasmussen, A. 1996. ‘L’ Internationale scientifique 1890–1914’, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Réunion des Musées Nationaux. 1993. 1893: L’ Europe des Peintres Paris. Paris: Musée D’ Orsay. Rolland, D. 2000. La crise du modèle français. Marianne et l’ Amérique latine, culture, politique et identité. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Rolland, R. 1915 (1916). Au-dessus de la Mêlée. Paris: Ollendorff. Trans. by C.K. Ogden, Above the Battle. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Samuel, Raphael (ed.). 1989. Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity. 3 vols. London: Routledge. Schneer, John. 1999. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press. Singaravélou, Pierre. 1999. L’ École française d’Extrême-Orient ou l’ institution des marges 1898-1956. Essai d’ histoire sociale et politique de la science coloniale. Paris: L’ Harmattan. Valenti, Catherine. 1999. ‘L’ École française d’Athènes: 1846–1981.’ Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Université de Provence.

Thinking the State with Bourdieu and Foucault


U. Kalpagam

The ‘State’ in Anthropology Anthropologists today are increasingly concerned with how best to do ethnographies of the state. Two perspectives are currently lending themselves to creative debates. One, following Das and Poole, demarcates the anthropological project of the state as understanding the effects of the nation-state at its ‘margins’. ‘Margins’ in their understanding refers to the domains occupied by people ‘insufficiently socialized into the law’, or instances when the state was ‘undone by the illegibility of its own practices’, or as the ‘space between bodies, law and discipline’ (2004: 9–10). Their analytical strategy is to move away from the perspective of viewing the state ‘as a rationalized administrative form of political organization that becomes weakened or less fully articulated along its territorial or social margins’ (ibid.: 3). Instead their strategy is to see how ‘the practices and politics of life in these areas shaped the political, regulatory and disciplinary practices that constitute, somehow, that thing we call “the state”’ (ibid.). The other perspective lending itself to ethnographic engagement that simultaneously decentres ‘monolithic and univocal notions’ of the state is to examine the work of specifically located state agents: what particular categories of state agents actually do and the obstacles — sometimes emanating from other state institutions — that they encounter in carrying out their mandates. This perspective reveals

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the state as a loose grouping of institutions that often work at cross-purposes (Clark 2004). If the first perspective follows from Foucault’s ideas and Foucauldian critiques, the latter perspective owes much to Bourdieu’s analysis of the bureaucratic field, although actual ethnographies of the state creatively draw from different thinkers and ideas. Let us now examine how these two perspectives instituted themselves in the contemporary anthropological discourse. Although the study of the state has been the privileged domain of political philosophers and political scientists, Weber brought it into the sociological domain. Even if anthropology was earlier concerned only with the study of primitive societies, those generally considered as stateless societies, they have also long been concerned with the maintenance of law and order, and of the kinds of proto-state institutions or early state formations in such societies. Today anthropology is rethinking the ways of studying the modern state in contemporary societies, in particular the ways of understanding the effects of power and forms of governance on subjects in modern societies. If Evans Pritchards’s classic work The Nuer (1940) erased the presence of colonial power there, Asad (1973) and others brought the colonial encounter into the agenda of anthropological theory. Concerned with the ways in which colonial law and governance transposed from western political practice into colonial contexts restructured those societies, anthropological literature on the role of state power in pre-modern and early modern societies viewed the state as a centralized apparatus out of which the controlling, repressive, and transformative power of the state emanated. This was also the perspective of the state in political philosophy at that time. Viewing state power as arising out of a centralized apparatus made it possible to posit the state and society as distinct and separable entities that often led to the understanding that a strong state resulted in a weak society, or a weak state resulted in a strong society (Migdal 1988). In more recent works, the state-society distinction is weakened by a greater permeability between the two. This shift in perspective owes

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much to the works of Foucault and Bourdieu, especially to Foucault’s attempts at decentring the state in his focus on the dispersal of state power. While Bourdieu does not seek to decentre the state, he observes that as an organizational structure and as an authority regulating practices, it exerts a permanent action of formation of durable dispositions, through all the constraints and disciplines that it imposes uniformly on all agents. Moreover, the state makes a decisive contribution towards the production and reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality. Bourdieu’s significant ideas on the state are contained mainly in his essay ‘Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field’ (1998a). In another essay (1998b) he argues that the Hegelian vision of bureaucracy as a universal category and the Marxist vision of them as usurpers of the universal are not contradictory but complementary as what the state may claim of the universal is rooted in the particular. His monumental work The State Nobility (1996) deals with the work of consecration carried out by the education system in the production of a state nobility, which in order to consolidate its position constructed the modern state and the republican myths, meritocracy, and civil service. His recent work Pascalian Meditations (2000) while providing a critique of scholastic reason calls into question the assumption of a free and transparent ‘subject’ and suggests a reappraisal of the relation of social sciences to politics. Foucault’s ethnographies of power in modern societies and his notion of ‘governmentality’ has decidedly shifted the focus from a centralized power centre to the capillaries that distribute power and to the points at which power is applied, especially in its subjectifying effects. More significantly, Foucault helped us see the productive effects of power rather than its repressive effects through the triadic relationship between power, knowledge, and subjectivity. This has been particularly helpful in understanding the ways in which knowledge of society and of the governed is produced as part of governance itself in modern societies.

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Contemporary ethnographies of the state are much influenced by the works of Foucault and Bourdieu as also others like Taussig and Agamben. In this article I compare and contrast Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s ideas of the state, as the ideas have influenced my own work on the colonial state, especially noting Bourdieu’s delineation of emergence of scientific fields and his theory of practice. In examining the relevance of their ideas to postcolonial futures, I suggest that Bourdieu’s more recent writings, especially his critiques of neo-liberalism and his work on contemporary social suffering has provided a useful way of understanding the role of state agents and of the citizen/subjects of modern state power. Bourdieu’s Ideas on the Modern State For Bourdieu (1998a) the genesis of the modern European State is a process of emergence, in the sense of a process through which ‘a reality without precedent’ has been constituted. He describes this process as the concentration of different types of capital namely concentration of the capital of physical force as initially described by Max Weber, the concentration of economic capital, the concentration of information capital like statistics and the concentration of symbolic capital in the form of juridical power. In this process he observes that the state makes a decisive contribution towards the production and reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality. As an organizational structure and as an authority regulating practices, it exerts a permanent action of formation of durable dispositions, through all the constraints and disciplines that it imposes uniformly on all agents. In particular, in reality and in people’s minds it imposes all fundamental principles of classification — sex, age, ‘competence’, etc.— through the imposition of divisions into social categories such as active/inactive, which are the product of the application of ‘cognitive’ categories, now reified and naturalized. Further he observes, The construction of the state is thus accompanied by the construction of a kind of common historical transcendental

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which, after a long process of incorporation, becomes immanent to all its ‘subjects’.

Through the structuring it imposes on practices, the state institutes and inculcates common symbolic forms of thought, social frames of perception, understanding or memory, state forms of classification or, more precisely, practical schemes of perception, appreciation, and action (Bourdieu 2000: 175). Although Bourdieu refers to the structuring of practices by the state, he does not explicate the process of structuring involved in governmental practices. For him it is the school system through which the state produces and imposes categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world — including the state itself. Bourdieu also observes how the state effects a unification through counting and classification. He notes, The State concentrates, treats, and redistributes information and, most of all, effects a theoretical unification. Taking the vantage point of the whole, of society in its totality, the State claims responsibility for all operations of totalization (especially thanks to census-taking and statistics or national accounting) and of objectivization, through cartography (the unitary representation of space from above) or more simply through writing as an instrument of accumulation of knowledge (archives, for example), as well as for all operations of codification as cognitive unification implying centralization in the hands of clerks and men of letters (1998a: 45).

Such cognitive unification for Bourdieu is necessary for the concentration of statist capital, which is the sum of the other capitals mentioned before. In foregrounding the concentration of various species of capital, Bourdieu actually renders opaque the nature of modern governmental power and its underlying political rationalites. While noting that the state takes on the role of totalization and objectivization, he does not show how it simultaneously leads to individualization and creates both a new field of the ‘social’ and new spheres of governmental power

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where population, both individual and mass, becomes an object of governmental interventions. It is these Foucauldian insights, which Bourdieu lacks, that provides a justification for enumeration, codification, and classification as a way of enabling abstraction that is integral to modern state power. It is this abstraction that enabled the Hegelian vision of the bureaucracy as a universal category upholding the general interest. So Bourdieu is quite right that to understand the symbolic dimension of the effect of the state, in particular what he calls the effect of universality, it is necessary to understand the specific functioning of the bureaucratic microcosm. For the analysis of bureaucratic microcosms may reveal how the effect of universality is either subverted to promote particular interests of either the state agents or the state subjects or indeed how an effect of universality is sought to be created when in fact only particular interests have been served. These instances of deviation could occur both at the margins and the centres of state power. But Bourdieu argues that it is necessary to analyze the genesis and structure of this universe of agents of the state who have constituted themselves into a state nobility by instituting the state, and in particular by producing the performative discourse on it which, under the guise of saying what the state is, caused it to come into being by stating what it should be — that is, what should be the position of the producers of this discourse in the division of the labour of domination (1998a: 58). He is not only interested in just ways of abstraction and its effects on the subjects governed, but how particular state agents deploy these powers of abstraction and to what effect. Bourdieu’s advantage in introducing these agents, the state nobility, is that it allows him to posit the state as the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital: the capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, informational capital, and symbolic capital. It follows that the construction of the state proceeds apace with the construction of a field of power, defined as the space of play within which the holders of capital of different species

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struggle in particular for power over the state, that is, over the statist capital granting power over the different species of capital and over their reproduction particularly through the school system. I find this specification of the field of power and of the struggle between the different branches of the state such as the army, police, judiciary, executive, and legislature that is implied given his definition of the species of capital rather impoverished and banal. As compared to the other understandings of the field of state power and of the struggles therein, Bourdieu’s perspective hardly lends itself to understandings of domination, hegemony, and subjection through state power. For instance the Marxist understandings of the nature of the state seeks to understand the classes that dominate the state and the manner in which those classes assumed their dominance. Foucault’s ideas of the field of state power show how it is shaped and moulded by varying political rationalities and technologies of rule and their effects on the conduct of subjects. But Bourdieu (1998b) is at pains to declare that the Hegelian and Marxist perspectives on the bureaucracy are not contradictory but complementary. Bourdieu’s motive in defining the bureaucratic field in the manner he did was to say that it is a site of struggle between social agents who must invoke the universal in order to triumph. And this leads to the monopolization of the universal. The relative unification and universalization associated with the emergence of the state has for its counterpart the monopolization by the few of the universal resources that it produces and procures. Bourdieu observes that ‘The monopolization of the universal is the result of a work of universalization which is accomplished within the bureaucratic field itself.’ (1998a: 59). And of course there are profits attached to it. . . . all social universes tend to offer, to varying degrees, material or symbolic profits of universalization (those very profits pursued by strategies seeking to ‘play by the rule’). It also implies that the universes which, like the bureaucratic field, demand with the utmost insistence that one submits to the universal,

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Recent ethnographies of the state that seek to understand it through the functioning of state agents (Mountz 2004; McDougall and Valentine 2004) deal with bureaucratic microcosms, and study how notions of impartiality and responsibility are variedly configured in different contexts. A Critique of Bourdieu’s Views of the State When Das and Poole (2004) suggest that we focus on the ‘margins’, i.e., those insufficiently socialized by law or to those for whom state practices are illegible, they are in fact questioning Bourdieu’s assumption that the constraints and disciplines are uniformly imposed on all agents which renders possible the formation of durable dispositions. For Bourdieu, the state categories of thought are produced and imposed by the school system and not many belonging to the ‘margins’ are likely to be part of that school system. Thus, at the ‘margins’ of the state, the durable dispositions of agents could in fact be different from the others. While this argument may hold in any instance, it is unlikely that the same set of people are going to be at the ‘margins’ permanently, for sooner or later they are likely to be incorporated, which means they become socialized by law and learn to decipher state writing (such as law and administrative discourses) that no longer remains illegible to them. We also need to note that the construction of the state is more than just state classifications. Bourdieu does not adequately explain what he refers to as ‘the structuring it imposes on practices’. In fact, nowhere does he make it clear that he is referring to ‘practices of governance’. These are indeed numerous and varied. Governmental practices are interventions that seek to act upon constituted objects towards desired ends. Such practices need first to be framed in a policy discourse, routinizing them through temporal frameworks making it a continuous process of intervention, which in turn requires standardization for purposes of

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replication through processes of standardization and finally be rendered accountable so as to measure their effects through methods of accountability. This is what the various ministries and departments are engaged in as an on-going process of governance. All these are aspects of governance that go together in constituting knowledge of objects of governance. If we acknowledge that both power and the knowledge of the objects of governance are simultaneously determined through the processes of governance, then administrative discourses constitute the discursive strategies of constructing objects and fields for purposes of intervention. This is something unique to the modern state, as its fields and objects of intervention are rationally constituted to meet rational ends. The representational goals are therefore matched by the requirements of intervention. It is in fact arguable whether the effect of universality created by the state is because of the particular set of agents involved in the performative discourse of the state or on account of the forms of governance. If we accept that the effect of universality is really the effect of abstraction then we can understand the role of state agents in the creation of that universality effect through their performative discourses. Asad (2004) has noted that both the idea of abstraction and the notion of equivalence are integral to the modern liberal state. When a bureaucrat who is expected to treat all citizens as equal, chooses from among equals, his choice is free and uncertain. The uncertainty of his choice or even the statistical structure of bias cannot prove that a biased decision was made in a particular case. Asad further notes, If it is the case that people in society are never homogenous, that they are always constituted by different memories, fears and hopes, that they have different histories and live in different social-economic conditions, then the official who chooses or judges may be held accountable for who, how and why he categorizes. But the act of categorizing always involves abstraction from one context and its application to another context — and it is always, in a sense, uncertain (2004: 283).

Bourdieu’s purpose in introducing agents as producers of the

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universality effect is to show how the bureaucracy emerged as a ‘universal group’ that is in charge of defending the general interest when in fact they only serve particular interests. The material and symbolic profits of universalization that Bourdieu refers to are well known to those grappling with the Indian developmental state and of the role of its bureaucracy. The rent-seeking potentialities of the license-permit Raj, the dowry price fixed for Indian Administrative Service officers in certain communities, the commission to be paid for contracts and bureaucratic transfers, and so on are all too familiar. Similarities and Differences with Foucault Bourdieu’s observation that the construction of the state is accompanied by the construction of a kind of common historical transcendental — i.e. common cognitive frameworks, social schemes of perception, symbolic frames of thought, understanding, and a certain kind of reason — which after a long process of incorporation, becomes immanent to all its ‘subjects’ recalls to my mind Foucault’s notion of ‘episteme’. Foucault defines ‘episteme’ as follows: This episteme may be suspected of being something like a world-view, a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that the men of a particular period cannot escape — a great body of legislation written once and for all by some anonymous hand . . . ; the episteme is not what may be known at a given period . . . ; it is what, in the positivity of discursive practices, makes possible the existence of epistemological figures and sciences. . . . (Foucault 1985: 191–2).

The ‘episteme’ is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyzes them at the level of discursive regularities (Foucault 1985: 191). The administrative discourses of the modern state thus become a site of the ‘episteme’.

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Foucault’s ideas, as we all know, have been central to several postcolonial writings, in particular Said’s Orientalism (1978), and Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), although Foucault himself, never once in any of his writings, mentions, even casually, the colonial situation. In a series of articles I wrote on colonial governmentality (Kalpagam 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2002), I have examined the importation of certain categories of thought through processes of colonial governance using the Foucauldian framework. The ‘discursive practices’ of governance by the modern colonial state embodying the diverse strategies of rule and administration constitutes the colonial archives. By treating such archives as a ‘discursive formation’, it is possible to trace their links to knowledges and sciences by employing the Foucauldian notion of the ‘episteme’. The modern episteme that would constitute modern social sciences would no doubt contain the numerical world-view. But the sciences are, in fact, more than numbers, or rather the discursive constitution of objects in scientific representations have to lodge both categories and numbers in a manner amenable for interventions. It is here that state classifications of sex, age, ‘competence’, etc., through the imposition of divisions into social categories, play a role in instituting a numerical world-view. Although Bourdieu does not use the notion of episteme, he is fully aware that the problematic of state and knowledge production is an epistemological issue. Elsewhere he writes: In fact, there is a tendency to reduce what is and should be an epistemological questioning to a political questioning inspired by prejudices or political impulses (anarchist dispositions in the specific case of the state, iconoclastic passions of relativist philistines in art, antidemocratic inclinations in public opinion). . . . Insofar as one is led to question not only ‘moral conformism’, but also ‘logical conformism’, that is, the basic structures of thought, one goes against both those who, finding no fault with the world as it is, see in this epistemic radicalism a kind of decisive and socially irresponsible preconceived opinion, as well as those who reduce it to political radicalism as they conceive it, that is, to a denunciation which, in more than one case, is a

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Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context particularly perverse way of sheltering oneself from true epistemological questioning. (I could give an infinite number of examples to show how ‘radical’ critiques of the categories of INSEE in the name of a Marxist theory of classes have allowed critics to avoid an epistemological critique of those same categories and of the act of categorization and classification, or even how denouncing the complicity of the ‘philosophy of state’ with the bureaucratic order or with the ‘bourgeoisie’ gives free rein to the effects of all the epistemic distortions inscribed in the ‘scholastic point of view’.) The real symbolic revolutions are without doubt those, which more than moral conformism, violate logical conformism, unleashing merciless repression which gives rise to similar attacks against mental integrity (Bourdieu 1998a: 36).

Writing about the epistemological power of the state, Bourdieu elaborates that in differentiated societies, the state has the ability to impose and inculcate in a universal manner, within a given territorial expanse, a nomos, a shared principle of vision and division, identical or similar cognitive and evaluative structures. And that the state is therefore the foundation of a ‘logical conformism’ and of a ‘moral conformism’ (these are Durkheim’s expressions), of a tacit, pre-reflexive agreement over the meaning of the world as a commonsense world. Many at the ‘margins’ may not share the same principle of vision as the others and hence resist logical conformism on grounds of illegibility of state writing. Because Foucault’s notion of episteme is ‘a great body of legislation written once and for all by some anonymous hand’, individual agents who produce the discourse do not matter. But for Bourdieu for whom state power is ‘symbolic power’, the agents who produce them do matter and in fact they constitute the state nobility. Bourdieu says that ‘to account fully for the properly symbolic dimension of the power of the state, we may build on Max Weber’s decisive contribution (in his writings on religion) to the theory of symbolic systems by introducing specialized agents and their specific interests’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 57). Foucault is not concerned with the state or state theory as

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such, but in the dispersal of state power through capillaries in the various institutions, at the point at which power is applied. Thus there are no agents, no state nobility, no struggle between different holders of different species of capital, no statist capital and no profits of universalization and no monopolization of the universal resources as in Bourdieu. Rather, in Foucault’s approach, the effect of universality, the state effects, are achieved through the modes of governance. By conceiving the state as embodying ‘governmentality’, by which he meant the ‘ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics, that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power’ (Foucault 1991: 20), he argued that this type of power resulted in the formation of both a whole series of state apparatuses as well as the development of a whole complex of savoir, what is known as ‘political economy’. Bourdieu emphasizes the role of the state in imposing cognitive categories but the process of such imposition is not entirely spelt out, either in the sphere of education or the mechanisms of governance. He notes: If the state is able to exert symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates itself simultaneously in objectivity, in the form of specific organizational structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity, in the form of mental structures and categories of perception and thought. By realizing itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out of a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural (1998a: 40).

He does not explain that these ‘long series of acts of institution’ refer to practices and procedures of governance. He only refers to the state ‘effecting a homogenization of all forms of communication, including bureaucratic communication (through forms, official notices, etc.)’ and of it contributing ‘to the unification of the cultural market by unifying all codes, linguistic and juridical. . . . ’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 45–46).

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State Categories and Habitus What is of significance to Bourdieu is how these state categories lodge themselves in the individual and collective habitus. ‘As organizational structure and regulator of practices, the state exerts an ongoing action formative of durable dispositions through the whole range of constraints and through the corporeal and mental discipline it uniformly imposes on all agents’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 53–54). ‘One could offer countless similar instances in which the effects of choices made by the state have so completely impressed themselves in reality and in minds that possibilities initially discarded have become totally unthinkable. . . . ’ (ibid.: 37–38; emphasis mine). ‘Through classification systems (especially according to sex and age) inscribed in law, bureaucratic procedures, educational structures, and social rituals (particularly salient in the case of Japan and England), the state moulds mental structures and imposes common principles of vision and division, forms of thinking that are to the civilized mind what the primitive forms of classification, described by Mauss and Durkheim, were to the ‘savage mind’. And it thereby contributes to the construction of what is commonly designated as national identity (or in a more traditional language, national character)’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 45–46). For Foucault, there is no use for habitus, and the idea of state moulding mental structures and imposing common principles of vision and division would be a little too simplistic to explain how state power transforms subjectivities. Equally, Bourdieu’s question as to why the state commands doxic submission is answered quite differently. Bourdieu holds that in order to fully understand the immediate submission that the state order elicits, it is necessary to break with the intellectualism of the neo-Kantian tradition to acknowledge that cognitive structures are not forms of consciousness but dispositions of the body. That the obedience we grant to the injunctions of

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the state cannot be understood either as mechanical submission to an external force or as conscious consent to an order (in the double sense of the term). The social world is riddled with calls to order that function as such only for those who are predisposed to heeding them as they awaken deeply buried corporeal dispositions, outside the channels of consciousness and calculation. . . . And to speak of ‘ideologies’ is to locate in the realm of representations — liable to be transformed through this intellectual conversion called ‘awakening of consciousness’ (prise de conscience) — what in fact belongs to the order of belief, that is, to the level of the most profound corporeal dispositions (Bourdieu 1998a: 54–55).

Foucault certainly does not view obedience to state orders as arising out of ‘dispositions of the body’. In his essay ‘The Subject and Power’ (1982), Foucault says that power ‘acts upon, and through, an open set of practical and ethical possibilities’. Gordon (1991: 5) notes, ‘what Foucault finds most fascinating and disturbing in the history of Western governmental practice and its rationalities is the idea of a kind of power which takes freedom itself and the ‘soul of the citizen’, the life and lifeconduct of the ethically free subject, as in some sense the correlative object of its own suasive capacity.’ In his essay on ‘Governmentality’, Foucault (1991) observes that with government ‘it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved.’ This is very much like what Bentham suggested of ‘artificially so arranging things that people following their own self interest, will do as they ought’ (Scott 1999: 38). The political rationality of government created the new self-regulating field of the ‘social’ where ‘the tendency towards the identification of interests operates to ensure that the new rights-bearing and self governing subjects do as they ought’ (ibid.). Tully (1993: 179) has a notion of ‘juridical government’ that refers to the whole ensemble of knowledge, techniques, habitual

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activity, and subjection which links together probabilistic and voluntaristic forms of knowledge, that emerges as a new practice of governing conduct between the Reformation and the Enlightenment in Europe. Its aim is to reform conduct: to explain and then deconstruct settled ways of mental and physical behaviour, and to produce and then govern new forms of habitual conduct in belief and action. Finally, this way of subjection, of conducting the self and others, both posits and serves to bring about a very specific form of subjectivity: a subject who is calculating and calculable, from the perspective of the probabilistic knowledge and practices; and the sovereign bearer of rights and duties, subject to and of law from the voluntaristic perspective.

For Bourdieu, ‘(the) state does not necessarily have to give orders to exercise physical coercion in order to produce an ordered social world, so long as it is capable of producing embodied cognitive structures that accord with objective structures and thus of ensuring the belief of which Hume spoke — namely doxic submission to the established order’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 56). Thus, the contrast between Foucault and Bourdieu on the obedience to the state’s orders is clear. Bourdieu does not examine the political rationalities of government and its changes. Although his work on the emergence of the state nobility indicates his sensitivity to historicize the state, it is well within the traditionally conceived frame of state theory. He comes close to Foucault when he sees power as becoming more diffused when he notes, ‘No longer incarnated in persons or even in particular institutions, power becomes coextensive with the structure of the field of power’, but that is as far as the agreement goes (ibid.). He observes, More precisely, power is primarily wielded invisibly and anonymously, through ‘mechanisms’ such as those that achieve the reproduction of economic and cultural capital, in other words, through the apparently anarchical, yet structured, actions and reactions of networks of agents and institutions that are both in competition and complementary, and involved in increasingly

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long and complex circuits of legitimating exchanges (Bourdieu 1998a: 386).

Bourdieu’s claim is that the theory of habitus has the primordial function of stressing that the principle of our actions is more often practical sense than rational calculations. His advantage in introducing habitus in the analysis of the state enables him to posit a relationship between the structure of the hopes or expectations constitutive of a habitus and the structure of probabilities which is constitutive of a social space. This means that the objective probabilities are determinant only for an agent endowed with the sense of the game in the form of the capacity to anticipate the outcome or what is going to come forth in the game. This anticipation, according to Bourdieu, relies on a practical pre-categorization based on the implementation of the schemes of habitus which, arising from experience of the regularities of existence, structure the contingencies of life in terms of previous experience and make it possible to anticipate in practice the probable futures previously classified as good or bad, bringing satisfactions or frustrations. Bourdieu further observes that the symbolic power that the state exercises can manipulate hopes and expectations, especially through more or less inspired and uplifting performative evocation of the future — prophesy, forecast or prediction. It can thus introduce a degree of play into the correspondence between expectations and chances and open up a space of freedom through the more or less voluntarist positing of more or less improbable possibles — utopia, project, programme or plan — which the pure logic of probabilities would lead one to regard as practically excluded (2000: 234). All fields, according to Bourdieu, are constituted by a nomos, or a fundamental law. Also, every field has its stakes that agents/members of the field understand as stakes in the game. Illusio presupposes the suspension of the objectives of ordinary existence of the field in favour of the new stakes, posited and produced by the game itself. This self-deception is necessary to

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keep players involved in the game. It arises when the hopes and expectations are at variance with the objective probabilities leading to a sense of anticipation. It is the way of being in the world, of being occupied by the world. An agent can be affected by something very distant, even absent, if it participates in the game in which he is engaged (Bourdieu 2000: 135). The field of the state especially consists of people who are not all equally placed or positioned with respect to any state practice or state action or events. Nonetheless even distant events can structure the hopes and expectations of agents. People at the ‘margins’ of the state have their hopes and expectations structured differently from the structure of objective probabilities constitutive of the social space. Asad (2004) has suggested that ‘the entirety of the state is a margin’ and that the ‘sovereign force of law is expressed in the state’s continual attempt to overcome the margin’. Understanding the Colonial Context with Bourdieu Although it is well known that ‘governmentality’ studies are strongly influenced by Foucault, the points of convergence and difference between Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s ideas of the state suggest new ways of expanding governmentality studies. Bourdieu, as heir to a certain French intellectual tradition, engages with ideas that Foucault dealt with or with Foucault’s ideas though he never explicitly acknowledges this fact. My work on the colonial state belongs to the genre of work dealing with the colonial production of knowledge of colonized society that follows the intellectual tradition of Edward Said, Bernard Cohn, and Ranajit Guha. It deals with the manner in which certain Western categories of thought were installed in the epistemological repertoire of Indian thought through the processes of colonial governance from an examination of the statistical records. My work on colonial statistical knowledge and administration shows how colonial knowledge and power were mutually determined. Statistics was not only a powerful discourse of the modern colonial state in India, but the discursive

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practices of administration regulated certain spatial and temporal categories, constituted new objects of discourse, generated vast quantities of numbers and classifications, and ushered in new kinds of interventions, new conceptions of causality and new modes of reasoning. It is with these new categories of time and space, new conceptions of ‘economy’ and ‘society’, and the new discourses of ‘history’ and ‘progress’ that narratives of modernity could be framed and contested. In fact, the statistical practices of colonial governance that promoted these new discourses were even instrumental in the formation of a new public sphere, in which governance entered the public discourse in a new way inviting the various publics to the ‘public use of reason’. The techniques of government instituted by the colonial state thus gave rise to a whole set of scientific discourses about society; often these discourses were constituted in terms of competing discourses of the so-called ‘moral and material progress’ of these societies. The production of knowledge about society as part of the technologies of governance created the field for social scientific discourses to emerge for the first time. Perhaps because of his having done fieldwork in Algeria, a former French colony, Bourdieu, unlike Foucault, does not erase the colonial context but nowhere does he elaborate on the construction of colonial power or on its implications for knowledge, though he shows much sensitivity to the issue of colonial knowledge. In his essay ‘For a Sociology of Sociologists’ (1993) he observes ‘What the social history of “colonial science” could offer — from the only standpoint that seems to be of interest, namely the progress of the science of present-day Algerian society — would be a contribution to knowledge of the categories of thought through which we look at that society’ (ibid.: 50). Seemingly, his concerns are quite close to my project. Of the colonial archive, Bourdieu notes that ‘in order to understand what has been left to us — corpuses, data, theories — we have to make a sociological study of the social conditions of production of that object’ (1993: 51). And that one cannot do a sociology of the social conditions of production of ‘colonial’

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‘science’ without first studying the appearance of a relatively autonomous scientific field and the social conditions of the autonomization of this field. Further he notes, We first need to determine what were the specific properties of the field in which the ‘colonial’ ‘science’ produced its discourse on the colonial world, and how these properties varied at different times. In other words, we need to analyse the relationship this relatively autonomous scientific field had with, on the one hand, the colonial power, and, on the other, the central intellectual power, that is to say the metropolitan science of the day [ . . . ] Then one would have to analyse the variations in the relationship of this field with national and international science and with the local political field, and how these changes were translated in its production (ibid.: 51).

For Bourdieu the field is important as . . . it implicitly defines ‘unthinkable things’, things that are not even discussed.What is most hidden is what everyone agrees about, agreeing so much that they don’t even mention them, the things that are beyond question, that go without saying. That’s just what historical documents are likely to mask most completely, because it doesn’t occur to anyone to write out what is self-evident; and it is what informants don’t say, or say only by omission, in their silences (ibid.: 51).

As the ‘field’ defines the unthinkable, defines the space of possibles, it helps to understand ‘why these people could not understand certain things, could not raise certain problems; of determining what are the social conditions of error — necessary error, inasmuch as it is the product of historical conditions, determinations. In the ‘goes without saying’ of a particular period, there is the de jure unthinkable (the politically unthinkable, for example), what is unnameable, taboo, the problems that cannot be dealt with — and also the de facto unthinkable, the things that the intellectual tools of the day do not make it possible to think’ (1993: 52). Bourdieu thus concludes that ‘the problem of the privileged relation to the object — native or external, ‘sympathetic’ or

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hostile, etc — in which discussion of colonial sociology and the possibility of a decolonized sociology is normally trapped needs to be replaced by the question of scientific control of the relation to the object of science which in his view is one of the fundamental conditions of the construction of a genuine object of science. Whatever object the sociologist or the historian chooses, this object, his way of constructing the object, raises the question not of the historian or sociologist as an individual subject, but of the objective relationship between the pertinent social characteristics of the sociologist and the social characteristics of the object’ (1993: 52). Bourdieu also acknowledges that there are different ways of world making. In his Pascalian Meditations he notes, Ethnology and history bear witness that the various dispositions towards the natural world and the social world, and the various anthropologically possible ways of constructing the world — magical or technical, emotional or rational, practical or theoretical, instrumental or aesthetic, serious or ludic, etc.— have very unequal probability, because they are encouraged and rewarded to very unequal degrees in different societies, depending on the degree of freedom with respect to necessity and immediate urgencies that is provided there by the state of the available technologies and economic and cultural resources; and, within a given society, depending on the position occupied within the social space (2000: 16).

Thus, the different kinds of ‘world-making’ have to be related to the economic and social conditions that make them possible. Bourdieu, however, does not suggest how colonialism made possible new ways of world-making, especially through the processes of colonial governance. Bourdieu, Foucault and Postcolonial Futures It is however in the uncertain terrain of postcolonial futures that many of Bourdieu’s ideas gain our recognition. Not only have administrative categories instilled themselves as cognitive

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categories in the minds of citizens generated by the politics of protective discrimination and have thus moulded the habitus of individuals and groups generating its own dynamic in democratic politics, but the promise of development has placed all citizens in an illusio. Ideas such as development, poverty alleviation, empowerment, grassroots democracy, that are part of a repertoire of Indian state discourses of nation-building, have created hopes and expectations of improbable utopias, although their objective probabilities under neo-liberalism and globalization are not so optimistic. When freedom is viewed not as the absence of coercion, then it becomes a realm of possibility for individuals to act in an unconstrained manner only within that realm of possibility rendered accessible to them. If freedom is viewed in this perspective, then it is valid to posit that governmentality itself constitutes and instrumentalizes freedom. The knowledgeeffects of colonial governmentality have extended far beyond the colonial period, signifying the importance of the colonial epistemological project. Moreover, such epistemological practices are contained within the new political projects of governance, even as new political rationalities underwrite new kinds of rational discourses. Liberal strategies of government seek to effect transformations in the conduct of individuals even as the government constitutes them as free individuals; thus liberal governmentality aims only at gradual effects through changes in norms and the norm-governed behaviours of free individuals. Such changes in norms and in the conduct of citizens that governmentality sought to effect in post-Independence India forms part of the narrative of modern freedom that the postcolonial nation-state holds forth as a promise. Such a freedom is part of the implicit contract between the modern nation-state and its citizens, a contract that has eluded fulfilment for the greater part of the postcolonial period and is increasingly forced into a position of retreat under new political rationalities of governance. Governmental techniques through which modern power is exercised seeks to constitute citizens as modern rights-bearing

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subjects who, as members of a national fraternity, would then begin to aspire for the same goals. For example, the administrative category of ‘scheduled tribes’ caused the various tribes to lose their particular identities and their histories have been erased from institutional memories. Such techniques of normalization tend to produce a unitary history and to postulate a set of unitary goals that would be subscribed to by all. The production of homogeneous citizens out of members of diverse communities not only inflicts sufferings by displacing practices of traditional cultures in the direction of modernity so as to redeem individuals, it also raises hopes and expectations that human suffering caused by deprivation would be alleviated by the state. But the production of homogeneous citizens is an uneven process that creates its own ‘margins’ of those yet to be, or insufficiently homogenized. Bourdieu was a staunch critic of neoliberalism. Economists of all hues were the subject of his vitriolic attacks for their abstract models, for mistaking the ‘the things of logic for the logic of things’. Although he compared neoliberal economic discourse to psychiatric discourse in asylums, he pinned much hope on state institutions and the minor state nobility. He observed, And so if one can attain some reasonable hope, it is that, in state institutions and also in the dispositions of agents (especially those most attached to these institutions, like the minor state nobility), there still exist forces, which, under the appearance of simply defending a vanishing order and the corresponding ‘privileges’ (which is what they will be accused of), will in fact, to withstand the pressure, have to work to invent and construct a social order which is not governed solely by the pursuit of selfish interest and individual profit, and which makes room for collectives oriented towards rational pursuit of collectively defined and approved ends (1998c: 104–5).

As understanding the experience of social suffering by agents located everywhere in the social space assume significance and importance under the impact of neoliberalism, the relevance of

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Bourdieu’s ethnographic project on The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in the Contemporary World gains significance. Kleinman (1995/1997) observes that the search for social theories of the human misery of violence, poverty, and oppression will preoccupy the next generation of ethnographers. He sees Bourdieu’s work as a crucial struggle to develop social theory that will support comparative ethnographies of social suffering, so that ethnographies can go beyond personification to understand social misery as social experience. The Weight of the World is a series of ethnographic encounters between various state agents providing services to a wide cross-section that includes many at the margins of French society. In many ways it combines the two perspectives on ethnographies of the state that was introduced at the beginning, suggesting that newer perspectives open up dimensions of human experience that are often both complex and not immediately apparent. Ethnographies of state functionaries and institutions imaginatively combined with how those at the ‘margins’ shape and are in fact shaped by governmental power could contribute much to understanding the Indian development experience. References Asad, Talal. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New Jersey: Humanities Press. ——— 2004. ‘What are the Margins of the State?’ In V. Das and D. Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. ‘For a Sociology of Sociologists’. In idem (ed.) Sociology in Question. Trans. by R. Nice. London: Sage Publications. ———. (1989) 1996. La noblesse d’État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by L.C. Clough, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1994) 1998a. ‘Esprits d’ État. Genèse et structure

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du champ bureaucratique’. In idem, Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’ action. Paris: Seuil, pp. 99–103. Trans. by P. Bourdieu, ‘Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field’ in Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Trans. by R. Johnson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 35–63. ———. 1998b. ‘On the Fundamental Ambivalence of the State’. Trans. R. Beebe and H. Thompson. Polygraph 10: 21–32. ———. 1998c. Contre-feux. Paris: Raisons d’ agir Éditions. Trans. by Loïc Wacquant, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New York: The New Press. ———. (1997) 2000. Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. Trans. R. Nice, Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre et al. (1993) 1999. La misère du monde. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by P. Parkhurst Ferguson, S. Emanuel, J. Johnson, S.T. Waryn, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burchell, G.C., C. Gordon and P. Miller. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Clark, K. 2004. ‘Agents of the State’, Symposium abstract in Citizenship and Public Space Abstracts, The Canadian Anthropology Society, University of Western Ontario, Canada, 5–9 May. Das, V. and D. Poole (eds). 2004. ‘State and Its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies’. In Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Dreyfus, H.L. and P. Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. (1969) 1985. L’ archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith, The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications. ———. (1978) 1991. ‘Governmentality’, in G.C. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gordon, C. 1991. ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’. In G.C. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Kalpagam, U. 1999. ‘Temporalities, History and Routines of Rule in Colonial India’, Time & Society, 8 (1): 141–59. ———. 2000a. ‘The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge’, History of the Human Sciences, 13 (2): 37–55. ———. 2000b. ‘Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” ’, Economy and Society, 29 (3): 418–38. ———. 2002. ‘Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 15 (1): 35–58. Kleinman, A. 1995/1997. Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press. McDougall, Allan and Lisa P. Valentine. 2004. ‘Impartiality, Citizenship and Order Maintenance’, Paper presented at the Conference Citizenship and Public Space, The Canadian Anthropology Society, University of Western Ontario, Canada, 5–9 May. Migdal, J. 1988. Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Mountz, Alison. 2004. ‘Civil Servants Respond to Human Smuggling: An Ethnography of the State’, Paper presented at the Conference Citizenship and Public Space, The Canadian Anthropology Society, University of Western Ontario, Canada, 5–9 May. Pritchard, Evans. 1940. The Neur. Oxford: Clarendon. Said, Edward. 1978 (1995). Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Scott, D. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Tully, James. 1993. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu’s Theory of the Symbolic: Traditions and Innovations


Sheena Jain

T

he range of symbolic phenomena that Pierre Bourdieu’s various sociological analyses encompass is very wide. It includes myth, language, art, and science, revolutionary and magical forms of consciousness (in the context of the Algerian subproletariat), and also what he terms practical logic, practical sense, and commonsense. It includes as well as the symbolic aspects of religion, of ritual, of kinship systems, education, law, philosophy, systems of tastes in lifestyles, political preferences and aesthetics, gender, politics, literature, the media, and the state. It is therefore helpful to note that at a general level, the realm of the ‘symbolic’ in Bourdieu’s work refers to mental structures, including schemes and categories of perception, thought, evaluation, and action, both conscious and unconscious, as well as to activities, institutions, and objects pertaining to such schemes and categories (see Bourdieu 1998: 40, 46, 53, 54, 56, 121). Underlying Bourdieu’s various analyses is a theory of the symbolic, whose originality stems from the original theory of practice in which it is embedded. The theory draws attention to the fact that symbolism is intrinsic to human practice, and that symbolic phenomena are products of the material and social environment in which human practice takes place, as well as contribute to the creation of this environment. The basic conceptual framework of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, consisting of the interrelated concepts of habitus, fields, and capital, is informed with this understanding of the symbolic.

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This article attempts to identify the various traditions of analysis that go into the making of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic, and to specify the way in which he innovates with them, to surpass them in power and scope. The theory emerges as a singularly original contribution, reflecting a general feature of Bourdieu’s sociological craftsmanship which he describes as the attempt to adopt a fair attitude towards theoretical tradition, affirming as inseparable both continuity and rupture as a precondition for truly productive thought (Bourdieu 1985: 15; Bourdieu 1996: 180). A characteristic feature of Bourdieu’s sociology is the attempt to transcend the opposition between objectivist and subjectivist modes of analysis. The rationale for seeking to do so lies, according to Bourdieu, in the fact that society is twodimensional — a ‘system of relations of power and relations of meaning between groups and classes’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 5). How this transcendence is achieved will become clear when we discuss the links of his theory of the symbolic with the method of relational structuralism (conventionally part of objectivist analyses), and with phenomenology (a typically subjectivist approach). Bourdieu’s article entitled ‘Symbolic Power’ provides a particularly clear framework for viewing the relationship between previous approaches and his theory of the symbolic (Bourdieu 1991: 163–70). It discusses explicitly (albeit schematically), the neo-Kantian tradition and its sociological version in the writings of Durkheim and Mauss, the structuralist tradition, the contribution of Marx, and the work of Weber. It also implicitly but clearly indicates how relational structuralism and phenomenology are relevant for a full appreciation of how Bourdieu reconstructs tradition in his theory. Its argument is as follows: Bourdieu identifies three types of symbolic instruments each of which has been the focus of a distinct mode of analysis. Thus we can distinguish between symbolic systems (1) as instruments of knowledge and construction of the objective world, being thereby structuring structures usually apprehended as various symbolic forms; (2) as means of communication, perceived as

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symbolic objects, and described as structured structures; (3) as instruments of power in so far as they contribute to the formation of a dominant culture which functions to integrate dominant classes while creating the false consciousness of the dominated classes. In other words, legitimating the established order by establishing distinctions or hierarchies and in turn legitimating these distinctions. From this perspective symbolic systems are instruments of domination, phenomena usually designated by the term ideology or qualified as being ideological. In Bourdieu’s conception, all symbolic systems share the three qualities noted above. They are symbolic forms capable of structuring structures; they themselves constitute structured structures; and they serve the ideological function of maintaining the dominance of the dominant and the domination of the dominated. The coming together of these aspects in Bourdieu’s theory is not however a simple additive process. It is an alternative proposal based on a critical rethinking of the implicit assumptions and methodological features of existing traditions, a rethinking we will discuss now. Relationship with Pre-existing Traditions To consider first the relationship with the neo-Kantian tradition — that of symbolic systems as symbolic forms or structuring structures, which treats the different symbolic universes (myth, language, art, and science) as instruments for knowing and constructing the world of objects, and thus views them as structuring structures alone. This idealist approach of the HumboldtCassirer tradition and its American Sapir-Whorf version moves beyond Kant in giving the mind a greater role in constructing its own reality, thereby recognizing, as Marx notes in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in The German Ideology, the ‘active aspect’ of cognition (Marx and Engels 1976: 615; Cassirer 1953; Carroll 1956). But Bourdieu chooses to go further along with Marx. He argues that this tradition is nevertheless a form of idealist intellectualism that fails to recognize that the principle of the construction of the objects of knowledge is real concrete activity —

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practical activity oriented towards practical functions — an insight that links Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic clearly to his theory of practice. Though also within the neo-Kantian tradition, the work of Panofsky is seen as being more cognizant of history, breaking with the notion of transcendental forms (Panofsky 1991). But it does not relate historical forms of perception and representation systematically to the social conditions in which they are produced and reproduced (see Bourdieu 1991: 164; Bourdieu 1986a: 218 n. 2) From this point of view, though still within the Kantian tradition, the work of Durkheim and Mauss is the proper starting point for a sociology of symbolic forms. With Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classification, symbolic forms or forms of classification cease to be universal transcendental forms, and become social forms that are arbitrary in the sense that they are relative to a particular group and are socially determined (Durkheim 1965; Durkheim and Mauss 1963). In this framework, what gives symbolic forms their objectivity and meaning is the presupposition that they are upheld by a social consensus, or an agreement of the structuring subjectivities. This places the approach squarely within the idealist tradition. While concurring with Durkheim that there is a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, Bourdieu, in place of social consensus, calls attention to variations in cognitive dispositions towards the world according to social positions and historical situations which he terms different kinds of ‘world-making’. He also deconstructs the ideas of social consensus and of a collective consciousness to reveal that they conceal the crucial political role that symbolic systems play in relation to systems of social domination and subordination. This they do, for example, by the naturalization of arbitraries, and the creation of a commonsense, or ‘doxa’, as he calls it. The existence of different kinds of ‘world making’ and a cognizance of their political functions suggests that systems of classification constitute a stake in the struggles that oppose individuals and groups in society, and lead to the emergence

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of orthodoxy that tries to formalize doxa, and to heterodoxy that opposes it. The notion of a collective consciousness is also critiqued, for hypostasizing the social, perpetuating the conventional dichotomy between the individual and the social. This prevents Durkheimian sociology from being able to provide a sound causative mechanism for the social determination of classifications. Bourdieu proposes instead that social divisions and mental schemata are structurally homologous because they are genetically linked: the latter are nothing other than the embodiment of the former in subjective dispositions which he terms the habitus. As the word ‘embodiment’ suggests, these dispositions are embedded in bodies. This positing, that the social is instituted in biological individuals, breaks down the dichotomy between the material and the symbolic, and the duality between mind and body. Furthermore, since in this view the social is instituted in individuals, it implies that there is in each biological individual something of the collective or trans-individual valid for a whole class of agents. Thus the traditional antinomy between sociology and social psychology also disappears (see Bourdieu 2000: 156–57; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 12–13). A further rupture from Durkheim’s idealism is marked by the fact that the theory does not make conscious obedience to rules or the transcendental social norm via social constraint, the determining principle of all practices (thus positing that the social world is governed by a symbolic system external to individual actors). Bourdieu sees this conception as an example of the error of misplaced concreteness and what he terms the fallacy of the rule; that is, of slipping from the model of reality to the reality of the model (Bourdieu 1986a: 29). It projects the manner in which observed regularities are systematized and constructed into an explanatory system by the sociologist, that is, consciously and logically — into the content of its explanation. In its search for the generative principles of practice, Bourdieu’s theory, in contrast, takes into account the role of unconscious and pre-conscious determinants, as well as the particular logic of practice which he terms practical logic, which is unlike abstract logic.

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Thus Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic shares with the neo-Kantian view of symbolic systems as structuring structures, a recognition of their cognitive functions, and also finds a point of departure for a sociology of symbolic forms in Durkheim’s postulate of a correspondence between mental structures and social structures. However, it moves away from the Durkheimian framework in more ways than one. It critiques the notions of social consensus and of a collective consciousness by introducing the dimensions of differentiation and power; it rejects the dichotomy between the individual and the social; it transcends the idealist mind-body duality; and it reveals the objectivist errors of Durkheim’s epistemology. Turning to the tradition of viewing symbolic systems as structured structures — there is a continuity between it and the tradition discussed above in so far as structuralism seems to provide instruments to realize the neo-Kantian ambition of grasping the specific logic of each of the symbolic forms. However, in place of the modus operandi or productive activity of consciousness, the structuralist tradition emphasizes the opus operatum or structured structures — that is the structures of consciousness and the mind itself and of symbolic forms in general. This approach owes much to Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole (de Saussure 1974: 9ff ). Identifying langue as the proper subject matter of linguistics, Saussure suggests that the essential nature of signifying systems is to be found not in the substance of their empirical instantiations but in their underlying structures, which are structured in accordance with the mechanism by which the mind performs the operation of signifying, an insight that Levi-Strauss incorporates into his study of human culture (Levi-Strauss 1967). It follows that the meaning of symbolic forms lies in their internal structure, which is logical and coherent, and can be analyzed independently of the social context in which they are found. Bourdieu critiques Saussurian linguistics as well as LeviStraussian structuralism. He finds in Saussure’s concept of langue the construction of a seemingly independent object domain

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which is in fact the idealization of a particular set of linguistic practices which have emerged historically and have certain social conditions of existence (Bourdieu 1991: 5). The alternative he suggests involves placing language as a symbolic form in the context of the social, historical, and political conditions in which it is found. It follows that speaking cannot be adequately understood as the mere realization or ‘execution’ of a pre-existing linguistic code (for that is found to be itself the product of variable socio-historical conditions), nor, by extension, can other symbolic works be seen as finished products to be deciphered by reference to a code which may be termed ‘culture’ (Bourdieu 1986a: 23). In fact, this notion of conduct, including symbolic production and its products, as execution, is an idealist construct, and as Bourdieu points out, is common to all modes of thought which he terms ‘objectivist’. This includes the structural functionalism of Durkheim and Radcliffe Brown who view social practices as realizations of the workings of a system of norms embedded in a social structure, and of the structuralism of LeviStrauss which views cultural phenomena as manifestations of the unconscious structures of the mind. It involves a viewpoint most easily adopted in elevated positions in the social space, where the social world presents itself as a spectacle seen from afar and from above, as a representation (Bourdieu 1990: 27). And once more, the error of misplaced concreteness and the fallacy of the rule, noted in the case of Durkheim’s approach, are found here as well, for structuralism takes the intellectual process by which it builds its models of reality to understand it as constituting the content of that reality. The functions of logical integration and communication attributed to symbolic systems (and as a corollary placed in the subjectivities of social agents) are a projection of the social scientist’s relationship to his/her subject matter. Concomitantly, individuals or groups are portrayed as the passive supports of forces that mechanically work out their independent logic (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 8). However, Bourdieu’s theory does owe something to structuralism. To begin with, it credits structuralism with making possible a break with the substantialist mode of thought current

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in the social sciences till well into the 1960s. The replacement of the idea that the meaning of each symbolic element in a symbolic system resides in it separately, by the insight that it is rather to be found in the structure by which other elements of the same class are related within a system, had revolutionary implications (see Bourdieu 1968: 684–85). This mode of thought, which Bourdieu terms relational structuralism, is an intrinsic part of his sociological theory, and will be discussed in some detail later. He uses it in his analysis both of symbolic systems in particular, as well as of social systems in general, of which symbolic systems are a part. This provides a key to understanding how, as structured structures, symbolic systems are efficacious as structuring structures in relation to social reality, and enable systematic comparisons between different systems. This includes discerning of structural affinities and homologies, and even relations of transformations (ibid.: 700). The critical difference, however, is that in Bourdieu’s theory, the coherence of symbolic structures emanates not from the universal structures of the human mind, but from the structures of the material and social environment that both engenders human practice (which includes the practice of symbolism), and is constructed by it. The coherence of symbolic systems is therefore not a logical coherence (except or at least to a greater extent, where it is an explicit principle of practice, as in philosophy or science), but a practical coherence. Features of symbolic systems that deviate from logical logic, such as ambiguity and polythesis, are thus comprehensible in relation to their practical functions, obeying what Bourdieu variously terms a logic of convenience, or a ‘poor’ logic, or an ‘economical’ logic.1 We will consider next the tradition that views symbolic systems as instruments of domination. The Marxian framework highlights the role that symbolic systems play as ideologies, maintaining structures of economic domination and subordination in society, while Weber — in his analysis of power — throws light on the importance of symbolic systems in legitimizing relations of power.

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Though there are strong affinities between the Marxist view of symbolic systems as supports of relations of power and Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic, there are major divergences as well (Nelson and Grossberg 1988). For one, while the Marxist conceptualization of symbolic systems as forms of consciousness or embodiments and manifestations of such forms suggests that they are intellectual constructs involving conscious thought (hence the use of the term ‘ideology’ in the Marxist tradition), Bourdieu regards the knowledge construction that constitutes symbolic systems as having nothing in common with intellectual work, but as involving, pre-eminently, an activity of practical construction, even of practical reflection, as suggested by the discussion of practical logic above (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 121). What makes symbolic systems efficacious in maintaining relations of domination is that they exert themselves, not in the pure logic of knowing consciousness, but in the obscurity of the dispositions of habitus, ‘in which are embedded the schemes of perception and appreciation which, below the level of the decisions of the conscious mind and the controls of the will, are the basis of a relationship of practical knowledge and recognition that is profoundly obscure to itself ’ (Bourdieu 2000: 171). Moreover, the habitus being embodied phenomena, genetically linked to the social structure, it follows that the scholastic notion of false consciousness and the expectation that political liberation will come from the ‘raising of consciousness’ (a point on which certain versions of Marxist thought and feminism converge) neglects the extraordinary inertia, though not immutability, which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies. In fact, Weber’s insight into the significance of legitimizing discourses in maintaining systems of power, also suffers from intellectualism, for it presupposes a free act of lucid consciousness underpinning the recognition of legitimacy (see Bourdieu 2000: 177). Bourdieu prefers to use ‘belief ’, rather than ideology, for embodied symbolic systems; he furthermore coins the term ‘symbolic violence’ for describing the process by which arbitrary forms of domination are accepted as natural and

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inevitable by individuals and groups; and uses the term ‘misrecognition’ to designate the form of cognition that is involved in the process. Further, the agreement between objective structures of the world and cognitive structures posited by Bourdieu also distinguishes his theory of symbolic violence from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, in the sense that the former requires none of the active ‘manufacturing’ of the work of ‘conviction’ entailed by the latter, and also from Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, since the work of making domination accepted is largely done by the very logic of the functioning of symbolic systems in Bourdieu’s framework of analysis (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 168 n.123). To quote, Legitimation of the social order is not . . . the product of a deliberate and purposive action of propaganda or symbolic imposition; it results, rather, from the fact that agents apply to the objective structures of the social world structures of perception and appreciation which are issued out of these very structures and which tend to picture the world as evident (Bourdieu 1989: 21).

More fundamentally, Bourdieu critiques Marxism for reducing the social world to the economic field alone, resulting in the definition of social position with reference solely to the position within the relations of economic production. In its place, Bourdieu conceives of the social space as a multidimensional space of relatively autonomous fields, even as he concedes that these are more or less strongly and directly subordinate, in their functioning and their transformations, to the field of economic production (Bourdieu 1991: 24). It follows that symbolic systems play a role in maintaining systems of domination and power defined by criteria other than economic class, such as, for example, sex and ethnicity, which, moreover, cannot always be reduced, even in the ultimate analysis, to refracted forms of economic relations. Further, in differentiated societies, according to Bourdieu, virtually every field is characterized by the existence of its dominant and dominated, with symbolic forms

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and symbolic struggles, including processes of symbolic violence and misrecognition constituting elements of the field. Bourdieu also avoids what he terms the ‘short-circuit’ effect common in Marxist criticism, consisting of the reduction of ideological products to the interests of the classes which they serve (Bourdieu 1991: 169). He notes that symbolic systems are fundamentally distinguishable according to whether they are produced and thereby appropriated by the group as a whole, as in simple, undifferentiated societies, and in the everyday symbolic struggles of groups in differentiated societies, or, on the contrary, produced by a body of specialists, and more precisely, by a relatively autonomous field of production and circulation. Where they are produced by specialists, they owe their most specific characteristics not only to the interests of the classes or class fractions they express, but also to the specific interests of those who produce them and to the specific logic of the field of production (ibid.: 168). This also provides a corrective to the ‘reflection’ theory which relates works directly to the social characteristics of the authors, or of the groups to whom they are addressed or are assumed to be addressed, neglecting the fact of the existence of the field of cultural production as a relatively autonomous social universe (Bourdieu 1996: 202). In conceptualizing the relative autonomy of the cultural field, Bourdieu credits Weber’s work on the sociology of religion for drawing his attention to the neglected area of the religious work carried out by specialist agents and their own interests (Bourdieu 1996: 181–82). But he moves away from the realist typology that informs Weber’s discussion of the same, towards a construction of the religious field (as well as of all fields) as structures of objective relations which can account for concrete forms of the interactions to be found in them (ibid.). Innovations by Synthesis In critically engaging with the three modes of analysis discussed above, Bourdieu affects an innovation by synthesis. The first

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synthesis results in the view that symbolic systems exert a structuring power in so far as they are structured. The idea is that while one key aspect of the social significance of symbolic systems is their structuring power, at the same time, what gives them this efficacy is the fact that they themselves are structured. In drawing our attention to this aspect of symbolic systems, Bourdieu brings together, within a new framework of analysis, the structuralist tradition and the neo-Kantian tradition, particularly in its structural-functionalist variant. For supposing ‘moral’ integration to be an important condition for the existence of social integration and the ‘logical’ integration of symbolic systems to be an important condition for their constitution, the contribution to social order made by symbolic systems involves both processes of the systematization of symbolic representations and of the inculcation of belief in individuals and groups in these representations. As our discussion above clarifies, this systematization, in the case of Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic, does not take place in a transcendental realm of ideas detached from social processes, or even via universal, transhistorical structures of the mind. So also, the inculcation of beliefs is neither the activity of a pure transcendental consciousness shaping the knowledge of reality, nor is it an external force, emanating from a hypostasized entity called society, acting upon passive social agents. Rather, both the coherence of symbolic systems and their constitution as systems of belief are part of a process which is critically shaped by and in turn shapes, the social and material environment in which human practice takes place. Thus, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice Bourdieu defines symbolic systems as ‘practical taxonomies, instruments of cognition and communication which are the preconditions for the establishment of meaning’ and which ‘exert their structuring efficacy only to the extent that they are themselves structured’ (Bourdieu, 1986a: 97). But as he adds in his The Logic of Practice, This does not mean that they are amenable to a purely internal (‘structural’, ‘componential’, etc.) analysis which artificially

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isolates them from their conditions of production and use and so cannot understand their social functions. The coherence that is observed in all the products of the application of the same habitus has no other basis than the coherence that the generative principles constituting that habitus derive from the social structure (the structure of relations between the groups, the sexes or the generations, or between the social classes) of which they are the product and which they tend to reproduce in a transformed, misrecognizable form, by inserting them into the structure of a system of symbolic relations (Bourdieu 1990: 95).

To elaborate on the above: the fact that a social formation has a structure means that human practices are structured, and since human practices by definition involve symbolic practices as well, symbolic systems too are structured. However, the social structures and the structures of symbolic systems embodied in the habitus in the form of a system of dispositions that are the generative principles of the practices of individuals and groups, are not thereby identical, in the sense of the latter being a direct and true representation of the former, but are rather structurally isomorphic with each other. This enables the habitus to generate practices that are both objectively and subjectively compatible with the context in which they occur. This is so even as the symbolic component of the habitus may reproduce the principles of the social structure in a transformed and misrecognizable form, with this transformation and misrecognition playing a crucial role in the reproduction of the social order, and with symbolic systems sometimes, and to an extent, even overdetermining social structures with their specific symbolic effects. This underlines the fact that the structure of symbolic systems, as indeed the very fact that they are structured, is an important characteristic that makes them efficacious as structuring structures, capable of structuring human practices including the construction of reality and also thereby the social and material environment in which practice takes place. It also means that a proper analysis of their structures has to take into account the logic of the practices of which they form part, as

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well as of the social structures in which they are produced, and in which they circulate. The second synthesis affected by Bourdieu leads to the view that it is as structured and structuring instruments that symbolic systems fulfil their political function as instruments of domination. For while as Durkheim’s structuring structures and LeviStrauss’s structured structures, symbolic systems remain unrelated to systems of power (except in the sense that social solidarity in the structural-functionalist tradition is seen to rest on a shared symbolic system), Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic engages centrally with the relationship between the two. That symbolic systems are efficacious as instruments of domination because they are capable of structuring and are themselves structured, suggests the particular power of processes of symbolic construction and symbolic communication in maintaining systems of social domination — in other words, of the specific contribution of what Bourdieu terms symbolic power, to any system of power.2 He brings to light the fact that apart from what is obtained through force, whether physical or economic, the different classes and class fractions in society are engaged in a symbolic struggle, properly speaking, aimed at imposing the definition of the social world that is best suited to their interests. Symbolic systems thus bring their own distinctive power to bear on the relations of power which underlie them, through the process of symbolic violence, that is, the creation of a belief in the legitimacy of relations of domination, which involves their structuring efficacy as structured systems. Moreover, as we have noted earlier, these symbolic struggles are engaged in by classes, either directly, in the symbolic conflicts of everyday life, or else via the struggle between the different specialists in symbolic production. And since the field of symbolic production is a relatively autonomous field, this means that even as the field of symbolic production is a microcosm of the symbolic struggle between classes, nevertheless, it is only by serving their own interests in the struggle within the field of production (and only to this extent) that producers serve the interests of groups outside the field of production. Thus, for

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instance, it is possible for ideologues of the dominant class — i.e., of the economically dominant class, who are engaged in symbolic production including that of defining the principles of social hierarchization, to appropriate for their own benefit the power to define the social world that they hold by delegation, such as by tending, as they do, to set the specific capital to which they owe their position, which Bourdieu terms cultural capital, at the top of the hierarchy of the principles of hierarchization.3 Transformations through Linkages Apart from critically synthesizing existing traditions of analysis, Bourdieu also links his theory with relational structuralism and phenomenology, but once again through a critique. Relational Structuralism As noted earlier, the fact that Bourdieu employs the relational mode of thought both in his analysis of symbolic systems in particular, as well as in general, of social systems, of which symbolic systems are a part, enables him to make systematic comparisons between different systems (not just in a particular society or culture, but also in societies at different points of time in history, and between societies and cultures), including the discernment of structural affinities and even possible relations of transformation. This has important consequences, enabling us to understand, for example, how, while conceiving the cultural field as a relatively autonomous structure of objective relations, Bourdieu can posit the possibility of homologies between it and the field of social classes, such that, for instance, the ideological systems that specialists produce in and for the struggle over the monopoly of legitimate ideological production, reproduce in a misrecognizable form, the structure of the field of social classes.4 What brings into being structural and functional homologies between fields, is the fact that there are shared properties between fields which Bourdieu considers general laws of the functioning of fields, which are invariant across

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different fields. For each field is conceived of by Bourdieu as a space of social positions, constructed on the basis of a principle of differentiation or distribution of a set of properties active within the field — i.e., capable of conferring strength or power within it (which Bourdieu terms various forms of capital). Each field, moreover, is a field of struggle, with specific stakes and interests, irreducible to those of other fields. Generally speaking, the struggle for which a field is the site, has for stakes the monopoly of legitimate violence, or of the specific authority characteristic of the field under consideration, which is also a struggle for the conservation or subversion of the structure of the distribution of capital specific to the field. Indeed, the field as a whole is defined as a system of deviations on different levels and nothing, either in the institutions or in the agents, the acts or the discourses they produce, has meaning except relationally, by virtue of the interplay of oppositions and distinctions (Bourdieu 1991: 185).

The fact of homologies between the field of social class and that of ideological production makes the latter efficacious in maintaining the system of class because of the existence of invariants governing the structures of different fields, in conjunction with the existence of a logic specific to each field. Thus, the ideological function of the field of ideological production is performed almost automatically. But the distance between Bourdieu’s use of the method of relational structuralism and its use in natural sciences and in social science structuralism can clearly be seen in his observation that [to] give primacy to the study of the relations between objective relations rather than to the study of the relations between the agents and these relations, or to ignore the question of the relationship between these two types of relations, leads to the realism of the structure which, taking the place of the realism of the element, hypostasizes the systems of objective relations in already constructed totalities, outside the history of the individual or the group. Without falling into a naive subjectivism

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or ‘personalism’, one must remember that ultimately, objective relations do not exist and do not really realize themselves except in and through the system of dispositions, produced by the internalization of objective conditions (Bourdieu 1968: 705).

Furthermore, and very pertinent from the point of view of his analysis of symbolic phenomena, Bourdieu attempts in his work to establish [an] adequate knowledge both of the space of objective relations between the different positions which constitute the field and of the necessary relations that are set up, through the mediation of the habitus of those who occupy them, between these positions and the points of view on that very space, which play a part in the reality and development of that space (Bourdieu 1991: 242).

Significantly, too, with reference both to individuals and to groups, habitus is the unifying principle of practices in different domains, the locus of practical realization of the ‘articulation’ of fields which objectivism from Parsons to the structuralist readers of Marx lays out side by side without securing the means of discovering the real principle of the structural homologies or relations of transformation objectively established between them (Bourdieu 1986a: 83–84).

The link between the systems of dispositions and fields is clear in the fact that the habitus, as a system of durable dispositions, exists as a potential for action in every individual, and determines, in the first instance, the inclination to take part in the struggles characterizing particular social fields, with the choice, usually unconscious, of these fields, being contingent on the existence of the pertinent capabilities within the habitus. The specific strategies of agents and the results of their actions, are, however, necessarily dependent on the individual skills of a player, and on the quantity and quality of the capital which an individual agent or group can mobilize in struggles, so that any given practice is the combined outcome of the activation

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of habitus and deployment of capital, within the parameters of the logic governing a field, which has its own specific structure. We should, however, remind ourselves here of the fact that while the structure of the symbolic systems constitutive of the habitus are generated by objective structures, the two may be identical in structure, but not necessarily in content, so that the former may reproduce the principles of the social structure in a transformed and misrecognizable form, thus contributing to the efficacy of symbolic systems in maintaining relations of domination and subordination. Link with Phenomenology While acknowledging that relational structuralism facilitates the recognition of aspects of social reality which can be dealt with as a system with an immanent necessity independent of individuals’ consciousness and will, and which can therefore be explored in the same way as are relationships among facts of the physical world, Bourdieu necessarily engages with certain traditions of analysis that explore the reality of subjective experience as well. From the point of view of method, the supercession of the seemingly antagonistic paradigms of what Bourdieu calls social physics, or a form of ‘objectivism’, and social phenomenology, which can be termed ‘subjectivism’, involves turning them into moments of a form of analysis capable of capturing the intrinsically double reality of the social world. As regards various forms of social phenomenology, Bourdieu concedes that they do provide rich descriptions of the subjective experience of the social world as self-evident which social theory has to take account of, and that they are quite right in recognizing that mundane knowledge, subjective meaning, and practical competency play a part in the continual production of society. But they fail to explain the feeling of self-evidence, and also cannot fully understand practical understanding. According to Bourdieu, the feeling of self evidence that characterizes the subjective experience of being in the world can only be understood in terms of the notion of habitus, since the

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immediate understanding that agents obtain of the world is the result of applying to it forms of knowledge derived from the history and structure of the very world to which they apply them. Moreover, phenomenologists ignore the political dimension of the perception of the world as self-evident which Bourdieu incorporates into his analysis through the notion of misrecognition. He points out that while the political function of classifications is likely to pass unnoticed in the case of relatively undifferentiated social formations, in which the prevailing classificatory system encounters no rival or antagonistic principle, a change takes place in situations of crisis. The adjustment between the order of things and the order of bodies which characterizes the doxic mode of existence, forms the basis of the political action of legitimation, with guardians of the symbolic order, whose interests are bound up with commonsense, trying to restore the initial self evidences of doxa, and the political action of subversion trying to liberate the potential capacity for refusal, which is neutralized by misrecognition. This is by performing a critical unveiling of the founding violence masked by the feeling of self-evidence (see Bourdieu 2000: 187). As regards practical understanding, Bourdieu points out that phenomenologists are unable to see that the principle of practical comprehension is not a knowing consciousness but the practical sense of a habitus, which, as we have noted earlier, is constituted by schemes of perception, appreciation, and action that are often not conscious. Indeed, as in the case of ethnomethodology, they attribute unjustified autonomy and importance to linguistic schemes, which are only one aspect of the system of habitus (Bourdieu 1986a: 123–24). Moreover, tending to be ahistorical and antigenetic, phenomenology does not perceive the social classifications and social meanings it draws attention to, in relation to the social experiences in the course of which they are acquired, and which, as Bourdieu points out, are always situated and dated (Bourdieu 2000: 136). In fact, being the product of incorporation of the structures and tendencies of the world, the schemes of habitus that inform practical knowledge, make it possible for them to adapt endlessly to

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partially modified contexts, and to construct the situation as a complex whole endowed with meaning, including a quasi-bodily anticipation of the immanent tendencies of the field, and also of other behaviours engendered by isomorphic habitus (ibid.: 130). Thus even subjective hopes and related emotional experiences can be analyzed in terms of the dialectic of habitus and structures. As Bourdieu puts it, ‘through the dispositions of the habitus (themselves adjusted, most of the time, to agents’ positions) expectations tend universally to be roughly adapted to the objective chances’ (Bourdieu 2000: 216). By analysing how commonsense is produced by this dialectic, Bourdieu provides a mode of understanding which is far removed from the Schutzian mode, in which the adequacy of explanatory models is validated in terms of the consistency of the constructs of the social scientist with the constructs of commonsense experience of the social reality (Bernstein 1985: 156). Thus, for instance, even though Bourdieu is an admirer of the work of Goffman, who, as he writes, ‘[through] the subtlest, most fugitive indices of social interaction, grasped the logic of the work of representation; that is to say, the whole set of strategies with which social subjects strive to construct their identity, to shape their social image, in a word, to produce a show,’ he has serious reservations about symbolic interactionism as a method of social analysis in general (Bourdieu 1983: 112–13). For by describing practices as strategies explicitly oriented by reference to the anticipated cues as to the reaction to practices in situations of interaction, symbolic interactionism ignores the role of precognitive or corporeal knowledge in processes of interaction, including the sensing of imperceptible cues of bodily hexis via a habitus which is a product of past social experiences and which, as a shared system of dispositions, orchestrates collective action, without conscious intervention. More generally, it ignores the fact that ‘interpersonal’ relations are never, except in appearance, individual to individual relationships; that the truth of the interaction is never entirely contained in the interaction. It is to forget, as Bourdieu clarifies, that interaction owes its form to the objective structures which have produced the dispositions

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of the interacting agents, which, moreover, allot them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere (Bourdieu 1986a: 81–82). Indeed, ‘the sense of one’s place’, as Goffman puts it, is, according to Bourdieu, part of each agent’s practical, bodily knowledge of her present and potential position in the social space, and is ‘converted into a sense of placement which governs her experience of the place occupied, defined absolutely and above all relationally as a rank, and the way to behave in order to keep it and to keep within it’ (Bourdieu 2000: 184; Goffman 1961). It is this practical knowledge that orients interventions in the symbolic struggles of everyday life which contribute to the construction of the social world, ‘less visibly but just as effectively as the theoretical struggles that take place within the specialized fields, especially the political, bureaucratic, juridical, and scientific ones, that is, in the order of symbolic, mostly discursive, representations’ (Bourdieu 2000: 184). Nevertheless Bourdieu does take into account discursive forms of knowledge as well, including the fact that practical sense itself is capable of being made explicit in several ways. This, significantly, leads to the relative independence, with respect to position, of explicit position-taking, or verbally stated opinion, and opens the way for the specifically political action of representation (Bourdieu 2000: 184). As this suggests, by focusing on processes of the construction of meaning in situations of person-to-person interaction alone, not only is symbolic interactionism unable to fully explain the situation of interaction itself; it is also unable to bring within its purview other contexts of the creation of meaning, such as the field of politics and the specialized fields of symbolic and cultural production, which, independently and in articulation with the world of everyday symbolic struggles, play an important role in shaping the subjective experience of the social world. Thus, Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic does not negate the value of phenomenological descriptions of subjective experience, and even builds on certain insights it provides, such as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bodily experience as part of the

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process of the construction of meaning (see Merleau-Ponty 1962). However, it relates subjectivity (which is not defined purely in terms of consciousness) to objective social structures, in a dialectic that goes beyond the immediate context of subjective experience in time and in space, but is at the same time materially and historically grounded. This also includes a focus on how structures of subjectivity play a role in power struggles in general, through the embodiment and effect of the differentially distributed power of symbolic capital. Conclusion The discussion in this article of the points of convergence and divergence between Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic and the other traditions of analysis that he engages with and critically incorporates in his theory is not an attempt to reconstruct the process by which the theory has been constructed, but a step towards an appreciation of some of its distinctive features in relation to the theoretical trends that have influenced it. Thus, in contrast to the idealism of the neo-Kantian tradition, including its sociological version in the work of Durkheim and Mauss, Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic, even while recognizing the cognitive function of symbolic systems, and finding in the work of Durkheim and Mauss the beginnings of a properly sociological approach to symbolic phenomena, is a materialist theory linked to a sociological perspective that is critical of structural functionalism. Furthermore, it is a theory that views symbolic systems as cognitive instruments that are themselves structured and thus finds in the structuralist tradition some useful tools for the internal analysis of these forms. However, it transforms the internalist readings structuralism offers by opening them up to relate symbolic forms to the practices of which they form a part and the social and material environments in which they exist. Thus, even as Bourdieu accepts the idea that as structured structures, symbolic systems are effective instruments of communication, he rejects the idealist postulate of structuralism that relates symbolic systems to universal structures of the human mind.

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We have also seen that Bourdieu’s theory is one that recognizes the political functions of symbolic systems, which the Durkheimian and structuralist traditions do not take into account, but which are part of the Marxist and Weberian perspectives. However, while it incorporates some of the insights of these two thinkers, Bourdieu’s theory rejects certain basic features, both of their conceptualizations of symbolic systems, as well as of their analyses of social reality in general. Thus, the fact that by recognizing the cognitive, communicative, and ideological aspects of symbolic systems, Bourdieu synthesizes disparate perspectives, is a feature of his theory of the symbolic whose distinctiveness is related to the distinctiveness of his overall sociological approach. This makes it something other than a mere eclectic putting together of diverse perspectives. Indeed, as noted in the beginning, an important feature of Bourdieu’s sociology is the attempt to transcend the opposition between objectivist and subjectivist modes of analysis. Our discussion of Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic in relation to the method of relational structuralism and in relation to phenomenology, apart from taking us closer to some characteristic features of his theory, brings to the fore the rationale for Bourdieu’s refusal to accept this dichotomy, and some key aspects of the manner in which he overcomes it.

Notes 1. Polythesis refers to the form of relations (between terms, etc.) produced and used in different situations, and never brought face to face in practice, which are practically compatible though logically contradictory, involving what logicians call ‘the confusion of spheres’. Their meanings are produced and used polythetically, that is to say, one after another and one by one, or step by step (Bourdieu 1986a: 107, 110). 2. Bourdieu defines symbolic power as the power of constructing reality (Bourdieu 1991: 166). 3. Cultural capital may be defined as a form of knowledge, an internalized code or a cognitive acquisition which equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for, or competence in deciphering cultural relations

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and cultural artefacts, and which exists either in the embodied state, or in an objectified state, including in the form of cultural goods or academic qualifications, i.e., in an objectified form which is institutionalized (Bourdieu 1986b). 4. It should be noted, however, that according to Bourdieu the relations of the other fields to the field of economic production are both relations of structural homology and relations of causal dependence, the form of causal determinations being defined by structural relations and the form of domination being greater when the relations in which it is exercised are closer to the relations of economic production (Bourdieu 1991: 246).

References Bernstein, Richard J. 1985. The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. Oxford: Methuen and Co. Ltd. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1968. ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’. Trans. A. Zanotti-Karp. Social Research 35 (4): 681–706. ———. (1982) 1983. ‘Goffman, le découvreur de l’ infiniment petit’. Le Monde, 4 December: 1 and 30. Trans. by R. Nice, ‘Erving Goffman: Discoverer of the Infinitely Small’. Theory, Culture and Society. 11 (1): 112–13. ———. 1985. ‘The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and Field’. Sociocriticism. 11 (2): 11–24. ———. (1972/2000) 1977/1986a. Esquisse d’ une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ ethnologie kabyle. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Trans. by R. Nice, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1983/1992) 1986b. ‘Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital’, trans. by R. Kreckel, Soziale Welt, 2: 183– 98/ reprinted in idem, Die verborgenen Mechanismen der Macht. Hamburg: VSA Verlag, pp. 49–79. Trans. by R. Nice, ‘The Forms of Capital’. In John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. London: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–58. ———. 1989. ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’. Sociological Theory. 7 (1): 14–25. ———. (1980) 1990. Le sens pratique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by R. Nice, The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. (1982) 1991. Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by G. Raymond and M. Adamson, Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (1992) 1996. Les règles de l’ art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by Susan Emanuel, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (1994) 1998. Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’ action. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by R. Johnson, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (1997) 2000. Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. Trans. R. Nice, Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and J.-C. Passeron. (1970) 1977. La reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du systéme d’ enseignement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by R. Nice, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc J. Wacquant. 1992. Réponses. Pour une anthropologie reflexive. Trans. by L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Carroll, John B. (ed.). 1956. Language, Thought and Society: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Cassirer, Ernst. 1953. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press. de Saussure, F. (1973/1967–74) 1974. Cours de linguistique générale. (ed.) Tullio de Mauro. Paris: Payot/ critical edn (ed.) Rudolf Engler. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Trans. by Wade Baskin, Course in General Linguistics. Glasgow: Collins. Durkheim, Emile. 1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive Classification. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1967. Structural Anthropology, Vol. 1. New York: Anchor Books. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1976. The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg (eds). 1988. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1991. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books.

The Field of Indian Knowledge in France in the 1930s as Reality and as Fiction


Roland Lardinois

M

ost of the authors studying ‘Orientalism’ not only lump together different national traditions of Indian knowledge into a single western tradition of orientalist scholarship, they also lack an understanding of the social and intellectual differences at work within the orientalist scholarship itself (Inden 1990). Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of field helps us to break away from these macro-historical and sociological approaches. It enables us to consider the specificity of the social and intellectual space in which orientalist knowledge is produced, as well as the internal differentiations of the orientalist producers themselves. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to look at orientalist scholarship in France in the interwar period as a specific field of cultural production. The sociological definition of the field of Indian scholarship is a stake within the field, as it involves the definition of the resources that the agents should possess to be included in or excluded from the field itself. I would therefore like to focus on the sociological construction of the field of Indian scholarship and its internal structure, basing myself on two different sets of materials. One will be a statistical analysis of a prosopographic1 survey. But I will also juxtapose this analysis with a piece of literary fiction written by René Daumal who was very much located in the field in the 1930s. I contend that there is

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a partial homology between the structure of the world depicted in the novel and the structure of the field of Indian knowledge as sociological analysis revealed it. But outlining this homology also raises the issue of the relationship between the fiction and the reality that the narrator intends to represent in his narrative. From a sociological point of view, how should we analyse the many links between the inner word of the poet, his involvement in the mundane literary field and the understanding produced by the sociologist? In this regard, my use of Daumal’s fiction is akin to the use of Flaubert’s L’ Éducation sentimentale by Bourdieu in his understanding of the literary field. So, from this point of view, this article also intends to be a contribution to the sociology of the literary field in France in the 1930s. René Daumal’s A Night of Serious Drinking In 1938, René Daumal (1908–1944), a young poet very much attracted by the Orient like many surrealists in the interwar period, and a self-taught Sanskritist who Louis Dumont met briefly at the beginning of the 1930s, published one of the few novels he has written: La Grande Beuverie (A Night of Serious Drinking).2 This short fiction is not at all realistic. At first reading, this comic récit seems more a piece of nonsense written by a poet in his youth, rather than a serious novel. However, informed by the biography of René Daumal, I propose to read this narrative as a kind of mockery of the field of cultural production and, more precisely, of the field of Indian knowledge in France in the 1930s. A Night of Serious Drinking is a humorous piece of writing telling the story of the dream of a young man, the narrator, after he experienced a night of drinking with a few friends. Trying to leave the room where they had their drinking bout, the narrator climbs up a staircase and enters a loft which happens to be a sick bay. There, he discovers an entire world of fantasy inhabited by people called the Escapees because they have escaped from the lower depths, or the real world. Then, guided by a medical orderly, the narrator visits the capital of this world where the Top Escapees live.

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Let us first focus on the second and main section of the book, ‘The Artificial Paradise’, and consider the structure of this world of fantasy as the orderly himself presents it to the narrator (we may consider both of them as Daumal’s spokesmen). This world is made of three ‘concentric areas’ labelled according to the types of people living there. The first are the Fidgeters, who are opposed to the two others groups, the Fabricators of useless articles and the Clarificators. Within the area where the Fidgeters live, people have ‘money and status’ (p. 43), they live in ‘gaming rooms’, sit ‘around a roulette table’ and play ‘for very high stakes’ (p. 41); they call their activity ‘governing’, but it brings ‘a swarm of disasters’ (p. 43). In fact, Daumal makes the Fidgeters a caricature of the world system of power where dominant and dominated countries struggle with one another. However, says the narrator, the players do not belong to a particular nation; they are ‘men of every race and colour, each with his national flag’ (p. 41) whose game is ordered by a croupier, a sort of Janus with a head like a ‘double-hemisphere world map’: on one side ‘were grouped all the mother countries and on the other were all the colonies’. All these men play with soldiers, tanks, missionaries, Bible, linotype machines, modern schools, and so forth. But, whatever they played with, they always use the same currency, the same money which goes ‘under the generic name of civilization’ (p. 42). If the Fidgeters are characterized by ‘fortune and status’, which can be translated into economic capital giving them power and related honour, they are opposed to the Fabricators and to the Clarificators who are both ‘living in the world of ideas’ (p. 44), that is the world of cultural production. But this intellectual world is itself split between Art (Fabricators) and Sciences (Clarificators). And each side is again divided in different clans and sub-clans, as the orderly explains it. On the Art side, the Fabricators are divided between Fabricators of useless articles (the Artists proper) and Fabricators of Useless Utterances (the producers of literature). And Daumal details the internal division of this last group, distinguishing three subclans: the Pwatts, the Nibblists and the Kirittiks — where we

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easily recognize the poets, the novelists and the critics, the leading characters belonging to any literary field. However, ‘there is a host of secondary types of Fabricators’, like painters, musicians and actors to name a few, whom the narrator also visits. On the Sciences side, the Explicators are divided into three clans. The two extreme types are the Scienters and the Sophers: ‘the first attempt to explain things and the second explain anything the first are unable to explain’ (p. 64). And in the middle, ‘between the laboratories of the Scienters and the retreats of the Sophers, unclassifiable Classificators, rejected by each group in turn, come and go’ (p. 77). Within these unclassifiable or ambiguous Classificators, we find groups like the Psychographers, the Anthropographers, the Politologists, the Logologists and other curious types of scholars. In other words, the humanities or the social sciences seem to be already caught, for Daumal, between hard sciences and philosophy. But Daumal not only specifies these internal divisions of the field of cultural production according to the main occupations of its agents, he also takes into account a second division running through the Fabricators and the Explicators according to the types of public that each group is addressing. First, there are ‘small numbers of the public’ (p. 47) who are so infected by the Fabricators and the Explicators that they stay with them permanently. But the remaining public — accounting for the second type — ‘turn up in their spare time, visit the museums, listen to lectures and concerts and read in the librairies’(p. 47). In contrast to the happy few who are highly concerned with the cultural productions of the Fabricators and the Explicators, the mass of the public is negatively defined: ‘they have never known how to make anything’ (p. 47); they have never felt they might have something to do or to write; and they do not really understand what the Fabricators and the Explicators are producing. Finally, they are left with nothing but blind admiration for those artists. If we analyse the features of the different clans and sub-clans visited by the narrator, we are able to order very roughly most of the cultural producers represented in this world of fantasy,

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first, according to their specific occupations and, second, either to the restricted or to the large-scale public they are adressing (see Figure 1). Figure 1 The Field of Power and the Fields of Cultural Production according to René Daumal’s A Night of Serious Drinking Fortune Fidgeters Governing as a world game Mother countries Tanks Soldiers

Colonies

Modern schools

Missionaries Bible

Rest of the public

↑ Inspiration

Sophers

⏐ Passive Pwatts ⏐ Aeshetishams Astromancers ⏐ ⏐ Realist painters ⏐ Nakiñchanamourti Philophasists ⏐ Biographers ⏐Sanscruting language Painters for pleasure ⏐ ⏐ Politologists ⏐ Fabricators ←⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→ Cathedral Clarificators ⏐ ⏐ Psychographers Krittiks Fabricators of⏐holy water ⏐ Mnemographers Anthropographers ⏐ ⏐Logologists ⏐ of language Abstract painters Legislators ⏐Purificateurs of accounts Pure materia prima of poetry ⏐ Mathematicians Active Pwatts Logical rigor ⏐ ⏐ Reason Scienters ↓ of public Small numbers World of Ideas

However, the analysis is not complete without noting that Daumal, ironically, locates at the very centre of his imagined

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city a cathedral around which are clustered every imaginable place of worship: chapels, mausoleums, pagodas, stupas, mosques, synagogues. And in the religious district so delineated in the core of the city are located factories producing ‘Holy water’ under the supervision of a bizarre professor named Mumu. It appears as if the entire intellectual world toured by the narrator moves around these religious symbols which overwhelmed the field with a religious atmosphere. To understand the function of this religious cultural capital objectified in churches, it has to be related to the struggle between the Sophers and the Scienters, as Daumal describes it in his novel. The latter, as defenders of materialism, ‘apply the experimental method exclusively to material objects’ (p. 69); the Sophers can only but react against the Scienters by defending their spiritual or religious position for their belief is in a world exclusively driven by ideas and values and not by wordly matters. So, in this struggle between the material and the spiritual, ‘Holy water’ is produced to be injected into the veins of the most infected of the scienters to cure them of their scientism, thus reconciling ‘science with faith’. These ‘Delusions of Paradise’ (Paradis artificiels) depicted by Daumal can be understood as a metaphor of the social world split between the field of power above, and the field of cultural production below (structured by the main oppositions underlined earlier). Futhermore, we can look at the field of cultural production described by Daumal as a metaphor of the field of Indian knowledge in France in the 1930s, in which the author was himself located. Two remarks on this point. First, the narrator, the hero of the novel, finds his double when he encounters a character named Aham Egomet who is enquiring about the city where he lives temporarily. We recognize in his first name, Aham, the nominative singular of the personal pronoun ‘I’ in the Sanskrit language. Second, among the Philo-Sophers inhabiting the city, the narrator met a Master or a guru, a young Tibetan named Nankiñchanamourti (i.e., the Theosophist Krishnamurti whom Daumal met at that time), ‘trustee of all wisdom’ (p. 82), who is associated with the Philophasists or the scholars studying

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‘the language of Sanscruting’. (In eighteenth century France, ‘Sanscroutam’ was a reference to the Sanskrit language.) This ‘Buddha-guru’ teaches disciples and especially women, and his utterances are full of words loaded with ‘esoteric sense’ that have to be deciphered. Not surprisingly, his utterances seem to be attuned with the prayers that large crowds sang ‘to glorify the name of the Lord’ when they congregate in their cathedral or in other religious institutions. Daumal, a self-taught Sanskritist, was closely associated with different kinds of prophets very active in the intellectual field in the 1930s. At the same time he strongly denounced, in a typical surrealist vein, all kind of religious sects and esoteric prophecies. In light of this, A Night of Serious Drinking appears to be the enacting of an analysis of the field of Indian knowledge but in a literary form which seems to be a denial of the analysis itself. So, it is only in confronting the structure of the novel with the structure of the field, and within it the trajectory and the position of Daumal himself, that we can properly understand the underlying meanings of his récit and reconstruct the principles by which it has been generated. The Genesis of Indian Scholarship The emergence of an autonomous academic space devoted to the study of non-western civilizations may be understood as a combination of three basic factors: first, the development of a market for a particular type of cultural goods, i.e., orientalist knowledge; second, the existence of a corps of specialists, the orientalists as scholars working within different disciplines and attached to particular erudite institutions; and third, learned societies and journals acting as agents of legitimation of the orientalist knowledge produced by those specialists. In the case of France, the development of a modern academic space devoted to orientalist scholarship started in the aftermath of the French Revolution with the foundation, in 1795, of the École des langues orientales vivantes (School for Living Oriental Languages; hereafter L’O). Although this historical process was not linear, its

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major landmarks can be outlined broadly. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, we witness, first (in 1814), the establishment of two chairs devoted to Sanskrit and Chinese languages respectively at the Collège de France and, second (in 1821), the foundation of the Société Asiatique. Then, in 1868, a new school modelled on the German university system and devoted to erudite scholarship, the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) was founded in Paris (Charle 1994: 21–59). Within this school, Indian knowledge was taught at the Fourth section ascribed to philological and historical studies, and at the Fifth section (opened in the middle of the 1880s) devoted to religious studies. The foundation of the EPHE was followed, in the 1870s, by the setting up of few chairs of Indian studies at the universities of Paris and Lyon, then by the creation, between 1898–1900, of the École française d’ Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and, finally, by the opening at Paris, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of the Guimet Museum. Aided by new orientalist publishing houses like Ernest Leroux, Adrien Maisonneuve and Paul Geuthner, the French orientalists also had their learned collections and journals primarily Journal asiatique (JA), the Bulletin de l’ École française d’ Extrême-Orient (BEFEO) and a late-comer, the Revue des arts asiatiques (RAA) published by the Guimet Museum from the middle of the 1920s. The foundation of the Institut de civilization indienne (attached to the Sorbonne) initiated by Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935) in 1927, may be seen as a landmark in the process of the development of an autonomous field of Indian knowledge, which began more than a century ago (Lardinois 2003–4). Although the sheer number of teachers delivering courses in Indian studies at Paris was still limited in the years before the Second World War (being no more than 15 scholars), almost all the disciplines were taught covering the area then called ‘Greater India’ from Iran to Cambodia and South-East Asia.3 Paris was then the main geographical and social centre for orientalist scholarship in France. A small group of scholars either born or educated at Paris, at the Sorbonne and the EPHE, being members of the French School for the Far East or curators in French museums

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(either at the Guimet Museum or the Louvre), simultaneously held different institutional positions in the field. This contributed objectively and subjectively to the general feeling that scholars of India were a true ‘academic community’, sharing the same intellectual interests and being united around Sylvain Lévi, the guru, as both his students and disciples use to call him, and who exercised for about half a century his scholarship from the Collège de France and the EPHE. To be or Not to be an Indian Scholar If the historical genesis of orientalist scholarship helps us to delineate the main institutions which produced most of the academic research on India during the interwar period, we should however be careful about the ‘institutionnal effect’ induced by this kind of history that might influence the sociological construction of the field. The official representation produced by the dominant institutions acting as selecting agencies of the legitimate academic orientalist scholarship may seek to ignore the less legitimate agents who may not have an institutional position. In any field of cultural production, the definition of the resources required to be efficient in it is itself a stake within the field. Therefore, in selecting the agents involved in the field of Indian scholarship, we should pay attention to those who might be rejected on its margins. Their positions as well as their intellectual production might also reveal some stakes far less explicit amongst the most savant groups of the space of Indian knowledge. To break with this official representation of the field, we can use two empirical tools. First, let us evaluate the market for intellectual goods devoted to India through a quantitative analysis of the books and pamphlets published in France in the years between the wars (1920–1940). Although it is not easy to number those publications from different sources which do not always use the same categories to classify the books, we may nevertheless calculate it to be approximately 400 books (including translations into French) equally distributed between the two

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decades. These publications can be divided into three main categories sharing, broadly, an equal part of the market during these years. Savant publications comprise 36.5 per cent of the total; literary production (including fictions, travelogues and journalistic essays) 29.2 per cent of the market; and Christian missionaries and spiritualist pamphlets 33.3 per cent (1 per cent unknown). But from the first to the second decade, we notice some revealing changes. First, the percentage of savant production increases from 30.6 per cent in 1920–1929 to 43.1 per cent in 1930–1939, which can be accounted for by the development and growth of Indological scholarship. Second, the most significant change affects the third group, devoted to spiritualist publications. Between 1920 and1929, the main part of these publications are made of the Theosophist pamphlets issued by the eponymous movement and accounting for 30.2 per cent of the total, the missionaries’ publications being no more than 6.3 per cent. But in the next decade (1930–1939), Theosophist pamphlets dwindle to a mere 13.9 per cent as they meet with competition from publications on yoga and neo-Hinduism (mainly Aurobindo’s essays being translated into French) which now gather 10.4 per cent of the market from being almost non-existent in the previous decade. The percentage of Christian missionnaries’ publications remained stable at 6 per cent of the total. The growth of publications dealing with Hindu spirituality in the 1930s is linked to the emergence of a new kind of student attending courses at the EPHE in the years preceding the Second World War. But the intellectual demand of those groups was not well adjusted to the offer made by Sanskrit scholars, and some of them vigorously reacted to this new public. For example, Louis Renou expressed it strongly, remembering this period many years later: ‘makers of simulacrum, theosophists, occultists ( . . . ) lay waste the borders of Indian scholarship’ (Renou 1964: 32).4 For the sociologist the borders of Indian scholarship may reveal some stakes which might be repressed by academics located at the centre of the field. To overcome this, we turn to a second tool — reading carefully different reviews of the

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development of Indian knowledge in France, written by scholars after the Second World War, in the 1950s. The names mentioned or omitted in these reviews attest that there was no consensus among the academics to decide who should or should not be included in the field of Indian studies. I will consider four examples. First, Jules Bloch (1951: 114–24) states that among the savants Paul Pelliot, although a sinologist, ‘is entitled to be an Indianist’; and among the non-academics, Jules Bloch quotes the name of Jean Herbert, the translator of Aurobindo’s book (1942) into French, and who was also close to Romain Rolland. Second, Paul Masson-Oursel (1953: 351)mentions almost without restriction in his review the names and the works of Romain Rolland as well as René Guénon underlining for the latter author ‘his violent critique, often very strong, of the so-called superiority of the West’. Third, Jean Filliozat (1953: 566) in the very Indological Manuel d’ études indiennes (vol. 2) associates, in the same chapter dealing with Mahayana Buddhist doctrine, the Belgian Sanskritist Louis de La Vallée Poussin with Father Henri de Lubac (2000) who published for the layman a history of The Encounter between Buddhism and the Occident.5 Fourth, and last, the sinologist Paul Demiéville (1958) is the only one strictly adhering to an academic survey of the development of Indian knowldge around the time of the Second World War. Those facts, considered together with Renou’s opinion quoted earlier, bear testimony that savants and prophets of all kinds who either struggled together or ignored one another, nevertheless shared a similar intellectual interest in the study of Indian society. Whether they agreed or not, both fought for the monopoly of the legitimate discourse to tell the truth about India, and so contributed to the construction of the field of production of discourses on the Indian social world. Restricting the sociological analysis of this field only to the academic groups prevents the understanding of the knowledge effects that the less legitimate agents may have produced in a particular historical stage of the field where the relationship between the different groups is not so closed as some academic scholars might think.

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Therefore, the aim here is to analyse the structure of the field of Indian knowledge (to put it simply) in considering all the agents who have been involved in the study of India in the 1930s, without any judgement on the merit of their works. The 1930s has been taken as the decade of reference for two reasons. First, the death of Sylvain Lévi in 1935 and the beginning of the Second World War put an end to a historical period when Indian studies in France were completely dominated by Sanskritists and their Indological approach. Second, the sociology of India developed by Louis Dumont in the 1950s owes a large part of its theoretical framework to the state of the field as it was structured when Dumont entered it as a student in the 1930s. The survey includes all the authors of books, articles or review articles dealing with India at large. They have been selected on the basis of membership in orientalist institutions, publications in orientalist journals as well as non-specialist ones (particularly major literary journals like the Nouvelle revue française (NRF) and some other less known literary journals); also included are authors of books on India being reviewed in these journals as well as contributors to permanent chronicles on Indian subjects (at large) either in academic or non-academic journals. The population which adds up to 111 individuals should be taken as a significant selection of the agents active in this field during these years. I collected prosopographic data relevant to these individuals and classified them into 47 variables, to a total of 131 modalities. The article aims to give a comprehensive description of the field, by sketching out its general structure; I will present here the main results of the statistical analysis without dealing with the technical aspects of the method.6 The Double Structure of the Field of Indian Knowledge In the 1930s, the field of production of discourses on India was structured by two sets of oppositions that were historically grounded. The first divided the population according to the total volume of its orientalist scholarly capital as it was measured by the educational variables. In this specific cultural field of

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production, the population was highly qualified in terms of scholarly capital: almost 85 per cent of the individuals were endowed with a licence diploma, i.e., a 3-year university degree. So, it was not so much the scholarly capital which divided the population, rather a specific form of it — the orientalist capital — as it could be measured by the possession of a diploma from the EPHE or the L’O. So, on the one hand, we find individuals having only the baccalauréat or less, and on the other, those who are the most endowed with an orientalist ‘capital’: generally, these persons have a diploma from both the EPHE and the L’O, plus a thesis. Armed with the possession of an orientalist (i.e., here an Indianist) capital, there were two main forms of legitimization of the orientalist goods. First were scholars whose knowledge was grounded in the endowment of an Indianist education received within the university. Second, we find different groups of producers whose legitimacy to deal with Indian society was located outside the erudite milieu itself — journalists, writers, poets or missionaries. As most of the individuals within the first group belong generally to an academic institution, they constitute what can be called the academic group of the field of Indian studies, or the field of ‘restricted production’. The remaining agents are characterized by one or another form of literary capital and are generally outside these academic institutions; therefore, they form the mundane or profane groups of the field of Indian studies — the pole of large-scale production. Although a field is not a juridic space with a membership, the relative weight of these two populations in the 1930s may be roughly estimated, for descriptive purposes, on the basis of their inclusion or exclusion from official orientalist institutions: the academic group accounts for about 55 per cent of the total, and the mundane groups therefore represent 45 per cent. However, this division of the field of Indian studies into two sub-populations which seems to be mutually exclusive, is itself duplicated within the most specific institutions of the field of orientalist knowledge. The academic scholars themselves are unequally qualified in terms of orientalist capital. Let us consider, for example, the French School for the Far East (EFEO)

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during the first half of the twentieth century. The scholars attached to the EFEO do not constitute a homogeneous population either in terms of their scholarly formation, or their trajectory. Between 1898 and 1956, only about 25 per cent had a permanent position at the EFEO, and among those who were temporary members, some were currently holding academic positions at the Sorbonne or the EPHE. Alfred Foucher (1865– 1952) is a good example: born in Britanny in western France, he went to Paris after his baccalauréat and entered the prestigious École normale supérieure in 1885; three years later, in 1888, he was agrégé de lettres and started studying Sanskrit with Sylvain Lévi at the EPHE Fourth section where he specialized in Buddhist iconography. He received his doctoral degree in 1905. From 1895 onwards, he was lecturer at the EPHE, and in 1914 was appointed professor of Indian language and literature at the Sorbonne. He spent his academic life either teaching at the University or working in the field in South Asia. He was twice Director of the EFEO in the 1910s, and in 1922 he founded the French archaeological delegation in Afghanistan — Delegation archéologique française en Afghanistan, DAFA — which he directed until 1925. However, if the philologists acquired a dominant position within the EFEO, they were confronted at the beginning of the twentieth century with different groups of learned amateurs with direct access to the field. For example, the missionaries were one group: Father Léopold Cadière from Missions étrangères was a well known specialist of Annam (Dartigues 2001). Colonial administrators were another group: Jean Przyluski ended his career as professor, first at the L’O, then at the EPHE Fourth section, and lastly at the Collège de France where he succeeded Louis Finot in 1911. The professionals within the EFEO were themselves divided into two major groups, the philologists and historians on one side and the architects on the other. Both published in the same journal, the BEFEO. But many architects came from artistic families, were educated at the École des Beaux-Arts and were neither formally trained in Sanskrit or any other Asian languages.

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The statistical analysis reveals a second opposition. The population studied is divided according to the internal composition of the Indianist capital itself. It opposes on one side, at the pole of restricted production, the agents who are conservators in different museums (Louvre Museum or the Guimet Museum) and some members of the EFEO, both dealing mainly with art and archeology and on the other side, agents posted at the University, at the Collège de France and at institutions like the EPHE and the L’O who in turn are divided between the philologists and the philosophers. But within the field, this division is further determined by a third variable — religious capital (or the denominational affiliation) of the agents. However, in a historical study using mainly published material instead of oral history, the information on denomination is difficult to assert and very often incomplete. Many agents appeared either to be affiliated to a religious order, mainly Catholic (most of them being Jesuits), or trained in a religious institution such as the Institut Catholique at Paris or at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium or, again, to be publicly associated with official Catholic institutions. This is the case, for example, of the Sanskritist Olivier Lacombe (1904–2001), who was a close friend of Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher, and who presided over the Committee of the Catholic Intellectuals in the 1960s. Apart from the Catholics, there were other denominations to be registered like the Jews, but very few Protestants.7 I coded this variable only when the information was the most objective or official, through public statement or when mentioned in obituaries. Out of 111 individuals, there is no information for one-third, 33.3 per cent; nevertheless, the Catholics accounted for half the total population, 50.5 per cent, Jews for 8.1 per cent and other denominations for 8.1 per cent. But more important is the fact that there is an unequal repartition between the two sub-populations of the field. While among the academic scholars, information is missing for almost 46 per cent of them, it is missing for only 18 per cent among the mundane group. At the pole of restricted production, the Catholics represent about 34.5 per cent of the

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agents at least, and Jews 11.5 per cent as against 70 per cent of Catholics and only 4 per cent of Jews at the pole of large-scale production (some well known cases of Jews converted to Catholicism have been counted as Catholics, like Raymond Schwab, the author of the Oriental Renaissance (1950), who was holding the post of higher civil servant at the Senate). Thus, the field of production of Indian discourses in the 1930s is broadly divided, first, between the savant pole and the mundane pole, the dominant and the dominated, the institutional or official Indianist scholars and the outsiders; and second, between the Catholic pole and the non-Catholic one. The pole of restricted production is differentiated between scholars studying history and archaeology, publishing either in the BEFEO or RAA, and the philologists and specialists of texts, publishing in the JA, the BEFEO and other linguistic journals. Specialists in oriental art are in-between the savants and the mundanes. The pole of large-scale production is divided between essayists, critics and writers who seem to be gathering themselves around two people — Romain Rolland and René Guénon. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Rolland (b. 1866), then professor at the Sorbonne University, was endowed with the most legitimate forms of scholarly certified literary capital. Having studied at the École normale supérieure, and an agrégé in history, he submitted a thesis in art history, and then convened an innovative course in the subject at the Sorbonne in the 1900s. However, he left the university before the Great War to write novels and essays, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1915. In his intellectual trajectory and status, Rolland combined some contradictory assets — those of the legitimate savant in his own field of art history, and those of the prophet in the literary and political field. Rolland is therefore a kind of legitimate deviant or a crowned prophet (more so after he received the Nobel Prize). By contrast, René Guénon (b. 1886) is a prophet whose trajectory is marked by successive and progressive exclusion from the intellectual field, until his final departure for Cairo, where he lived from the 1930s until his death in 1951. Many of the individuals around Guénon are Catholics and deal with

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spirituality and esoterism, while the agents around Romain Rolland are mainly writers and poets. Particularly interesting are individuals who can be considered go-betweens, mediating between the different groups of scholars within the field, and more specifically between the most opposed factions, the savants and the mundanes. There are three kinds of assests which, individually and cumulatively, could foster a relationship between these two groups: the possession of philosophic capital, Catholic denomination, and often, a thwarted school trajectory as regards the primary goals expected, generally to enter a prestigious higher teaching institution (particularly the École normale supérieure). Let us consider some examples. Paul Masson-Oursel occupied multiple positions in the field of Indian studies. Masson-Oursel (b. 1882) was an agrégé of philosophy and taught for many years in a prestigious lycée in the Latin Quarter at Paris (lycée Henri IV); he also studied Sanskrit and specialized in Indian philosophy, wrote his doctoral dissertation on comparative philosophy between West and East (India), and in the 1920s he joined Sylvain Lévi at the Fifth section of religious sciences at the EPHE. However, Masson-Oursel was also associated with Durkheimian sociologists and historians, particularly with the historian Henri Berr who founded the Revue de synthèse, a journal devoted to the study of social facts in a global perspective, opposing the then dominant positivist historical school represented by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos (who were the main targets of Durkheim in his fight against the historians in 1903–1908). But MassonOursel was also involved in the literary field. He reviewed books, occasionally in the Mercure de France, and more regularly in the NRF where he presented orientalist knowledge to a literary audience. One social effect of this multiple position was the circulation of orientalist themes amongst different intellectual spaces. As an illustration, we may mention a note read by Paul MassonOursel at the Société Asiatique and published in 1927 in the Journal asiatique with a factual title: ‘L’ Éuropéocentrisme et la critique historique (Euro-centrism and Historical Criticism)’ and then reissued in the NRF but with a title much more adapted

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to the ideological debate running within the intellectual field in the 1920s: ‘Orient-Occident’. The philosopher Olivier Lacombe’s (b. 1904) interest in Indian philosophy was inspired by his friend Jacques Maritain, the dominant figure of the Catholic intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Maritain supported Lacombe’s reading of Hindu spirituality according to neo-thomist philosophy that Maritain himself, professor at the Institut catholique in Paris, was then developing within the philosophical field.8 Let us now consider Louis Dumont’s position in this intellectual space. Although Dumont (b. 1911) started his academic life in the 1950s, he has recalled that his interest in India started in the 1930s when he was only 20 years old.9 After he got his baccalauréat at the end of the 1920s, Dumont began preparing for the entrance examination for a higher engineering school as his family wanted him to do. But within a year he dropped out, broke ties with his family and started making a living by doing casual jobs. At the beginning of the 1930s, Dumont started roaming around leftist literary and political circles close to the Communist party, meeting writers of the avant-garde literary groups, particularly René Daumal who was then the leader of the young poets gathered around the literary journal Le Grand Jeu. Then, from 1935 until the beginning of the War, Dumont moved away from these avant-garde circles. He joined the Musée de l’ Homme where he worked as an Assistant and then resumed his studies at the university and attended courses in ethnology, particularly Marcel Mauss’ teaching at the newly founded Institut d’ ethnologie. Thus, in the 1930s Dumont was associated with writers and poets like René Daumal, with whom he shared homologous social attributes (age, education and taste), before joining the ethnographic milieu. So, for a better understanding of the intellectual atmosphere that was surrounding those literary circle, let us return to Daumal. René Daumal as Analyst of the Field It would be difficult to assert that René Daumal, before starting his novel, really had in mind the structure of the space as it is

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revealed by a sociological study of it. However, my personal reading has been reinforced when I discovered that, according to the exegetes of Daumal, his two novels — the second one being Le Mont Analogue (The Analogous Mount) — contain a lot of biographical information. Thus, aware of the specific intellectual milieu involved in the knowledge of India in France at the time on the one hand, and by the personal details available in Daumal’s novel on the other, we can say that A Night of Serious Drinking is a metaphor of this intellectual field where its members developed an interest in India and the Far East. Keeping in mind the structure of Daumal’s novel, let us consider his social and intellectual trajectory and position in the field of Indian scholarship which could also account for his sociological insight. René Daumal’s position crystallizes most of the contradictions at work within the pole of large-scale production of the field of Indian knowledge, and his position-taking expresses well the spirit of the young writers and poets ‘who [were in their] their 20s around 1930–1933’,10 as Louis Dumont said about himself. Daumal was born in 1908 in a small village in the north of France near the Belgian border. His father, a government teacher in the village school, was a socialist revolutionary activist, strongly secular and anticlerical, who was suppressed for his political activity. Later on, he became a tax collector. Between 1922 and 1925, Daumal attended the lycée at Reims (a provincial town north-east of Paris) where he experimented with drugs, and started writing poetry. At the end of the 1920s, after his baccalauréat, René Daumal went to Paris and sat for the entrance examination for the École normale supérieure. However, he failed, and joined the Sorbonne where he studied philosophy for three years and got a license diploma. But his main interest was poetry and literature. At that time, the surrealists, led by André Breton, were the major avant-garde group within the literary field. But Daumal and some other poets belonging to a generation younger than Breton, particularly Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vaillant, his comrades from his school years at Reims, went their own way. They all experienced, although in different

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ways, a failure in their scholarly training: Roger Vaillant dropped out of university to be a journalist and later, a writer; GilbertLecomte did not achieve his medical diploma as his father had wanted him to do. Despite the attraction and the control exercised by Breton’s movement, Daumal and his young friends founded a new literary group, and in 1928, launched the first issue of Le Grand Jeu. It was however a short-lived experience as the journal published only three issues (the 4th and last one, at the beginning of the 1930s, was incomplete). René Daumal, who was probably the brightest poet and the most innovative of the group, was very soon introduced to the Gallimard’s literary cenacle of the NRF. In the first half of the 1920s, one question which strongly divided the intellectual field was the ideological debate labelled the ‘Orient-Occident’ debate (Sapiro 1999: 142–61). There were scientific, literary and political stakes in this debate. But, it may be said that the Orient that attracted poets and writers of the avant-garde, like Breton and Daumal, was largely an imaginary one. But while for Breton this attraction did not last long, that was not the case for Daumal. From the 1920s onward, Daumal read Guénon’s work (one major book published by Guénon in 1925 was entitled Orient-Occident), and he also started studying Sanskrit on his own; he never attended any courses at the Fourth and Fifth sections of the EPHE. The discovery of Indian classical philosophy and culture was a major experience in his life. He expressed it for the NRF, reviewing one of Uday Shankar’s performances given in 1931 at Paris, which was a great cultural event at the time. Daumal was so moved by Indian dance, theatre and music that he joined Uday Shankar’s troupe and left with them for a tour to the USA in 1931. When he returned a year later, Daumal immersed himself in Indian studies. He prepared a Sanskrit grammar for himself, ignoring the one published by Louis Renou (Renou et al. 1932). Renou, on reading it, wondered how Daumal could have got on his own such an understanding of the Sanskrit language. Daumal also published translations from Sanskrit texts (Upanishads), articles on Indian philosophy and book reviews in literary

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journals like the NRF and Les Cahiers du Sud. He joined the esoteric group gathered around Georges Gurdjief, a mystic of Russian origin who was very popular in literary circles in France. But at the same time, Daumal published a robust pamphlet against the profusion of pseudo-religious groups which had proliferated in the inter-war period. Daumal died of tuberculosis just before the end of the Second World War, in 1944. According to one of his biographers,11 Daumal began writing A Night of Serious Drinking in 1932, during his sojourn in the United States. That he had to distance himself, at least geographically, to start considering the life that made him depressed, testifies to the contradictions that Daumal was then experiencing in his personal life. Within the mundane pole of the field of Indian knowledge, Daumal’s position is basically a twin one. If he belongs to the avant-garde of the literary field, he is not part of the surrealist group; familiar with the works of the orientalists he reads, he does not attend their seminars; he is a poet and a philosopher, a self-taught philologist as well as a pataphysician (a literary genre inaugurated by the writer Alfred Jarry at the end of the nineteenth century). Claiming himself a strong materialist, Daumal is also following a quest for the Absolute; he is a follower of Marxism and an admirer of the Upanishads; he is fond of puns which he uses in his novel and, at the same time, he is exploring the power of words as expressed in the brahmanical learned tradition or in modern poetry. He can launch a violent attack against ‘the filthy initiated, their anti-semitic lamas and stiff-looking brahmans’ (Daumal 1993: 337–38) while himself being a member of an esoteric group. So, the act of writing, and more particularly of writing a fiction, was then a way out for Daumal, if not to resolve his personal contradictions then at least to distance himself from them. Therefore, instead of reading A Night of Serious Drinking as ‘a voyage into the center of the self ’, to use Kathleen F. Rosenblatt’s words, who nevertheless shows a thorough understanding of the novel, I propose to understand it rather as a voyage into the centre of the field of Indian knowledge in the

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1930s. I should confess, though, that when I first read the novel many years ago, I did not understand it at all, seeing it only as nonsensical fiction. Only since I completed the sociological analysis of the field of production of Indian discourses in the 1930 have I been able to read it afresh, discovering, to my astonishment, that its structure is homologous in part to the strucure of the field in which Daumal was situated. So, in artificially dividing the internal analysis of this literary work from its external determination, social as well as intellectual, we can not properly understand how this fiction expresses itself in a parodic mode Daumal’s viewpoint on the field. To accomplish this task, the sociologist has to reinvent the author’s point of view, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s stance about Flaubert (Bourdieu 1992). In this particular case, we have to take together the savants and the commoners, the Sanskritists and the poets. Therefore, we should take Daumal seriously when he says that he wanted to write a satire. Published only one year before the colonial exhibition (‘Exposition coloniale internationale’) held at Paris in 1931 which for some attracted the fierce criticism of the surrealists, and for others determined their ‘orientalist’ vocation, A Night of Serious Drinking enacts the many involvements of Daumal in the intellectual field, each in turn being parodied by the author, as if willing to retain both, when in fact he could not stand one or the other.

Notes 1. Prosopography (from the Greek prosôpon ‘person’ and graphein ‘writing’), refers the basic socio-demographic data relating to a person. Mainly used in ancient history, for example, to study the dignitaries of the Church, the prosopographic method has also been introduced in studies of the sociology of the élites. 2. All references here are to the English translation by Cowhard and Lovatt (Daumal (1938) 2003). 3. The term ‘Greater India’ was coined by French Sanskrit scholars in the 1920s, then used by Indians to designate the extension of Indian civilization

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

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and culture in South and South East Asia. See Przyluski 1936: 18–22; Bayly (forthcoming). Louis Renou, born in 1896, was then full professor of Indian Languages and Literature at the Sobonne, Paris. His critique is developed in Renou 1964a: 116–21. This book, however, cannot be considered to be a proper indological study of Buddhism. The only sociological feature shared by Poussin and Father de Lubac is that they are both reading Buddhism from a catholic viewpoint, albeit differently. The study is grounded in a Multi-Correspondence Analysis, and will be presented in full in a forthcoming work. The two other modalities were Other Denominations and Information Missing. See Olivier Lacombe’s thesis, ‘L’ Absolu selon le Vedânta’ (The Absolute According to the Vedanta), a thesis first supervised by Sylvain Lévi. On the life history of Louis Dumont, cf. his interview with Gerald Berthoud and the members of the research group ‘Pratiques sociales et théoriques’ in Revue européenne des sciences sociales: Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, 1984, 22 (68): 153–67; on his academic trajectory proper cf. Galey (1981). Cf. ‘Dumont l’ intouchable’. Interview with Enthoven (1984).

11. Cf. Kathleen F. Rosenblatt’s ‘Introduction’ to Daumal (2003).

References Aurobindo, Sri. 1942. Œuvres complètes. 1. La Bhagavad-Gîtâ. Trans. by Camille Rao and Jean Herbert. Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve. Bayly, Susan. (Forthcoming) . ‘India’s « Empire of Culture ». Sylvain Lévi and the Greater India Society’. In Lyne Bansat-Boudon and Roland Lardinois (eds), Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935): Etudes indiennes, histoire sociale. Bloch, Jules. 1951. ‘L’ indianisme en France depuis 1939’. Archiv Orientalni, 19 (1–2): 114–24. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992 (1996). Les règles de l’ art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by Susan Emanuel, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press. Charle, Christophe. 1994. La république des universitaires 1870–1940. Paris: Seuil.

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Dartigues, Laurent. 2001. ‘Conversations, hybridations et tensions identitaires aux sources de l’ ethnologie viêtnamienne du Père Cadière’. Revue française d’ histoire d’ Outre-Mer. 88 (332–33): 297–318. Daumal, René. (1938) 2003. La Grand Beuverie. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. by David Cowhard and E.A. Lovatt, with an Introduction by Kathleen F. Rosenblatt, A Night of Serious Drinking. New York: Tusk Ivories. ———. (1935) 1993. ‘À propos des nouvelles religions et au revoir’. In Pascal Sigod (ed.), René Daumal. Les dossiers H. Lausanne: Éditions L’ Age d’ Homme: 337–38. de Lubac, Cardinal Henri. 1952 (2000) . La rencontre du bouddhisme et de l’ Occident. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Demiéville, Paul. 1958. ‘Organization of East Asian Studies in France.’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 18 (1): 163–81. Enthoven, Jean-Paul. 1984. ‘Dumont l’ intouchable.’ Le Nouvel Observateur. 6 January; rpt in Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 1984, 22 (68): 29–33. Filliozat, Jean. 1953. L’ Inde classique. Manuel des études indiennes. Vol. 2. Paris: École Française d’ Extrême Orient. Galey, Jean-Claude. 1981. ‘A Conversation with Louis Dumont. Paris, 12 December 1979.’ Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), 15 (1–2): 13–29. Inden, Ronald. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell. Lacombe, Olivier. 1937. L’ Absolu selon le Vedânta. Les notions de Brahman et d’ Atman dans les systèmes de Çankara et Râmânoudja. Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner. Lardinois, Roland. 2003–4. ‘La création de l’ Institut de civilisation indienne par Sylvain Lévi en 1927’, Studia Asiatica, 4–5: 737–48. Masson-Oursel, Paul. 1953. ‘La connaisance scientifique de l’ Asie en France depuis 1900 et les variétés de l’ orientalisme’, La Revue philosophique de la France et de l’ étranger, 7–9 (July–September): 342–58 Przyluski, Jean. 1936. ‘Greater India and the Work of Sylvain Lévi’, Journal of the Greater India Society, 18–22. Renou, Louis. 1964a. Hommage à Sylvain Lévi pour le centenaire de sa naissance. Paris: Éditions de Boccard. ———. 1964b. ‘Indology in France.’ United Asia, 16 (2): 116–21.

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Renou, Louis, Nadine Stchoupak, and Luigia Nitti. 1932. Dictionnaire Sanskrit-Français. Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve. Sapiro, Gisèle. 1999. La Guerre des écrivains 1940–1953. Paris: Fayard. Schwab, Raymond. 1950 (1984) . La Renaissance orientale. Préface by Louis Renou. Paris: Payot. Trans. by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Preface by Edward Said. New York: Columbia University Press.

Literature and Politics: The French Literary Field during the German Occupation (1940–1944)


Gisèle Sapiro

T

he literary field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s conception (1984), should be thought of as a sub-space of the social space, where struggles occur according to specific rules which define both the stakes and the values. These rules are relatively autonomous, which means that an actor’s behaviour in the field cannot be reduced to external social determination, such as economic interest or social origins. Social determinations are translated (or refracted) within the specific logics of functioning of the field. As Bourdieu (1971, 1983, 1992, 1993) has demonstrated, the French literary field reached a very high degree of autonomy in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a group of writers promoted the judgement of peers over that of the public as a mark of the aesthetic value of literary works. The aesthetic value of a work was consequently distinguished from the economic value (i.e., sales). This distinction entailed the emergence of a field of restricted production, as opposed to the field of large-scale production ruled by the market law. The literary autonomy was also developed against the moral and political constraints which were imposed on literature, through censorship and prosecutions. Central to the understanding of the French literary field is the question of the relations between literature and politics. At

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the end of the nineteenth century, Zola’s commitment in the Dreyfus Affair in favour of justice and truth against the ‘raison d’ État’ founded the figure of the ‘intellectual’ (Charle 1990). After the Second World War, Sartre redefined literary autonomy while creating the figure of the ‘total intellectual’, which is involved in politics in the name of his symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1980; Boschetti 1985). The question of the relations between literature and politics raises that of the limits of the autonomy of the literary field, and of the elements of heteronomy, that is its dependency regarding different social spheres such as the state or the economic field. This was the question which led me to choose the period of the German Occupation in France during the Second World War as a case-study to understand the grounds of the French literary field’s autonomy and heteronomy.1 During the German Occupation, the French literary field was deprived of the conditions that ensured its relative autonomy. In addition to the repressive measures, the extreme degree of politicization imbued even the most apolitical attitudes with political meaning. By bowing to outside demands, the agencies of diffusion and consecration (the Académie française, the literary juries) initially contributed to this loss of autonomy. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of resistance that the literary field brought to bear on these external constraints bear witness to the survival of a form of autonomy, even in times of national crisis. It thus revealed the principles of this autonomy, as well as the elements of heteronomy. After the French defeat in 1940, during the German Occupation, France was divided, geographically and ideologically. Geographically, it was divided between the occupied North and the ‘free’ Southern zone, until the German troops invaded the South in November 1942, when the Allied forces landed in Algeria. Politically, there was a crisis of national identity: the majority of the French people supported Marshall Pétain who accepted the defeat and decided to collaborate with the occupying forces, while a minority agreed with De Gaulle who said that the war was not over and chose to resist. The military defeat lead to the

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creation of the authoritarian and corporatist Vichy Regime, which cancelled all democratic rights and promulgated antisemitic laws (Paxton 1972). While most studies devoted to intellectuals during the German Occupation of France have focused on a political camp (Collaborators or Resistants) or on some individuals, I have used Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘literary field’ to approach the literary world as a whole, and to emphasize the literary reasons for French writers’ attitudes and their political choices. In the first part of this article, I shall focus on these literary reasons. This research comprises the analysis of the role of four main literary institutions which controlled the literary field during this period of national crisis. In the second part I shall deal with these four literary institutions: the Académie française, the highest state literary institution; the Académie Goncourt, a literary jury which awards the most important prize for a novel every year; the Nouvelle Revue française (NRF), the most prestigious literary journal of the interwar period, endowed with a high symbolic capital; and the Comité national des écrivains (Writers’ National Committee), the most important organization of the intellectual Resistance which was founded during the Occupation. I shall end with a short insight on the post-war period. The Literary Reasons for Political Commitment The literary reasons for writers’ attitudes during the German Occupation were analysed from three different perspectives: at a structural level (through statistics), from a biographical standpoint (through a qualitative comparison of the trajectories of two writers), and at the discursive level (through text analysis of the intellectual debates). The statistical analysis aimed at verifying the relations between writers’ political choices and the structure of the literary field. If such a relation could be established, it would be evidence for the relative autonomy of the literary field regarding external constraints: it would mean that social factors such as age or social origins did not determine

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writers’ political attitudes directly, but through the mediation of the literary field. The qualitative comparison of the trajectories of two writers who shared many social properties, but who made opposite political choices during the German Occupation, provided a case-study for observing the mediation effect of the literary field at an individual level. Finally, the study of the intellectual debates in which writers took public aesthetic, ethical, and political positions provided the different representations underlying the relation between political attitudes and positions writers occupy in the literary field, especially the authors’ conceptions of literature and of their social role as writers. The Statistical Inquiry The statistical inquiry was based on a sample of 185 writers who were active in the 1940s. It allowed me to identify the relevant social and literary factors in order to explain their political choices under German Occupation. The record originally included 128 variables, concerning biographical data, constructing these writers’ social trajectories or, as Christophe Charle puts it, the ‘space of biographical possibles’ (Charle 1994: 14). The data was submitted to Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), a tool for Geometric Data Analysis based on a contingency table, which has proved to be very powerful for exploring the social space (Benzécri 1992; Rouanet and Leroux 1993; Greenacre and Blasius 1994) and which is especially welladapted to Bourdieu’s relational and structural conception of the social space and of fields.2 In row-profiles of the contingency table were individuals’ trajectories, and in columnprofiles variables; 58 variables were retained for Multiple Correspondence Analysis (Sapiro 2002).3 There were four groups of variables. The first group included social properties: date and place of birth, social origins, geographical position during childhood, adolescence and youth, scholastic capital as given by secondary school, and higher education. The second group included variables that characterizes

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position in the literary field: literary genre (poetry, novel, drama, criticism, etc.) for three periods of the career, main publishing houses where the writer’s works were printed, periodicals to which he or she contributed, criteria of institutional consecration (such as literary prizes and membership in literary institutions) degree and type of recognition on the basis of record in anthologies and dictionaries. The third group of variables concerned aesthetic positions: literary schools or literary trends such as naturalism, symbolism, surrealism, proletarian literature, and so on to which writers have belonged at three different periods of their career. The last group of variables concerned political position-taking in the 1930s and during the German Occupation. Data was provided by lists of petitioners as well as the authors’ political writings and articles in newspapers. The categories were: collaborationists, that is supporters of collaboration with the Nazi occupying forces; supporters of the reactionary and authoritarian Vichy Regime headed by Marshall Pétain (a regime which was born out of the French military defeat and the auto-destruction of the Third Republic); resistants, i.e., writers who participated in an underground movement in the realm of civil or armed resistance; resistance sympathizers or writers who supported the Resistance without themselves actually working in the movement; and finally writers who evolved from supporting the Vichy Regime to supporting the Resistance. The geometric representation of the data displayed the structure of the literary field in the 1940s. The space of political choices appeared to be homologous to the positions the writers occupy in the literary field (see Chart 1). The first axis of MCA set young debut or avant-garde poets, who published in small literary magazines against older adventure or regionalist novelists, who published in established publishing houses and in journals with a large circulation, and who had an institutional consecration (literary prize winners, members of the French Academy). This axis thus opposed dominant to dominated writers. It also opposed two poles of the literary field defined by Bourdieu: the field of restricted production,

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Chart 1 The Structure of the French Literary Field in the 1940s (simplified representation of MCA) Symbolic Capital – Communist Party

Extreme-right

Critics

Académie Goncourt

Comité national des écrivains

Académie française VICHY Institutional consecration +

RESISTANCE

Novelists

Institutional consecration –

Library Success

Poetry magazines

Literary Prizes

Avant-garde Poets

COLLABORATION Playwrights NRF RESISTANCE SYMPATHIZERS Nobel prize Symbolic Capital + where the specific logics of the literary field prevails, to the field of large production, where external principles, such as the logic of market or political demand prevails. At the pole of large circulation, writers mostly chose to cooperate with the political powers, Vichy or Collaborationism (while Vichyism and Collaborationism were two different modalities in the dataset, they were both opposed to the ‘Resistance’ modality on the first axis.) At the pole of restricted production, writers were mostly

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Resistants: for them, underground activity did not radically alter the conditions of production, since they were used to limited editions and confidential circulation. According to Bourdieu’s theory, two principles of hierarchization should be distinguished within the literary field. The first, which is based on the global volume of capital, is best represented on the first axis, as it opposes dominants and dominated writers. The second principle is the structure of the capital: institutional consecration as opposed to symbolic recognition. While institutional consecration was represented on the first axis, the second axis introduces the degree of symbolic recognition. It opposes authors endowed with an important symbolic capital (down), namely writers who collaborated in the Interwar period to the most prestigious literary journal NRF, founded by André Gide and published by Gallimard, to writers deprived of symbolic capital, such as political activists (up), that have come to play a role in the literary field because of the context of national crisis. While the writers deprived of symbolic capital are involved in political activism which is their way of existing in the literary field, the recognized authors take a more distant stance towards politics: they can be resistant sympathizers, because they are always suspicious about the political and economic powers, but most of them did not have a real underground activity. Thus the literary field structure appears to be indeed the matrix of the writers’ political attitudes. The writers’ political choices are strongly related to the position they occupy in the field. A Biographical Comparison The results provided by the statistical inquiry regarding the literary reasons for political choices needed to be explored, on a biographical level, by a qualitative analysis of a few case studies. One such case-study was provided by the comparison of the trajectories of two writers sharing several social properties, which means they have a similar habitus: François Mauriac and

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Henry Bordeaux, two catholic novelists, both members of the Académie française. Whereas everything would seem to place them in the same social space, from 1935 on they found themselves in opposite political camps. A defender of Mussolini’s and Franco’s policies, like all right-wing intellectuals, and like the Church, Bordeaux resolutely chose Marshall Pétain’s side. After his election to the Académie française in 1933, Mauriac announced his break with the academic Right and took up the defence of Ethiopia as the aggrieved party, and of the Basque people during the Spanish war before going on to join the intellectual Resistance: he is the only member of the Académie française to have gone into ‘illegal’ activity. Comparison of the two trajectories shows that this political cleavage is linked to an opposition between two antagonistic logics in the literary field: heteronomy, which means submission to the moral and political demand and the quest for temporal awards, as opposed to autonomy, or the quest for symbolic recognition by peers and the claim of intellectual values such as freedom of expression, truth, etc. It is his refusal of heteronomy, which led Mauriac to abandon the values of the bourgeoisie and to become a kind of prophet, in the name of true Christian values, that he defended against the established Catholic Church (Serry 2004). In the 1950s, after he won the Nobel prize in 1953, he was to be one of the first French intellectuals to protest against the use of torture by the French army in Algeria. The comparison thus showed that literary reasons can underlie differences between two writers who have a similar habitus. This illustrates the mediation that the literary field exerts on external social constraints. Representations The relation between the aesthetic, ethical, and political dispositions of the authors and the positions they occupy in the field can be grasped, qualitatively, through the analysis of their conception of literature and of their social role as writers. This was the third perspective on the literary reasons for political

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choices. Despite their geographical dispersal after the occupation of Paris by the German troops, writers carried on with their dialogues and polemics. A wide literary quarrel about the intellectual causes of the defeat began after the creation of the Vichy Regime, and lasted until 1942. It was called the ‘Bad Masters Quarrel’ and provided data for analysing the different conceptions of the writer’s responsibility and of his social role underlying the representations of the causes of the French defeat. Conservative writers close to the Vichy government and/or the Collaboration accused writers endowed with symbolic capital, namely André Gide and the team of the NRF, of being responsible for the French military defeat. How could writers be held responsible for a military defeat? The argument was that they had been ‘Bad teachers’, ‘bad enchanters’, troublemakers and war-mongers, and that being subjectivist, amoralist, pessimistic, they had had a bad influence on youth. They were therefore considered to be ‘public enemies’. Literature, like women (Muel-Dreyfus 1996) was accused of embodying the culture of pleasure (l’ esprit de jouissance), privileging this over the culture of sacrifice (l’ esprit de sacrifice), in Marshall Pétain’s terms. Under the particular conditions of the Occupation, these accusations took a denunciatory turn. They appeared as so many ‘symbolic murders’. This contributed to knitting together those who were trying to resist the importing of heteronymous logics in the field into the struggle for the reconquest of the literary field’s autonomy. In the face of this moralistic problematic imposed upon these writers, their reaffirmation of the autonomy of literary and intellectual values at first came through a denial of the social impact of literature. At a second stage (without this evolution being automatic), they reversed their stance by assigning to these values, in roundabout or covert phrases, an intrinsic universal meaning, by identifying the defence of the values of the French ‘spirit’ with the fight for liberty. This was the meaning given to the intellectual Resistance and provided the grounds for its legitimacy. Their conflicts were based on pre-existing divisions. A genealogy of the categories used in this debate, such as that of ‘bad

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master’, allows a study of the sociogenesis of the systems of opposition that underpinned these representations. These systems of opposition had partly crystallized at the turn of the century in struggles engendered by the morphological transformations of the intellectual field and the development of Republican education which had imposed a modern culture based on science against the classical literary studies based on Latin and Greek (Sapiro 2004). The rising model of the professional, whose expertise is based on a specialized knowledge (Abbott 1988), contributed to the decline of the dominant figure of the man of letters. This decline explains the reactionary stand that was taken by a whole group of writers, around Charles Maurras and the royalist league Action française. These tensions were transposed to the literary and political quarrels that agitated the literary field between the wars. The reactionary Right condemned romanticism, individualism, and revolutionary ‘messianism’ in the name of the classical values incarnated in the ‘French genius’. These debates largely set the conceptual framework of the quarrel over morality in literature aroused by the attacks on André Gide and the NRF after the First World War, just as it set the framework for the ‘defence of the Western Civilization’ against ‘Eastern’ influence (i.e., Arabic, Jewish, Bolshevik, Asiatic, etc.), symbolized by the internationalism of writers like Romain Rolland and Rabindranath Tagore. This favoured the alliance of the Right in the 1930s with the fascist regimes. During the Occupation, these representations surged forth again. Four types of critical discourse were identified on the basis of the analysis of these debates. These discourses are never found in a pure state, but are distributed, through the play of homologies, according to the positions occupied in the literary field. They are ordered around two axes. The first axis runs from the most academic to the least academic discourse. The more dominant a position one occupies, the more one tends to adopt an academic discourse that is euphemistic and depoliticized (on the surface) according to the conventional rules of intellectual controversy. Inversely, the more one moves towards

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the dominated positions, the more one’s discourse is likely, through the struggle against the dominant viewpoints, to become politicized and to denounce academicism as a type of conformity. This polarization largely coincides with the opposition between ‘the old’ and ‘the young’ in the literary field, between writers who have succeeded and young pretenders or ‘failed’ writers. On the second axis, discourses are split between a pole in which attention is paid to a work’s form and style, an expression of the logic of autonomization and of the growing reflexivity of the fields of cultural production that were becoming more and more oriented towards the ‘search for cultural pertinent features’, to use Bourdieu’s phrase (1993: 117), and on the other hand, those that tend to focus on a work’s content. Thus, according to this second structuring factor, at the dominant pole two types of discourses confront one another. On the one side, there is the legitimate discourse attached to the style and form prevailing at the symbolically dominant pole, and on the other, at the temporally dominant pole, the discourse that privileges content over form and tends to carry a moral judgement, even a moralizing view, of work that concerns itself with their social effects. It is at this pole where ‘good taste’ is elaborated, that, in the name of ‘high morals’, the notion of ‘the writer’s responsibility’ was developed against freedom of creation and against those authors who were ‘disturbing’. This is where the idea of literature’s function as the instrument for reproducing a social ‘elite’ and for maintaining the social order is most clearly stated. Against moral judgement brought to bear on work, legitimate criticism at the pole of symbolic recognition was led to reassert the pre-eminence of aesthetic values such as ‘talent’, ‘originality’, and ‘style’. Against the conception of literature as an instrument of symbolic power by the forces of conservation were ranged the critical function of intellectual activity, of literature as a form of research, and the universal values of Thought. This is why, at the symbolically dominant pole, morality tends to take the form of a defence of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’, which are intellectual values, as against notions of the ‘common good’ or ‘reasons of state’ advanced by their

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adversaries — an opposition that the Dreyfus Affair had consecrated. At the dominated pole, too, we must distinguish two types of discourse about literature. The subversive strategies of the avant-gardes often led them to give a political import to their protests (this was the case with the Surrealists in the 1920s), but to remain oriented towards redefining the aesthetic and stylistic possibilities in a given state of the field. In contrast to the defenders of ‘good taste’, they valorized literature’s subversive vocation. On the other hand, those who did not possess the cultural resources (inherited or acquired through education) necessary to accede to the educated debate or to contest it on the basis of its own categories tended to reduce the critical discourse to a political or social discourse that had a better chance of being heard if it resorted to the logic of public scandal. These four types of discursive practices are differentiated according to their relation to literature, and so we may discern four logics — ‘moralism’ (‘good taste’ allied to a sense of social ‘responsibility’); ‘scandal’ (literature as a mediatic event); ‘aestheticism’ (which lay stress on the form rather than on the content); and ‘subversion’ (literature as a means to subvert the symbolic order) — that induce different types of mediation between literature and politics and forms of politicization (Sapiro 2003). These logics are more or less incarnated in historic forces, individuals, groups and institutions. And consequently we will find them within institutions that represent them in an ideal-typical manner. The Literary Institutions The attitudes of the four literary institutions which controlled the literary field during this period and their role under German Occupation were analyzed in relation to their history, their composition, and the inner struggles between their members.4 Each of these institutions embodies a different principle of autonomy, but also of heteronomy. They embody, as an ideal type (after Max Weber), the different social logics which coexist

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in the literary field, as a result of the different sphere of dependency of the field: ‘good taste’ and a sense of social responsibility has to do with the official logics of state representation and control, best represented in the literary field by the Académie française; ‘scandal’ and reducing literature to social aspects is characteristic of the journalistic logic and represented by the mediatic success of the Goncourt prize; ‘art for art’s sake’ expresses the aesthetical logic, which was best embodied in the interwar period by André Gide’s review, and the NRF, and the subversive use of art is typical of the political logics, that was embodied by the Comité national des écrivains, the main group of the literary Resistance. As in the literary field in general, the national crisis reinforced the inner divisions within these literary institutions. But their mode of survival corresponded to the ideal-typical logic they represented. The Académie française The Académie française is a State institution founded under the Old Regime, which is the most representative of the official logic. Its 40 members (of whom only half are writers, the others being political personalities or diplomats, clergymen, lawyers, and professors) are recruited from the higher social classes; they are often sons of civil servants, educated at élite schools: they are the élite of the State. As the Académie lost its monopoly as a consecration institution at the end of the nineteenth century, it also became more conservative in its literary taste, as well as in the ethical and political views defended by its members. It was divided between republicans and anti-republicans. The academician writers often belonged to the anti-republican camp. During the German Occupation, the Académie française was close to the Vichy Regime. Most members of the Academy were very conservative, and they had taken, before the war, anti-democratic political positions in different matters, notably social and educational questions. They also supported the Italian fascist regime, and defended a neo-pacifist attitude towards the Nazi regime. The Académie had also recruited in 1938 Charles Maurras,

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the leader of the royalist league Action française, whose ideas were one of the regime’s main source of inspiration. Most of its members supported the leader of the Vichy government, Marshall Pétain, who was also a member of the Académie. But the Académie française was too deeply linked with the national identity to take a real collaborationist stand. Rather, it applied a waitand-see policy. Moreover, there were among its members also a few opponents to the regime, like Mauriac, Paul Valéry and Georges Duhamel, who, from 1942 onwards, succeeded in reversing the balance of power as the other academics were absent (they were in the Southern Zone). For example, they gave literary awards to opponents of the Vichy regime, an important support since it implied financial help. The political opponents to the conservative tendency of the Académie were also those endowed with the greatest symbolic capital (like Valéry and Mauriac), which allowed them a certain distance towards the institution, and on the basis of which they defended literary autonomy inside it. The main opposition which structured the literary field was thus refracted inside the Académie française. The Académie Goncourt The Académie Goncourt, a literary society and association founded in 1903 on the basis of the Goncourt brothers’ legacy, which awards a novel prize every year, was initially supposed to ensure literary autonomy, contrary to the Académie française which was close to political power and high society. But it had become dependant on the press for its symbolic recognition, and began using ‘scandal’ (inner struggles, quarrels about the prizes, and so on) in order to exist (i.e., as a way to make the press speak about it). Most of its members, who came more often from the petite bourgeoisie but had more inherited specific social capital in the literary field than the members of the Académie française (they were sons of free intellectuals, journalists or artists), made a living as journalists. During the German Occupation, the Académie Goncourt adjusted itself to the new dominant ideology: while the prize

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was supposed to encourage a young author who was not yet very well known, it was Henri Pourrat, a 60-year-old, famous writer, close to the Vichy Regime and who advocated a ‘return to the land’, who won the 1941 prize. In fact, the Académie Goncourt was also divided in two camps, the conservatives, and the defenders of literary autonomy. The latter — though much more noisy than the members of the Académie française — were at the same time less efficacious. The inner balance of power would not be reversed until the Liberation in 1944. But the divisions of the jury, which turned into public struggles, gave rise to a lot of comments in the press. Thus the numerous ‘scandals’ around the Académie Goncourt helped the institution to survive during those times of national crisis. ‘Scandal’ was its way of continuing to exist in the public sphere. The NRF The NRF had been the most prestigious place for pure literature during the interwar period. It was founded by André Gide and Jean Schlumberger before the First World War, and created a publishing house that would become the most prestigious literary publisher, Gallimard. Embodying aesthetic logic which refuses to submit the literary judgement to any moral or political considerations, it had kept literature separate from politics, despite pressures to politicize it. Most of its collaborators belonged to the anti-fascist camp. Jean Paulhan, its editor, resisted politicization by introducing politically antagonistic authors together: for example, when Malraux wanted to publish an essay by Trotsky, Paulhan published alongside an essay by the fascist writer Drieu La Rochelle promoting fascist socialism, so that both essays would cancel each other out (Cornick 1995). Jean Paulhan stopped publishing the NRF with the military defeat in May 1940. But the German Ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, asked the fascist writer Drieu La Rochelle to launch it again and to transform it into an elegant review for propaganda in favour of Franco-German Collaboration. Otto Abetz knew the French culture very well. When he arrived in Paris, he said

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that there were three powers in France: the bank, the communists, and the NRF (and not the Académie française: this confirms the symbolic capital the journal had acquired). After some hesitation, most of its founders (Gide, Schlumberger, Claudel) quit, and the journal began to decline, although Henry de Montherlant, Paul Morand and some other pro-fascist writers continued to publish in it. The young avant-garde of Gallimard publishing house, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, refused to collaborate with the NRF, and they followed Jean Paulhan in the literary Resistance. There was thus a generational split in the review. The Comité national des écrivains (Writers’ National Committee) In 1941, some young literary magazines in the Southern Zone began to dispute the NRF’s monopoly of symbolic consecration. It was Aragon, a poet who had been a surrealist and had become a member of the Communist Party, and who was also Drieu La Rochelle’s most intimate enemy, who orchestrated the opposition. This opposition was both literary and political. Thanks to the use of literary devices and of a coded language such as that used by the medieval troubadours, political protest could be expressed in legal literary magazines, through poetry or literary criticism. This technique made possible the regrouping of the literary field in spite of geographic dispersion and the organizing of the literary Resistance. It is significant that an underground literary organization, the Comité national des écrivains, was founded in order to defend the literary autonomy that was betrayed by the traditional literary institutions. A parallel underground literary publishing house was created, the Éditions de Minuit, that would publish 24 books and brochures until the Liberation (Simonin 1994). The creation of an underground literary sub-field, with an organization, a journal, and a publishing house, was the result of an alliance between writers dispossessed of their means of expression and the French Communist Party, which provided

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organizational structures with a view to forming a Front national des écrivains (Writers’ National Committee). It illustrates the political logic, which led the avant-garde, who stressed the subversive dimension of literature, to make alliance with the political opposition. But it shows at the same time that the defence of autonomy often implies dependency on an external force, which threatens to entail a new kind of heteronomy. This alliance was only made possible, however, by the literary affinities between the communists and the non-communists of the group. In the occupied zone, the Gallimard-NRF network, impelled by Jean Paulhan, played a crucial role in recruiting early members in 1941. The Southern zone was invaded by German troops in November 1942; in 1943, Aragon organized the intellectual Resistance on the basis of the literary networks he had constituted around the poetry magazines. But the alliance between communists and non-communists would not last long after the Liberation. The split would occur precisely around the question of literary autonomy. The Recomposition of the Literary Field at the Liberation After the Liberation of Paris in September 1944, the Comité national des écrivains blacklisted those writers who had committed themselves to Collaboration. From 1945 to 1953, when a law of amnesty was voted, writers were tried and some were sentenced to death for ‘intelligence with the enemy’. A purge of the profession was also organized. The gravity of the sentence to which writers were exposed provoked an acute surge of emotion in the literary world, dividing it in two camps: the ‘indulgents’ and the ‘intransigents’. The political opposition between left and right — communist and Gaullist — underlies, of course, this cleavage, but it is not sufficient to explain it fully. The main opposition is a struggle between the old generation and the new one for the transformation or the conservation of the balance of power which characterized the literary field before the war, and for the imposition of the

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legitimate definition of literature. Against ‘art for art’s sake’, which prevailed in the literary field before the war, the younger generation, best represented by Sartre and Camus, imposed a conception of ‘committed literature’ based on the notion of the writer’s responsibility. The NRF was replaced, at Gallimard, by Les Temps modernes, Sartre’s Review, where he developed his theory of ‘committed literature’. The notion of the ‘writer’s responsibility’ is the main legacy of the intellectual Resistance and would underlie the intellectuals’ later commitment against torture and decolonization in the Algerian war, from 1956 to 1962. What did the academies become? The Académie française continued to apply the wait-and-see policy before it would be possible for the academic right to reorganize (Pétain and Maurras’s seats at the Academy were kept free until their death in the case an amnesty would allow them to come back). The Académie Goncourt, on the contrary, immediately adjusted itself to the new dominant ideology: the winner of the 1945 prize was Elsa Triolet, a woman — it was the first time a woman won the Goncourt, at the very moment when women obtained the right to vote in France. Triolet was a Jew, Russian, communist, and Aragon’s wife, and Aragon had become very powerful at the Comité national des écrivains. The institutionalization of the Committee and its growing dependence on the Communist Party implied a loss of its symbolic prestige in the literary field. Although the Committee survived until 1970, it lost its influence from 1947, the year when most of the enterprises (magazines and publishers) born in the Resistance disappeared or redefined their projects — as was the case with the Éditions de Minuit — in order to survive. The literary field was thus ‘normalized’. Conclusion The period of German Occupation in France provided an interesting case study for investigating the French literary field. The situation of national crisis favoured the heteronymous forces in the literary field against the autonomous elements. Heteronymous writers appealed to external political forces in order to

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reverse the balance of power in the field, and tried to subordinate literature to a moralistic and political judgement. The traditional institutions of the literary field like the Académie française and the Académie Goncourt, and even the NRF, contributed to this loss of autonomy. But its divisions and its mechanisms of resistance to the heteronymous forces bear witness to the survival of a form of autonomy of the literary field. The situation of crisis revealed the homology between political position-taking and the positions the writers occupied in the literary field. While most dominant writers belonging to the pole of large circulation collaborated with the occupying forces or sustained the Vichy regime, the intellectual Resistance was launched by young, dominated avant-garde poets with the help of communist militants. As the traditional literary institutions failed to defend literary autonomy, the young dominated authors created an underground sub-field and an underground organization, the Comité national des écrivains. Moreover, the loss of autonomy due to the situation of crisis and the fight against the heteronymous forces in the field entailed an alliance between the writers endowed with a high symbolic capital and the avant-garde in the struggle for the reconquest of autonomy. The struggles in the literary field crystallized during this period around the defence of autonomy. The structure of the field also underlay the forms of politicization in the field, as illustrated by the literary debates and the mode of survival of the institutions in this period of national crisis. In effect, these forms vary according to the two axes which structure the literary field: dominant vs dominated, autonomy vs heteronomy. Moralism, aestheticism, public scandal, and subversion are the four main forms of politicization, illustrated by the discourses as well as by the literary institutions. Notes 1. This research was conducted for my PhD thesis under Pierre Bourdieu’s supervision, which I defended in 1994. A revised and enlarged version was published as Sapiro 1999.

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2. MCA is a method for multi-variable analysis: it relates all the categorical variables to each other, representing clusters of individuals who share a high number of properties and, conversely, clusters of variables shared by the higher number of individuals. 3. There were 236 active modalities and twelve illustrative. Seventeen writers from the 185 were put as illustrative, being too marginal as writers or because of lack of information. Two of the 58 variables were illustrative because of lack of information as well. The first three factors of MCA contributed respectively to 5.6 per cent, 3.9 per cent and 3.2 per cent of the overall inertia. The law percentage is due to the important number of variables and modalities. 4. The inquiry is based on the archives of these institutions, most of which had never been used, and on a prosopography of their members.

References Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Benzécri, Jean-Paul. (1980) 1992. Pratique de l’ analyse des données, 1. Exposé élémentaire. Paris: Dunod. Trans. by T.K. Gopalan, Correspondence Analysis Handbook. New York: Marcel Dekker. Boschetti, Anna. 1985. Sartre et ‘les Temps modernes’. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1971 (1985/1993). ‘Le marché des biens symboliques.’ L’ Année sociologique, 22: 49–126. Trans. by R. Swyer, ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, Poetics, 14 (1–2): 13–44/ trans. rpt in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 112–41. ———. 1980. ‘Sartre’. London Review of Books. 2 (20 November-3 December): 11–12. ———. 1983/1993/1994. ‘The Field of Cultural Production or The Economic World Reversed’. Trans. by R. Nice. Poetics 12 (4–5): 311–56/ rpt in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 29–73/ rpt in The Polity Reader in Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 50–65. ———. 1984. ‘Quelques propriétés des champs.’ In Questions de sociologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, pp. 113–20.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. (1992) 1996. Les règles de l’ art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by Susan Emanuel, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Intro. and ed. by R. Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Charle, Christophe. 1982. ‘Situation du champ littéraire’. Littérature 44: 8–21. ———. 1990. Naissance des ‘intellectuels’ 1880–1900. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1994. La République des universitaires 1870–1940. Paris: Seuil. Cornick, Martyn. 1995. The Nouvelle revue française under Jean Paulhan, 1925–1940. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Greenacre, M. and J. Blasius. 1994. Correspondence Analysis in the Social Sciences. London: Academic Press. Muel-Dreyfus, Francine. 1996 (2001). Vichy et l’ éternel feminin. Contribution à une sociologie politique de l’ ordre des corps. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by Kathleen A. Johnson, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. Durham: Duke University Press. Paxton, Robert O. (1972) 2001. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940–1944. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Reprinted by New York: Columbia University Press. Rouannet, Henri and Brigitte Leroux. 1993. L’ Analyse des données multidimensionnelles. Paris: Dunod. Sapiro, Gisèle. 1999. La Guerre des écrivains (1940–1953). Paris: Fayard. ———. 2002. ‘The Structure of the French Literary Field during the German Occupation (1940–1944): A Multiple Correspondence Analysis’, Poetics. Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts, 31 (5–6): 387–402. ———. 2003. ‘Forms of Politicization in the French Literary Field.’ Theory and Society, 32: 633–52. ———. 2004. ‘Défense et illustration de “l’ honnête homme”: les hommes de lettres contre la sociologie’. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. 153 (June): 11–27.

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Serry, Hervé. 2004. Naissance de l’ intellectuel catholique. Paris: La Découverte. Simonin, Anne. 1994. Les Éditions de Minuit 1942–1955. Le devoir d’ insoumission. Paris: Institut Mémoires de l’ édition contemporaine.

Symbolic Violence, Masculine Domination and Politicization of Gender: The Case of the Vichy Regime (France, 1940–1944)


Francine Muel-Dreyfus

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istorical research since the 1970s — above all the work of Robert O. Paxton (1972) — has conclusively shown that in 1940, France was the only occupied western European country whose government did not confine itself to administrative tasks under German direction, but actually internally revolutionized its institutions and value system. This political, social, and cultural undertaking was called the National Revolution whose motto ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ (Labour, Family, Fatherland) replaced the Republican’s one ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). The political reconstruction of femininity and gender was central to this conservative revolution, headed by Marshall Pétain and the right-wing political forces which celebrated it as a victory in the heart of defeat.1 The National Revolution undertook several and wide-ranging reforms. It is sufficient to mention here that the reforms involved the educational system, the family, and the medical sphere. Reforms introduced in the educational system tended to eliminate the programmes of democratization of schools by successive left-oriented governments from the First World War

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onwards; family reforms tended to return to the old legislation which imposed masculine domination in the private sphere and the recognition of family associations as political forces; and medical reforms imposed a growing control over women’s bodies. Thus, these reforms impacted significantly on women’s lives — their access to education, work, and control over their bodies. Reforms were undertaken as early as July 1940 regarding women’s work, education and schooling for girls, family and health policy, and feminine influence in the city and the public sphere. Here, and in the ethical, social, and political justifications that supported these reforms, and also in the commentaries, often militant, of their numerous defenders, we find all the facets of the myth of the eternal feminine. This notion had become commonplace and had imposed the idea of an eternal feminine nature and an eternal feminine essence that always has and always will escape history. The defence of the ‘eternal feminine’ was caught up in the heritage of political battles in which opposing views of the social world clashed. Its imposition as the only legitimate social definition of femininity was also the imposition of a conservative social philosophy that rejected and excluded ‘outsiders’. My research (Muel-Dreyfus 2001) investigates the political stakes of the construction of womanhood, by the State, in a time of crisis. I ask how the myth of the ‘eternal feminine’ comes to be revived in an emergency situation, under an authoritarian government, when all safeguards have collapsed? In what way is this myth central to the political and social philosophy of the National Revolution? The National Revolution teaches as much about the inexhaustible richness of the representations and modes of production of this aspect of the social unconscious that is the ‘eternal feminine’ as the polarization of investments in defence of the myth teaches us about the political and social options of this conservative revolution. If the culture of female submission is expressed in all its violence between 1940 and 1944, it is nevertheless at work though dormant, at other, less fraught periods of history. Vichy texts on women also teach us something about

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the everyday aspects of the symbolic violence that is at the basis of male domination and female submission. My research shows that the order of bodies is a fundamental dimension of any political order. The return to the biological foundation of ‘natural’ differences between the sexes and the related idea of an irreducible difference between masculine and feminine ‘destinies’ nurtured, through all sorts of metaphoric slippage, the political ideology and the sociodicy of a regime obsessed with restoring national homogeneity that should have been destroyed by individualism, egalitarianism, the Declaration of Human Rights, parliamentary democracy, and the social conflicts of 1936; a regime that rejected all forms of the ‘inassimilable’.2 The Vichy regime’s view of social hierarchies and of the ‘legitimate’ reproduction of those hierarchies, its definition of the elite and of the people, its anti-Semitism, were all tied to the defence of a ‘natural’ order of things and of the world, with focus on an ‘eternal’, ‘natural’, male/female hierarchy as one of their foundational beliefs. The representation of an immutable, ‘natural’, necessary, biological order legitimizes the representation of an immutable, ‘natural’ and necessary social order. The culture of feminine submission is a paradigm of the culture of submission in the broadest sense: submission of the ‘masses’ to the elite, of the poor to the rich, of newcomers to old notables, of ‘unhealthy stocks’ to ‘healthy stocks’, of the deracinated to those firmly rooted, of outsiders to the established.3 By repositing the relationship of women to work and to the educational system, Vichy recreated an elitist educational system. This system denounced the ambitions of the ‘outsiders’. It also refused a relationship between scholastic order and family order that would otherwise have relativized the importance of family heritage in acquiring social positions. Finally, by rediscovering ‘natural’ aptitudes, by recasting doctors in the role of experts in social order and social philosophy, by founding a system for the ‘scientific’ legitimization of social destinies on the notion of a female anatomical ‘destiny’, Vichy established a relationship between the biological order and the social order. Following this logic, the return to

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the ‘eternal feminine’ made it possible to posit a world where all inequalities were inequalities of ‘nature’ inscribed on an ‘eternal’ order of things. Under the Vichy regime, abundant legislation dealing with work, the family, health, and education mapped out the legitimate places for women, outlined the forms of transgression, and defined sanctions. In this legal demarcation of frontiers, real and symbolic violence were inextricably intermeshed. And for all the regime’s ideologues, all the ‘prophets’ of decadence and regeneration, it was essential for a renovated France that women in general and mothers in particular return to or stay at home. A study of the social logics at work in the fields of education, medicine, demography, religion, and literature, to restore the archaic mythic conceptions, shows the development of ideological crystallizations that lend themselves easily to one-upmanship, radicalization, a stiffening of ideas that restore archaic, mythic conceptions. It also shows that the strong-armed unanimity that reigns in times of crisis, when all safeguards have collapsed and when political opposition is reduced to silence, is grounded in a forgetfulness of yesterday’s controversies and conflicts: it is pregnant with the denial of history. In Vichy France, this collective reconstruction of the ‘female nature’ and of women’s place in public life, fostered by the supreme State authority, tended to impose the idea that for women myth and history are one and the same, they overlap in the ongoing reiteration of sameness: ‘A girl must above all be the same as her mother’, wrote one official thinker on education in a condemnation of women’s recently gained access to secondary and higher education (Benjamin 1941). Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic violence and masculine domination in Kabylia society were of great importance to me in my research on the Vichy regime. In The Logic of Practice (1990a) Bourdieu sees male domination as the form par excellence of symbolic violence. Symbolic violence is performed through an act of misrecognition and recognition which lies outside of the controls of

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consciousness and will, in the obscurity of the practical schemes of the habitus. The work of socialization tends to achieve a somatization of relations of domination — firstly through a social construction of the vision of biological gender, which itself serves a basis for the whole mythic world view; and then through the inculcation of a bodily hexis which is a kind of internalized politics (Bourdieu 1990b; 2001)

Women’s Guilt and the ‘Invention’ of the Culture of Sacrifice The Vichy policy of returning mothers to the home seemed to disregard the realities of the professional, scholastic, and intellectual situation of French women in 1939, a situation that had evolved since the nineteenth century. Compared to other European countries, women in France had been working for a long time and many had taken advantage of the developments in the field of education. From 1906 to 1946, French women represented close to 40 per cent of the working population; many of these were married. Most of the women who worked in industry and agriculture did so out of necessity. The major consequence of the First World War on the women’s job market was the increase in the employment in the middle classes which was linked to the drop in their income and to the demographic imbalance that had increased the number of single women. As a result, between 1906 and 1936 the number of women in public service doubled. In the middle classes and in certain sections of the bourgeoisie, family strategies concerning girls’ education and investments in women’s education became necessities after the First World War. The thirst for knowledge, the struggle for economic survival, and the process of the structural deskilling of ‘female’ occupations combined to encourage the consistent rise in the demand for women’s instruction. But the higher women went in the educational system, the more their access was slowed or violently blocked. Nevertheless, they began to exercise their

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right to the skilled professions, as lawyers, doctors. This was facilitated by the fact that female secondary education had been assimilated into male education in the lycées in 1924, and the baccalauréat was officially opened to girls from this date. With a blindness that surprises us today, the discourse that began with the National Revolution disregarded the realities of women’s conditions and aspirations. The violence of the permanence of an image and an imagery of woman in the kitchen reappeared intact, untouched by the struggles for women’s suffrage, by the presence of three women in the government of the Popular Front of 1936, by women’s access to higher education and numerous skilled jobs, by the permanence of women’s work in industry, agriculture, and offices. The Vichy rhetoric on the feminine offers a striking example of the denial of history. Whatever became of the educational and professional advancements of women, their accomplishments in the field of sports, the gains of the feminist movements, the thin, lively bodies of the garçonnes in this view of the world?4 In this discourse, the observation, unanimous in the recent past, of the courage and capabilities of women during the First World War was lost, as though a groundswell had left a blank stretch of sand on which one could begin again to write the saga of the ‘eternal feminine’. A reserve army would become involved in this collective reconstruction of the myth. In his remarkable study L’ Étrange défaite (1946), on the 1940 defeat and the fears and instances of social revenge expressed in its wake, Marc Bloch, historian and co-founder of Annales, speaks of ‘the hypnotic effect of chastisement’ to define the atmosphere of the period. Questions regarding the reasons for France’s defeat and the need for renovation were cloaked in an obsessive concern with collective guilt and the need to designate offenders, those guilty people who were behind the occurrence of ‘decadence’. Women were in the forefront here. As early as 1940, Candide, a magazine with links to Action Française5 with a pre-war circulation of 300,000, called for a toughening of anti-semitic legislation and punishment of ‘those who were to blame’. In their words

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The vital springs had dried up. One secret of our downfall resides here. Inebriated with themselves, smitten with personal ambition, women have gradually been drawn away from their eternal role. French women of today bear a heavy share of blame for our defeat. The new men are well aware of this. The new legislation is not only wise, it is severe. It thwarts the unfettered outbursts of female cupidity. It requires that women stay at home or return there (Corthis 1941).

The first set of legal exclusions (the act revising naturalizations is dated 16 July 1940 and the first special status for Jews, aimed primarily at excluding them from civil service work, is dated 3 October 1940) included an act, dated 11 October 1940, known as the Women’s Labour Act. It prohibited the employment of married women in civil service and quasi-civil service work, exhorted those unwed women under the age of 28 who were already employed there to find a husband within a twoyear period (in which case the state would provide a dowry for them), ordered the dismissal without compensation of mothers of three or more children whose husbands had employment, and also ordered the immediate retirement of women over 50. Reforms, projects, and discussions on education were predicated on a single notion: that men are called upon to perform a craft, whereas girls have nothing else to learn but their ‘craft of womanhood’, as stated in the periodical published by the Uriage school for higher learning for male cadres created by Vichy (Hussenot 1941). In October 1940, in an article that would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier, the very serious daily paper Le Temps published an ironic commentary on the lists of bachelières (girls having passed their high school graduation examination), expressing the hopes that henceforth ‘knitting will prevail over schooling’ and preaching as follows: ‘Perhaps the day will come when women will have their names in the newspapers because they have given birth to a fourth child’ (Charles 1940). An act dated 18 March 1942 made teaching of ‘family life and housekeeping’ compulsory in all schools for girls. Girls’ education now had to do with imitating, with

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the body’s memory, the early apprenticeship of perennial domesticity. Plans for a scholastic subculture for girls proliferated; it was even suggested that girls be deprived of the theoretical aspect of the science curriculum. Women’s only legitimate function was considered to be motherhood (‘There is no room in society for a coquettish, childless woman: she is of no use’, proclaims a flyer from the Commissariat General for the Family), and Vichy actually ‘nationalized’ that function in 1941, by establishing Mother’s Day, the last Sunday in May, as a national holiday. The celebration of Mother’s Day yielded an opportunity for an extraordinary array of rituals and a collective effort at mobilizing cultural images and symbols resulting in the reinforcement of the normative proclamations on women’s ‘nature’. Mother’s Day, with its imposition on women of a univocal image of themselves, and concomitantly of what they should be, may be viewed as a celebration of deprivation that denies that it is deprivation. This is a high point in the formalization of the regime’s view of womanhood, which I propose to call ‘the culture of sacrifice’. This gender subculture, fed on the immemorial cultural stock of the Catholic view of women, calls women to order: they must be forgetful of themselves, devoted, in voluntary servitude, in the only place they may legitimately occupy: the space of the home. ‘The home becomes our cloister. Our life has its unchanging rule . . . ’ writes the winner of the contest preparing for the celebration of Mother’s Day, 1942; ‘Mothers are mystically bound to sacrifice’, are the words of the propaganda bureau of the Commissariat General for the Family (Archives Nationales).6 Returning to the sociogenesis of Mother’s Day and to the decisive role played by the Vichy regime in its ultimate establishment as a national holiday, I would like to underline the arbitrariness of this state designation of the feminine whose creation has been forgotten because it has been so successful in asserting itself in fact and mind. We may thus ask the following question: By making Mother’s Day a national holiday, did the state act only in the public space?

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Behind each toddler coming home from school with a drawing, embroidery or a poem, loomed the State, entering the intimacy of private space with a reminder that the fates of men and women were different, once and for all. As it ordered and controlled signs of private recognition throughout the nation, the State achieved the symbolic feat of assigning an order to bodies, and delivering up the perfect expression of a previously less visible gender subculture. By thus connecting public ritual and the call to order of the private celebration, this ceremonial code conveyed the sociological truth of Mother’s Day. This national day was in fact a rite of consecration, of legitimization, i.e., a ‘rite of institution’ as defined by Pierre Bourdieu with respect to rites of passage: the major effect of the rite is the one that goes almost completely unnoticed, because it is less to transform the person involved in the rite than to establish a limit, a gulf, between those involved and those not involved. The initiation of young people first of all establishes the difference between men and women and institutes it by establishing man as man and woman as woman. In the same way, the Mother’s Day rite is the magical establishment of a difference that establishes an identity and imposes a social essence based on biological differences. By separating mothers in the ceremonial space and in the temporal space (of the calendar), the state imposed limits and a ‘right to be that is inseparably a duty to be’ (Bourdieu 1991b). By indicating their identity to women-mothers, it produces an effect of statutory assignment, of symbolic violence, that had real effects because this establishment imposed a destiny and enclosed those it distinguished within the limits thereby assigned to them and that it made them recognize. The rite of institution embodied in Mother’s Day first erected a magical boundary between the masculine and the feminine. This reinvention of Mother’s Day, and its ultimate establishment as a national holiday, is a good example of the work of selection carried out at certain historical junctures in the available cultural stock of representations of the feminine and of the masculine/feminine opposition. This work of mobilizing symbolic

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representations and interpreting the meaning of symbols, which limits and contains their metaphorical potential, ends in reinforcing normative statements about feminine ‘nature’ and in producing the illusion of social consensus, since time immemorial, concerning what could have been a subject of conflict or, at the very least, was far from having achieved general agreement. The perceived differences between the sexes were thus channelled through fixed representations that took the form of an eternal binary opposition offering a normative and univocal affirmation of the nature of the masculine and the feminine.7 Vichy’s construction of Mother’s Day presented itself as the simple continuation of a ‘customary’ celebration, while the process of selecting the masculine/feminine schemes of opposition that accompanied it repressed any alternative possibilities, including the memory of the relative symbolic and practical nonexistence of this commemoration during the interwar period. One of Marshall Pétain’s most famous mottos was that in France, in the interwar years, ‘the spirit of pleasure has won out over the spirit of sacrifice’ (Pétain 1941). This undertaking, the national re-education of women, expresses an elitist social philosophy that rejects outsiders, all those people whose yearning for immediate pleasure leads them to push ahead on the social calendar. The defence of ‘proper’ teaching for women and of ‘proper’ teaching for the people are part of the same system. The discussion of women’s relationship to school is necessarily also a discussion of how society’s elites are maintained or renewed, of access to secondary and higher education for the middle and working classes and the alternative of birth or worth, raising the old ghost of déracinement (rootlesness, deracination), patterned after Barrès’ model.8 La Garçonne, heroine of the famous novel by Victor Margueritte, is first and foremost a graduate of the Sorbonne. The state’s recognition of a fundamental inequality between male and female intellectual aptitudes founded on the irreducible difference of male and female destinies brought women back into line in the scholastic order. Putting women in their place is at the heart of this ‘eternal sociodicy’ that relies on

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‘apocalyptic denunciations of all forms of “levelling”, “standardization”, or “massification”’, to identify ‘the decline of societies with the decadence of bourgeois houses, i.e., a fall into the homogeneous, the undifferentiated’ (Bourdieu 1984). This is the most political level of signification of the feminine education issue, and it is omnipresent in the outline of the educational limitations for girls drawn up under the National Revolution. The marking out of the intellectual ambitions of each sex, and therefore of their legitimate use of the educational system, is inseparably a marking out of the legitimate educational and social ambitions of each level of society. Just as the female lycéennes or students always run the risk of what might be called ontological deracination, the access of the masses to knowledge is always a bearer of social deracination and therefore of illicit ambitions, envy, and revolts. The female gender subculture produced during the National Revolution coalesced in the interaction between the ideological and political utilization of the myth by the French State and the strategies of those most closely involved in producing it. It raced forward, spurred by corporatist logics, the vying for markets, attempts of previously unsuccessful or less successful would-be prophets and competition of all sorts. This ‘invention’ of a culture of sacrifice sheds light on earlier partial ‘inventions’ of the demand for women’s to be forgetful of themselves, grounded in the defence of a variety of strategic institutional, vested interests (production of priests by mothers for the Church, arguments favouring a closed school system to exclude newcomers, definition of doctors as educators-of-mothers and of medicine as family-medicine, population growth raised to the dignity of official wisdom, etc). If Marshall Pétain had not solemnly contrasted the spirit of pleasure and the spirit of sacrifice, and if all the champions of the ‘eternal feminine’ had not identified with that sly phrase, full attainment of that gender subculture would perhaps have been out of the question. And yet, it simply drew the various pieces of the puzzle from the stock of scholarly and commonsense thinking. That culture was already present, bolstered by all of these elements in some

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invisible or less visible way, but it could not be named until it became one of the very foundations of power. The explicit politicization of the culture of women’s sacrifice is definitely what lent it its full meaning and public visibility, rescuing it to escape the banalization of withdrawal to the private sphere. National Motherhood and Exclusion of the ‘Inassimilable’ In 1939, the journal of the National Alliance against Depopulation published a cartoon showing three dead people attached to execution posts bearing signs reading ‘abortionist’ and ‘traitor’, with the legend: ‘Abortionists kill one French baby out of three. Anyone who protects them is a traitor to France, working for foreigners. What punishment do they deserve?’ With the establishment of the Vichy regime, the radicalization and triumphant imperialism of the demographic interpretation of the defeat along with the self-promotion of demographers to the dignity of public accusers and saviours led to the escalation of figures, cataclysmic predictions, horrendous descriptions and calls for repression by the defenders of the family and of natalism. The National Revolution reinforced control over women’s bodies by modifying the status of abortion, which was no longer a crime against the individual, but a crime ‘against Society, the State and the Race’, according to a 15 April 1942 Act. Henceforth judged by an emergency court, the State Court set up in 1941 to judge ‘an individual guilty of action potentially harmful to the French people’, abortionists were now liable to the death sentence. Natalist policies were already very repressive in the 1930s, but with the Vichy regime they took on a new tone: abortion was viewed as the point of no return of ‘egoism’, that female version of individualism, the negative counterpart of sacrifice glorified by Mother’s Day. Medicine, in turn, provided the regime with an unending supply of ‘scientific myths’ that constantly ground in the idea that maternity is women’s ‘civilizing process’, to use Norbert Elias’ (1969) phrase: demographic balance and women’s psychological balance go hand in hand.

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The National Revolution offers a perfect example of an overproduction of ‘scientific myths’, that satisfy, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘the unconscious impulse that drives one to give a unified and total response in the manner of myth and religion to a socially important problem’ and of their political uses. The paradigmatic case of Montesquieu’s ‘climate theory’ is examined by Pierre Bourdieu (1980) so as to describe the ‘Montesquieu effect’. This is the effect of truth or scientificity that is procured in the social sciences, as it was in the natural sciences in earlier periods, by superimposing two principles of coherence: the surface coherence of the rhetoric of scientificity (partly based on borrowings from more advanced sciences) and the deep coherence of mythical logic. The mythological ‘scientificity’ that is produced in this way presents in a misrecognizable form a complex of sexual and social phantasms (North/ South, cold/hot, tense/relaxed, etc.). If the ‘eternal feminine’ of ‘scientific’ discourse seems to escape history, it is because there is an entire stock of cultural images of the feminine and of the masculine/feminine opposition progressively constructed over time, most often in times of crisis and confrontation, whose historical conditions of production have been ‘forgotten’. These schema, which are part of the social unconscious, can always be re-mobilized, purified in some way of their historical processes of production. They can thus appear as eternal truth, as indisputable values to which it is always good to return, and which would lead to that golden age to which only the mythic vision of the social world gives access. By proclaiming a declining birth rate to be the primordial disorder, demography raised itself to the dignity of a political philosophy, particularly since discourse on the falling birth rate was always concomitantly a discourse on the dangers involved in naturalization, the risks of racial mixing and contamination of the race. The family to be restored to a place of honour was the family ‘of French blood’. The issue of immigration and the declining birth rate had already been turned into a system in the late 1930s, with the growing xenophobia attendant on the victory of the Popular Front, but, with the Vichy regime and its

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rapid decision to revise naturalizations and create a special status for Jews as early as July and October 1940, the most commonplace appeal to motherhood may be heard as preaching for a unified, purified French nation. It has become a platitude to contextualize thinking on population growth and naturalization, demographic prophesying and denunciation of the dangerous stateless. This acme of the reconstruction of male domination with its violent delimitation of women’s legitimate territory on the basis of the ‘natural’ order was, inseparably, the acme of exclusion. The spirit of the family was seen, above all, as a national spirit, and as Maurras says, ‘the real country must return to its natural organization’: The wild post-1924 naturalizations will be carefully revised. An old song says: ‘The French are in their homeland’; that was no more than an admirable outcry of our juvenile determination. Within our lifetime, it will become an established truth, as we enforce our great motto, ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ (Maurras 1941).

The ‘true’ French woman was expected to support regeneration by producing children and staying at home. And the admonition to women, eager to study and to invest their energies in a profession, was a call to reconstruct the national body, to an organicist political philosophy based on the idea of ‘natural’ communities, with the family as the ‘basic cell’ of society. Like the recently naturalized, with neither hearth nor home, women made the mistake of leaving their home, those ‘hearths’ that were ‘little fatherland’, as Maurras put it, to form the national order. The call for French motherhood was part of a political vision that reformulated history in terms of invasion and pollution by alien elements inassimilable by the social body. Thinking on ‘the suicide of the family cell’ (Archives nationales: Commissariat General for the Family)9 is part of a broader reflection on ‘the obligation to concentrate French forces, whose features have been set over many generations’, according to the presentation of the reasons motivating the first special status for

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Jews. At a time when thought on the prevailing chaos was needed, this reflection easily rediscovered the thesis of those typical producers of ‘scientific myths’, the old French theoreticians of racist anthropology with their political-biological vision of the national community. René Martial, specialist of immigration and half-breeds — ‘interracial grafts’ in his words — himself a trained doctor, and founder of a course on the biological anthropology of races at the Paris School of Medicine, became a member of the board of directors of the Institute of Sociological Anthropology headed by Darquier de Pellepoix, second general commissioner for Jewish Affairs. This institute was to study the scientific bases of racial ‘selection’. Martial, who applauded the exclusion of foreigners and Jews from civil service and the medical professions, was opposed to inter-racial marriages since in his opinion people of mixed blood are characterized by ‘vulgarity, facial asymmetry, poorly proportioned limbs and body, mental instability and morbid originality’ (Martial 1942). Like Alexis Carrel, also a doctor and famous author of Man, the Unknown (1935), and head of the Foundation for the Study of Human Problems created by Marshall Pétain in 1941, Martial was interested in the ‘healthy’ stock, the heritage of the fatherland, and condemned feminism as a ‘biological error’. Carrel’s central objective, and that of the Foundation he directed, was to improve the ‘civilized races’ through the reproduction of their best elements and to encourage the perpetuation of elites through the development of the ‘strong’ against the ‘predominance of the weak’, by reviving the ‘ancestral potentialities’ of the ‘noble and energetic strains’. Carrel’s personal obsessions concerning the sterility of noble stock were consistent with the demographic thematics of the infertility of the elites deployed during the nineteenth century. The Biology of Lineage team of the Foundation therefore strove first to locate stocks of ‘good genetic constitution’ and then to aid in the propagation of these stocks. For it was considered pointless to increase the birth rate if the increase was accomplished ‘as a result of the fertility of defective elements’. Nazi racial hygiene had also reactivated the distinction, dear to the German

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eugenicists of the 1920s, between ‘mothers of the race’ and mothers responsible for ‘racial degeneration’ (see Bock 1983). Thus, the ‘positive’ eugenics of the Carrel Foundation proposed to replace democracy with what could be called a ‘biocracy’, in which ‘hereditarily and biologically gifted beings have a duty to unite only with beings who are also of superior quality’. The Biology of Population team set as its priority scientific work concerning heredity, genetics, eugenics, and, with the assistance of the recently created Coordination Centre for Family Movements, undertook a ‘census of the healthy stocks of France, of fertile and professionally gifted families’.10 Here the Foundation provided the ‘scientific’ version of the genealogical concerns of the National Revolution obsessed by the women’s responsibilities in the ‘degeneration’ of the country. The second task that the Carrel’s Foundation team of Population Biology set for itself was the scientific treatment of immigration: it announced the establishment of documentation concerning foreign immigration in France and the completion of surveys intended to ‘determine who are the immigrants whose presence may be deemed desirable’. The Foundation thus provided the guarantee of its scientific authority to the French State’s obsession with restoring the homogeneity of the national body, weakened as much by the declining birth rate as by immigration, according to the theoreticians of degeneration who sustained demographic thought during the interwar period. To distinguish ‘assimilable’ groups from the others, the Foundation undertook investigations of the Armenians of Issy-lesMoulineaux, a suburb where they were concentrated, and the foreigners of Les Halles neighbourhood in Paris, where the majority of the Jews, refugees of the 1930s, lived. It sought to know what the products of crossing these foreigners with French men and women are worth [for the presence] of groups of undesirable foreigners from a biological standpoint is a sure 11 danger for the French population.

This refocusing on the masculine/feminine opposition was consistent with biological anthropology and, in turn, biological

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anthropology was consistent with the preservation of the hereditary heritage, with the assimilable and the inassimilable. As we know, for Xavier Vallat, first Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs, the Jew was first of all ‘an inassimilable foreigner’. In this social philosophy of withdrawal into oneself and condemnation of the other, the mobilization of French homemakers came to symbolize the homogeneity of the social body. In the regulations for the competition intended to reward the best texts and illustrations celebrating mothers organized by La Revue de la famille in preparation of Mother’s Day 1942, the first article specifies: ‘A contest is opened to all readers of La Revue de la famille of French nationality, etc.’ This detail probably served as much to exclude foreign children and adults who might have wanted to send their drawing or poem, as to recall, on the occasion of this Mother’s Day, that it was a question of national maternity. Here, again, we see that the call for women’s participation in the recovery of health went hand-in-hand with the affirmation of the principle of exclusion. Natalist propaganda and the state construction of femininity based on maternity functioned like therapeutic agents that aimed to restore the internal balance of the social body that had to be reborn to purity. The best protection against this dangerous ‘border’ formed by ‘crossbreeds’ was national feminine sacrifice. In 1943, The French Union for the Defence of the Race, in charge of propaganda at the General Commission on Jewish affairs as of December 1942, used the slogan ‘Long live the race, and consequently, long live mothers’ on his radio programme celebrating Mother’s Day: And you mothers who have already formed and delivered your child who is already a man to society for the collective good, be thanked for your sacrifice. This multiple sacrifice will undoubtedly be the salvation of our country that so many country-less scoundrels without honour wish to see perish (Marguy 1943).

Vichy was the revenge of conservative forces, a counterrevolution that combined both faces of the opposition to the Republic: the old opposition to 1789, Human Rights and free,

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secular, compulsory schooling, and the more recent opposition to the Popular Front encompassing all those forms of ‘massification’ characterizing the 1930s — the democratization of education, the rural exodus producing overcrowded cities, great concentrations of workers, paid vacations sending hordes of invaders into the countryside and polluting the ‘lovely month of May’, plus the immigration of ‘inassimilable’ refugees. Paradoxically, this revenge was expressed through the ‘apolitical’ theme of the construction of womanhood during the National Revolution. Reverting to the myth of ‘eternal womanliness’, pervaded by political aversions of all sorts, was used for the worst of all justifications, the reverting to a French nation rid of any racial impurities. This backed up an anti-democratic world-view justifying class prejudice and official anti-semitism through the call to revert to an eternal order of things and people. The most innocuous Vichy text on returning mothers to their home is a condemnation of individualism and the precepts of Human Rights. ‘Eternal womanliness’ as a political philosophy makes sexual and social submission one and the same thing, and the rulers thus inscribe women, or rather, ‘the French woman’, in their racist rhetoric. Conclusion Calls to return to earthliness, the denunciation of erroneous modernism and the celebration of regionalism by literature and folk revivals are part of the ideological nebula — close to the völkish ideology, so pregnant in the Nazi discourse12 — of this conservative revolution. For the regime’s theoreticians, women ‘rooted in nature’ must once again become the guardians of the ‘great cosmic and social continuity’. Vichy discourse concerning the ‘eternal feminine’ can present itself as an eternal discourse concerning the eternity of things. It denies any notion of the historical, political, and cultural construction of sexual differences, incessantly returning to the body and to the differences between bodies. It imposes a biological vision of the social relations of gender all the more as

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it tends to impose a biological vision of all the social failures, finding the secret of the vitality of peoples in ‘millenary balances’ and ‘cosmic continuities’. It nationalizes the female body by reference to the carnal anchoring of Barrèsian nationalism.13 It inscribes itself in the myth of eternal return, making women the guardians of tradition, making them intermediaries of harmony with the eternity of the world against all the intrusions of history. A Little Guide to Mother’s Day published in 1943 tell us that Mother’s Day is the epitome of ‘living folklore’. ‘Folklorizing’, a false history that fixes, is one of the tools of amnesia, an eternally political arm. By pulling this thread, it would be possible to construct a comparative sociology of the processes of ‘folklorizing’ femininity, and to reveal the consistencies and variations in its political and social functions. By questioning the political meaning of this conscious and justified return to what nurtures the socio-cultural unconscious of femininity and its apprenticeships, the identification of women with the nature of their body and, through this, with nature, it would be possible, case by case, to historicize the social processes of reproduction of this form of symbolic violence that is so difficult to question, all the more as it often eludes consciousness. In the last chapter of The Myth of the State (‘The Technique of Modern Political Myths’), Ernst Cassirer (1946) asked about the return of mythic reason in times of crisis. In all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again. For myth has not really been vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity. This moment comes as soon as the binding forces of man’s social life lose their strength and are no longer able to combat the demonic mythical powers.

We know that mythic demons do not fall from the sky. But to trace the paths of their reappearance, it is necessary to undertake a historical sociology of the production of the social representations, which is, by definition, interminable. Approached

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from this perspective, the subject is necessarily always far from being exhausted; to go further, a detour through comparative reflection would be necessary, for that would make it possible to systematize the logics of questioning already constructed and to restore to them a dynamic force that the violence of banality, both the ultimate object of and the (unconscious?) check to this research, ultimately saps. How, we might then ask, and find answers to many questions: the ‘eternal feminine’ is inscribed in the ideological constellations of the fascist and authoritarian regimes of the period and in the ideological constellations of contemporary nationalist movements? How is it inscribed in racist rhetoric of the past and of the present? What interests its privileged institutional producers defend, what claimed or hidden legacies are invested in it? What are its social mechanisms of crystallization and how is it inscribed in the philosophy of power? Notes 1. In June 1940 the German army invaded Belgium and northern France. The same month, Marshall Pétain, First World War hero, became head of the government and asked for armistice. France was cut into two zones, the occupied zone in the north and the ‘free’ zone in the south. Pétain’s government established itself in the south in Vichy, a spa with big hotels that were transformed into ministries. The originality of the Vichy regime in the French contemporary political tradition is that it brought together all the right-wing political groups, even the more extreme ones like the ‘Action Française’ founded by the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras. The Vichy government followed an increasingly conservative and anti-semitic policy. The German occupation gave right-wingers the opportunity to avenge themselves, especially against the policy of the ‘Front Populaire’, the Left government of 1936. ‘Hitler rather than Popular Front’ was a slogan of the time. 2. For the French theoreticians of anti-semitism of the time, the major grievance against the Jews was that they were ‘inassimilables’. 3. I refer here to the title of Elias (1965). 4. The ‘garçonne’ of the 1920s is a young woman who lives as a young man (‘garçon’). Garçonnes study, work, and are often represented with short

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hair, dancing, and smoking. The word is also the title of a famous novel by Victor Margueritte, published in 1922, which brought scandal in its wake. One million copies were sold by 1929 and the book was the subject of widespread debate in the press. The female protagonist of the novel takes courses at the Sorbonne and, disappointed by her family and her fiancé, acquires social and sexual independence through her job. 5. The ‘Action Française’, directed by Charles Maurras, was the most important right-wing political movement of France in the first half of the twentieth century. It is possible to say that the National Revolution was the culmination of fifty years of ideological battles since the Dreyfus affair led by the ‘Action Française’. 6. Archives nationales, F 41291. 7. I agree with Joan Scott who proposes to undertake comparative sociohistorical analysis of these processes of establishing a point of view as the dominant point of view, rejecting in a collective amnesia, the conflicts, debates, and alternatives of the past. See Scott (1988). 8. Maurice Barrès, conservative nationalist and anti-Semite, published Les Déracinés in 1897. This title soon became the expression of the rightist criticism against the republican social philosophy and the ‘intellectuals’ — Barrès invented this word during the Dreyfus affair — stigmatized as guilty of favouring envy and revolt of the ‘outsiders’. In this famous novel, Barrès criticizes the republican university and its ideal of universalism and of social mobility via education. 9. Archives nationales, F 41291. 10. ‘Rapport au Chef de l’ État sur l’ activité de la Fondation en 1942’, Archives nationales, 2 AG 78. 11. Cahiers de la Fondation française pour l’ étude des problèmes humains, numéro 2. 12. On the völkish ideology, see Bourdieu (1991a). 13. After the defeat of 1870 and the Commune of Paris, the notion of degeneration was raised to the ranks of a political concept, and the images of the lost provinces acquired a corporal and biological form with Barrès. The contributions of Social Darwinism and the conceptions of the human community as inseparably historical, biological, and social specific to Le Bon, Soury, and Vacher de Lapouge would, at the end of the century, give its consummate dimension to this political-biological view of the national community. The determinism of the new nationalism which condemned democracy, was a physiological, racial, and naturalistic determinism that affirmed the principles of subordination of the individual to the community

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and of the integrity of the national body. This anthropological construction, anti-individualist and anti-intellectual, resonated in harmony with the image of the national community forged by Barrès (1903): ‘Beings can only bear the fruits produced for all eternity by their stock’. See also Sternhell (1978).

References Barrès, Maurice. 1903. Amor et Dolori sacrum. Paris: Plon. Benjamin, René. 1941. Vérités et rêveries sur l’ éducation. Paris: Plon. Bloch, Marc. 1946 (1949) . L’ Étrange défaite. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. by G. Hopkins, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940. London: Oxford University Press. Bock, Gisela. 1983. ‘Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization and the State’. Signs, 3 (Spring). Bourdieu, P. 1979 (1984/1986). La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. R. Nice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press / London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1980. ‘Le Nord et le Midi. Contribution à une analyse de l’ effet Montesquieu’. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 35 (November): 21–25. ———. (1980) 1990a. Le sens pratique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by R. Nice, The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1990b. ‘La domination masculine’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. 84 (September): 2–31. ———. (1988, new edn) 1991a. L’ ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. by P. Collier, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (1982/2001) 1991b. ‘Les rites d’ institution’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 43 (June): 58–63 / In idem (ed.), Langage et pouvoir symbolique, pp. 175–86; Trans. by G. Raymond and M. Adamson, ‘Rites of Initiation’. In Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 117–26. ———. (1998) 2001. La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by R. Nice, Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Carrel, Alexis. 1935. L’ Homme, cet inconnu. Paris, Plon. Trans. by A. Carrel, Man, The Unknown. London: Hamish Hamilton. Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. The Myth of the State. Yale: Yale University Press. Charles, Ernest. 1940. ‘Ces bachelières . . . ’ Le Temps, 20 October. Corthis, André. 1941. ‘Le marxisme est l’ ennemi de la femme et du foyer’. Candide, 15 (October). Elias, Norbert. 1965. The Established and the Outsiders. London: Frank Cass & Co. ———. 1969. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Berne: Verlag Francke AG. Hussenot, Anne-Marie. 1941. ‘La mission de la femme française’. Jeunesse . . . France! March. Marguy, Paule. 1943. Union française pour la défense de la race, ‘La Fête de Mères’. Archives du Centre de documentation juive contemporaine. Broadcast of 17 May, LXI: 105, 79. Martial, René. 1942. Les Métis. Nouvelle étude sur les migrations, le mélange des races, le métissage, la retrempe de la race française et la révision du code de la famille. Paris: Flammarion. Maurras, Charles. 1941. La seule France. Lyon: Lardanchet. Muel-Dreyfus, Francine. (1996) 2001. Vichy et l’ éternel féminin. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by Kathleen A. Johnson, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Paxton, Robert O. 1972. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. New York: Norton. Pétain, Phillipe. 1941. ‘Appel du 20 juin 1940.’ In La France nouvelle: Principes de la communauté. Appels et messages. Paris: Fasquelles. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’. In idem, Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Sternhell, Zeev. 1978. La droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914. Les origines françaises du fascisme. Paris: Seuil.

Habitus, Performance and Women’s Experience: Understanding Embodiment and Identity in Everyday Life*


Meenakshi Thapan

P

ierre Bourdieu has been critiqued extensively for not having foregrounded an analysis of gender domination in his otherwise very rich and engaging works on Algeria, Kabylia society, education, art and aesthetics, and on contemporary French society. Feminists are also peeved by his almost insulting references, or contrarily his lack of recognition, to well-known French feminisms and the women’s movement in his article, and later work, Masculine Domination (2001).1 It therefore seems more meaningful not so much to ask where and to what extent Bourdieu’s work seeks to provide an adequate explanation for gender domination, but to address the question in terms of the significant conceptual categories and analytical skills in Bourdieu’s sociological toolkit that help us in our sociological endeavours. Undoubtedly, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is seminal to an understanding of, and engagement with, questions of how gender identities are made, negotiated, redefined, and performed. I use the conceptual category of ‘postcolonial habitus’, the dominant modality for the exercise of multiple subjectivities shaped by class, age, ethnicity and region. I use it moreover to specify the context in which habitus is created and reproduced. I therefore take recourse to a historical and social condition

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that shapes habitus in diverse and particular ways through familial relations, schooling practices and other modalities of the social and public domain. At this point, it is necessary to emphasize the class-based nature of the postcolonial habitus wherein postcoloniality makes a marked contextual difference in the lives of upper-class women, with privileged access to English education and social and cultural capital. However, this is not so for poor or low-caste women with less access to social or cultural capital.2 But I do not thereby preclude the possibilities of resistance or transformation as these are embedded in the nature of habitus itself to the extent that Bourdieu was concerned with the notion, following Chomsky, of ‘generative grammar’ and so of the ‘creative, active, and inventive capacities of habitus and of agent’. In fact, Bourdieu clearly emphasizes that ‘[h]abitus is not the fate that some people read into it. . . . It is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures. It is durable but not eternal’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133).3 Moreover, habitus is embodied in the human subject and is an experience, and in that sense a capital, made explicit through bodily hexis — the bearing of the body, comportment, and deeply ingrained habits of behaviour, feeling and thought. Embodiment is thus critical to Bourdieu’s sociology of lived practice and of what he calls ‘the practical sense’ without which social reality is not constituted. The major feminist critique against Bourdieu expresses a dissatisfaction with the concept of habitus which, in spite of Bourdieu’s emphasis on the possibilities of change, is viewed as embodying an unchanging, obstinate set of dispositions that inhere in the body, emotions and psyche, and that endure over time. Contrarily, contemporary feminist discourse emphasizes ‘agency, fluidity, the instability of subject positionings and identities’ which, as Terry Lovell tells us, ‘contrasts at times very starkly with the durability of Bourdieu’s dispositional subject’ (Lovell 2000: 12). In this article, I seek to understand habitus, its constancy and simultaneously its malleability in the context

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of women’s experience, and my intervention in this debate occurs on two registers: First, I seek to define and understand the constancy of habitus in women’s experience wherein agency is contained in every attempt at breaking out so that the challenge to oppression or domination takes place on well-recognized and trodden paths of resistance and rebellion that often do not reveal more than they appear to. They thus emerge from, and rest within, the social fields inhabited by subjects. They do however articulate the individual aspirations, desires, and goals of the human subject. Second, I address the problem of women’s enactment or performance of identity in terms of what they seek to present about themselves through a variety of expressions that are embodied in their vision and construction of themselves as gendered beings. In a sense, as Judith Butler argues, ‘gender is performatively produced’ thereby ‘constituting the identity it is purported to be’. Further, ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler 1990: 24–25).4 I therefore pursue the notion of performativity as being central to women’s self-construction and question whether this performativity and the creativity that is imbricated in performance in fact constitutes a breakdown in habitus. Or is it the case that the habitus is structured to some extent by ‘a kind of performativity’, as suggested by Butler (1997: 153)? If habitus operates according to a performativity, then the ‘social life of the body’, Butler argues, ‘is produced through an interpellation that is at once linguistic and productive’ (ibid.). The manner in which this interpellative call takes ‘form in a bodily stylistics’, it is suggested, ‘in turn, performs its own social magic [and] constitutes the tacit and corporeal operation of performativity’ (ibid.). Such a formulation understands habitus as the bodily enactment of certain dispositions that are already given and reaffirmed by society. I propose that performativity in a woman’s enactment and presentation of her embodied self, however, steps out of the constraining nature of

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habitus and reflects the more liberatory elements of play, movement, and unfettered expressions of the self. I do not suggest an ‘emancipatory model of agency’ (Mahmood 2005) but argue that agency emerges from within the structures of power and (like Butler), emphasize that ‘the reiterative structure of norms serves not only to consolidate a particular regime of discourse/power but also serves as the means of its destabilisation’ (as quoted in Mahmood 2005: 20).5 Moreover, norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted but performed, inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways’ (ibid.: 22). In this understanding of the simultaneous constancy and malleability of habitus, the view is that the habitus is embodied, unthought, instinctual but also reflective, through understanding and articulation, as well as through embodied work and play, made and unmade in the experience of everyday life. I examine Bourdieu’s widely influential conceptual category of habitus in terms of its emphasis on the collective, the social, so well articulated in his statement: ‘Habitus is a socialized subjectivity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 126); and the implications of this when we seek to emphasize a sociology for women on the basis of subjectively constructed knowledge. The focus on women arises from an explicit effort to speak about the ‘social’ from the perspective and experience of women. It is only when the experience of women forms the basis of understanding the social that we can speak about a sociology for women. The act of hearing women’s voices is essential to understand woman’s recognition of herself as a feminine subject and that act of ‘recognition is a significant moment in the construction of subjectivity’ (Skeggs 1998: 98). This article focuses on differentiated acts of recognition, mediated by class, location, and culture in the everyday lives of women. Experience is central to ‘the construction of subjectivity and theory’ (ibid.: 27) without in any way suggesting that the category of woman is unique, fixed or determined.6 Women’s personal and social worlds are defined in terms of the home, family, childhood, workplace and life experiences at

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various times in their lives. In the process of articulating their life-worlds, women traverse untrodden paths of revelation, strength, and surprise as well as the more frequented ones of abuse, dishonour, shame, and rejection. In these, they revert to memory, narrative, and voice as tools for reconstructing their emotions, thoughts, and experiences in making sense of their own constitution as embodied, gendered beings. Although women’s narratives reflect both the normalizing and disciplining strategies that are present in the most commonplace aspects of their everyday lives, they are also unerringly aware of the choices available to them in such complex circumstances. In other words, the habitus clearly constructs their experience in many important and non-subversive ways but their voices also reflect the call for challenging the structuring structures of the habitus through negotiation, contestation, and transformation. I now turn to these voices in order to explore and understand the multiple subjectivities that inform women’s constitution of their gendered identities in the multiple worlds they simultaneously inhabit, as well as point to the generative constituents of habitus itself. Rather than provide a description of each woman’s life story, I attempt to unpack the narratives and draw out the threads that point to the commonalities and differences in the narratives, keeping in mind the emphasis on the habitus, its constancy, and its malleability. Class, Family, and Community One of Bourdieu’s most significant contributions to sociology has been his emphasis on social class in the formation of an individual’s habitus. This undoubtedly affects the manner in which gender identity is expressed through performance. The critical markers of the social in women’s experience are marriage and motherhood within the overwhelming presence of, and engagement with, the network of kin and family. Among the women I interviewed, social class and the variations within it are reflected in their understandings of their position in the family, their goals, and motivations, and above all, in their contestations

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of their position in the domestic and the public sphere.7 Educated, westernized and upper-class women in urban India tend to be more articulate about the forms of oppression they experience in their everyday lives and simultaneously recognize their conflicts and dilemmas and know how to deal with them. This is also the case for women who live in urban slums although the manner of expression and style of performance are both articulated and performed quite differently. Monica, born in 1944, clearly belongs to an upper class, privileged, educated, and elite family. Her father read at Oxford and went on to become the head of an eminent institution of higher education in Punjab. She had access to a good English-medium school in New Delhi and to an exclusive boarding school. She has a younger sister and both girls received ‘good’ education, as was common at the same time among this social category, at ‘all girls’ institutions of education. However, she was married at a very young age. Her husband’s mother saw her skating at a rink and sent a proposal of marriage for her son. Evidently, in familial contexts, marriage and a ‘good’ marriage are celebrated and valourized. Monica’s younger sister in fact envies Monica’s marital status as that of a ‘well married’ woman, rich and well-settled. Women’s perceptions of their everyday realities may be markedly different from how others, including their kin, perceive them. When asked what her occupation is, Monica replied, ‘I do everything but earn money. Now I’ve realized I’ve missed the bus.’ Her husband is a businessman and they are extremely wealthy. Monica however emphasized that she has no access to any money and has no decision-making authority in the household. She repeatedly said that her husband takes all decisions from buying the furniture to other household tasks: He had the knack and the money to do it. I can’t take major decisions. Children have to speak on my behalf. Money speaks. I’d put up a fight but nothing comes of it.

In the context of the family, women are divested of sexual desire for many reasons, the most significant being a complete lack of communication and affection between the marital

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partners. It has been argued that the social construction ‘of female “need” constrains women to invest desire in maternity rather than . . . sexuality. Hence it constructs the female self in accordance with the dominant cultural paradigm’ (Das 1995: 169). In fact, a woman is often compelled to invest desire in maternity primarily because of the lack of communication or pleasurable sexual relationships with the partner. Monica has three children and while the older two children are married, the youngest daughter fills her life: Ever since I had my daughter, I wanted to be with her and look after her. I wanted her so badly. I was lonely. You know, that inner loneliness. I want people all the time.

Monica’s sexual relationship with her partner is devoid of desire and is a source of intense agony for her: I was forced to have sex. The hurts during the day reflected in my sex life at night. Slowly, I didn’t want any of that. Now we don’t share a bedroom for the last eight years. I started getting a phobia. I wouldn’t move for hours together in case I disturbed him and he would pounce on me. After every fight, I would sleep with the children and then those periods grew longer. He used to womanise and that hurt me and I couldn’t bear his touch. Physically I am so put off, I don’t think I would like him to touch me.

Her social class propels her to add, Indian men have no ‘grooming’ and I value that in a man. I yearn for a companionship. I was only 41 or 42 [years of age] when I moved out of the bedroom. Where is the good relationship? You don’t get it on a platter. Even if I get a chance today, I would walk out. Casual flirtation, people are in to. But I’m conservative, I can’t do anything on rebound. But today if I get a solid relationship, I would give it all up.

Monica’s experience of her unfulfilled sexuality is linked to her expectations of an interpersonal relationship that embodies the dispositions of an upper class upbringing with all its

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expectations of what Monica refers to as good ‘grooming’. The continuous attack on her embodied self which she experiences as rape, loss of dignity, and so on prevents her from engaging in a satisfying sexual relationship with her partner. The denial of sexual desire is further mitigated by her experience of her marriage as an oppressive condition that denies her freedom, choice, and financial independence and from which she has no clearly articulated exit points. Motherhood undoubtedly marks an important defining moment in a woman’s identity and is also invested with desire, as a socially invested ‘need’. However even motherhood, exalted and praised as it is in the Indian family, fails to provide women with self-worth and fulfilment if their self-respect and dignity is continually under assault by their partner. I have become a very bitter person and I am very rude to him. There is always rape in marriage. One hour before, he is abusing me and then wanting sex; and I refused and he pulled my hair and raped me. Then one day I broke his precious things and I told him, ‘You dare touch me’. My needs were never perceived by him. Now I don’t take any shit from him. He never used to even give money for housekeeping, etc. My decisions I say doesn’t matter one bit. He will listen to my children but not to me. I don’t like it. It hurts my dignity that my children have to speak for me. I’m emotionally dependent on my children and I don’t like it. Am I a caretaker only? I would like to get out of the situation. The best thing is to be away for three-four months or I would have a nervous breakdown. We’ve outgrown each other. I don’t like being near him.

In seeking independence from her children, Monica is asserting a movement away from tradition that emphasizes the opposite, i.e., close and dependent relations between grown-up children and their ageing parents. While it is within the family that Monica experiences shame and dishonour in front of her children, it is in the same physical and emotional space that Monica steps ‘out of ’ the accepted definitions of a ‘good’ wife and mother, by breaking her husband’s precious things, by

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leaving him for several months in a year, and by even indicating a desire to be independent of her children. Monica partly blames her mother-in-law’s continuous presence for many years as one reason for the breakdown of her marriage: I had a horrible mother-in-law. She was controlling everything. She didn’t like my husband even sitting next to me. The doctor told me to be careful during my pregnancy. She didn’t like him touching me. She was a young widow and very possessive about her son. I was given no money, no freedom to do what I want. My husband was weak and didn’t rebel and in fact over the years he has become a carbon copy of his mother. All the time she was there.

In a sense, her mother-in-law therefore continues to exist through her son and this is evident in Monica’s life. The presence of the kin plays a significant role in shaping the marital encounter and relationship and influences need and desire within the relationship as Monica’s account so clearly shows us. Social class and its privileges are, however, not sufficient in themselves to prevent the experience of gender domination or a breakdown of self-esteem. At the same time, the generative quality in the habitus continuously seeks a space within which there can be a ‘breaking out’ of the existing space whether we understand this in terms of women’s well-being or an actual social and physical space. The wealth and social status that privileges Monica over other women in no way contributes to an added experience of emotional contentment or well-being: The craving of ‘being wanted’ everyone has. If you have five cars, three servants and four dogs, it is not necessary to be happy. He is working more to show others that we have so much money. I would like to have a husband who is retired, likes to travel and we have less money. He is like a machine; he always talks in terms of money and his goal is to make more and more money. I would like to enjoy my life. To keep up his standard, he has to work more and more. I am not enjoying

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my life because my husband is not there. I would go mad here staying in this tense atmosphere. There is a lot of stress here.

Then, Monica finds her own solution to her problem. By questioning her present state, and seeking another life, her action reflects the creation of other dispositions outside the current frame: That’s why I go away to — for four to five months every year. I don’t care if he minds or not. I don’t care if he womanises. My children are grown up now. They support me. I’m not an escapist but time is running out and I want to get away. I’m dying to have some peace and being away gives me that relief. I don’t ask him even when I’m going.

In this way, Monica seeks to resolve the external conflict, and by defining and seeking well-being for herself she moves away from the constancy that is imposed on her by her habitus without however completely abandoning her present state as a married woman with a family to whom she always returns. The nuclear family, as much as the extended family, changes women’s goals, occupational choices and indeed their notions about their embodied existence. Monica’s experience in the family is very much shaped by the fact that she did not study beyond high school and is therefore unable to be financially independent. She has also become dependent on her situation, tormented as it is, to the extent that she acknowledges that she is ‘conservative’ and also committed to her children in diverse ways. In some senses Monica appears to have surrendered to a life of luxury and wealth that sustains her in the midst of her emotional and personal misery. The postcolonial habitus clearly endures in the class-based nature of its existence and the social status and the position this entails. Simultaneously, however, there is a movement between the constancy and malleability of habitus, both aspects that simultaneously seek to keep Monica firmly embedded in her current context, much as she desires to break free, as well as provide her with the impetus, drive, and strength which enable her to take on violence and despair on her own terms.

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Clearly, the experience of poverty, unemployment, low caste and class status, disease and suffering raises the issue of choices in terms of needs and desires in the everyday life of a woman. I contend however that at no time are women’s choices located outside their everyday existence; in that sense, they speak from within the multiplicity of their experience and location. But this does not suggest that women do not in fact articulate and exercise their agency in contesting, resolving or changing oppressive conditions, as accounts by middle- and upper-class women indicate. It is only that they decide to use several and varying acts of resistance that need not necessarily fall into a universal pattern, but remain embedded in local acts or modalities of agency evolving from individual ways of perception and action. Their potential for change is therefore always limited and constrained. The malleability of postcolonial habitus, embedded as it is in social class and location, is revealed in the following account which reflects an experience of embodied work where women do not have an occupation as such, but after having experienced embodied shame and dishonour, use their bodies to dominate the oppressive other. The strength and effectiveness of performance lies in its ability to transgress authority although this effort may often involve moral or ethical questions of the ‘good’ woman. Nevertheless, such women show great strength, resilience, and the power to dominate through their tough posture (bodily hexis) and strategic and manipulative responses to every difficult situation they encounter. This is 29-year-old Parvati, mother of two children, with a ramrod straight posture and a defiant stance.8 Parvati (the name of a goddess, Shiva’s consort) is an assumed name. She tells us that she was named Parvati by the man who first bought her. I encounter Parvati suddenly, I do not know her, nor have I heard anything about her, so I do not seek her out. She walks into the hutment where I am conducting interviews with some women. It appears that there is an electricity problem in the slum and the Delhi Electricity Board has suddenly cut off all power. Parvati stands at the door and harangues the other women about their inaction in getting

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the power restored. She berates them for their lack of action and tells them that unless they march to the electricity office and threaten the officials with dire consequences, there will be no electricity. Parvati’s bodily stance, voice, and tone indicate a militant woman, aggressive, fearless, and articulate. She motivates the women to action by arguing that the sarkar (government) cannot suddenly remove electricity: ‘They should have given it to us long ago. If they do not give it to us by this evening, we’ll break all the wires.’ In her long narrative about her life, which is primarily dominated by her relationships with different men, Parvati emphasizes aspects of her life when she was not subjugated — by men, by her predicament or circumstances — but was able, each time, to circumvent the imposed control. She is conscious of her agency that she has exercised, and emphasizes her ability to contend with different men and difficult circumstances. Her narrative is dominated by her experience of repeated rape or attempts at rape and comprise the subjective experience of her everyday life. Parvati emphasizes her attempts at being strong and fierce. She says she has fought with the police and the local representative (vidhayak) on various issues. She does not have a ‘husband’, she says, and is ‘not dependent’ on anyone. She says she does not have any work and that she has been told that she talks too much. She seems to think this is the reason why she is out of work. Parvati narrates her life history over several days, appearing to realize the extraordinary nature of her life experiences and speaking with passion, depth, and emotion. She begins by telling me that she was kidnapped from a small town in Uttar Pradesh when she was child (studying in Grade Three), and was sold thereafter for the purpose of prostitution. She, however, ran away from there when she was seven years old. At the age of 14, she married a 35/40-year-old man who harassed her and did not give her food. Parvati found work as a domestic help to feed her children. She slowly got fed up of her life and ran away only to return shortly as she had nowhere else to go and she missed her children. Her husband hit her black and blue on her return such that she had to be admitted

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to a hospital. She was in bed for six months, and was relatively less harassed in that period. Parvati stated that this was the only time when her husband was soft with her and an effort was made to help her back to normalcy. Later, her husband took her to the railway station to sell her but Parvati managed to escape on the pretext of visiting the toilet. She arrived at a friend’s house where her friend’s husband and brother tried to rape and harass her. Parvati asserts that she managed not to be raped because she raised an alarm and threatened them of informing her friend. Parvati later rented a hutment in the slum where she now lives, then started work by polishing bartans (utensils) in a steel factory. Regarding her state of impoverishment at that time, she stated that food was a luxury for her. All she managed to eat, or rather drink, was a solution of water mixed with wheat flour: ‘When one is hungry, then one realizes what life is all about. I used to sleep in a gunny bag’. This implies that she had given up the hutment she had rented and the children appear to no longer be with her. In the meantime, she continued working at the factory. Here the employer tried to cheat on her in terms of money. She then changed her job to work at a hospital as a cleaner. There again the doctor and his attendants raped her under the influence of drugs. Later, she allowed the doctor to have sex with her because she did not want to lose her job for which she received Rs 800 a month. At her place of residence (it is not clear which one or where), Parvati made up a story about a fictitious husband who returned at midnight and left around 4.00 am to obtain social acceptance and also safety from lecherous men preying on single women. The landlord, however, came to know that she did not have a husband and tried exploiting her. Later, a man kidnapped her and took her into a jungle and raped her. While narrating all this, Parvati made it a point, at her own initiative, to emphasize all the acts of resistance she engaged in to assert her independence and maintain her self-esteem. She refused to remove her clothes and told this man, ‘If you want to remove them, take them off yourself ’. He not only removed her clothes then,

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but also made her undergo the torment with other men. She says she later made him pay her back the way she wanted. She first married him at a temple. (When asked the reason for marrying him she added that he had promised to take care of her.) Later, he took her to a property dealer where her thumb impression was taken. This property dealer and his brother encouraged her husband to consume alcohol. These men then raped her and one of them even bit her breast. She grew increasingly fed up of her life and left after informing her husband and her mother-in-law. Parvati then took up a job as a Security Officer with the local police as she had managed to make contacts with them while with her previous husband. Later, her husband visited her but refused her any monetary support and called her a badchalan (bad character). She managed to save some money with her job to buy a small jhuggi (hutment) but found it difficult to stay alone. Often she would run to a temple where she found other women staying. She stayed there for about a year till a mahatma threw her out. Ironically, this man too had tried to rape her, but she had managed to escape by slapping him. Later, she had tried reporting the incident to a journalist, to unravel the misconduct happening at the temple, ‘a place of worship’, as she said. However, she was asked to first lodge an FIR at the police station. Before she could file a complaint, the mahatma from the temple set the police on her, fabricating a case that she had forced herself upon him. She said that she decided to face the police instead of running from them and told them the whole story. She returned to her jhuggi thereafter and resumed her work as a security person. At this point, Parvati said that she wanted to kill herself because she was fed up with her life and tried to get run over by a train. She was however saved by a police officer who brought her back to her jhuggi. The jhuggi was in a bad condition and needed repair. This police officer not only gave her money to have her jhuggi repaired but he also gave her clothes. He thereafter took her to his place. They grew fond of each other and even went out together. People objected to their relationship,

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saying that she (Parvati) was a bad character. But he continued their relationship and took her to his brother’s place to refer her for a job. His brother tried raping her and she complained to the police officer. He retorted that she should have slapped him. He took her from there to a nearby housing colony where they stayed for sometime. Parvati confesses that she loves him and always will and adds that this man really cared about her and gave her a lot in material terms. She spent some of the best moments of her life with him: ‘Those eight years were the best years of my life’. This man now stays elsewhere and is married to a woman of his community (Muslims). ‘If I phone him, his wife abuses me and if I trouble him he says, that if I continue to trouble him, he would kill himself ’, Parvati said. She has rented out her jhuggi and lives off the rent, which is around Rs 1,200 and enough for her survival. This is the first time however that she owns a hutment; it is not clear how and when she acquired this property. Parvati’s language suggests well-being and agency. She appears to be independent and reflects a sense of purpose and selfreliance. Her life has made her completely focused on survival and she expects the same from other women asserting that women who cannot face life head-on and resist oppression are worthless. I do not trust anybody, not even a woman. I have fought with life and death. I will not make any friend now. A woman should keep her faith and not lose courage. I fought with evil; that is why my life is very precious. If a woman is in distress, I am the first one to help. A woman who is not ready to take challenges is good for nothing.

Parvati also appears to be disillusioned with men in general. The person whom we call brother plays with our honour; one who can keep one’s master happy can work. For a man, woman in the house is not valuable, but a woman from outside is special (like tasty meat). They never think that they may have to answer God. Men think, if they have slept with a woman they

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have accomplished something, but they would have to pay for it at some point in time.

After many sessions with her, spread over several days and indeed months, Parvati concludes the interview by commenting, Parvati is not a human being, she is just a life (Parvati koi insaan nahi, kewal ek zindagi hai). Her embodied experience of repeated rape, sexual abuse and oppression by men has resulted in her construction of herself as ‘just a life’ and not really as a thinking, feeling, experiencing person. She views her identity in terms of her past existence and experience and not in terms of her own aspirations and desires. She has also learnt to use her body for survival and for dominating the oppressive other. To some extent she has been a victim by virtue of being a single woman, forced by men into unwanted relationships. Later, she seems to have taken to seeking support from the same people and one is led to think, through granting sexual favours as well. She has full faith in God and adds that she has done everything including sleeping on the road and under a cart. She takes pride in the fact that she ‘kept’ a policeman as a companion. It was perhaps the ultimate act of resistance: publicly keeping a policeman as her lover and companion. It was a complete transgression of all norms and achieved a dual objective with a single stroke: her protection by a man with an official and honourable face as well as her own goal of being independent and free. The uses of the body have however resulted in her subsequently seeking an identity ‘above’ or outside her embodied life as a sexual object, as it were, by pursuing a ‘good’ life in the service of the community. In this manner, although Parvati says that she is now considered a badchalan (bad character) because she does whatever she wants to, she is quick to point out her role in services to the community and her restoration of her ‘good name’. Through performing a service and role that will bring recognition and acceptance, Parvati finds comfort and final acceptance. She has also succeeded in projecting herself as she would like to be seen and understood: as a community person, working

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for the upliftment of women, a do-gooder as well as a force to contend with. The other women told me that when Parvati walks into the local police station, the policemen look scared and start locking up the place because before they can react, she flings the choicest abuses at them, threatens them, then tells them the problem and leaves with an ultimatum that often includes death to the policemen. She certainly has a presence in the community and says, with some pride and satisfaction, I am now much better off than what my earlier situation was. I fell [down] but I have been saved. I never thought I would be able to stand up again. I never told anyone that I am a mother. People used to hide their children from me but now I work in the service of the community. I have earned a name for myself. Everyone knows me, you can ask anyone.

Parvati emphasizes her work for the community, which has restored the more socially desirable ‘good character’ and social recognition to her on which her identity now seems to rest. In her eventual search for social acceptability, she falls back on the strategy of working for the greater common good which will bring her more honour, status, and acceptability, and eventual recognition for being more than a mere life but also a person. Thus it is within the same social and public domain which is the source of her rejection that she ultimately finds acceptance and legitimacy. Sexuality however is central to Parvati’s experience of her life, her oppression, her acts of resistance and even agency, which help her to use her body for her survival through the very pleasure it seems to provide others: the granting of sexual favours. However, she recognizes the double-edged nature of women’s sexuality which can be both a source of strength but can also become a terrible weakness: ‘When a woman is in a man’s arms she loses her senses, this is her biggest mistake.’ This is how Parvati acknowledges the manner through which compliance may take place, through sexual encounters, which may also serve at different times to provide the ground for engaging in resistance. Bourdieu’s enigma of the coexistence of

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compliance and resistance in an experiential sense is marked in the sexual domain of Parvati’s life. But this does not necessarily result in the transgression of authority, rather it helps in the attainment of personal goals and, in Parvati’s case, is her strategy for survival. This also raises the significant question of work, through woman’s embodiment, that is considered at the margins of what is ‘moral’ and socially acceptable behaviour.9 In transgressing the boundaries of the socially acceptable, Parvati’s everyday life practices reveal her struggle for survival in a life dominated by exploitation and poverty. However, Parvati has also shaped an identity for herself through her engagement with all forms of authority, for example by using foul language with policemen thereby presenting herself as fierce and unassailable, engaging in sexual encounters of different kinds for the express purpose of survival and, through her bodily hexis, presenting herself as a strong, independent woman. Speech and bodily stylistics come together in performance and Parvati emerges as an agential subject driven by her desires, aspirations, and goals. Unlike Parvati, Monica’s habitus — shaped by her social class and upbringing — clearly prevents her from publicly presenting herself in quite the same manner and she therefore remains trapped in her marital life. However, both women submit in very different ways to social expectations of the ‘good’ wife (Monica) who lives with her husband against all odds and the ‘good’ woman (Parvati) in the service of the community. Ultimately, the malleability of the habitus in performance is restricted by the social and public domain which impacts women differently who nonetheless seek, negotiate, struggle with, and develop different ways of selfexpression in their presentation of themselves in everyday life. The Body in the Mirror: Bodily Image and Embodied Practice An important aspect of gender consciousness and identity is body image, which is not just about how one is seen by another but also how sees oneself and would like others to see them.

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The element of self-construction is therefore always present in both perception and practice. In this section, I attempt an understanding of women’s performance both in front of the mirror not only to present their embodied selves with a particular image but also as they see themselves performing for the gaze of the other. While it is true that through such performances women are not transgressing authority and their construction of their gender identity remains embedded in particular images that exist in the social, cultural and public imaginaries, they nonetheless give off expressions of themselves that they want to, in this process of construction of their self and public image. In this sense, the woman is engaged, in a practical sense, in creating and performing images that show her to be how she wants to be seen. The narratives that follow indicate that women do indeed understand the impact of the social, cultural, and male representations of their embodiment which to a large extent influence their own images and perceptions. However, their agential practices are reflected in their attempt to redefine ‘beauty’ in a strategic mode to resist conventional notions of it. But this resistance is not always sustained, and women are often in a complex situation where they seek and value the approval of the social and public other, which may incorporate both the male and the female gaze, and simultaneously resist the gaze in order to enable their own vision to prevail. More importantly, they use their performance to tease and manipulate the other, as well as consciously devise the self performatively through a reiteration of performative acts in such a way that enables their vision to prevail. The element of strategy that is imbricated in this process is obvious and is indicative of ‘the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs’ (Butler 1990: 139).10 There is an intimate relationship between women’s perception of embodiment and the experience of sexuality. Kamini, born in 1956, a school teacher and separated from her husband, says: The shape of my body is important. That is, to feel good about myself. Not a barbie doll figure, of course. As a particularly

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progressive woman I might say I am not vulnerable to media images of the body but of course one is. [One] also justifies it by saying it is ‘healthy’ [to stay thin]. A woman’s body is pleasing to yourself [sic.], to have a beautiful body. I feel more relaxed relating to somebody if I feel my body is the shape I like.

Kamini in fact urges men to acknowledge her body shape and comment on it. In this manner, she plays a dominant role in the assertion of her body image and its acceptance among the men she relates to: When men do express themselves in relation to my body’s shape, it’s almost as if I prompt them to say it. I nudge them to do it. Their saying ‘It’s wonderful’ is not enough because I know it’s not. [An] oriental figure: large breasts, small waist, is what I have and men might say they appreciate it because they like it. Their perceptions are different from mine in terms of what they like, e.g., western female body. But their perceptions don’t convince me enough to alter myself for them.

The effect of media representations of women’s embodiment is acknowledged. There is an articulation of herself as someone who desires male approval of her body and simultaneously resists male constructions of authentic feminine embodiment. She perceives her need for the other’s appreciation of her physical beauty which is clearly linked to her sexuality but she is also aware that she is not convinced to transform herself because of male notions of idealized embodiment. There is an obvious conflict, in this case, between her perceived need and her rejection of the male gaze. At the same time, however, Kamini consciously resists her former husband’s assessment of her body image throughout the marriage, refusing to submit to his expectations: My husband didn’t like my weight. In a kind of protest, I remained fat throughout my marriage. He had no right to relate to the way I looked. That was my business. It was also related to the fact that I didn’t like my body fat. He didn’t articulate

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it obviously but jokingly and with vibes. . . . My identity was tied up with this image of being slim. Although I was protesting all the time, I was also succumbing to it. I wasn’t relaxed about it. It affected my sexuality. My husband didn’t realize what he was doing. So many women are more inward-looking and articulate to themselves about the sub-texts in their relationships than men.

Resistance is therefore a conscious, articulated act in response to a perceived act of oppression that has important consequences for the identities women shape for themselves. So while women may experience conflict in their own assessment of their body image and response to the gaze of the other, there is often a far more clearly articulated response when the gaze is experienced as oppressive in ways that threaten their identities. Kamini also expresses an acute awareness of a woman’s abilities to articulate her emotions in relationships far more effectively than men who, she argues, are not so much in tune with their inner selves. This observation helps Kamini to recognize her relationship with her husband as ‘violent’ in many dimensions and enables her to focus on acts that express her resistance to the violence. Kamini’s emphasis on women’s ability to articulate their inner worlds is reflected in Rehana’s experience of her embodiment and the manner in which age, changing perceptions, and lifestyles contribute to embodied practices. Rehana was born in 1956, is married with two young children, and is a radio journalist. She has had a very western education and upbringing in schools outside India which she thinks has largely influenced her ideas about relationships, choices, and equality. Rehana identifies ‘age’ and the changing life-course of a woman as strong components of body image and she values a woman’s embodiment in maternal terms, as being ‘useful’ and thereby more legitimate than the purely sexual or aesthetic: Those definitions [of body image] change with age. As a teenager and as a married mother would be completely different. When I was in my early twenties, my body had to be athletic, sexy, and I had to flaunt it because I was in the West. I wore

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hot pants, mini skirts. But I don’t feel like that anymore. Now my body is mine. Something nobody owns. I have a kind of relationship with it in which it is mine to do what I please with it and it doesn’t have to be shown. Comfort and aesthetics are the primary factors in my existence. In the process, it might look sexy to my husband and other people but it’s not what I set out to do. Now I’m not embarrassed by it. As a teenager I was, but now I am not separated from my body. . . . There is a greater self-confidence and self-assurance now that comes from motherhood. The fact that I breast-fed, used my body for my children, it has a value, it is more precious now. Then it is not so much on display. Now [there is] more a sense of the wholeness of my body: mental, physical, etc. Age, intellectual growth and physical change (motherhood), a combination of these three factors have influenced my perceptions of my body. The fact that I’m doing yoga, homeopathy, all this has to do with my body.

Women, especially as they approach middle age, articulate this movement away from earlier definitions of embodiment and, in this emphasis on embodied resistance through age, Rehana is inflecting maternal acts with both utility and agency. The perception of ‘wholeness’ in relation to the bodily self in terms of both utilitarian purpose as well as ‘value’ reflects an understanding of the fragmented body and woman’s assertion to make her body whole, through the practice of yoga or homeopathy, for instance. Radhika, born in 1953, is a well-educated theatre personality who directs, acts, and dances on stage, and is married with a child. Her experience of body image and bodily practice also highlights the changing concepts of embodiment with age and maturity. Unlike Rehana, she experienced her embodiment as a young woman not in terms of display but more in terms of peer group approval. However, Radhika asserts that as one grows or ages, mediating notions of the self that are created or shaped by other are overtaken by agentially negotiated constructions of self. There was the notion of ‘the fashionable girl’ in college days and we didn’t want to be fashionable. We had our own notions

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of fashionable from scruffy jeans to a beautiful Indian sari. My friends wore skirts but I didn’t. But now, I feel if it looks good on me, why not? So it is a changing notion of viewing the self. In college, peer group and whatnot came between self and the world. Now one is more in touch with self as self and unmediated by notions of self. So one can arrive at different things/ notions about clothing. Also [there is] a different notion of self now where it [clothes/the attire] can look nice but I’m not making a statement.

Radhika’s body image and self-presentation may be unmediated by the social and public gaze as she perceives it but she also wants to be simultaneously recognized as a trendsetter or as someone whose sartorial style is publicly appreciated. In this sense, there is a desire for social and public recognition of body image that is tied up with her own identification of what constitutes her image in terms of the clothes she wears and the style she sees herself as setting. There are other utilitarian considerations that influence sartorial choice but all of these are nonetheless shaped by class, dispositions, and taste. Radhika therefore has a strong sense of what beauty means for her in terms of both her experience of it as well as her idealization of it, If I started looking very scrappy and [the] skin [is] full of blackheads and looking tired, I wouldn’t want to go around like that. The idea of physical beauty has been very important for me — not long nails and removing hair. [It is] to do with acting. In front of a mirror, [I have] performed for hours. So it has to do with looking at an attractive and beautiful person. Mixture really of attractive and beautiful. [I have] an interest in theatre, performing another, enacting another in front of the mirror. Not just seeing yourself but also the character you are playing. So mixture of inner character, your own physical features, and the character you are playing. So when one is really into a character one’s physical features can change and become beautiful as your inner character also changes.

In this manner, she creates the perfect image of herself through the mirror, using the medium of theatre through which

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she presents how she sees herself at different moments in time and space. The conflict may be between Radhika’s idealization of beauty and her unsatisfactory experience of her own body image as she sees it reflected in the mirror and through touch, so that she is unhappy when her ‘eyes have a puffy look’ or her ‘paunch is loose’. However, Radhika herself does not experience this as conflict and in fact sees a direct relationship between her work, i.e., theatre, ‘feeling good’ and ‘looking good’. She also acknowledges the important role of the gaze and appreciation by the social and public other in enhancing her own experience of feeling good. In this sense, for Radhika, shape, form, pleasure, and feeling good are all part of the everyday experience of beauty and this is heightened by others’ appreciation of her physical form as well as of her work. Health (through yoga and homeopathy), happiness and beauty (as in looking good), both within their own definitions as well as in the discursive constructions of others, are associated with good work for women like Rehana and Radhika. The mirror is an important instrument in women’s experience of the embodied self. It is used both for reflecting body image as well as for constructing the image through performance and play. In the construction of her image, Radhika uses the mirror to enhance particular aspects of the reflected body to express emotions; it is therefore an agential instrument. In Leena’s narrative that follows, however, the mirror is used for an assessment or evaluation of the body image, through the gaze of the other, and can sometimes result in a fetishization of woman’s embodiment through a fragmentation of the body into its various parts. Simultaneously, however, the body is also used to construct an identity by performing different versions of self-expression in front of the mirror. Leena, an upper caste Punjabi woman, born in 1961, is a university teacher, married and pregnant when I interviewed her, and has a very well-defined perspective on her embodiment in terms of its idealized form, sensuality and her own relation to her changing bodily shape. The desire for an idealized embodiment

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is concealed behind her emphasis on her personality. Mike Featherstone refers to this as ‘the performing self ’ and examines the attention paid to the shaping and perfecting of the personality as a mode of self-presentation (1991: 187ff ). Leena presents her ‘body-for-others’ as her personality but underneath her personality lies her ‘body-for-myself ’: I like to look good. I’ve always taken care of myself. I like my body to look nice. I should like my face when I look at it in the mirror. I don’t like to see a tired face. I like to see a glowing face in the mirror. . . . When I see my body in the mirror, I should like it, it should be pleasant for me. I don’t like to see sagging breasts, don’t like to have extra flesh on thighs or hips. So I like to maintain my body and eat less. I should like my body. So I don’t want to have a thin body but it should look nice to me. But if I have seen it [fat], then I always do something about it. Most men don’t talk about my body, that they find my breasts desirable and ravishing, etc. They talk to me, about me, as a person. My husband used to talk about my body before marriage, in letters, etc. But not later. Maybe it’s not a ‘ravishing body’. Maybe they don’t find it attractive. Because I admire men’s bodies. I like certain kinds of men’s bodies.

The image in the mirror is of profound significance for Leena who judges the mirror reflection in terms of her own standards of physical perfection. She then undertakes a project to change the image and replace it with one that is more appealing to her own gaze. She is emphatic that her body image, as reflected in the mirror, should please her. This includes the physical feeling and experience of a sensuality associated with ‘sexiness’. I should find my body sexy too. For example, I don’t like a fat stomach in my body. I also relate to my body in a sexy way. I should feel sexy looking at my body. I find my body sexy in the pregnant state. There is an incongruity that I find attractive: the breasts are bigger. I really thought that I would hate my body when I am pregnant. But I don’t. I actually quite enjoy it. I take off my clothes to look at my body and then put them on again.

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The mirror becomes the instrument through which she tends to define her identity in relation to her embodied state. The image is therefore of considerable importance in her overall perception of her body, its symbolic value in her everyday life, and the uses to which she seeks to put it. Although there is clearly a narcissistic concern here with body image and the pleasures of the body, the social and public other is none the less a major consideration in defining her embodiment. She says: I don’t know if my body is ‘sexy’ in the male definition of it; whether your [one’s] lips or boobs are sexy. I’m not oozing sex. I don’t have breasts that are heaving or bouncing about, so that men may not find it sexy. In my case, it’s hidden but it’s all there. And that in a way attracts men. I don’t dress up to highlight my contours, emphasize my shape, etc. I emphasize more on my personality.

There is an underlying concern here with what men desire from women’s bodies, and Leena’s perception of her inability to fulfil that desire in an obvious manner. She however offers the promise of fulfilling that desire through her suggestion, ‘it’s all there’. Women’s embodiment therefore is very much for the other, and significantly seeks fulfilment as much from the other as through the mirror. While some women may veil their desire for male approval with descriptions of a spiritual or inner beauty, or do so as a strategically resistant mode, others assert the influence of the male gaze in the experience of their own embodiment. Women also fetishize their embodiment (as Leena perhaps does) through gazing at themselves in the mirror and deriving pleasure from viewing different parts of their embodiment. In this manner, a woman sees a reflection of the image and elides the image with the gaze resulting in bodily perceptions and practices that exist only through the gaze. Simultaneously, through performance, by emphasizing her ‘personality’, as Leena puts it, she actually manages to put forward and assert a particular image of her self.

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In the accounts of these women, the mirror is the site for the enactment of an identity. Radhika uses it as a stage or theatrical prop not only for emoting or performing different suitable expressions but also for assessing her own embodied props for ‘beauty’. For Leena, the mirror serves as a reflection of what she wants to see, to give her pleasure, a feeling of ‘sexiness’ (as she puts it) and to examine and assess her own image. The mirror is also a site through which they perform a version of what and how they want seen. Although this performance takes place in a personal space where the only spectator is the woman herself, she uses this to perfect her image, through repetition and mimicry, to construct a self-defined version of her identity. A woman might also play around with definitions of her identity, allowing it to take on different contours, masks, and personas, depending on the context, situation, and temporal moment. Kamini does this through her embodiment and experience of sexuality, endlessly carving out an emotional and physical space within which she may be constructing her embodied identity, through lived practice. For example, her decision to ‘stay fat’ throughout her unhappy marriage was a strategic form of contestation emphasizing her refusal to comply with an ostensibly authentic image. There is also the use of manipulation as a strategy. We find that to evade bullying by her husband, at one level Monica engages in an overt form of resistance by leaving town and going away or through an explicit confrontation. At another level, there is an understanding of resistance as a simultaneous engagement with a self-mediated persona thereby creating, or giving off a ‘new’ self or embodied identity, showing glimpses, sides or even completely, what ‘I’ might like to, or could, be. ‘I love my body’, says Kamini or Leena, and therefore want to be ‘myself ’ in a particularly ‘sexy’ way. These self-definitions may not be acceptable to others but women engage with them not only as acts of defiance but, more assertively, as acts of creation and self-definition. Undoubtedly, notions of self and gender are shaped by the male or the social gaze but they are also made ‘whole’, as it were, by their own understandings and practices which they seek to use not only as a form of self-fulfilment but also for manipulating

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or ‘teasing’ the other whether this other is masculinity, maleness, or even a discursive order that creates and recreates the culture of a society.11 At this point we may ask what indeed happens to the conceptual category of the habitus in this movement of creation, construction, repetition, mimicry, showing off, exhibiting, transforming, making way, making do, transgressing authority or as the case may be, ethical boundaries, with embodied perceptions and practices? The habitus clearly remains critical in this process since there is the interplay of socially structured general dispositions that frame subjectivity, consciousness, and embodied practice. However, habitus is also created and recreated through the process of performance which is grounded not only in repetition or mimicry but is also a consciously asserted expression of the way women want to look at their embodied selves and the way they want to show their embodied selves both for their own pleasure as well as to ‘knock you out’, tease or manipulate others with their conscious objective to seduce, portray, entrap, or simply ‘be’, as the case might be. The question that we may consider at this point is whether there is space in Bourdieu’s category of habitus to encompass these notions of play, creativity, and construction. Personally, I do not consider the habitus a closed category as Bourdieu himself emphasized the open-ended nature of dispositions which may both modify or reinforce dispositions. However, habitus as defined and used by Bourdieu does not contain within it the possibilities for performance that engage with a transgression of authority and the force and embedded nature of tradition through a playing out of subjectively constituted agential acts. It is this element of performance as transgression that constitutes the point of departure from Bourdieu’s socially constituted habitus, and which can perhaps help us to take the concept forward to a more enabling understanding of its generative and agential nature. *

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Niraja Gopal Jayal, Roland Lardinois and Nilanjan Sarkar for their very useful comments and suggestions. I

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would also like to acknowledge the audience, especially Sneja Gunew, Sunera Thobani, and Valerie Raoul at the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Relations, University of British Columbia where a version of this article was presented in October 2005.

Notes 1. See for example Armengaud and Jasser (1993). 2. It could possibly be assumed that a ‘colonial habitus’ may be embodied in earlier generations of Indian women with similar cultural and social capital. An elaboration of this point, however, lies outside the scope of this article. 3. It has been argued that while the habitus is ‘in principle, generative, . . . it is itself generated by the field in which it develops and therefore has no independent effect upon that field’ (Lovell 2003: 5). 4. ‘Performatives’, we are told, ‘(utterances which enact or instantiate or bring about social statuses, as in the authorized declaration of marriage) are also always performances, but they have the force of social institutionalization behind them which mere performances lack. They are embedded in the social structures and norms that authorize them. For Butler, socially embedded performatives may be dislodged, their meanings transformed, by inspired performances that transgress with authority’ (Lovell 2000: 15). 5. Lovell points to the limitations of such agency by arguing that ‘transformative political agency lies at the interstices of interaction, in collective social movements in formation in specific circumstances rather than in the fissures of a never-fully-constituted self, or in the always open-ended character of speech and language’ (2003: 2). I however believe that it is essential to also point to the agency of individual selves in very intimate moments of their personal lives as such agency enables transformative action at different levels and in multiple spaces, albeit not always at a collective level. 6. Skeggs points out that, ‘[it] is through the experience of subjective construction that we come to know and be known. This enables the shift to be made from experience as a foundation of knowledge to experience as productive of a knowing subject in which their identities are continually in production rather than being occupied as fixed’ (1998: 28). 7. My analysis of women’s experience in this article is based on their accounts during my interviews with two groups of women: twenty-five middle-class

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and upper middle-class adult women in New Delhi who were selected on the basis of a snowball sample and twenty-five adult women living in a slum in north-western Delhi who were similarly selected. To protect their identity, pseudonyms have been used. 8. In this narrative, I have retained the name given to me by Parvati and protected her original name. 9. I am grateful to Niraja Gopal Jayal for the formulation of this point. 10. Judith Butler concludes therefore that ‘as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences’ (1990: 139). 11. The construction of identity includes within it the potential for agency. It is perhaps in this sense that Butler tells us that the task for feminism is ‘to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them’ (Butler 1990: 147).

References Armangaud, F. and G. Jasser. (1993) 1995. ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Grand Temoin?’, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 14 (3): 83–8. Abridged Trans. by C. Delphy, ‘Liberty, Equality . . . but most of all Fraternity’, Trouble and Strife 31 (Summer): 43–49. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1998) 2001. La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by R. Nice, Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc J.D. Wacquant. 1992. Réponses. Pour une anthropologie reflexive. Trans. by L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Das, Veena. 1995. ‘Voice as Birth of Culture’, Ethnos, 60 (3–4): 159–80. Featherstone, Michael. 1991. ‘The Body in Consumer Culture’. In Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth and Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage Publications, pp. 170–96.

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Lovell, Terry. 2000. ‘Thinking Feminism With and Against Bourdieu’, Feminist Theory. 1 (1): 11–32. ———. 2003. ‘Resisting with Authority: Historical Specificity, Agency and the Performative Self ’, Theory, Culture and Society. 20 (1): 1–17. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Skeggs, Beverly. 1998. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage Publications.

Pierre Bourdieu and Anthropology: From Kinship to Gift*


Alban Bensa

C

an we reduce Pierre Bourdieu’s relationship with social anthropology to his fieldwork in Algeria and rural south-west France? Throughout his work, these ethnographic experiences provided him with the opportunity to compare peasants’ ways of life with those of workers, the petits-bourgeois, scholars, etc. and, at the same time, to build a general theory of social life, based on the relationship between continuity and rupture. All these questions were embedded in Bourdieu’s own uprooting from his native Béarn, in the uprooting of Kabylia peasants related to French colonial policies and in Bourdieu’s confrontation with Parisian scholars and academic institutions. Rather than dwelling on a banal observation of these processes, and of deploring their devastating effects on any hypothetical preexisting social harmony, Bourdieu used these transformations as a case study for an understanding of the internal dynamisms of the societies. Conversely, he used them for a critical revision of some of the main paradigms of anthropology. Is it necessary to imagine hermetic worlds that would reproduce their internal structures imperturbably from schemes that time would be unable to alter? Or should we find in the midst of social phenomenon the motor forces of the variations and transformations that determine history? Should we study the influence of the past, or how and at what price to get rid of it? This is, in substance, the challenge posed by Pierre Bourdieu to ethnology, which he claims both as personal experience and as his fieldwork

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method, and to the social sciences which, in their original unity, consider all societies without creating a rift between history, ethnology and sociology (Bensa 1996). An article would not be sufficient to discuss the intricate relations that Bourdieu has maintained with ethnology. I will limit my investigation to an analysis of texts about kinship and gift through which Bourdieu attempts to erase the disciplinary boundaries between sociology and ethnology. Sociology versus Ethnology Many anthropologists consider Pierre Bourdieu to be a sociologist, who is also the author of some more ethnology-oriented texts about Kabylia and Béarn. But in fact Bourdieu’s own work questions the separation of the two disciplines. First, because for a long time, ethnology has not reduced its investigations only to the study of pre-industrial societies. Second, because all Bourdieu’s subsequent works were inspired by his research in Algeria and rural south-west France. The concepts of strategy, habitus, social field, capital, and symbolic domination were conceived through his own experience of rural changes on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. Pierre Bourdieu, then, used these concepts to analyse different aspects of French society. And finally, because his theory applies to all social sciences, one of his major works, La Distinction (1979), can be considered as ethnological as his texts about the Kabylia house, Arab kinship or marriage in rural Béarn. Like Durkheim and Mauss, Bourdieu considered ethnology to be nothing but a branch of general sociology. He never stopped to rethink the relations between all his fieldwork experiences and so to link his empirical experiences with his theoretical propositions. While claiming a sociological approach to his work, Bourdieu avoided establishing a gap between ethnology and sociology. Rather, he sought to emphasize the internal coherence of his works, thereby avoiding crossing boundaries between disciplines: ‘all of my work, for more than twenty years, has aimed at

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abolishing the separation of sociology from ethnology’ (1987: 92). The works of Bourdieu include a large array of social situations, ranging from the traditional peasantry to the haute bourgeoisie, including teachers, priests, lawyers, artists, etc. He selected the transformations during ‘the short twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm 2000) as an experimental field, more precisely since the end of Second World War. Nevertheless, he does resort to the analysis of previous periods, for example in his works on the sociology of art. The articulation between, on the one hand, the decomposition or the reconstitution of rural worlds and workers-in-crisis and, on the other, the growth of the middle classes affords Bourdieu with the keystone to the problem posed by the coexistence of social reproduction and change. The conversion of habits and the modification of trajectories, related to the effects of schooling, decolonization, rural exodus, industrialization and the development of the service industries, etc., clarify the social strength that is active in contemporary historical transformations. In order to reveal the general laws of social life, it is necessary to examine the appropriate objects. While Lévi-Strauss considered that Amazonian micro-societies were able, through their supposed immobility and ‘transparency’, to disclose the keys to the first social contract, Bourdieu preferred to focus on research subjects characterized by a more obvious historical instability, as if, from his standpoint, the principles at work in society were to become more apparent in deep and continuous changes. Works on the mutation of societies are not only the concern of sociologists. Many anthropologists, too, have set social change at the core of their researches. Max Gluckman and Jack Goody, French or American Marxist anthropologists (Claude Meillassoux, Marshall Sahlins), the works of Leroi-Gourhan and Balandier, all illustrate studies of social change, transformation of modes of production or of major innovations. But Bourdieu, in the wake of Max Weber, rejects the dominant, ‘scholastic’ point of view which reconstructs a necessary train of causes and consequences without considering the logical practice of the

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agents. In other words, Bourdieu sets up against the objectivist option that insists on an ‘external vision, one above all without any practical action at stake’ (1987: 76), and which thereby puts aside the function of these stakes, such as those which are carried by singular subjects confronted with new practices. Analyses such as historical portraits, synoptic boards or preconceived views of different aspects of social reality, that set up strong or even ‘graphic’ connections between determinations (production modes, kinship system, symbolic systems, etc.) and effects (political structures, exchange forms, religious ideologies, etc.) are thereby called into question. In breaking away from the objectivist view ‘of what others would call the structuralist “paradigm” ’ (ibid.), Bourdieu allows himself the opportunity to develop thoughts both around the relation between agents and their practices and around the scientific practice itself. Are field-notes sufficient to the ethnographer — whether or not he is in possession of Notes and Queries or Mauss’ Manuel d’ ethnographie — to grasp the maze of successive and often contradictory points of view, displayed by the subjects when their practices, rather than their supposed identity, are being investigated? In order to bridge the gap between observers and observed subjects, to reduce the bias often born from overinterpretations, Bourdieu resorts to a systematic, non-directed, recorded interview; he thereby grants an important value to a conceptualized enunciation. This priority given to the wordin-context also feeds another critic of graphic expertise: in the manner of Jack Goody (1979), he underlines how the constraints of writing define the scholastic point of view which put aside the speech-act and practice as practice. Bourdieu combines a genuine quantitative and statistical sociology with a qualitative inquiry, which puts the accent on social categories of judgement and taste, as stated by its interlocutors. From interview excerpts to multiple-entries tables, from annotated photographies to statistical analyses, he combines procedures traditionally belonging to the separate disciplines of ethnology and sociology.

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Nevertheless, it is through his distancing himself from positivism in general, and the complexity of his notion of structure in particular, that Bourdieu affirms himself as a sociologist. In claiming this scientific identity, Bourdieu consolidated his works with what he thought to be the least esteemed discipline of social sciences (Bourdieu 2001: 191–92). However, he continues to blur the boundaries between sociology and ethnology. For this purpose, as far as theory, method, problematic, object construction or even academic path (having personally been elected at the Collège de France), are concerned, Bourdieu maintains a dialogue, sometimes explicit but mostly implicit with the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In many respects, this relationship, in its complexity, is testimony to the ambivalent links maintained between French sociology and ethnology, even though the respective fields of these two disciplines increasingly tend to overlap. To analyze precisely the influence of this discussion on Bourdieu’s essays — whether they are opposed to Lévi-Strauss’s theories or not — is not an easy task and would require more than a single article. I will restrain myself to questions regarding kinship which have been examined by LéviStrauss (1949) and Bourdieu (1972). Both works have brought forth major but incompatible contributions. The opposition between these two points of view, dealing with what is called the ‘Arab’ marriage and gift practices, points, in my opinion, to the divergences between the two major figures of French ethnology and sociology, and also to two visions and interpretations of the social world. Kinship: From Structure to Strategy Bourdieu’s first article on kinship, written in collaboration with Abdelmalek Sayed, bears the Schopenhauerian title ‘La parenté comme volonté et comme représentation’ (Kinship as Representation and as Will). This was published in ‘Etudes d’ ethnologie kabyle’ with two articles that focused on the meaning of honour and the household (Bourdieu 1972/1977). Bourdieu’s work proposes a new approach to kinship studies by explicitly questioning

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the canon established in this field. His work is based on investigations in Kabylia about marriage practices, encountered in the Maghreb, Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, which encourage men to marry their father’s brother’s daughter (bint ‘al-amm). Lévi-Strauss had delineated the problem in a brief intervention (1959: 13–20), highlighting how much this type of alliance was, in the context of the theory of reciprocity placed at the core of his theory of kinship, ‘a taboo domain . . . a sort of scandal . . . of forbidden realm’, belonging to ‘Muslim or Arab systems’ (ibid.: 13). In patrilineal filiation, marrying with his parallel cousin means bringing a wife inside his kinship unit but according to Lévi-Strauss, ‘if one always exchanges women, with whom, in this case, will one exchange them?’ (ibid.: 14). In order to explain this ‘aberrant’ matrimonial form without dealing completely with the problem, he suggested, as have Robert Murphy and Leonard Kasdan (1959) ‘to call upon a new sociological dimension that is the historic dimension’ (ibid.: 19). Marriage with the parallel cousin strengthens the cohesion of lineages or facilitates their fission into a segmented universe, where the descendants are in competition. Lévi-Strauss sets forward the argument that the eventful history of the inter-lineage relations influences the choice of the conjoint, to the point of preferring the political argument over the principle of reciprocity, and the diachronic over the synchronic. His Kabylia experience encouraged Bourdieu to pursue the path first taken by Lévi-Strauss. This involved an interpretation of marriage with the parallel cousin with reference to economic and political factors, which determine all eventual specific logic of alliance and filiation. Yet, Bourdieu systematizes the argument by demonstrating that this mode of explanation is not just valuable for Arab kinship groups, but for all kinship studies. Accordingly, he finds the legitimacy to criticize researchers who try to reintegrate the Arab marriage into the ‘elementary’ or ‘semi-complex’ structures of kinship studies. Bourdieu contests the perspective supported by Jean Cuisenier (1962). Cuisenier — taking note of ‘at least, the economic external functions of matrimonial exchanges’ (Bourdieu 1972: 75)

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in the Arab marriage — attempts to explain it by an internal logic, a regulated imbalance that is both structural and statistical, between endogamy and exogamy. From the idea that ‘the usual genealogical terminology of Arab thought’ opposes in lineage the brother ‘who must marry endogamously in order to maintain the coherence of the group, and the other must marry exogamously in order to gain alliances for the group’ (Cuisenier 1962: 104), Cuisenier proposes a statistical analysis. One-third of marriages correspond to the first proposition and two-thirds to the second one. To prove this reckoning, Cuisenier applies the ‘structural’ equivalence proposed by Lévi-Strauss (between the father’s brother’s daughter and the father’s brother’s son’s daughter) to the paternal uncle’s granddaughter and the paternal grand-uncle’s daughter. One could refer to all these women by the expression bint-el ‘amm, ‘father’s brother’s daughter’. This combination of indigenous representation, statistical method, and nominalism aims at mastering the contradiction between standards and practices and at reintegrating external functions of Arab marriage in a pattern which justifies formal constraints of filiation: to preserve the ‘consistency’ of the group (endogamy) and to avoid its folding into itself due to external alliances (exogamy). Bourdieu notes that this pattern depends on the ‘genealogical writing game’ which decides, for example, to associate any marriage into the lineage as a marriage with the parallel cousin. The rigour of the statistical demonstration seems to be an unsound reasoning because of the terminology adopted by Cuisenier that identifies as ‘Arab marriage’ various and distinct matrimonial associations. By producing structural equivalences between different kinds of relatives (under the word ‘amm which designates the father’s brother), one should be careful not to confuse nominal assimilations between certain relatives and circumstantial results of specific matrimonial strategies. The uses of the word ‘amm (or bin-el ‘amm: father’s brother’s daughter) depend on the advantages and meanings provided by a specifically determined context.1 Bourdieu attempts to understand the approach that groups different practices under the

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same rubric, by freezing the kinship terminology. He indicates the contradictions of a completely nominalist reasoning and examines the limits of a statistical investigation based on genealogies. These mistakes are not only limited to Cuisenier’s article, but concern, in a larger sense, the unthought aspect of the greater part of kinship investigations. Bourdieu distinguishes ‘official kinship, single and immutable, defined once and for all by the norms of genealogical protocol, from practical kinship, whose boundaries and definitions are as many and as varied as its users and the occasions on which it is used’. It is ‘practical kin who makes marriages’ considering, without publicly taking it into account, ‘the economic conditions of the marriage, the status offered to the wife in her husband’s home, relations with the husband’s mother’ (Bourdieu 1972: 78), etc. Given this flexible valuation of concrete situations it appears to be excessively simplistic to separate one genealogy from another by writing it down and so abstractly dissecting it (ibid.: 76). Are the contours of patrilineal lineage and endogamy not drawn in advance in the way we collect them? The systematic investigation of the ethnographer regarding kinship relations gives to the persons he is speaking to the opportunity to mention kinship links that are barely operational and to spare the status of intangible facts to informations stemmed from a peripheral work, future elements of a system to be built. Unless we suppose, like Bourdieu, that ‘the group defines the agents and their interests more than the agents define groups in terms of their interests’ (ibid.: 73), any genealogy must be understood as a ‘in-situation’ speech. His graphic presentation and his data computerization are relevant to a kind of scientist drift, a scientistic illusion which projects his method requirements into the subject. The genealogical tree or the kinship software become the tools of a fiction, a construction which arbitrarily separates the kinship relations, recollected and expressed to answer the investigation, from other social relations. During my investigations in the Kanak nation, when I questioned my informants about the identity of their family, lineage or clan, they made a distinction between the official and

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the customary names. This distinction questions the strong identification of groups and persons through the genealogical device. For one thing, my interlocutors take a long time to choose a name because it represents an argument in a discussion that goes beyond the researcher’s knowledges. For another thing, they can also take advantage of the new inquiry to contest a name previously written down by the colonial administration or by an ethnologist. Considering these proper name uses in the long-term, we also notice the fluctuation of these names, which define a variable and strategic quantity of social relations indexed to the political hierarchies of each period. As the researcher’s work progresses — based on a steady genealogical framework — power influences shape the kinship speech according to global balances of power. But behind the kinship diagram, the connections established by the agents vanish because any autonomous ‘genealogical system’ is supposed to be governed by its own rules and so analysed by a quantitative and formal processing. It allows all possibilities of counting which classify, in a defined group, the Arabo-Berber area — for example, a marriage with the father’s brother’s daughter as endogamous and exogamous as well, at the cost of ‘the ostentatious waste of “scientificity” external signs like obscure diagrams and abstruse calculations, [that] has no other function but hiding the savings realized in the object construction and the establishment of the facts’ (Bourdieu 1972: 75). Considering the fluctuation of practices, it is easy to reduce the relativity of genealogical distance and proximity by standardizing the genealogical collections, but it is equally risky to idealize kinship terminologies. In taking ‘the coherence of the naming system for the practical logic of dispositions and practices’ (Bourdieu 1972: 131), one might confer a logical authority to some denominations whose meaning varies with their usages. The various forms of marriage cannot be deduced from terminologies whose applications are not exclusive to the kinship field and which function beyond the kinship links, abstractly defined by the genealogical frame. As an example, for the paicî Kanak speakers, the meaning of the Kanak word caa varies with the

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situations, naming the father as well as the political support of a chieftaincy, the grandfather or the son partner — both designated by a single word (ao) — and sometimes the colonist-boss too. One has to omit this large variety of usages and meanings to suppose that the system of kinship terminology, language used to name and classify the agents and their relations, really governs the practices or, in other words, expresses the structures and the structural mechanisms capable of governing them effectively (Bourdieu 1972: 77).

Analyzing a marriage with the parallel cousin according to this method makes it possible to eschew the view that associates empiricism and formalism by linking selected facts, to LéviStrauss’ general principles of alliance. Bourdieu suggests starting work in this field, not with genealogies and terminology — constructions poorly thought out by the researcher — but in the way kinship relations are used and practiced by the agents. In this demonstration, the notion of strategy acts a leading role. Structure or Strategy ‘Two marriages between parallel cousins may have nothing in common’ (Bourdieu 1972: 100), because each can tally with a particular strategical orientation of matrimonial union. The meaning of a marriage results from its strategy as it is displayed. The choice of a conjoint does not depend on an internal constraint of some ‘structure of kinship’ but on the relative social weight of the line (wealth or poverty, notoriety, demographic factors, etc.). One can thus marry one’s father’s brother’s daughter, either to conserve the inheritance in the proper group or, on the contrary, for economic reasons that prevent him from marrying a prestigious foreigner. At any rate, marrying with the parallel cousin, for a rich or a poor man, expresses the men’s will not to accept in their line a woman from another origin. ‘A woman is never worth more than the worth of the men in her lineage.’ (ibid.: 96). Fathers further their sons’ marriage within

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the lineage, for fear of living in the father’s home with a wife who cannot be controlled by the host and lady of the house or who represents the interests of another line, even if this be the maternal uncle’s line. To give preference to filiation aims at having a ‘pure blood’ descent and at reducing, as much as possible, the dangers carried by the women from other lineages; i.e. women who are not under the men’s thumb could tarnish their honour. The marriage with the father’s brother’s daughter reduces, at the same time, the continuous tensions between the father and mother, to the benefit of the father (Vogel 1997). In this manner, the domination by men over women and their associated representations intersects with the hierarchical stakes of economic and political competitions between the lineages and are projected onto filiation and alliance relations. This is one more argument in favour of analyses that refuses to consider kinship as an independent framework (Bensa and Rivière: 1982). Bourdieu’s understanding of Arab marriage leads him to an overall critique of kinship studies. In the wake of earlier interpretations which ‘do have in common the fact that they appeal to those functions which structuralism either ignores or brackets off ’ (Bourdieu 1972: 74), Bourdieu notes that ‘parallel-cousin marriage cannot be explained within the pure logic of the matrimonial exchange system and that any explanation must refer to external economic or political functions’ (ibid.). He disputes all reasoning that would assimilate kinship as an object in itself. ‘Structuralist objectivism’, he believed, not only conceals the polysemy and the ambiguity of social realities, it also fails to explain their meanings. According to Bourdieu, these meanings are accessible if one focuses attention on practices and their variations, without trying to relate them to an internal logic, that of ‘the pure — because infinitely impoverished — realm of the “rules of marriage” and “the elementary structures of kinship” ’ (ibid.: 128). Marriage with the parallel cousin is neither a norm nor a rule; it has nevertheless been constructed by the ethnologists like a very singular referential behaviour and can therefore constitute a type.2 All of Bourdieu’s analysis aims at criticizing the idealism

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which grants to formal systems a power of determination that they do not have. He supports, on the contrary, the idea that kinship is not an order from which practices proceed, but one of many possible tools of the practice: ‘kin relationships are something people make, and with which they do something.’ (1972: 81),3 constructed according to the practice principles, where the interest for the rule mingles with the individual interest. Kinship relations get their meaning outside of themselves. In fabricating the illusion of closed kinship systems which would obey their own laws, one forgets that basically kinship anthropology is no more than a subset of political anthropology. Bourdieu invites us to interpret kinship attitudes (genealogical divisions, terminological or matrimonial choices) in light of ‘the complete knowledge transactions at stake between all the individuals that [the genealogy] registers, i.e. the whole history of the material and symbolic exchanges, the foundation of inevitable solidarities, in disgrace as in prestige, in wealth as in calamity’ (ibid.: 85). This insistent invitation to totally reconsider kinship has hardly been discussed by French anthropologists. Bourdieu’s propositions generate a doubt regarding the homogeneity of the field and the constituent principles of its specificity and autonomy. According to Bourdieu, kinship relations are a part of all the social relations, and alliance and filiation are the instruments of economic, political, and ideological strategies. Does this mean that we should refuse to isolate logical constraints specific to ‘kinship structures’? Most works on Arab marriage, following Bourdieu’s work, have tried to get over this difficulty by defending, at all costs, the academic world of kinship studies. The new approach to kinship, based on the case of marriage with the parallel cousin, has attracted various reactions from the defenders of structuring power in matrimonial exchanges. The reaction has consisted in not discussing Bourdieu’s arguments or simply in omitting their citation. Others even try to consider this ‘Arab marriage’ as a middle way, which mixes up external functions with the internal determinations, or to put forward a logical hard core which would escape from every actors’ strategy.

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In the abundant ethnological literature concerning marriage with the parallel cousin, the authors try to outdo each other in refinements in order to overcome ‘the logical pitfall [constituted by the marriage] for those who try to apprehend [this] from the traditional concepts and categories of anthropological theory’. This disciplinary reference threatens to turn this kind of alliance into ‘the visible evidence of one of the most singular forms of kinship classification logic’, says Laurent S. Barry (1998: 18–19), and to support ‘against every functionalistic perspective which resorts to [political, economic, statutory] external factors . . . that it is generally possible to justify alliance systems from an internal theory, that is to say, the kinship facts have their own coherence.’ Elisabeth Copet-Rougier has adopted a nuanced point of view, showing that the first marriage with the parallel cousin has logical consequences. In order to live on, we have ‘to introduce at each moment of [the marriage] reproduction, elements that are not included in its basic structure and that do not have the same value: two brothers from one side, a brother and a sister on the other’; it results ‘in simultaneously lead[ing] consensus policies outwardly’. Copet-Rougier urges us to be wary of the effect of an anthropological illusion which wants the structure to hinge, in a [too] direct way, on the social practices without noticing that the structure itself develops particular effects and inner contradictions on which hinge other contradictions, located at the core of the ideology, and symbolical representations of concrete systems. Far from concluding an autonomy of the structure towards the concrete system or by the weight of some indecision due to chance, we have to determinate, in this dual articulation, the nature of the link which 4 fits one to another (Copet-Rougier 1994: 459).

Everything therefore depends on the status given to the coherence of kinship systems, the status of logical framework out of practices or, according to Bourdieu (1987: 77), status of practical sense or, if you prefer, what sport players call a feel for the game, as the practical mastery of the logic or of the immanent

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necessity of a game — a mastery acquired by experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse (in the way that, for instance, techniques of the body do).

On the one hand, to consider that this necessity is not immanent to the practices implies transforming it into a structural constraint, which cannot be reduced to any external determination. In the case of Arab marriages, it is necessary to reinvent, permanently, the squaring of the circle. On the other hand, to make an attempt at assessing the historical consequences of the ‘immanent necessities of the game’ leads to replacing logical logic by practical logic. This practical logic makes one’s way through diverse possibles to reach its goal. It is obvious that some actions reduce or guide other actions, what is called ‘experience’ confusing itself with the knowledge and the memory of these sequences. If I do A in order to reach C via B, the form and history of A partially determines B. To marry a parallel cousin is an act with both logical and historical consequences: the necessity of associating this marriage with another one, the latter being exogamous, leads to the duplication of both logical and strategic demands of a resort to exteriority. In other words, one gets married with one’s parallel cousin for reasons of patrimony, and one marries off one’s sister with an external line, in order to possibly perpetuate, the ‘Arab’ marriage to the next generation and, for the time being, to increase one’s capital of prestigious alliances. From Béarn to Kabylia: To Understand from the Inside To consider the field of possibles, provided that one historicizes those possibles in the light of the real practices already implemented, leads one to start, necessarily, from both historical and ethnographical experience. Bourdieu’s approach is rooted in a comparative view: he tackles the Kabylia’s question from his Béarnais social heritage and closely links the two fields in order to throw light on each other. It is from this to-ing and fro-ing

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that he draws a large part of resources for his critic of the decontextualized analysis of kinship;5 it goes without saying that this work [on Kabylia kinship] has received all that has been acquired by studies carried out in other fields, concerning subjects outwardly poles apart, like the single status in Bearn and kinship strategies in matters of education (Bourdieu 1972: 129).

Bourdieu claims to reach the understanding of practices from the inside, considering himself as a béarnais when he comes back to Lesquire or Oloron in Béarn, as well as a teacher or an academic and as Abdelmalek Sayad’s friend. Abdelmalek Sayad enables Bourdieu to understand the matrimonial practices of families ‘first, in different Kabylie villages, then into the valley of Collo, and at last, into the valley of Chélif and in the Ouarsenis’ (1972: 129). Bourdieu has compared this position, which appropriates ethnocentrism in order to better dissolve it, with ‘a reversed Tristes Tropiques’ (2002: 11). Bourdieu substitutes for the far out search for the origins of human societies, the researcher’s way through his own origins, in order to tackle the difference from the similarities, and not the other way around. From the moment that I wonder about what I would do myself if I were in my alter-ego’s position, the work I conduct on someone else becomes inseparable from the work on myself. The Other is not described any more as the bearer of a radical alterity but is considered like the ‘socialized agent’ implementing ‘the more or less “automatic” strategies of the practical sense’ (Bourdieu 1987: 78-79). Without trying to relate his behaviour to a cultural order or referring to some general laws, it will become necessary to set up particular links between the social deal in his possession, ‘the order of appearance of the cards’ (2001a: 191) and the field of possibilities as his action begins. In Béarn, the strategies of reproduction are organized in accordance with the logic of interest, aiming at rectifying the fecundity hazard (number of children, birth order of boys and girls), while reinforcing acquired social positions. The choice of

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spouses combines the status, wealth, and the families’ notoriety with matrimonial constraints. Within a European kinship terminology, in which only close consanguinity is prohibited,6 the ethnology does not attempt to isolate a singular practice to get a distinctive norm. It yet happens that the endogamy occurring in countries or the repetition of alliances between families already related, leads to a marriage between cousins, but one will prefer to talk about it as a special case, or as logically inevitable, rather than a typical model. Conversely, even a statistically marginal evidence of marriage between parallel cousins gives rise, on the other side of Mediterranean Sea, to a scholarly labelling immediately raised to the level of a theoretical problem within the discipline.7 Marriage with the parallel cousin can be nothing else but ‘Arab’, it comes under structures not absolutely ‘elementary’, but not really ‘complex’ either.8 The inner logic of these structures will even be seen in ‘Arab thought’. On the contrary, European peasants’ marriages are believed to belong to the ‘complex’ forms of alliance which fully accept the ‘external’ logic of economical strategies. The dialectic between the neighbouring and the distant gives the feeling that it is possible to normalize some practices to better emphasize the exoticism of others. This point of view brings out the opposition between our ‘complex’ systems of kinship, and foreign systems, all the more ‘elementary’, the Arabo-Berber kinship holding an intermediary position between the savage and the civilized, as in numerous evolutionist views. Bourdieu’s writings on Béarn are well-known in French ethnology because they enrich a recognized schema, while his analyses of Kabylia matrimonial strategies are rarely mentioned or even debated by specialists because, in fact, they disrupt the ‘Great Divide’.9 According to the doxa, to behold the Kabylia and the Béarn means to deny the differences between the elementary and the complex, the primitives and the others, a belief in which constitutes the ethnological credo. The unifying reference to the strategy calls into question the hypothesis of an internal logic of kinship and alliance ‘structures’. It involves thinking that reciprocity and the closing principles of matrimonial exchanges, and the general balance

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between terminologies and genealogical segments, are obvious to the actors, like gravity or the harmonious course of celestial bodies. On the contrary, understanding kinship as a social relation leads us to think about the validity of the diagrams and equations which turn rules into laws. When we carefully consider the contextualized strategies — leaving algebra and geometry to mathematics — the practices are not evaluated any more by the yardstick of a hidden order but by of all the justifications given by the actors confronted by historical constraints. These constraints (economic, political, ideological) temporarily regulate the social game, without any invariant structure to fix it. Compared to the notion of strategy, the problem of kinship rules, in their logical influence or their peculiarity leading to labelling societies, can appear minor, even anecdotal. Whatever the marriage (Iroquois, Crow-Omaha or Arabo-Berber), it has to do with the social work by which the actors organize the reproduction of the group, while assuring them a strong public position. It does not mean standardizing all the variations; it does not suppose that getting married in Béarn or Kabylia or even in the Amazon would all be the same. Beyond a shared strategic ambition which encourages us to go past exoticism, practices are not the same everywhere. What are the specifications of distinction? A detailed ethnographical and historical description reveals specific issues within each situation. If there is undoubtedly a strategy, it does not apply to the same objects. In the Kanak country (New Caledonia) for example, the issue was based on the number of people sharing the same name, via marriages, refugees or military power and not on the accumulation of goods or fertile lands. This competition gave rise to wars, capture of prisoners and elimination of opponents. In such a context, marriage between first-rate cousins was among the strategies to stabilize the competition and to initiate periods of peace (Bensa and Goromido 1997). The Kabylia strategies of honour are completely different and are based on the development of suffering and self-sacrifice. Also, the Kabylia house is not similar to the Béarnaise ousta and the lineage strategies in

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rural Algeria are really different from those of the peasants in south-west France. The tendency to generalize Bourdieu’s theory must be understood with regard to the field and the archives, in order to accentuate all the meanings of strategical exigency. In opposing the argument of structural regulation to one of strategy, Bourdieu strikes at the heart of anthropological interpretations founded on the supposed automaticity of behaviours. This hold of form over practice can find its justification only in a kind of general law, which makes of exchange and communication a transcendental organizing principle thanks to reciprocity. Lévi-Strauss even expressed the idea that the dualist orchestration of every reciprocal transfer will simultaneously belong to the social and to the entire living world. Exchange will therefore be based on something deeper than itself, on an unconscious infrastructure at once biological and mental (cognitive?). However, it remains difficult to admit, as Vincent Descombes (1996: 251) notes that ‘rules intended to be applied [could be] unconscious’. Unless one believes that the necessity of exchange works itself into societies by the Holy Ghost’s ways, we have to take account of the actors and their own conscient history, which gives them the ability to construct their social world. Bourdieu dismisses the structural models (and the application of an unconscious automacity) to bring out the strategy of agents involved in the social life with their own history. The critical argument applies as much to the ‘structuralist exercises’ on kinship as to the anthropological theories of the gift. A Far from Peaceful Gift Through the economic and political history of families, the studies on Arab marriage and matrimonial practices in Béarn give a special strength to the notion of strategy. Bourdieu applies the same reasoning to the gift and examines the central role of temporality involved in the act of giving and receiving. The strategy of alliance consists in taking a wife or husband in order to continue or upset the past (order of births, notoriety, patrimony). In the same way, goods received will be the subject of

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an immediate or deferred counter-gift, according to the respective positions of the involved partners. To the long and accumulated time of family history, which influences the choice of the spouse, is then added the short or average period of gifts exchanges. In both cases these uses of time are involved in the quest of material and symbolic gains. If structure stands in some permanence, strategy requires time to be fulfilled. It self-develops in the give-and-receive of the exchange, escaping from the instantaneity of the fair exchange, to settle down in duration: the gift will appear more generous as counter-gift comes late, and in that case, seems as well to be a disinterested act. ‘The discontinuous series of free and generous acts’ (Bourdieu 1997: 229), by concealing the obligation of giving back, enables the act of giving to become a moment of strategic affirmation of oneself. But, Bourdieu adds ‘the refusal of self-interest and egoistic calculation . . . never entirely excludes awareness of the logic of exchange, not even . . . the denunciation of another, denied, truth of generous exchange — its constraining and costly character’ (ibid.). Therefore, the reference to strategy establishes a close relation between trade and non-trade exchanges. For each of them, it is basically about interests, with the significant exception that, in one case, the calculation is shown, licit, and even encouraged as a ‘rational choice’, whereas in the other case it is concealed by the appearances of unselfishness and generosity without however succeeding in cheating its world. The capital of honour accumulated by the act of giving can be converted into social capital, even into economic capital (one only loans to the rich), while the social game of generosity and gratitude does not refrain its players from assessing and counting the goods that flow. The strategy progresses in masked fashion, and ventures the social lie in which coexists the denial of interest with the cynical use of the giving and returning duty for selfish purposes. One should not therefore confusedly see the gift/counter-gift practice as a non-mercantile virtue characteristic of traditional and primitive worlds, entirely taken by the symbolic value of things, acts, and words.

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Once again, by his vitriolic analyses, Bourdieu aims at shaking up the ethnological paradigm which supports the ‘Great Divide’ in the name of an irreducible division between ‘traditional exchange’ and market exchange.10 According to him, both ways of transferring goods are livened up by the expectation of a profit, which could either be the one deriving from a relation of dependence created by a gift without a possible return, or the one of a good price obtained at the end of a rough bargaining or by the competitive game on the market. The sole difference between the ‘economy of the gift’ and the ‘fair exchange economy’ would rest on the ability of the first to transmute economic capital into symbolic capital ‘through the alchemy of symbolic exchanges (exchanges of gifts, words, challenges and ripostes, murders, women, etc.)’ (Bourdieu 1997: 233), while the second one will clearly assert the bare interest of the exchange without trying to cover it with the chaste veil of generosity. But to avoid reintroducing the duality between archaic and modern economy, it is possible, in my view, to carry even further the dissolution of the frontiers between trade and nontrade. Nicholas Thomas (1991) has, for example, shown that in their first encounters with the European navigators, the indigenous people of the Pacific led, right away, the transactions in the registers of both gift and symbolic exchange and the ‘fair exchange’ one. The assessment of the benefits, that the two worlds connected through ‘first’ and other contacts can derive from both kinds, is neither enigmatic nor the peculiarity of any ‘culture’ or ‘mentality’ but depends on a shared lucidity, on the same strategic impulse dealing merely with different stakes and expressing themselves in diverse ways. Nowadays, for example, the cohabitation of calculation and gift is obvious in the Kanak ceremonies of bereavement. The largest part of the goods exchanged at those occasions is, on both sides, singled out for a strict counting registered in notebooks. This detailed assessment of gifts and counter-gifts exchanged by men (the kin of the deceased’s father and the kin of his mother’s brother) enables all the contributors to get back

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a part of the goods they had brought at the beginning. To rigorously reach this objective demands that one counts and assesses, in public and collectively, with the concern of not endangering anybody’s interests: no interest deduction compared to some capital which would be invested, but rather the protection of the right for each and every man to recoup, even partially, what he brought. The misbalance lies in the uncounted amount of ordinary and precious goods given by the paternal kin of the deceased to his maternal kin. This portion, without any return, constitutes an addition by which a tribute is paid to the lineage of the mother, source of life, and health. Therefore, the strict counting of the goods, which equitably flows from one group to the other, enables, by contrast, to highlight the portion truly given, by which is expressed the infinite debt of the uterine nephews in regard to their maternal uncles. The calculation clarifies that the gift is neither true generosity nor the search for economic profit, but an ostentatious sign of a vital dependence with respect to those who gave life and could take it back. Moreover, these exchanges are dominated by the fear of releasing the anger of the maternals by not giving enough or not receiving them with dignity. Thus, the exchange is an anticipated response to possible violences, which are also weakened by their ritualization: the uterines miming, at their arrival, a war-like attack. In these Kanak ceremonies, so very different from the potlatch of Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest Coast, the relations between gift and violence are not straight but inverted: the gift does not provoke the other but on the contrary, brings appeasement to his potential anger. It is an alternative to confrontation. As for competitions between lineages, they are gauged through the speeches that come with the exchanges, in acts of witchcraft to which are attributed the weakening of a group and in the stories about the origins of the clans. What is expected in return for the uncounted excess of clothes, bank notes and shell-rosaries is not a material compensation of the same type but a force of life and health, which, by definition, escapes measurement. The gift without material

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return is assimilated here as a propitiatory and sacrificial act imploring the magical protection of uterines even if it also manifests, more coarsely, the notoriety of the deceased’s family through its capacity to mobilize groups that can gather goods and prepare the increment. The interest is understood in a broader sense, at once social and vital, since the strategy is more motivated by the search for longevity rather than a mercantile project. It is ‘life insurance’, say those who are concerned. One should not need any extra proof than the relations to money, to time and to his own people, displayed by Edouard Gorohouna towards a Canadian mining company to which the Kanak nationalists yielded, in 1996, the right to exploit the nickel of the Koniambo’s massif. The agreement was sealed during an exchange ceremony, where the western industrialists, certainly unaware of it, occupied the position of maternal uncles who for Kanak people assure to their uterine nephews life and health, facing the delegation of Melanesian political and traditional officials, including Edouard Gorohana. He explains: ‘We gave the massif. We did not sell it. We did not act like white people who always come to take money and leave with the profit, far away from us. The Canadians acquired the massif in exchange of shells and traditional wealth, not for money. They wondered how many tons of minerals they could extract from this mine and for how many years and how much money they could expect. But for us, it was not a matter of money. We thought that it would be a good thing to be able to earn something, to derive a benefit from this act, that it would keep us alive in the future. It’s a good thing that we thought to act this way. It is, in fact, our way to give, to give with the heart. We know that it is good to act like this because, one day, our children and grandchildren and all of our people will have a job’ (Bensa and Comolli 2004). The trade and non-trade exchanges, appeal to the same counting procedures, and all the strategies that one observes here, refer to ‘the general economy of practices’ where power, wealth, and life expectations are closely linked. Yet it is necessary for each situation to clarify, by ethnography, the deviations of meaning that the strategies locally take to be fulfilled. As mentioned above

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regarding kinship, if one understands the complexity and the specificity of practices, then the specific limits inside which spread out the Kabylias’ strategies but not the Kanaks’, Collège de France candidates’ ones but not the stockbrokers’ are obvious (Hassoun 2000), etc. Grants of powers to one or another category of people, classifications of goods according to scales of values, horizons of expectations shaped by local history, shape the progress and the semantics of strategies. By developing a pan-strategic conception of social life, Bourdieu took the risk of reducing logic’s diversity of practice to some generalized economism tinged with ethnocentrism. Alain Caillé (1986: 111-14) did not fail to emphasize that, in L’ esquisse d’ une théorie de la pratique (1972), ‘the articulation of material interests to symbolic interests’ tends to make out of the axiomatic of interest an interpretive panacea which erases ‘the question of the sense of existence’ and ‘the history and genesis of values and symbolism’. Bourdieu replies to this criticism in his Méditations pascaliennes (1997), in facing ‘the structuralist ethnologist, who makes exchange the creative principle of the social bond, and the neo-marginalist economist who desperately seeks the specifically economic principles of cooperation between agents, reduced to the state of isolated atoms’. He continues by inviting these two points of view to study economic and social conditions in which historical agents are produced and reproduced, endowed (by their upbringing) with durable dispositions that make them able and inclined to enter into exchanges, equal or unequal, that give rise to durable relations of dependence. Whether it is the philia which, in the ideal vision at least, governs domestic relations, or the trust accorded to a person or an institution (a well-reputed trademark, for example), these relations of ‘trust’ and ‘credit’ are not necessarily grounded in and set up by rational economic calculation (Bourdieu 1997: 238-39).

Therefore, the logic of the interest is curbed, even diverted, by the social history of practices which, in any case, gives birth

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to singular modalities of economic relations representations, to the point where these become unrecognizable. The Return of the Same As the formal and global determination by the structure is just a mathematical dream of anthropologists, pure rational strategy is nothing but an illusion of economists. The reading by Bourdieu of the economic anthropology of the gift and of the structural anthropology of kinship denounces both the free will credited to actors by economic liberalism and the automatic obedience to unconscious rules preached by structuralist anthropology. Where the latter considers practices as effects of the structure (uncontrollable by the subject), Bourdieu’s thought focuses on practices as they combine lucidity and blindness, decision and renunciation, present and past, probability and uncertainty. There is no point ignoring the temporality in order to rejuvenate a cold logical framework which is indifferent to change; on the contrary, it is necessary to consider the process of apprenticeship and legacy, of acquisition and transmission of knowledge and savoir-faire, in order to grasp social life in the sequences (generational, biographical, conjonctural) that make history out of it: not formal variants, games of elements within a pre-established context, but practical variations in the flow of a project which is accomplished as strategy. This way should have led Bourdieu to ‘do history’ or to propose a sociological theory of history. But, according to him, the logics of practice are not, strictly speaking, logics of action (Bensa 2003). Between agents and what they undertake also intervenes the mediation of incorporated memory and the distribution of means and stakes, attainable in the present; in other words ‘the habitus’ and the ‘field’ which tightens the strategy in the vice of the recurrent and the foreseeable. Whereas criticism of the structure in the name of strategy and of the immobility in the name of movement seemed to lead us to a full history of practices, everything occurs as if Bourdieu restored

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to anthropology the credit that he simultaneously invites us not to grant to it anymore. Michel de Certeau (1990: 90) has emphasized the contradiction which consists of Pierre Bourdieu opening, on the one hand, the practices to the strategy, and on the other closing them again with regards to the ‘habitus’: there is no choice between several possibilities, so there is no ‘strategic intention’; there is no introduction of correctives due to better information, therefore not the ‘least calculation’; there is not any prediction, but only the ‘presumed world’ as the repetition of the past.

Are his critics against any ahistorical conception not nuanced by the central place offered to the concept of repetition? The question of the return of the same in history thus underlines more the unexpected continuity between Bourdieu and LéviStrauss’ works than the rupture often attached to it. The ‘habitus’ permits one, in fact, to readjust practices and situations to structure: with these strategies, scholars without knowing it, the most traditionalist ethnology can return. In the insulated reservations where ethnology observes them, it considered in fact the elements of an ethnic group as both coherent and unconscious (de Certeau 1990).

The importance granted by Bourdieu to the notion of habitus testifies to the hold of anthropological culturalism on a work whose critical power and originality are thus moderated. When strategy refers to the rule as means and reveals the progress of a concern as singular as the events induced by it, the habitus is an exemplary sample, the sign of a belonging, which enters into history backwards. The strategy reveals the way a particular history occurs here and now, while the habitus is already a generalization, a forecast that never stops being realized. Is the unfolding of action comparable to the regularity of the habitus? The habitus, in folding back the rule to regularity, cancels the historical potentialities of any situation. Strategies as action and

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history, and the habitus as abolition of time by the resurgence of the same, are the core of all Bourdieu’s works. But shall we see there a productive ferment or a contradiction, which makes it possible for the social fact to avoid its historicity?

Notes *

This paper is a translation of Bensa (2004) by Emilie Jacquemot.

1. The children of ‘amm are all agnatic parents. The ‘amm designates the ‘old person’ or someone from the lineage. In another nomenclature, it is a classificatory type with a metaphoric use. 2. ‘Marriage with a parallel cousin, which was considered to be the rule in Arabo-Berber countries, was the object of certain structuralist exercises whose weakness I believe I have demonstrated’ (Bourdieu 1987: 89). 3. This tool is not entirely plastic since the previous COUPS define the possible surrounding series of COUPS at the interior of which certain marriages will be improbable and others, in reverse, very frequent; that which confers to each ensemble of practices of kinship study a certain ‘style’. 4. Thanks to François Pouillon for having brought this article to my attention and furnished the details used in n. 1 supra. 5. ‘Is it possible to say which, the Béarnais or the Kabyle, is the double of the other? They seem “controlled familiarities” — and haunted — the one by estrangement from their native land, the other by the strangeness of their cultural difference’, notes Michel de Certeau (1990: 83). 6. These prohibitions are themselves variable as time goes by, since one sees, according to the period, the prohibited degrees of kinship fluctuate; cf. Duby (1981). 7. In the Béarn, it is in the succession system, ‘the law of primogeniture’, that appears to be a characteristic like the folk costume or the patois, the ‘culture Béarnaise’, without understanding that what is grasped ‘as a distinctive feature of this system is nothing but a transgression of principles where the principles’ force still appear’ (Bourdieu 1987: 172). 8. ‘Is the functioning of the complex structures compatible with the existence of preferential or prescriptive rules of alliance, that could be assimilated to “positive” rules [customarily characterisitic of elementary structures]’? To Bourdieu, this problem of classification into one or other category has no sense since he agrees with Needham (1971) ‘that kinship

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does not present a class of distinct and discriminable facts’ (Bonte and Izard, 1991: 556). See also Geffray (1990); Cresswel (1996). 9. Except for a paper on ‘family’, written by Eric Fassin, the voluminous issue devoted to kinship in the anthropological review L’ Homme, does not mention, either in the introduction, or in the approximately forty contributions published, Bourdieu’s writings on kinship. Cf. L’ Homme, 2000: 154–55, (‘Questions de parenté’). 10. It is striking, however, that Bourdieu picks up and improves work after work in his sociology of the gift without, contrarily to kinship, propping it up by case researches, fieldworks or a critical reading of the numerous works dedicated to this topic since the publication of L’ esquisse d’ une théorie de la pratique (Bourdieu 1972).

References Barry, L. S. 1998. ‘Le “mariage arabe” ’, L’ Homme,147: 17-50. Bensa, A. 1996. ‘De la micro-histoire vers une anthropologie critique’, in J. Revel (ed.), Jeux d’ échelles. La micro-analyse à l’ expérience. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, pp. 37-70. ———. 2003. ‘Le singulier et le pluriel’, in P. Encrevé and R.-M. Lagrave (eds), Travailler avec Bourdieu. Paris: Flammarion. Bensa, A. and J.-C. Riviere. 1982. Les Chemins de l’ alliance. L’ organisation sociale et ses représentations en Nouvelle-Calédonie. Paris: Selaf. Bensa, A. and A. Goromido. 1997. ‘The Political Order and Corporal Coercion in Kanak Societies of the Past (New Caledonia)’, Oceania, 68 (2): 84-106. Bensa, A. and J.-L. Comolli. 2004. Les esprits du Koniambo. En terre kanak. Paris: Archipel 33 et Arte (film of 90 mins). Bonte, P. 1994. Épouser au plus proche. Inceste, prohibitions et stratégies matrimoniales autour de la Méditerranée. Paris: EHESS. Bonte, P. and M. Izard. 1991. Dictionnaire de l’ ethnologie et de l’ anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972 (1977). Esquisse d’ une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ ethnologie kabyle. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Trans. R. Nice, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1979 (1984/1986). La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. R. Nice, Distinction: A Social

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Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press; pbk London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987 (1990). Choses dites. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Trans. L. Wacquant, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1997 (2000). Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. Trans. R. Nice, Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1992 (1996). Les règles de l’ art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil. Trans. by Susan Emanuel, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2001. Science de la science et réflexivité. Paris: Raisons d’ agir Éditions. ———. 2002. Le bal des célibataires. Crise de la société paysanne en Béarn. Paris: Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre and A. Sayad. 1972. ‘Stratégie et rituel dans le mariage kabyle’, in J. Peristiany (ed.), Mediterranean Family Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caillé, A. 1986. Splendeurs et misères des sciences sociales. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Copet-Rougier, E. 1994. ‘Le mariage “arabe”. Une approche théorique’, in P. Bonte, Épouser au plus proche. Inceste, prohibitions et stratégies matrimoniales autour de la Méditerranée. Paris: EHESS, pp. 452-73. Cresswell, R. 1996. ‘Techniques et culture. La parenté arabe’, in R. Cresswell, Prométhée ou Pandore? Propos de technologie culturelle. Éditions Kimé: Paris, pp. 151-217 Cuisenier, J. 1962. ‘Endogamie et exogamie dans le mariage arabe’, L’ Homme, II (1): 80-105. de Certeau, M. 1990. L’ invention du quotidien. I. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard (‘Folio’). Descombes, V. 1996. Les institutions du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Duby, G. 1981 (1983) . Le Chevalier, la Femme et le Prêtre. Le mariage dans la France féodale. Paris: Librairie Hachette. Trans. by Barbara Bray, The Knight, The Lady and The Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France. New York: Pantheon Books. Fassin, E. 2000. ‘Usages de la science et science des usages. À propos

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des familles homoparentales’, L’ Homme, 154-155 (April/September): 391-408. Geffray, C. 1990. Ni père ni mère. Critique de la parenté: le cas makhuwa. Paris: Seuil. Goody, J. (1977) 1979. La raison graphique ou la domestication de la pensée sauvage. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Hassoun, J.-P. 2000. ‘Trois interactions hétérodoxes sur les marchés à la criée du Matif. Rationalité locale et rationalité globale’, Politix, 52: 99-119. Hobsbawm, E. 2000. Le court vingtième siècle. Paris: Editions Complexes-Monde Diplomatique. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1949 (1969). Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rev. edn trans. by J.H. Bell, J.R. von Sturmer and Rodney Needham (editor), The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1959. ‘Le problème des relations de parenté’, in Systèmes de parenté, Entretiens interdisciplinaires sur les sociétés musulmanes, EPHE: Sixième section. Mauss, M. 1947. Manuel d’ ethnographie. Paris: Payot. Murphy R.F. and L. Kasdan. 1959. ‘The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage’, American Anthropologist, 61 (February): 17-29. Needham, R. 1977. La parenté en question. Onze contributions à la théorie anthropologique. Paris: Seuil. Notes and Queries on Anthropology. (1874) 1967. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonisation in the Pacific. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Uberoi, J.P.S. 1962. Politics of the Kula Ring: An Analysis of the Findings of Bronislaw Malinowski. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vogel, F. 1997. Mémoires du Nil. Les Nubiens d’ Égypte en migration. Paris: Karthala.

Documents and Testimony: Violence, Witnessing and Subjectivity in the Bombay Riots, 1992–1993*


Deepak Mehta

H

owever one may characterize Hindu-Muslim violence in India, the problem is neither a lack of literary and academic writing on it, nor its coverage in the visual and electronic media. The problem is that in public discourse we have accepted without reflection that the term ‘riot’ — a noun with the force of a verb — is an exhaustive description of communal warfare. But by what procedure does the category of the riot describe relations of violence between Hindus and Muslims? How do those who have experienced such violence deal with its effects? What are the means by which the state controls the riot? Does the riot highlight notions of governmentality more than of politics, signalling a shift from people to populations, from culture to demography? This article is concerned with these questions as a way of addressing a related problem. Posed as a question, the problem is: in the commissions of enquiry reports that follow a riot, what explains the absence of collective responsibility in propagating and instigating violence? Taking as my object of analysis the Report of the Srikrishna Commission (1998; hereafter SCR), I will focus on its discursive structure, show how it resonates with reports generated in colonial India and argue that the SCR is based on an epidemiological theory of violence. This

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theory of the riot excludes individual subjectivities as much as it argues for the anonymous, random, and irrational character of violence. Yet, mechanisms of exclusion are determined by factual regularity. What is excluded is the veracity of individual testimony since it is thought that pain and suffering engendered by violence are paralyzed with fear and incomprehension at best, or used as strategic ploys to obtain compensation. Together with an analysis of public documents of violence between Hindus and Muslims, this article describes an individual act of survival in response to the Bombay riots of 1992–93.1 The meaning of survival continually evolves as it responds to changing conditions of everyday life, and to the extent that violence touches the testifier’s family, the survivor does not fully possess his/her story of survival. The SCR authored by Justice Srikrishna, was conducted at the behest of the Maharashtra government to focus on the causes of the Bombay riots of 1992–93 and later the bomb blasts of March 1993. In the SCR, descriptions of violence are frozen. It locates violence within affected neighbourhoods in Bombay and links it to violent mobs fuelled by political parties. The documentary material garnered by the SCR uses a mass of elements (police force, political parties, criminal crowds) that are placed in relation to one another to arrive at a coherent and static account of the violence. The SCR is a process by which the riot is made monumental. I do not, thereby, mean to argue that public documents of this sort are evidence of a culture’s continuing identity. My focus is on the modalities of communal violence in Bombay and the way in which the past is brought into play through particular representations that have persisted since colonial times. My research suggests that communal violence is implanted in public memory through a range of statements that were first formulated in the colonial archive. The issue here is not whether the memory of survivors will or has entered historical record, but how the unfolding of history influences the memory of survivors of violence. In contrast to public documents, individual testimonies are based on the act of speaking and demand the subjectivity of the

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speaking subject.2 For Agamben (1999: 17) testimony is used in at least three senses. The first points to a person who in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties occupies the position of a third. The second sense designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event and can therefore bear witness to it. Finally, testimony always presupposes something that pre-exists the person. Its force must be validated and certified. Here testimony aids in the making of public documents. I will be using testimony in the second and third senses to show that the speaking subject is both witness and survivor. Through witnessing and survival we will learn of how violence described by testimony is conditioned by and exterior to that described by public documents. The outside of public documents is achieved not by a simple interdiction but by privileging the public document’s internal coherence and historical consistency. In fact, the force of the commission of enquiry is that it maintains itself in relation to other texts. If the SCR establishes filiations, it is with other inquiry reports, rather than with those testifiers who provide evidence before it. As I understand it, spoken testimony is premised on the elaboration of a structure of feeling. Its recall allows for the construction of local subjects: the making of a people who think of themselves as belonging to a place. The question here is whether individual personal testimonies add up to a collective view (Douglass 2003: 33). Is the testifier a rhetorical position, based on a chronological narration of recalled experience and speaking always from a first person perspective? (ibid.: 34) This article will argue that the speech of the testifier is informed by the archive of the communal riot, just as much as it is sensitive to the contexts in which the testifier speaks and to the expectations of the interviewer.3 To the extent that individual testimony is influenced by public documents, we see the force of third person discourses and how, through them, Hindu-Muslim violence is collectivized as a riot. Once we take into account the experiences of eyewitnesses, their apprehensions, and interpretations, we get a perspective on the workings of history in the interior lives of survivors.

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Colonial Riots The history of the communal riot in Bombay can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century. Hindu-Muslim violence in the Bombay Presidency may be dated to the East India (Religious Disturbances) Report, 1894. As a prototype of how riots are to be ordered in their reportage, the discursive structure of this report exercises a formative influence on the writing of Hindu-Muslim riots.4 In the colonial archive we find a period of relative quiet from the turn of the century till the 1920s. Beginning in 1928, we find at least one major riot a year till 1944. The colonial archive reports riots in the city of Bombay in 1923, 1928, 1929, 1931, 1932, 1934, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941 and 1944. Together with official inquiry reports, we find a day-by-day unfolding of the riot in the reports of the Commissioner of Police, regular communiqués issued by the Press Department of the Government of Bombay, extensive coverage in the Press, in various Indian languages, including English and in the Bombay Congress Bulletin.5 An impressive list of official reports is produced on Hindu-Muslim violence after 1894: Instructions for the Guidance of Honorary Magistrates during disturbances (1929), the elaboration of a riot prevention scheme (1931) and amendments of the Bombay Police Act, 1902 (1938) explicitly formulate Hindu-Muslim violence as an epidemic that must be treated as a problem of law and order. Read together with the Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island we see how Hindu-Muslim violence shapes the city. I will consider three accounts of the communal riot in the colonial archive: the report of 1894, the Report of the Bombay Riots Enquiry Committee, 1929, and the reports on what is known as the ‘alms riot’ of 1932. I will also draw on the official reportage of a Hindu-Muslim riot in Bombay city in 1936, known as the Byculla Temple-Mosque dispute. I will read these accounts in conjunction with the SCR. For the most part these accounts are inquiry committee reports, daily briefings of the Commissioner of Police of the Bombay Presidency and other official documents, but also some Press reports that find their way into official documents.6

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A Hindu-Muslim riot on 11 August 1893 lasts for three days.7 The acting police commissioner of Bombay reports that shortly before 1 p.m., after the Friday prayers, Muslim worshippers, armed with sticks begin to attack Hindus and the police in the Byculla locality. ‘Shouts of “Din, Din” (religion; faith) were raised, sticks waved in the air, and a rush was made for the Maruti Temple in the Hanuman Lane’ (1894 Report: 29). The rioters are driven down Bhendi Bazaar past the Paidhuni Police Chauki. Within the hour, riots break out in various other localities and spread with ‘astonishing rapidity through almost the whole of the native town. Infuriated mobs of Musalmans surged from street to street, carrying havoc and destruction in all directions’ (ibid.). If the crowds are dispersed from Bhendi Bazaar, they gather at Grant Road and Parel Road. Riots rage through Kamatipura and Clare and Bellasis Roads. Falkland Road, Duncan Road and Nal Bazaar are the scene of furious fighting. The police are unable to control the violence and troops are requisitioned by late afternoon. Having borne the brunt of the initial attacks, the Hindus retaliate near Grant Road, Falkland Road and Kavasji-Patel Tank Road and towards midnight of 11 August, ‘300 Hindu mill-hands came out, bent on revenge, at the Arthur Road, but were kept back in their chawl with great difficulty’ (ibid.: 31).8 Hindus make many isolated attacks on solitary Muslim wayfarers. If the first day of the riot belongs to Muslims, the Hindus in the northern parts of Bombay make the second day’s attacks. Violence is initiated by mill-hands at Chinchpokli, Arthur and Parel Roads, Sewri and Mazgaon. Large mobs of Hindus are dispersed from Grant Road but not before they destroy Muslim houses. The most important recorded events are disturbances connected with Muslim burial processions. The demeanour of a Muslim funeral procession, numbering some 3,000–4,000 rouses the animosity of Hindus and the resultant violence is quelled by the military. By the close of the second day matters improve and by the end of the third day, ‘the city began to assume its wonted appearance’ (ibid.: 34).9 The zones of the city that are mentioned in the report refer to the ‘native’ section

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of Bombay. All subsequent reports delimit Hindu-Muslim violence as falling within these zones. It is almost as if there is a riot geography to such warfare. The 1894 Report provides a chronology of the riot, but also seeks to compare it with the Parsis–Muslim violence of 1874. On both occasions violence is initiated by Muslims in the neighbourhood of the Jama Masjid (ibid.: 22) and there is a ‘direct relation between religious excitement and a resort to violence’ (ibid.), but the ‘outbreak’ of 1874 does not have the same proportions of 1893. In 1874 the ‘mob’ was easily dispersed. During the later outbreak, the mobs form into organized gangs, especially the Hindu mill-hands of Bombay. These gangs exact a heavy toll on Muslim mill-hands. This theme of intra-class violence is further developed in the riot inquiry report of 1929.10 A file of the Home Department of 1936 mentions that in 1929 the immediate cause of the riots is the spread of false rumours of kidnapping of children by Pathans. Hindu mill-hands attack Pathans in the mill area on 2 February. The Pathans retaliate after two days and by the fifth day of February, violence spreads to the city. But the real reason for the attack on the Pathans is that they have taken the place of striking mill-hands at the Sewri oil installations. Communist leaders of strikers resented the Pathans’ actions, and during January 1929 there were several unprovoked attacks on Pathan workers by the strikers and mill-hands. Presumably, therefore, strike leaders maliciously started the kidnapping rumours. (File 870 (14), 1936).

But why should violence between factions of the working class be thought of as communal? The answer is tortuous and tenuous. The 1929 Inquiry Committee Report mentions that on 5 February, the violence between Hindu mill-hands and Pathans turned into a communal riot (1929: 9). Quoting Dr Nunan, an eyewitness police surgeon, the report says that the disturbances were not riots in the ordinary sense of the word, rather murders in side lanes. As a result of the general strike called in April 1928 by the Girni Kamgar Union, later known as the Red Flag

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Union, inflammatory speeches were made by ‘extremist leaders’ and these weakened respect for law and order as much as they led to attacks on Pathans. An extract of the speeches is found in Appendix B of the Report. ‘The leaders of the Red Flag Union were quite reckless, and their violent speeches found their expression in the differences of the two communities instead of in class hatred’ (ibid.: 21). But nowhere in the Appen- dix do we find the leaders exhorting workers to attack Muslims. By 5 February Pathans had begun to ‘assault Hindus generally, presumably because their main, if not only assailants were Hindus’ (ibid.: 28). The conflation of Pathan with Muslim is marked. ‘The conduct of the Moslem assailant showed design’ (ibid.) though the Report is at pains to deny foresight. ‘The retaliation by Moslems was due to the Pathan hunt’ (ibid.). Following the murder of 6 Pathans on 5 February, the feelings of the ‘Moslems were aroused, especially among the lower and more excitable classes’ (ibid.). In the official reports of the ‘alms’ riot of 1932, colonial records assign a temporal order to the violence. The file of 1936 divides the riot into 3 phases. In the first, violence begins on 14 May and lasts for 6 days. In the second phase violence begins on 25 May and continues till the 31st. We then find about ten days of stray assaults. Violence resumes on 10 June and gradually lessens. The assault of 3 Muslims on 26 June marks the beginning of the third phase, which subsides on 2 August. ‘After that date the situation was completely normal’ (File 870 (14) 77). The official Press note of 20 May says that the causes of the riot are obscure. One cause appears to be found in the refusal of Hindus to contribute alms for the ‘tabots’ for the Muharram procession while another is that a Muslim boy struck a cow.11 A second theme in the official accounts of the 1932 riots is of how the Civil Disobedience Movement against colonial authorities turns communal. The Press note quotes from a local Congress pamphlet: ‘The Congress had been trying to ensure that a large turbulent crowd would gather at Wadala in order to break into the [salt] works and steal and deface the factory.’ Posters had been placarded all over the city stating that ‘All roads lead

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to Wadala.’ The Congress counter-offensive begins with the ‘second battle of Wadala’ with mass attacks on saltpans on 15 May to be followed by a hartal and free distribution of salt in the city. ‘Thousands of satyagrahis are wanted. Wadala must be conquered.’ The people are further exhorted to swoop upon the police ‘like lightening from the sky, break the cordon through, and through every opening pour in like the foaming breakers into the doomed ship’. Following strong police presence at Wadala, the crowd, with characteristic proletarian thrift, turns its ire on Muslims, who then retaliate. The Press note is quite clear. The Civil Disobedience Movement threatens Muslims more than it does colonial authorities. Riot Traces: Outbreak and the Contagion From reading the reports to the Government of India and Press Communiqués issued by the Director of Information, the riot is formulated through a series of statements. These statements are important not because they allow us to analyze the relationship between the author and what he says, but because they establish how Hindu-Muslim violence can be meaningfully understood. We have discourses that circulate without the need for an author. Written in the third person, these statements conceal and perhaps silence the subjectivity of the writer. But they also make the riot occur in language, as a set of formal characteristics by which it becomes impossible to assign collective responsibility for the violence. These formal characteristics, however, can be registered through their linguistic traces. Schematically, these traces are first developed in the 1894 report. When it talks of crowds and criminals, of the distribution of the riot over the native city, of intra-class warfare (between Hindu mill-hands inhabiting their chawls against Muslim mobs who issue from the Jama Masjid), the Report marks a polemical engagement within native society — the primordial antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. Controlling the riot becomes a mode of addressing the inequalities of native society within Bombay. The riot itself is pregnant with the future.

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Among the various causes that embitter Hindu-Muslim relations is the ‘greater forwardness of the Hindus in the race of life and their more active participation in the spirit and practice of modern organization’ (1894 Report: 59). The consequent exclusion of Muslims will further estrange them from Hindus. As for Hindus, advanced ideas introduced by western education will produce also a ‘Hindu revival’. Its marked features ‘are the active propagandism carried out by itinerant religious preachers, and the development of the societies for the protection of kine’ (ibid.: 60). The riot becomes indexical but in a way that it is addressed in terms of administrative and legal criteria, not as political expression marking the birth of new social actors.12 Through the riot a future is set in play (of progress and revival within Hindu society and continued sullen resentment within Muslim society), while Hindu-Muslim relations are located within a historical tradition of animosity. Thus, the riot addresses contemporary concerns and intentions with respect to the future and also enduring elements of past social organization. We might say, then, that for the 1894 report the temporal semantics of the riot establishes the historical force contained within terms such as ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘outbreak’, ‘criminal classes’, etc. The 1929 report and the documents detailing the 1932 riot develop one or other of the themes laid out in the 1894 report. The 1929 report plays on the theme of intra-class warfare that turns communal, a theme that will resonate repeatedly. ‘Experience shows that in India riots are apt to take a communal turn’ (1929 Report: 76). It recommends that ‘Government should take drastic action against the activities of communists in Bombay’ (ibid.: 79). Yet ‘poorer classes’ rarely enter into communal strife. Such violence is the handiwork of agitators who ‘stir up’ trouble and who are the contagion (ibid.: 76–77). Therefore, during a riot hooligans must be arrested or expelled from the city. ‘The hooligan menace is next in seriousness to the communist menace’ (ibid.: 79). In conflating the riot with the hooligan menace, the 1929 report privileges the agency of those it thinks are most likely to initiate violence. In the process, this

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report substantiates the views of the 1894 report. First formulated in the 1894 report — ‘the predatory instincts of the criminal classes’ (1894: 25) — the concept of criminal classes and its synonyms, the hooligan or the mawali, are permanently occupied by the colonial archive after 1929. The efficacy of this classification establishes a boundary, a condition of possibility determining a capacity to act as well as circumscribing this action. In determining how to act this typology constitutes an administrative agency.13 Consider for a moment two tracts produced after the 1928 riot — Instructions for the Guidance of Honorary Presidency Magistrates (1929) and Resolution Number 8385 (10 August 1931) in the form of a memorandum elaborating a riot prevention scheme. The Instructions state that a magistrate on duty with the military during times of disturbance represents the civil power of the government. It is his duty to decide when force should be used, in his power to prohibit unlawful assembly (Section 141 of the Indian Penal Code) and call on a military officer to quell a riot. But the procedures used to quell a riot depend on the discretion of the military officer and the magistrate has no power to direct a particular form of force. Thus the riot occurs within zones delimited by the magistrate at hand and his power is made effective in terms of these zones. The assumption is that there is a correspondence between the Instructions and what is understood as a riot. But the Instructions also recognize that it is impossible to decide in an exact way when a magistrate should call on the military to use force. This correspondence is variable and must not be mistaken as an identity. If the Instructions delimit the powers of the magistrate during a riot, the riot prevention scheme (Resolution 8385) attempts to generalize the prevention of communal strife. While preventive measures are best suited to particular circumstances, the riot prevention scheme speaks with the weight of experience. Prevention is formulated in three stages — controlling the building of tensions, procedures to quell outbreaks, instituting punitive and rehabilitation measures after a riot. In the memorandum it is clear

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that the three stages of the riot are integrated into the functions of governmentality. Here, ‘early and continuous information [of the riot] is necessary [ . . . ] although the circumstances may be such as to render it unnecessary or even undesirable for the local officers to intervene in the early stages’ (Resolution 8385). The principles of governmentality are directed by forming ‘conciliation boards for the amicable adjustment of religious and social disputes’ (ibid.: 3). These boards are not an external criterion of sovereign decision — they are vitally tied to maintaining order. Accordingly, precautionary measures are proposed, such as banning processions during times of tension, keeping continuous vigil, increasing police pickets, and establishing efficient means of communication. Most importantly, the riot prevention scheme establishes the temporality of the riot — a linear sequence that will henceforth be written as causes, outbreaks, and commissions of inquiry. From 1932 onwards riots will be ordered into phases and they will be located within the semantics of causality. The privileging of causality eventually leads to tautology: causes are nothing more than redoubled statements on the foundational hatred between Hindus and Muslims. What was written of in 1894 as an almost spontaneous eruption over the native city is now placed in sequence and made available for administrative fiat. Riot and Disease Yet, underlying the phasing of the riot into stages is the power of repetition. Having accepted the riot as an administrative problem, its writing in post-colonial India is informed by the same structure — cause, outbreak and commission of inquiry. At the heart of this structure we find a predicative judgement that thinks of and constitutes violence as a disease of epidemic proportions. The 1894 report argues that the 11 August outbreak could not have been prevented. ‘[T]here were irritating causes at work which rendered an eruption inevitable’ (ibid.: 23). The main cause of the outbreak is

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the infection spread by the riots which had broken out in other parts of India especially those at Prabhas Patan [a district in neighbouring Gujarat], and the uneasy feeling generated through them among Muhammadans that Muhammadanism and the followers of that faith generally were suffering at the hands of the Hindus (ibid.: 25).

The agents of such eruption are the Musalman ruffians called Chilli Chors, engaged in the occupation of driving small bullock carts. Together with the Julais ‘(weavers from Hindustan, not a few of whom are Wahabis)’, these hooligans function as a contagion, infecting all those who come in their way (ibid.: 30). The 1929 report recommends ‘the institution of a settlement up-country for the Bombay hooligans, on the lines of the provision in force in England, in order that Bombay may get rid of them, and that they may have an opportunity of doing some useful work’ (1929: 58).14 The threat of the contagion is extended to the immigrant to the city. Act No XIV of 1938 amends the Police Act of 1902 (Bombay Government Gazette, 10 June 1938) by which the police are able to deal with people who are a danger to the city. Section 27 of the City of Bombay Police Act, 1902, states that whenever it appears to the Commissioner of Police that a body of persons in the city are causing or are liable to ‘cause danger or alarm, or a reasonable suspicion that unlawful designs are entertained by such gang or body . . . or that an outbreak of epidemic diseases is likely to result from the continued residence in the city of large number of pauper-immigrants’, he may direct such members to remove themselves from the city (File 355 (54) C-II, 1931). The amended Act of 1938 formalizes and places side-by-side the threat posed by the riot and the epidemic. Those that threaten order are gangs of people whose movements cause alarm, those who are carriers of epidemic diseases and crowds who are gathered for unlawful assembly. In such instances the Provincial Government may declare the proclamation of an emergency.15 Section 23 of the Bombay Police Act, IV of 1902 is invoked to spatialize the emergency. The carrying of weapons in public

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places is prohibited and curfew orders are promulgated over the ‘affected’ areas. These pronouncements are made in the Bombay Government Gazette. These orders extend over the native city. A notification of 16 October 1936 mentions and names the affected areas, about ninety in all. Presumably European colonies are not threatened by this contagion. The Bombay Presidency Weekly Letter of 31 October 1936 localizes the disease of the riot: During the recent riots in Bombay [Byculla Temple-Mosque Dispute] there was always the possibility that the communal virus might spread to districts in the Presidency even though on former similar occasions no such tendency had been noticed. . . . If further proof is needed, it is here furnished that India thinks very parochially and that its people can be made only with great difficulty to interest themselves in any matter which is not primarily one of local and direct personal interest (File 870 (14) 9).

The idea that the riot is a disease finds mention also in nationalist reportage. For instance, The Bombay Congress Bulletin of 17 May 1932 states, Blood-lust which descended on Bombay on Saturday evening like a plague has not lifted yet on Tuesday dawn. Murder stalks the streets while Loot and Arson, Fright and Terror make up his ghastly train. Each passing hour piles tragedy on tragedy. And perched on that bloody eminence the Mawali is still king in the gullies of Central Bombay.

For the Congress Bulletin the riot is a plague, a carnival of murder, blood-lust, a temporary madness, propelled by its agent, the hooligan. As with official documents, the Congress Bulletin focuses on the almost formal ceremonial aspect of the riot as a public spectacle.16 In both accounts, the struggle for understanding the riot is formulated through the concept of disease. This concept fixes the riot and then shows how the latter is distributed over the city. The force exerted by the disease is thought to be external to reason. Colonial documents hold that this force does not

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originate in the relation between the colonial state and native society, but is characteristic of an unthinking mass, incapable of rational discussion. The Congress Bulletin argues that the riot emerges from manipulated colonial subjects whose violence will invite greater state intervention. In fact the Bulletin demands such intervention. In either case, the riot as disease is staged publicly. Here the disease is pure physical force, it communicates nothing except its own savagery. It produces effects through the force of its weight. The words for which the disease is a metonym — plague, infection, virus — are words that have a material force built into them, not words that constitute communicative action in the rational sense. These words demand active state intervention. In condensing the essence of Hindu-Muslim violence into the syntagm ‘riot and infection’, the colonial archive evokes a vision where violence and disease are essential to native society in Bombay. It is with reference to this given, that the colonial state directs its administrative machinery. Henceforth, one of the basic features of colonial administration in Bombay will be a constant need to redefine who is a member of the city and who must be removed to its boundaries. Once the diseased-violent-pauper immigrant crosses over to the city, colonial administration takes pains to redraw what and who is inside and outside. This seems to be the foundation of how the riot is spatialized. The case of Bhupal Bharma Pandit is instructive. A resident of Jayasingpur in Kolhapur state and thus a foreigner in British India, Bhupal Pandit printed and distributed nearly 10,000 handbills in Hindi and Gujarati in October 1936 during the Byculla Temple-Mosque riot. The subject of these handbills was the marriage of a Jain boy with a Muslim girl.17 Following Muslim complaints, Pandit is arrested in October 1936 under Section 3 of the Foreigners Act and deported to Kolhapur state. The Police Commissioner prepares a statement regarding Bhupal Pandit that marks out in forensic detail the criminal history of the offender. Imprinted on this sheet is an image of Pandit’s history and its alignment to space. The function of this sheet is that it both

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Description

Name and Subject

Arrival Whether in Residence in British in Possession India Bombay of Passport

1932 [Bhupal Bharma Pandit] Village Jayasingpur, Kolhapur Height: 5 ft. 6 in. State Complexion: Sallow Build: Medium Identification Marks: Two cutmarks — one on forehead and the other on chin. Caste: Hindu Religion Or Nationality; Digambar Jain Age: 24 years

Liberty Liking Tailoring Home, Kamathi Building, Opposite Plaza Cinema, Lady Jamshedji Road, Dadar.

—

Remarks 1) Convicted and sentenced to be sent to Dharwar Borstal (Reformatory) School by First Class Magistrate, Bandra under Section 17(i) of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 25.4.32 (under the name of Ganpat Tukaram More) 2) Convicted and sentenced to four months rigorous imprisonment by First Class Magistrate, Bandra, under Section 7(b) of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 22.3.34

Sd. J.W. Rowland Commissioner of Police, Bombay, 24 October 1936 Source: File 870(10) Home Department (Special), 1936, Bombay Archives, Elphinstone College.

describes the legacy of an individual’s criminality, and plays a remedial role in rectifying the wrongs inflicted by similarly situated individuals. Through this sheet they are placed in a reconstituted future. Implicitly, this sheet relies on the view that the office of the Police Commissioner has the power to regulate the boundaries of an individual’s assimilation into the city. This

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logic makes the right to remedy historically contingent. Furthermore, characterizing Bhupal Pandit in this way is a function of government agencies, such as the police. This function transforms lives of criminals into cases, taking away from their stories the making of these circumstances. Foucault describes the power of the biographical account as not a ‘monument for future memory’, but a document for possible use. ‘This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure for objectification and subjectification’ (1977: 191–92). Pandit appealed against the order of deportment, but his past record was cited against him. His second sentencing in March 1934 was because he took active part in the Civil Disobedience Movement. From his perspective and of others like him, his history became a burden. His criminality did not support his redemption. In this sense individuation becomes a badge of stigma. In post-colonial India the infection initiated by the riot is noted in various commissions of enquiry but now a second and disquieting element is introduced — the idea that the state itself is infected with communalism, seen in its partisan handling of violence. To see the resilience of the concept of the disease and its distribution over the city I will now look at the Report of the Srikrishna Commission. The Srikrishna Commission On 25 January 1993 the Government of Maharashtra constituted the Srikrishna Commission to inquire into the circumstances, events, and immediate causes of the violence that occurred in the Bombay Police Commissionerate area, and to affix responsibility for the violence of December 1992. The Commission was also charged with determining the adequacy of preventive measures undertaken by the police to quell the violence. The evidence of the involvement of the Shiv Sena and other political parties of the right, of police bias against Muslims, forced the government to demonstrate its commitment to justice (Hansen 2001: 38). It did this by investing the Commission, headed by the High

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Court judge, Justice Srikrishna, with the dignity of legitimacy. Although the findings of the Commission were not legally binding upon the government, the Commission functioned as a legal body.18 It decided to make the proceedings public and to call upon a number of interested parties to let themselves be represented through legal counsel along with the Commission’s legal advocate.19 The Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra, in power when the Report was prepared, delayed its release. The SCR appeared in August 1998, five-and-a-half years after the riot. It was left to the state government to decide whether the evidence could be used to institute criminal prosecutions. When the Nationalist Congress Party came to power in 1998, it promised to implement the Report within three months.20 When the Shiv Sena assumed office in 1995 the principal area of conflict between the government and the Commission related to the release of various documents and files. In some cases the Advocate-General refused to release the files on the basis of ‘interest of state’, but the state could not in principle claim privilege and refuse to hand over the files (according to the Commissions of Inquiry Act). During its period in power, twelve of the more than twenty pending cases against Thackeray for incitement to violence were withdrawn or ‘classified’. On 23 January 1996 the state government of Maharashtra decided to dissolve the Srikrishna Commission, but 5 months later, following pressure from the central government, it restored the Commission, though with a changed mandate. The Commission would include the bomb blasts of March 1993 to arrive at a formula of balanced and equally-apportioned guilt.21 In the eyes of the Commission, this violence is irrational and perhaps incurable. ‘For five days in December 1992 (6–10 December) and fifteen days in January 1993 (6–20 January), Bombay, prima urbs of this country was rocked by riots and violence unprecedented in magnitude and ferocity, as though the forces of Satan were let loose, destroying all human values and civilized behaviour’ (SCR: 1). The opening sentence frames violence in cataclysmic terms and later as a chronic disease. ‘Communal riots . . . are like incurable epileptic seizures, whose symptoms,

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though dormant over a period of time, manifest themselves over and over again’ (SCR: 4). Later the SCR will talk of a ‘communal virus’. Violence so designated is an aberration. It must be explained through formal procedures of accountability, the raison d’ être of the Commission. In the SCR the conflation of disease and violence establishes solidarity with colonial records of the riot. In exploring the breakdown of public security, the Commission divides the riot into 5 phases: the build up to the riot, the period from 6 to 12 December 1992, the period from 12 December 1992 to 5 January 1993, the phase from 6 January to 20 January, the period subsequent to 20 January 1993. As with colonial records, the riot is put into phases and discussed through episodes. It has a well-established temporality and a force of its own that is distributed over the city. The agents of violence are of course ‘mobs’, ‘crowds’, and above all, ‘criminals’ instigated by Muslim ‘fanatics’ and political parties. In dealing with the attack on the legitimate authority of the state and the restoration of law, the SCR invests such legitimacy with dignity. Rather than seeing the SCR and the TADA courts as state spectacles of impartial and universal justice leading to public catharsis (Hansen 2001: 48–49), I read the SCR in two ways. First, it indicates the dual character of political power, and second, it does this by employing certain discursive practices.22 As far as the first point is concerned it is clear that for Srikrishna the riot is not within the remit of power, it is rather that a particular (illegitimate) power has issued from the riot which allows him to identify relations of violence between protagonists. Their modes of action challenge public authority so as to invite counter-measures from the police and concerned civil groups. Here, the riot becomes the terrain where the division between the sphere of the state and that of civil society tends to blur. But Srikrishna also holds that power is symbolic, that it designates an empty place that no one can seize. The SCR locates itself within a juridical codification of political power and argues that agencies of the state — particularly the police — have been unable to uphold the dignity of law. While the technical means of controlling the riot are linked to the

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exercise of disciplinary power as framed in law, procedures of redress disqualify, at least implicitly, a rationality based solely on police techniques. In arguing for redress and rehabilitation the SCR does not threaten sovereignty. It merely identifies that society is an object that has to be governed according to law. The riot puts society into crisis and the signs of this are seen in the inability of the police to enforce preventive measures, the failure of the intelligence apparatuses to maintain a list of communal hooligans and the inadequacy of registering riot-related offences (SCR: 30–32). The SCR seeks to restore the efficacy of the democratic system by an administrative recording of violence and its causes and a simultaneous critique of what it calls Hindu communal politics and the police force in Bombay. In this way it hopes to restore dignity to legitimacy. This government, however, is not purely juridical — it must take recourse to morality. The SCR reveals the appalling inefficiency of policing and a distinct bias against Muslims, of the bald attempts of the Shiv Sena–BJP government to obstruct the proceedings of the Commission. Srikrishna details the complicity of the police in the riots in pessimistic terms. Despite knowledge of the fact that the force had been infected by communal virus, no effective curative steps were taken over a large period of time as a result of which communal violence became chronic and its virulent symptoms showed up during the two riot periods (SCR: 35).

The Commission stands for the perpetuity of a higher form of justice. ‘That vicious communal violence on such scale should occur in the land of “Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah” (“Non-violence is the Highest Religion”) and Mahatma Gandhi, only shows that the message of love and brotherhood preached by apostles is not internalized. Unless this is done the spectre of communal violence would haunt the city again and again’ (SCR: 63). In other words, a sense of duty towards the nation and an ethical view of life must be the basis for the representatives of the state. It is this idea of the state as a moral entity that is at once the most sublime and the most unattainable.

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The SCR employs two discursive strategies to order the riot. It places the violence within: (a) a defined and given period; (b) and a given geographic area. The spatial and temporal ordering imposed on the violence and its convergence with particular institutions and practices leads to the discourse of the riot. This discourse is folded within the colonial archive. As with colonial records the SCR characterizes violence in the language of disease. This report thinks of the riot as a pathological object that must be recorded, its causes determined and remedies suggested. Accordingly, it details the ‘build up’ (SCR: 5–8) to the violence, noting the perfidy of minority appeasement and the vicious reaction of Hindu political parties, of judicial delays and failure of various central governments in arriving at amicable solutions to the Hindu–Muslim problem. The SCR then describes the ‘immediate causes’ (ibid.: 25–27) of the violence, observing that an economic or class dimension to the violence cannot be sustained, though the processes by which the labour force has been pushed into the informal sector makes such people especially vulnerable to communal aggression. The ghettoizing of Muslims in distinct areas of the city allied with a changing political discourse has led to a hardening of boundaries, social and spatial, between Hindus and Muslims. In a second sense the SCR sees the riot as pointing towards the pressure of time. In locating the riot within a temporality — 6 December 1992 to 20 January 1993 (SCR: 12–25) — the SCR hopes to stabilize the ruling order through legal preservation or legal finding. To the spatial meaning of the riot the SCR adds a historical unfolding. The sense of camaraderie, which existed between the Hindus and the Muslims when they were united in their efforts to throw the British out of this country, appeared to have vaporized and vanished with the ‘two Nation theory’ advocated by Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

In this sense the riot is another constellation of power beginning with the rise of communalism. Here the riot indicates the crossing of a threshold, a process that repeats itself over and over

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again. The riot is an iterative concept with a well-established periodicity. Through it one can establish the conditions of possibility of violence in order to mark out comparisons with other riots. What, then, are the discursive practices by which the dignity of legitimacy is put in place? First, these practices spatialize the riot by alphabetizing the city in terms of neighbourhoods. Second, they assign a precise chronology to the violence. Third, they document the testimonies of various named actors in the riots. Through these practices the riot is ordered, but it is important to recognize that this ordering is drawn from an archive of communal violence. As with colonial records, the riot is seen as a public contest. More appropriately, for the SCR the history of this violence is made visible on city spaces in Bombay and as this history becomes visible the riot is treated as revelatory: a repository of the relations between Hindus and Muslims. The reference to past violence (Bhiwandi, the Partition) with its allegories of fragmentation and ruin inform Justice Srikrishna’s monument to public remembrance. As with colonial inquiry committee reports, the riot is placed in linear time, spatialized in neighbourhoods and framed within causality. The SCR allows for individual testimony only to the extent that different individuals substantiate this ordering. The ordering of the riot through depositions, affidavits, testimonies, eyewitness accounts and so on follows the method undertaken by colonial reports — the attempt to understand the riot as pathology. The SCR, it is true, does not add or subtract to our understanding of medical discourse, but it records the riot as if it were a disease, first initiated in the 1894 report. As with the 1929 report, it surveys the distribution of violence, marks its onset and development (colonial records ascertain this disturbance on a daily basis as is evident in the reports of various commissioners of police) and the transformations that it undergoes. This mapping of violence does not have to pass through speaking subjects — in fact the riot is much more than individual speech. It has its own configuration and its own historicity, drawing from the method of writing earlier instances of Hindu–Muslim violence. The problem with

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violence, thus, is not merely one of behaviour. It is linked to the consolidation of meaning — in this case the representation of disease. Volume II of the SCR describes the riots as they occur day by day in the twenty-four police stations in Bombay, starting with the Agripada police station and ending with the V.P. Road station. Depositions of policemen, local and state level politicians and other citizens accompany each of these descriptions. The SCR names the neighbourhoods that comprise the police station area and where possible, the population composition of Hindus and Muslims.23 It then describes the build up to the riots and details the instances of violence. Next, it describes the number of arrests within each area, and finally closes with the accounts of ordinary citizens, mainly Muslims.24 Certain spaces and activities are carved out as essentially Muslim (mosques, bakeries, parts of slums — Chamra bazaar in Dharavi, Dargah Junction in Mahim, Janta Dairy in Deonar, the entire colony in Dongri, Friday prayers). Other spaces are iconic of particular events and are identified as Hindu — the Radhabhai Chawl incident in Jogeshwari, the Sitaladevi Temple in Mahim and the Parma Nagar violence in Deonar on 7 December, when Muslims knifed 2 policemen to death. Once city spaces are mapped through police stations we get a sense of the distribution of violence over the city and the response of the police in both controlling and abetting it. In the process, the SCR constitutes disordered spaces, but spaces that are partitioned into discrete units with little, if any, interpenetration. This mapping is a kind of discursive practice by which designated spaces acquire meaning only to the extent that they threaten order. In this space of violence the subject — Muslim, Hindu, policeman and social worker — takes up a position and speaks. The SCR, then, is part of an archive in the sense of Foucault (1978: 128–32). The archive coordinates and subordinates subject positions in which the riot appears and is defined. In part, subject positions are designated historically and in part they are substantiated by proper nouns. In this designation and substantiation time is distributed — the riot is segmented into

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periods and given a regular chronology. Thus, the archive of the riot, of which the SCR is part, authors a set of discursive statements that cause a multiplicity of violent practices to emerge as so many regular events. Testimony, Remembrance and Everyday Life If the SCR attempts to re-dignify the legitimacy of the state, individual testimonies of violence bear witness to the stripping away of that dignity. And if the archive establishes a referential relation between violence and language, testimony strives to speak the unsayable, with all its attendant ellipses and necessary forgetting. In the archive the subject is an empty position, generalizable and framed within the already written. In testimony, the position of the subject is unique and non-reproducible. Testimony’s bid for presence depends on the capacity for recall of remembered events, but a recall that is always coloured by perjury and forgetfulness. Against the discourse of the SCR, which exhausts the meaning of the riot so that objects of reform can be proposed, testimony treats the riot as lived experience. This suggests that it is in everyday life that violence as an experience of particularly dramatic moments of subjectivity is authored and translated. Once translated, it loses its exceptional character and becomes a ‘normal’ and banal phenomenon. When placed in the quotidian it is almost as if violence is a singular mode of apprehending immediate agonies. In this sense, violence mentioned in the testimonies is not systematized but is prosaic — a fact of one’s existence, belonging to the realm of the obvious and yet always coloured by irony. Second, violence is seldom subject to a stable analysis. Since 1994, when we started fieldwork in Dharavi, we have found that descriptions of violence have changed. This change is consistent with a shared ensemble of a reconfigured everyday life, most evident in the changed topography of the slum. If in 1994 and 1995 descriptions of violence showed how national boundaries were played out in the slum, in 1999 and 2000 the same violence was linked to the construction of high-rise buildings in

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Dharavi and the allotment of apartments to residents. Violence was now the product of the ruses of venal politicians, bureaucracies, and builders. In 2003 and 2004 we found that the violence of 1992–93 had congealed in at least two different ways. In the first instance this violence now belonged firmly to the past — one could not draw more lessons from it than had already been learnt and in any case there was no reason to remind oneself of those days. As one of our informants mockingly said, ‘when we have to remind ourselves we will come to you’. But in a second sense, 1992–93 had left behind a residue of fear that continued to direct one’s relationships with one’s neighbours, especially if they belonged to an opposing religious group. Thus in 2004 some Muslims participated with greater intensity than before in the annual Ganapati Puja, not because of a spirit of tolerance, but because as one of them said, ‘we also have to live like social beings, we have to ensure that we observe Muharram without tension’. Given this fear and forgetfulness, what can be the relation of the speech of the testifier to the event to which the testifier claims to bear witness? Can we find traces of the archive playing itself out in such speech?25 I will present the testimony of one resident, called Ali (pseudonym) from Dharavi. His experiences of violence have often coloured our interactions with others in Dharavi, continuing to inform their narratives. Insofar as Ali’s story touches on a memory of loss, the refusal to forget and its consequences, of police violence and its corrupting influence, this account is perhaps indexical of how violence was represented to us in 1994 and 1995. And yet, going over what others said, this story is different. Ali’s concern is not so much to detail the intricacies of the violence, as it is to focus on its effects. We met Ali in October 1999. He is in his late fifties and lives in one of the many chawls of Dharavi. He was a leather-worker who has now become a prosperous landlord, waiting to shift into one of the many high-rise apartment blocks that dot the slum. Ali came to Bombay from Aligarh in the 1960s and shifted to Dharavi in the next decade. He is married and has four living sons and two daughters. Ali was, until the previous year, an

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active member of the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamist reformist organization. He says that in Aligarh he was first introduced to the Deobandi School of Islamic persuasion, but later joined the Tablighis in Bombay after the 1992 riots. In 1994, when I first visited Dharavi, I heard that Ali had suffered an especially bad fate during the riots. I made repeated requests to meet him, but Ali was never available. I was told that ‘he’s become a bearded one now; he has no time’. A year later we again made attempts to meet him. After one such effort, we were told to let it be; perhaps Ali did not want to talk. Then in 1999 Ali came of his own accord and spoke to us. The conversation occurred over more than two hours in the office of an NGO called PROUD. There were 7 people present in the meeting. Ali: It (the violence) happened because of the masjid, but before it was broken the environment had become bad. What were we to know? We saw their rallies. . . . I had gone to work that day (6 December 1992, the day the masjid fell). In the evening I heard the news and I can tell you that there was fright in our hearts. I calmed my wife. It started the next day at eleven in the morning with stones and continued for seven days until the 14th. On 8 December my son was martyred, Iftiqar was his name (larka shaheed hua, Iftiqar uska nam tha). It happened across the [Joglekar] nullah (drain). Allauddin told me his body was lying on the other side. I got him back here; he had been shot in the head . . . what could I do? Outside was curfew. . . . His body was on the bed for three days. Together with a policeman I took the maiyyat (corpse that has passed through the hands of women) to the police station. They said that they were sending the body for post-mortem to the Rajabari hospital. I pleaded for his body to be removed to the J.J. hospital. I knew what they would do in their hospital. They would turn him into another criminal. When I kept on pleading the police said, ‘Should we send you to Pakistan, too?’ [laughs]. With the help of Dattu Khatke (a councillor during the riots of 1992 and a member of the Shiv Sena) I had the post-mortem done in J.J. hospital. I went in curfew and came in curfew.

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The ironies of this account are immediately apparent. Ali takes his son’s body to the police station with the help of a policeman, presumably a member of a force that is in Ali’s eyes responsible for his son’s death — the politics over the postmortem and Ali’s ironic laughter over the statement of the police confirms this. It requires the intercession of a member of a political party, whose role in the violence is well documented, for Ali to take his son’s body to J.J. Hospital. Perhaps, it is only in the ironic mode that Ali is able to constitute his subjectivity. The actuality of violence is either forgotten or rationalized. But his irony is threatened by loss. His subsequent statements point in this direction. In answer to the question of what happened after Iftiqar’s death, he says, What happened? They made me naked. I filled in forms and gave evidence so that his death would not go unrecorded. I went to the hospital. You see my hands? They tremble . . . the effect of the masjid is still there. The masjid politicians have all benefited from this hatred, all are complicit (masjid ke netaon ke liye nafrat men profit hai. Sare mile hain — Congress, BJP, Shiv Sena). But has fate decreed that not one believer be present in these parties? (Kya yeh ittefaq hai ki ek bhi momin in partyon men shamil nahin?) Q: Where did you give evidence? Ali: I went to the Krishna Commission. It recommended my name because I had the post-mortem result. My son’s death must be recorded. [Touching me] You don’t understand. I don’t want their money. My son’s death must be recorded (Uska khata upar to khula hai, par yahan bhi khulna chahiye).

Here the past is not closed, but acts upon Ali’s present and is perhaps actualized in the present. This actuality is of a kind where Iftiqar’s death does not enter the flow of time as continuity between past, present, and future. It is almost as if the past and present merge in the relationship of caring that Ali enters into with his dead son. He asks me, ‘Can you understand what happened?’ Such rhetorical assertions are the performative

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statements of those who are marked by the inescapable presence of violence and are also uttered as a means of incorporating their pain into the care structure of a larger humanity. In contrast, in the SCR the testimony of various participants in the violence will be fully realized only in the future, when the objects of reform proposed by it achieve fruition. The SCR is not concerned with the present moment of testimony, with the pathos and anger that runs through the accounts. Nor is it concerned with how individuals incorporate this violence in their daily lives. With the grace of God I’ve recovered. This year [1999] I went on my second Hajj [pilgrimage to Mecca]. I went with the delegation of the Jamaat. I went for the first time last year. People now call me a Haji [laughs]. After my son’s martyrdom they called me mad. The mad person is now a Haji [laughs].

After the conversation, we were told that Ali had indeed gone mad and that he was on medical treatment. Later Ali confirmed this. It is not merely his son’s death that hastens his illness, but as he tells it, his illness is placed side-by-side with the effects of the demolition of the mosque and the corrupt practices of political parties. It would be tempting to read the resolution of Ali’s loss in his immersion in the various practices of the Jamaat. It is almost as if the pilgrimage to Mecca fills in the void of his son’s death. His use of the term shaheed suggests this. But to read it in this way is to argue that his loss engenders a re-moralizing of the self. It cannot account for his ironic laughter. If we are to take his irony seriously then we must recognize that Ali is able to locate his son’s death in language and to articulate through this death his version of a permitted past. What silences his irony is not a theological guarantee (‘mad’ and ‘Haji’ are ironic bed mates in this account) but an equivocation that comes from his negotiation with the state. This equivocation is an ‘afterward’ — there can be no other. Talk of his son’s death after the compensation has been decided allows him to put something else in language. This something else comes from his experience in the Tablighi Jamaat, but also in his configuring of the state.

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Q: Has communal hatred become less now? Ali: How is that possible? How can we forget . . . ? Aslam: He’s asking if Hindus and Muslims fight. They don’t. The situation in 1992–93 was different. In those days . . . Ali: No, he’s asking if there’s hatred. Of course there is. The Krishna report is there. It names people. Until they are punished you can forget about living peacefully. Q: Weren’t those responsible for your son’s death punished? Ali: I admit it. I got compensation. You don’t understand. I’m still able-bodied and I can earn with my hands, even if they tremble. The state (sarkar) gave me money. It apologized for his death. With the sarkar it’s about profit and loss. The police take and the officer gives. Every time after a danga we fill ‘applications’ [for compensation]. It happened after Bhiwandi [early 1984] and it happened after the danga. The history of ‘Akhand Bharat’ is found in applications (Akhand Bharat ka itihas applications men milega).

Rhetorically, this account indicates a stylized conversation with the motive of reprobation — a dramatic representation of wrong and its redress. Apart from its rhetorical foundation Ali’s version points to the politics of memory. This politics refers to the process by which an accumulated and shared historical experience of communal conflict constrains today’s political action. It shows the contest over the proper interpretation of that historical experience.26 For Ali this experience is found in a dual understanding of the state. In the first instance, the state is the agency through which brutal violence is perpetrated, and in the second, it redefines such violence through bureaucratic procedure. His understanding is close to that generated by the SCR, which dignifies legitimacy by domesticating violence. If the SCR acknowledges the complicity of the police in the violence, it also recommends cases for rehabilitation. Ali is compensated for his son’s death: he is given a sum of Rs 50,000 by the state government. It is assumed that cases like Ali’s will reach closure once they are rehabilitated. In a second sense, however, violence is mobilized through a form of remembrance that is transported through the iconography of the body. It is not only his son’s

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body that lies in his house for 3 days, but Ali himself evokes violence as a corporeal memory — his madness and trembling fingers, together with his verbal discourse produce the effects of violence. This memory — of the body and in speech — of violence is a kind of phantasm, the outside of public documents and of history. From the point of view of the testifier this memory is a kind of haunting.27 I met Ali again in September 2004. He has become a prosperous businessman, having invested his money in the new apartments that are being built in Dharavi. In December 2003 he hired a shop in south Bombay to sell leather shoes and slippers, but gave up the business when the landlord of the shop insisted on raising the rent. Ali is no longer a member of the Tablighi Jamaat but continues to remain a pious Muslim. He is now a grandfather and takes care of his daughter’s children. His surviving sons are settled in Dharavi, and one of them stays with Ali supplying belts and buckles to various shops in Bombay. He was apparently with Iftiqar when the latter was shot in December 1992. Ali divulges this as an aside in the following conversation. As I was interested in pursuing Ali’s success story, I asked him whether raising money for his business ventures had been difficult. Ali: I had some savings and I used the compensation for my larka (boy, meaning Iftiqar) with care. Q: Compensation? Ali: After Iftiqar I got money. The Krishna Commission gave me a parcha (document). Q: Did the Jamaat have anything to say about this? Ali: Why should they? Business and Islam aren’t strangers. Before you help others you have to be secure. How can I be sure that this will never happen to me again? I don’t want to lose Intezar (his son who stays with him). With the grace of God he escaped their guns. I must build my defences . . . Q: Whose guns? Ali: He was a child then, going with the crowds, following Iftiqar. Even now I haven’t asked him about that day. See, I’m a man of few needs. I don’t watch TV, films or go to beer bars.

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I must be in a position where when this danga happens again, my son doesn’t get involved. I have to live here. I also thought that I should use the money for the quom (community). But I can’t do that by becoming a faqir (religious mendicant). I have to take care of my Intezar, my sons, my grandchildren. Nor can you. Do you beg for your child? Q: Who do you need to build your defences against? Ali: We do not pass through terror, this is my prayer. The situation is bad even now. You think their boys (Shiv Sainiks) are pacified? I make money for my family members, but also for the officers. I gave money for the post-mortem certificate. During their investigations I had to give money for their daily expenses. But that talk is old. I don’t wish to become naked again (dahsat phir na guzare, yeh meri dua hai. Niyat ab bhi bigdi hai. Kya unke larke thande ho gaye hain? Men gharwalon ke liye paisa banata hun par officer ke liye bhi. Post-mortem certificate ke liye paisa diya. Jab unki investigation ho rahi thi to chai-paani ka paisa dena hi pada. Kher yeh baat purani hai. Men phir nanga nahin hona chahta).

This account expresses at least three themes. First for Ali, the public character of the riot follows a pattern of invocation and is located in the social setting of work and home. Both these arenas of everyday life must be made secure from further violence. This security must be formulated vis-à-vis the ‘boys’ of the Shiv Sena and various agencies of the state. Second, but more than this setting, his experience of the violence of 1992–93 consists in arriving at a mastery of the past. However, this mastery does not assuage his anxiety. He is concerned that his youngest son has been exposed to the unsayable. So long as the effects of violence remain alive his attempt to master the past only makes this violence contemporaneous. Finally, Ali’s understanding of the history of the riot is not learned second-hand but is remembered from personal experience. His experience of the violence is necessarily mediated — by the SCR before which he provides evidence, by how he can understand his son’s death as martyrdom and in his attempt to build defences against its repetition.28 And it is this remembrance that is in the nature of a haunting.

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Where do we place Ali’s testimony? In a general sense, he is witness to the riots, but also to his son’s death. The latter concern is my focus. As survivor, he speaks for him who cannot speak. The SCR, too, speaks in the place of those who lived through the violence, but their speech is always an appendage to the dignity and hopeful impartiality of the state. From the point of view of the SCR the survivor’s speech is premised on the factual verification of experience and is located within a long history of communal conflict. Ali’s testimony has nothing to do with the acquisition of facts during a trial. He mentions that the violence and his subsequent negotiations with the police stripped him of dignity, made him naked. He is able to re-dignify himself, not by successfully having his son’s death recorded, nor even by becoming a member of the Tablighi Jamaat. His attempt at dignity, precarious and coloured by cynicism, is found in the way he speaks of his son’s death as martyrdom and later as a refusal to visit that experience. His dignity is located also in everyday acts of survival. Conclusion In presenting Ali’s testimony I have tried to show that his recall of the violence of 1992–93 is mediated by the category of the riot as it has been formulated in official documents. I have tried to emphasize the formation and inheritance of administrative understandings of violence between Hindus and Muslims. In treating the riot as a formative construct the ethnographic data that I have used does not conform to localized settings. The understanding of the riot oscillates between essential ideas of Hindus and Muslims and their materiality in precise locales and specific performances. We are in the circumscribed space of local groups and residential communities but also within the networks of law and order proposed by the state. Official documents of the riot work with bits and pieces of materiality, rehabilitating old truths in the search for meaning. The riot is a pathology that has specific colonial coordinates. Disease is the root metaphor of the riot and infection, and contagion (in the form of the

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hooligan) make up its body. By the 1930s colonial administrators envisioned the riot as organic to native society in Bombay and their reports were a kind of diagnostic science of the diseased body of the riot. This vision functions as a genealogical reservoir for the Srikrishna Report. For Srikrishna, colonial modes of analysing the riot are transposed into the political vernacular of everyday life and positioned as a disease. The formation of the riot is embedded in administrative documents, but is also seen in the accounts of participants in the violence of 1992–93. As witnesses these participants speak of their experiences and also make claims for rehabilitation and compensation. Indeed, it may be that experience and compensation are mutually reinforcing. From the point of view of the SCR testimony reinvigorates the historical project of the riot as disease and a part of it is focused on the containment of infected bodies. We must, however, also recognize that Ali’s testimony (and of others like him) is neither fully accommodated within the archive, nor a mere theatre of language. Ali’s account relies on being witness to 1992–93, of being bodily present to his son’s death. Part of his testimony is ritualized truth telling and part perhaps confessional. Whatever the truth of his account — we were told that Iftiqar was not ‘martyred’, that he was discovered and shot by the police while vandalizing a temple during the violence — it is clear that Iftiqar’s death is lodged not only in bureaucratic efforts of amelioration, but also exists as a shadow in everyday life. Ali’s testimony for this reason does not point to a factual truth as much as it moves between what can and cannot be said. The latter forces us to confront the question that Veena Das (1990: 32) asks, ‘what is the form through which violence may be written about when it exceeds limits?’ *

Acknowledgements: This article is part of a larger project sponsored by the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (IDPAD), called ‘Mapping City Spaces: Communal Violence, Social Reconciliation and the Documentary Practices of the State’. I thank the participants of the project — Roma Chatterji, Mani Shekhar Singh, Pratiksha Baxi, Asha Singh and Yasmeen Arif — for their comments on earlier drafts. The encouragement of Veena Das has been particularly helpful.

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Notes 1. Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1995. I will refer to the city by its former name. As is well known, the riots of 1992–93 followed the destruction of the Babri mosque on 6 December 1992. In the second week of March 1993 a series of bomb blasts ripped through high-profile financial and political establishments in Bombay. 2. By testimony I refer not so much to a written document as to how a particular event of violence is remembered and placed in everyday life. Remembrance itself changes over a period of time. However, I do not wish to set up a distinction between memory and history or to argue that memory critiques conventional historical discourse. My concern is to show the interpenetration of historical narrative and individual remembrance and forgetting. 3. The testimony that I will be considering is drawn from fieldwork in a slum in central Bombay called Dharavi. The fieldwork, conducted with Roma Chatterji since 1995, has explored the violence of 1992–93 in Bombay, its afterlife and its embedding in the everyday. See Mehta and Chatterji (2001), Mehta (2002), Chatterji (2005) for further details. 4. It is not as if there are no clashes in the Bombay Presidency prior to its reporting. We know that there is violence between Parsis and Muslims in 1850 and 1874, but Hindu-Muslim riots become a common feature after 1890. I am interested in seeing how the communal riot is materialized as discourse. By ‘discourse’ I refer to a set of institutional practices marked by Enquiry Commission Reports, written administrative guidelines, press communiqués and other writings that exploit the semiotic potential of violence. 5. We also find an extensive hate literature in the archive. Certain words carry with them the capacity to wound and designate others as inferior. The threat of violence is not merely a threat to language, but is contained within the possibilities of language itself. 6. In reading these reports together with a spoken testimony of a survivor of the Bombay riots of 1992–93 I hope to evade the distinction between memory and history. Ong’s (1982) distinction between oral societies and print culture assumes that presence and (oral) origins are fundamentally separated from history and written language. 7. After the violence subsides the government orders an enquiry. The Report examines communal violence with reference to the anti-cow slaughter movement in Rangoon, Azamgarh and Bombay. Here I will refer to the Report as it applies to Bombay.

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8. A chawl is a segment of a residential colony. It is made up of shacks densely packed together. 9. Following the August violence, we find a chain of riots between 1893–95 in the entire Presidency, ranging from the Raigad to the Ratnagiri districts. 10. The violence begins on 2 February 1929 and lasts till about 10 March. Violence occurs again on 22 April and continues till 15 May. On 22 April the government appoints an inquiry committee. 11. ‘Tabots’ are replicas of the mausoleum of the martyred Imam Hussain which are taken in a public procession and ritually interred in the month of Muharram. The archive makes frequent mention of riots during such occasions. At the beginning of the 20th century large parts of India witnessed what was known as the Cow Protection Movement. Various Hindu groups for whom the cow is sacred orchestrated the Movement. 12. The elaboration of a riot prevention scheme (1931), the experimental use of tear gas on rioters, corporal punishment, including (whipping), the banning of kirpans (small swords that Sikhs are enjoined by religion to carry on their bodies), are ways of restoring order. 13. By agency I refer to an economy of action, one that does not coincide with individual bodies. Administrative agency is circumscribed by law but also has the power to institute particular tasks. This action is also representative to the extent that actions are carried out in the name of the Crown. For a discussion on agency see Asad (2003: 67–99). 14. The theme of the contagion is echoed in the Press. The Parsi newspaper, Jam-e-Jamshed (17 May 1932) says, ‘It seems the lowest strata of society, bent on mischief, are having a free hand to satisfy their irrepressible desire to hurl themselves at each other’s throats and at the unfortunate peaceloving citizens who happen to be in the path along which their mad fury sweeps. The by-lanes of Bombay have become veritable death traps for passers-by.’ Similarly, the Kaiser-i Hind (22 May 1932) says, ‘The mobfury which has passed like a scourge over the city will leave behind deep and indelible traces of the tremendous havoc that has made hundreds of innocent people bereaved and homeless.’ 15. Sometimes, other sections of the Bombay Special (Emergency) Powers are invoked. In 1936, during the course of the Byculla Temple–Mosque riot a letter is intercepted from one Abdulla H. Kermali, a resident of Mazgaon, Bombay. Addressed to the Khilafat Press, the letter holds that in the present ‘Mandap’ dispute a ‘few incidents must occur so that they will strike terror in the Police Commissioner’s heart’ (File 870, 1936). Though the government is reluctant to use the Special Powers Act of 1932 generally used against ‘communalists’, in an emergency like the present

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the government has no objection to this individual being arrested and detained under Section 3 of the Act, if legal arrest and detention is otherwise impractical. Unfortunately for the Police Commissioner the name Abdulla H. Kermali ‘appears to be pseudonymous’ (ibid.). 16. Agency resides in the hooligan as contagion, but the hooligan himself becomes part of the spectacle. 17. The handbill is worded thus, One thing is accomplished. My brother, Shripad Jhas, has brought the Hindu society, the Muslim society and the Jain religion together by marrying a Muslim sister Ashabi. And many such true events have taken place and are taking place. Hence what benefit will be reaped by quarrelling among yourselves in connection with a temple or a mosque? There is no benefit indeed: the truth is the same in your Kuran and Puranas (File 870 (10), 1936). 18. According to the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, any proceeding before a commission of inquiry is a judicial proceeding ‘within the meaning of sections 193 and 228 of the Indian penal Code (45 of 1860)’ (ibid.: 5). The Commission functions like a civil court and can summon persons and documents. 19. A number of organizations and parties were represented: Shiv Sena, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Milli Council and the Communist Party of India. The SCR emerged like a public tribunal. The government, the police and various individuals and organizations filed many affidavits. Victims of bereaved families, mainly Muslims, submitted the bulk of these. 20. In June 2000 the Deputy Chief Minister, Mr Chaggan Bhujbal announced that 112 riot cases out of a total of 1,358 were being reopened and in August the same year the government announced the establishing of a task force to deal with the riot cases. In September 2004, the Indian Express quotes Arif Naseem Khan, a Congress (I) legislator from Bombay and one of the main petitioners in the Supreme Court against the non-implementation of the Report, saying that the Report has been implemented — from setting up the Special Task Force to arrests to giving compensation. ‘But there are more culprits to be brought to book and some suggestions remaining to be implemented about ensuring that no such riots occur again’ (Indian Express, 18 September 2004). 21. The contrast between the work of the Commission and the prosecution of those accused in the bomb blasts was evident. Of the 200 accused in the blasts and detained under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities

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22.

23.

24.

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(Prevention) Act, 1987 (TADA), 189 were charged with complicity and conspiracy. A high security TADA court was erected in Bombay with all the accused being charged with waging war against the Indian state. Kantorowicz (1970) shows that the dual character of political power rests on the notion of dignity embodied in the figure of the king. The king has two bodies, one that is the law, a sacred eternal body, and the other that is a human body. However, when society cannot be represented as a unified body or be embodied in the figure of the king, the nation-state takes the place of the king in terms of the principle of dignity and functions within the terrain of law. My attempt is not to trace the emergence of the modern state. I follow Agamben’s (1998: 91–111) discussion of Kantorowicz to show that dignity is emancipated from its bearer, in particular how dignity is embodied in the state and in those individuals who, following communal violence, make claims on the state. In spatializing violence, the Report follows a bureaucratic mapping of Bombay. Within such areas the presence or absence of criminal gangs is noted, crowd formations (maha-arti pujas, cycle rallies, Friday prayers) are reported and the attack on particular establishments (bakeries, leather stores, mosques, temples) acknowledged. The SCR points to a powerful ideological tendency that expresses the ideas of surveillance, control, and order instituted by the state. It admits, at least implicitly, that the theatre of conflict can be ordered along the two axes — abundance versus barrenness and congeniality versus hostility — and it is along these axes that the violence occurs. The name and designation of the deposing person thematises the way in which the violence is described. For instance, in the Dharavi police station area the deposition of Masood Ibrahim Kazi, a registered government contractor and social worker and the first Muslim member of the Shiv Sena in Dharavi, states that on 7 December 1992, Shiv Sainiks attached to the Dharavi shakha (branch) attacked him in Dharavi. From the same area, senior police inspector Gharge deposes that the December riots were instigated by Muslims and those in January the handiwork of ‘crowds’. All identifications are thus effaced save those designated as Muslim and Hindu. Even in the case of those who have pushed the events of 1992–93 into the past we find that violence, though distanced in time is experienced as spatially contemporaneous. Certain neighbourhoods and high-rise apartments are marked as being produced by the violence of 1992–93, certain neighbours, who participated in the violence, are evoked in a way that 1992–93 becomes the defining feature of their biography. Simultaneously, the violence of 1992–93 is compared with earlier and later events of

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Hindu–Muslim warfare (Bhiwandi in 1984, Gujarat in 2001–2). Violence is thus placed within historical time and it is perhaps here that the archive impresses itself on the testifier. 26. Lisa Yoneyama (1999) shows how the account of survivors of the atomic bomb critiqued official historiography in Japan. But ‘memory work’, on which such accounts rely, does not have the status of ‘fact’, if only because remembrance is modified by later experience. 27. I take my notion of haunting or ‘spectrality’ from Derrida (1994). 28. The idea of the witness proposed here is contrary to that developed by scholars such as Felman (1992). For her, to testify is to produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth. Such speech is performative, a ‘discursive practice’, that ‘addresses what in history is action’ (1992: 5). The problem is not of performative speech but of assuming that history moves through the actions of individuals. It may be that for the witness history is experienced as a new temporality and more so when it makes demands on the future.

References Primary Documents and Reports Bombay Government Gazette. 10 June 1938: (1) Acts of the Local Legislature of the Bombay Presidency and (2) Acts of the Indian Legislature Assented to by the Governor General. Bombay Government Gazette. 15 October 1936: Notification by the Commissioner of Police, Bombay. Commissions of Inquiry Act. 1952. Delhi: Universal Law Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd. Government of Bombay, Political Department. 1931. Resolution No. 8385: Prevention of and measures for bringing disorder, when they occur, under control. Home Department (Political). 1932. Newspaper Cuttings Regarding Bombay Riots 1932. In File no. 249, Box 82. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). 1929. Report of the Bombay Riots Inquiry Committee 1929. In File no. 543 (10) (E) (B). Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). May 1929. Hindu–Moslem Riots, Bombay. In File no. 344/29. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay.

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Home Department (Special). May 1932. Hindu–Mohammadan Riots in Bombay City, May 1932. 1) Reports to the Government of India; 2) Press Communiqués issued by the Director of Information. In File no. 793. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). May 1932. Civil Disobedience Movement 1932. Bombay City Reports. In File no. 872 (72) Pt. 4. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). 17 October 1936. 1) Proposal to deal with one Abdalla H. Kermali under Sections 3 and 4 of the Bombay (Special) Emergency Powers Act, 1932 in connection with Agitation over Byculla Temple Sabha Mandap Reconstruction. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Deportation of Bhupal Bharma Pandit under the Foreigners Act 1864. 1936. In File no. 870 (10). Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). 17 October 1936. Extract from the Secret Police Abstract For the week ending 17 October 1936. In File no. 87 (14) 1. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). 31 October 1936. Extract from the Bombay Presidency Weekly Letter no. 44, In File no. 870 (14) 9. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). 24 November 1936. Brief Notes on the Communal Riots in Bombay City in 1929 and 1932. In File no. 870 (14). Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Home Department (Special). 4 December 1936. Letter of the Commissioner of Police, Bombay referring to the riots over the Byculla Temple–Mosque Dispute. In File no. 870 (2). Part II. Maharashtra State Archives, Presidency College, Bombay. Instructions for the Guidance of Honorary Presidency Magistrates on duty with Military Detachments in times of disturbance in Bombay City. 1929. Bombay: Bombay Central Press. Russell, George. 1894. East India (Religious Disturbances): Copies or Extracts of Reports Relating to the Recent Conflicts between Hindu and Muhammadans in India, and particularly to the Causes which led To them. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

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Srikrishna, Hon. Justice B.N. 1998. Report of the Srikrishna Commission Appointed for Inquiry into the Riots at Mumbai During December 1992 and January 1993. Vols I and II. Published privately by Jyoti Punwani and Vrijendra.

Secondary Sources Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life. Trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chatterji, Roma. 2005. ‘Plans, Habitation and Slums-Redevelopment: The Production of Community in Dharavi, Mumbai’. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39 (2): 197–218. Das, Veena. 1990. ‘Introduction: Communities, Riots and Survivors’. In idem (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Douglass, Ana. 2003.‘The Menchu Effect: Strategic Lies and Approximate Truths in Texts of Witness’. In Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler (eds), Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. New York: Routledge, pp. 55–88. Douglass, Ana and Thomas A. Vogler. 2003. ‘Introduction’. In Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler (eds), Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. New York: Routledge. Felman, Shoshana. 1992. ‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’. In Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2001. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1970. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mehta, Deepak. 2002.‘Writing the Riot: Between the Ethnography and Historiography of Communal Violence in India’. In Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (eds), History and the Present. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Mehta, Deepak and Roma Chatterji. 2001. ‘Boundaries, Names, Alterities: A Case Study of a “Communal Riot” in Dharavi, Bombay’. In Veena Das et al. (eds.), Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Contributors Alban Bensa is Director of Studies, and Head of the research unit Genèse et transformation des mondes sociaux (GTMS) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is an anthropologist working on Oceanian societies (NewCaledonia) and on the relations between politics, history, and anthropological theories. He has published (with Jean-Claude Rivière), Les chemins de l’alliance. L’organisaton sociale et ses représentations en Nouvelle-Calédonie (1982); and among many articles in French and in English, he has recently published ‘The Ethnologist and the Architect: Post-colonial experiments in the Pacific’, in Benoît de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg and Lygia Sigaud (eds), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making (2005). Christophe Charle is professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Director of the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (CNRS/ENS), and member of the Institut universitaire de France. His major publications include Les Élites de la République (1880–1900) (1987); Naissance des ‘intellectuels’ 1880–1900 (1990); A Social History of France in the Nineteenth-Century (French 1991; English 1993); Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXème siècle (French 1996, 2001; German 1997; Spanish 2000; Italian 2002); La crise des sociétés impériales (1900–1940). Essai d’histoire sociale comparée de l’Allemagne, de la France et de la Grande-Bretagne (2001); Le Siècle de la presse (1830–1939) (2004). He is presently working on the history of theatre in three European capitals (Paris, Berlin, Vienna) and leads a comparative project on a cultural history of European capital cities (18th–20th centuries). Sheena Jain is Reader in the Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She has worked on the sociology of films for her M. Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New

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Delhi, and has been Commonwealth Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She has recently been awarded her doctorate; her dissertation is on Bourdieu’s theory of the Symbolic. U. Kalpagam is an economist and an anthropologist, and is currently Professor at the G.B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad. She has published in the fields of anthropology, gender studies, and economics. She has written on the colonial construction of knowledge in India, focusing on the colonial State. More recently, she has been engaged in ethnographic work in Chennai on ‘Urban Mentalities’. Roland Lardinois is a sociologist, and is currently Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and member of the Centre d’ Études de l’ Inde et de l’ Asie du Sud (CNRS/EHESS). Between 1981–1985 he was attached to the French Institute of Pondicherry, working on the historical demography of South India (18th–19th centuries). His present field of research is the sociology of knowledge on Indian society during the colonial period. He has edited Miroir de l’ Inde. Études indiennes en sciences sociales (1988); has co-authored (with Grigorij M. Bongard-Levin and Aleksej A. Vigasin), Correspondances orientalistes entre Paris et Saint-Pétersbourg (1887– 1935) (2002); and translated (with Isabelle Kalinowski) Max Weber’s Hindouisme et Bouddhisme (2003). He is currently completing a book on the genesis of Indian scholarship in France (19th–20th centuries). Deepak Mehta teaches in the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. Since 1994 he has been researching on communal violence in Mumbai. He is the author of Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India (1997). His research interests centre around the study of collective violence, material culture, and the anthropology of Muslim communities in north India. Francine Muel-Dreyfus is Director of Studies at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (CNRS) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She has worked

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on school education, social work, and the history of social sciences, medicine, and gender. Her publications include Le métier d’ éducateur. Les instituteurs de 1900, les éducateurs spécialisés de 1968 (1983); and Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender (2001). Gisèle Sapiro is a senior scholar at the Centre de sociologie européenne (CNRS) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her doctoral dissertation is on the French literary field during the Second World War, which she submitted to the EHESS. She has published one book, La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (1999), and many articles on literary institutions, literature and politics, and translation including ‘Forms of Politicization in the French Literary Field’, Theory and Society (2003); and ‘The Literary Field between the State and the Market’, Poetics (2003). She has also co-edited two issues of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (2002) on international cultural exchanges and the circulation of ideas. Meenakshi Thapan is Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She was earlier Professor at the Department of Education, University of Delhi (1989–2002) and Fellow of the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (1993–95). She was elected the first C.R. Parekh Visiting Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford (1998) and was Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago (1995). She has published Life at School: An Ethnographic Study (1991, 2006); and edited Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity (1997); Anthropological Journeys: Reflections on Fieldwork (1998); and Transnational Migration and the Politics of Identity (2005). She has also contributed essays to edited volumes and published research articles in professional journals in India and abroad.

Index abortion, status of, 187 Absolute, 149 Académie française, 156, 161, 166–67, 169, 171, 172 Académie Goncourt, 156, 167– 68, 171, 172 accountability, 85, 275 Actes de la recherche en science sociales (1975), 6 Action française, 163, 167, 182, 195n1 administrative discourses, 86 advertising, 13 aestheticism, 165, 172 agents and institutions, network, 92, 94 agrarian relations in India, 15 agrarian societies, 69 Algiers University, 2 Algeria, 2, 10, 29, 95, 103, 155; colonial situation, 7, 56, 161, 171; Kabylia peasants, 4–5, 7, 11, 12, 179, 199, 230–31, 252; —marriage practices, 234–45; lineage strategies, 246 Algérie 60 (1977), 56 Althusser, 112 Ancien Regime policy, 69 Annales, 181 Ansaris of Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, 24–25 antagonism, 64

anthropology, 36, 77–80, 254 Arab kinship and marriage in rural Béarn, 36–37, 231, 235– 43, 247; economic and political factors, 235–37, 240 Armenians, 191 Austria, empire, 59, 60 autonomy of literary field, 154– 56, 162, 165, 167, 168, 170, 172 Barrès’ model, 185, 194 Béarn, 230–31; Arab kinship or marriage, 36–37, 231, 235– 43, 244, 246, 247; ousta, 246 social heritage, 243 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 275, 277, 284 Bhupal Bharma Pandit case, 272–74 bint ’al-amm (marriage with father’s brother’s daughter), 235–26 biographical comparison, 160– 61 biological, biology: anthropology, 192; of Lineage, 190; order and social order, relation, 178; vision, 194 body, 123, 200; image and embodied practice, 28, 216–26; law and discipline, 77 Boer War, 65 Bolshevik society, 71

Index Bombay; Act No. XIV, 1938, 270; communal violence, 43– 45, 260–90; Foreigners Act, 272; Police Act, 1902, 262, 270 Bourdieu, Pierre; awards, honours and titles, 2; born, 1, 9; education, 2; military service in Algeria, 2 bourgeoisie, 180, 186, 232 Bulletin de l’ École française d’ Extrême-Orient (BEFEO), 136, 142–43, 144 bureaucracy, 7–8, 31, 45, 77–78, 82–87, 89–90, 282 Byculla Temple-Mosque dispute, 262–63, 271–72 Calcutta University, 15 Candide, 181 capital, Bordieu’s notion of, 19– 26, 119–20, 231; cultural, 11, 22, 23–24, 92, 104; different species, 82–83; economic, 11, 22, 23, 24, 80, 82, 92, 248– 49; social, 11, 22, 24, 124; symbolic, 23, 24, 80, 82, 156, 160, 162, 169 Catastrophe Era, 58, 63 Catholic University of Louain, Belgium, 143 Catholics, Catholic Church, 69; and the Indian studies in France, 143–45, 146, 161; view of women, 183 causality, 95 censorship, 154 Centre for European Sociology, 6

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centrifugal forces, 64 childhood, 203 Church, 161, 186 Civil Disobedience Movement, 265–66 civil society, 45 civil war, 64 class, 13, 24, 104, 117–18, 199, 200, 202, 221; family and community, 203–16; fractions, 113, 116 classical empires, 66–67 classification principles/system, 80, 82, 87, 90, 95, 107; political function, 121 codification, 81–82 cognition, cognitive and evaluative structures, 66, 80, 81, 89, 92, 98, 105, 112, 114, 125 collective consciousness, 106–07 Collége de France, 2, 136, 137, 142 colonial, colonialism, 15, 18, 29, 65, 96; power, implication for knowledge, 95; science, 95–96 Comité national des écrivains (National Writers’ Committee), 156, 166, 169–70, 172 Commissariat General for the Family, 183, 189 committed literature, concept, 171 common cognitive frameworks, 86 commonsense, 10, 103, 121, 122 communal (Hindu-Muslim) riots, communalism in Bombay, 43–45; 1893, 262–63,

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266–69, 278–81; 1929, Bombay Riots Inquiry Committee Report, 262, 264–66, 267, 268, 270; 1932, 265–66, 267, 268, 269, 271; 1992–93, 260–61, 289; colonial, 262–66; and disease, 269–74; Instructions for the Guidance of Honorary Presidency Magistrates, 268; outbreak and contagion, 266– 69; Parsis–Muslims violence, 1874, 264; role of police, 280, 282, 284; testimony, remembrance and everyday life, 281– 90; See also Srikrishna Commission Commune of Paris, 196n13 communication, 89, 105, 114 conformism, logical and moral, 87–88 Congress, 265–66, 275, 284 consciousness, 32, 61, 90–91, 103, 108, 111, 180, 194; false, 105, 111, 120, 121, 124; pure transcendental, 114 consensus, 106, 108 conservative forces, conservatives, 167, 168, 176, 177, 192, 208 convenience, Bourdieu’s logic, 110 Coordination Centre for Family Movements, 191 cultural, culture, 1, 13, 27, 38, 41, 89, 99, 105, 108–09, 117, 186, 202, 205, 244, 249, 254; change, 70, 73; conflict, 66– 67; consciousness, 61; displacement, 99; diversity, 3, 7;

imagine of the feminine, 188; imperialism, 66; of pleasure (l’ esprit de jouissance), 162; production, 113, 123, 129, 132, 134, 137, 164; reproduction, Bourdieu notion, 21; resources, 96, 165; of sacrifice (l’ esprit de sacrifice), 162 Darwinian, 10, 73 Daumal, Réne, (1908–44), 38– 39, 129–30; an analyst of the field, 146–50; Le Mont Analogue (The Analogous Mount), 147; La Grande Beuverie (A Night of Serious Drinking), 130–35, 147, 149–50 Declaration of Human Rights, 177 decolonization, 232 Delegation archéologique française en Afghanistan (DAFA), 142 democracy, democratization, 7, 67, 98, 176, 191, 197n 13; of education, 193 demographic factors, demography, 65, 67, 179, 179, 187–89, 239, 259 determinism, 8, 197n13, 233 differentiation principle, 118 discursive practices, 87, 95, 165– 66, 172 displacement, 4, 33 dispositions, open system, 14, 119, 122, 201, 208, 221, 225 domination, 11, 12, 13, 32, 59, 60, 82–83, 105–06, 110–13, 116– 17, 120; economic, political,

Index symbolic and cultural, 56–57, 60 dowry, 24 doxa, notion of, 26, 106, 121, 245 École d’ Athénes’ Foundation, 66 École des Beaux-Arts, 142 École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, 2 École des langues orientales vivantes (School for Living Oriental Languages, L’O), 135, 141–43 École française d’ Extrême Orient (EFEO), 136, 141–43 École Nationale de la Statistique et de l’ Administration, Paris, 5 École Normale Supérieure, 2, 4 École pratique des hautes etudes (EPHE), 136–37, 138, 141– 43, 145, 148 economy, economic relations, 23, 61, 70, 95, 112, 252–53 education, educational system, 24, 79, 89–90, 176, 179, 180, 182; reforms, 70, 176; sociology, 28 Egypt: France and United Kingdom rivalry, 65 embodiment of social divisions, 107, 200 emotions, 122, 200, 203, 206–7, 222 Encounter between Buddhism and the Occident, 139 endogamy, 24, 236, 237, 245

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enemy sisters, 65–69 Enlightenment, 57, 92 epistemological practices, 98 esoterism, 38, 145 ethnicity, 112, 199 ethnocentrism, 244, 252 ethnography, 16, 230, 251 ethnology, 96, 121, 230, 231, 245, 254 Études d’ ethnologie kabyle, 234 European civil war, 58 exchange relations, 233, 249–51 exogamy, 236 family, familial relations, 180, 200, 203; associations, recognition as political forces, 177; and kinship, 15, 22, 27, 70, 189, 203–16; reforms in France, 176, 177; women, 178 fascism in France, 71, 168, 195 female; need, social construction, 205; notion of anatomical destiny, 177; submission, 177–78 Femina, 28 femininity, 177, 192, 194 feminism, feminist in France, 12–13, 111, 197, 199, 200; analyses, dominance and resistance 26–46; as a biological error, 190 field, habitus and capital, Bourdieu’s concepts, 19–26, 104, 122; structural and functional homologies, 117–18 filiation, 235–36, 240 formalism, 239

306

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Foucault, Michel, 3, 12, 31–33, 274; notion of episteme, 86– 87; and Pierre Bourdieu, similarities and difference on state, 86–89 Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, (Carrel’s Foundation), 190–91 France, French: Communist Party, 170, 171; double structure, 140–46; Eastern influence, 163; and England conflict, 64, 65, 69; and Germany conflict/German occupation, 64, 65, 155–72; imperialism, 58, 59, 60, 63–69, 71–72; Indian knowledge, 129–40; intellectual tradition, 94; Old Regime, 167; Orientalism, 135; Popular Front, 181, 189, 193, 195n1; Prussian schools and military politics, 65; Revolution, See National Revolution; society, 199, 231; Union for the Defence of the Race, 192; Women Labour Act, 1942, 182, 187 Gallimard, 148, 160, 169, 170, 171 gender, gender relations, 12–13, 16, 27–28, 103, 180, 194, 201, 203, 225; consciousness and identity, 199, 203, 216–17; domination, 198; subculture, 183, 186 genealogical system, 237–39, 241 generative grammar, 200

Germany, 41; role in 1914 crisis, 67; imperialism, 57, 58, 59, 63–69, 71–72; Nazism, 30, 58, 71, 72, 158, 167; occupation of France, 39, 64, 65, 155–72; Social Democrats, 70; social policy and moral and religious intervention, 65; and United Kingdom, rivalry, 65 gift, Bourdieu’s reasoning, 36, 247–53; economic aspect, 249–51 Girni Kamgar Union. See Red Flag Union globalization, 10, 28, 98 governance, 31–32, 78, 87, 83, 98 governmentality, 32, 79, 87, 89, 91, 94, 98, 259, 269 Gramsci, 35; theory of hegemony, 112 grandes écoles, 11 Greece: British and German influence, 66 groups and classes, 104 Guénon, René (b. 1866), 139, 144, 148; Orient-Occident, 148 Guimet Museum, Paris, 136 habitus, Bourdieu’s notion, 3, 8, 11, 14, 19–26, 27, 30, 32, 33– 35, 40, 41–43, 57, 72–73, 90– 94, 104, 107, 111, 119–20, 120–22, 225, 231, 255; postcolonial, 28, 199–200, 209; symbolic component, 115 Habsburg empire, 63 hegemony, 32, 35, 63, 83, 112 heterodoxy, 107

Index heteronomy, 155, 165, 171–72 hierarchies, 105, 117, 160, 177 higher education in France, 12 Hindus-Muslims violence. See communal (Hindu-Muslim) riots in Bombay Historiography, history, 73, 231 homogeneity, 191–92, 241 homogenization, 33, 89, 99 homologies, 163 human rights, 193; in imperial colonies, 68 Humbolt-Cassirer tradition of symbolism, 105 identity, 64, 72, 73, 122 identity crisis, 17, 155 ideologies, 58, 91, 111, 118 illusio., 93, 98 immigration issue, 188, 191 imperialism, 29–30, 187; cultural, 29, 61 Indian Penal Code, 268 individual and social, dichotomy, 107 individualism, 73, 163, 177; female version, 187 individualization, 82, 232 inequality, 16, 18, 22, 185 infertility, 190 Institut Catholique, Paris, 143, 146 Institut de civilization indienne, 136 Institute of Sociological Anthropology, 190 institutional effect, 137 intellectual, intellectualism, 38, 96, 106, 109, 111, 165; field,

307

19–21, 96; morphological transformation, 163; resistance, 13, 21, 158–59, 162, 166, 169–72 interactionism, 122–23 inter-lineage relations, 235 international crisis, 1914, 58, 59 interpersonal relationship, 206 isomorphic structures, 34 Italy: cultural domination, 60; imperialism, 57; renaissance, 60 Jews, 143–44, 182, 189–92 joint family, 27 Kabylia, 4, 7, 11, 12, 179, 199, 230–31, 243–47, 252; kinship and marriage practices, 234– 45; strategies of honour, 246; See also gift Kaiser regime, 67 Kanaks, Melanesian society in New Caledonia, 36–37, 252; bereavement ceremonies, 249–51; identification through genealogical device, 237–38; naming system, 238– 39, 246 Kant, Immanuel, 105; neoKantian tradition, 90, 104, 106, 108, 114, 124 kinship rules and practices, 25, 27, 36–37, 203, 232; from structure to strategy, 234–43; implications for women, 16 knowledge, 91–92, 111, 123 Kultur (cultural emblem of Germany), 30

308

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L’ Amour de l’ Art. Les musées d’ art et leur public (1966. trans. The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, 1990), 5 L’ Année sociologique, 6 L’ Etrange Défaite; Marc Bloch, 181 La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (1979, trans. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1984), 5, 10–11, 19, 231 La Revue de la famille, 192 labour division, 71, 82 language and power, relationship, 8 langue, 109 Latin America: French imperialism, 60 law and order, 78 Le Mont Analogue (The Analogous Mount), by Réne Daumal, 147 Lévi, Sylvain (1863–1935), 136, 140, 145 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 4, 36, 108– 9, 232, 234–36, 239, 247, 254; structured structures, 116, 124 liberation, 168, 169, 170–71 Liberty, 30, 57 lineages, competition, 250 linguistic practices, 66, 109, 121 literacy, 61 literary field/institutions, literature: concept of Bourdieu, 156; hierarchization, 160; polarization between the old and the young, 164; politicization,

165–70, 172; reasons for political commitment, 156–57, 165; recomposition at the Liberation, 170–7; talent, originality and style, 164 male dominance, 176–96, 204, 240; See also women margins, 77, 84, 94, 99–100 marital relations, marriage, See matrimonial practices, Marxist, Marxism, 79, 83, 112, 113, 125, 149; conceptualization of symbolic systems, 111 masculinity, 225 materialism, 34, 134 maternity, 205 matrimonial practices (marriage, marital relations), 24, 205–07, 219, 244; exchange system, 36–37, 239; inter-racial, 190; and motherhood, 203; practices of Kabylias, 234–45; with parallel cousin, 235–42; See also family, kinship rules and practices Mauss, Marcel, 4, 6, 90, 104, 106, 124, 146, 231 meaning, creation, 123–24; precondition of establishment, 114–15 media, 13, 45 medical reforms, 177 mental schemata, 107 mental structures, 90; and social structures, correspondence, 106 Mercure de France, 145

Index middle classes, 7, 23–24, 70, 180, 232 mind, 110; and body, duality, 107–08 mirror and the body image, 28, 222–24 misrecognition, 112, 113, 121, 179 mobilization, 59, 64–65, 70, 73, 192 modernity, 27, 33, 95, 99 monarchy, 63–65 monopolization, 83, 89 Montesquieu’s climate theory, 188 moralism (good taste allied to a sense of social responsibility), 163, 165–66, 172 Morocco-France/Germany rivalry, 65 Mother’s Day, 183, 187, 192 motherhood, 183, 189, 206, 220 Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), 157–58 Muslims, 36, 282 police bias against, 274, 277 myth and religion, 188 mythical conception, 188, 194, 194 naming system of Kanaks, 238– 39, 246 National Alliance against Depopulation, 187 national community, 196, 197n13 National Motherhood and Exclusion of the Inassimilable, 187–93

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National Revolution in France, 40, 68, 135, 176–77, 181, 186, 187, 188, 191, 193 national superiority complex, 61 nationalism, 15, 73, 195, 196n13 Native Americans, 250 naturalism, 158 Nazism, 30, 58, 71, 72, 158, 167, 190, 193 neo-liberalism, 12, 80, 98, 100 A Night of Serious Drinking (La Grande Beuverie), by Réne Daumal, 130–35, 147, 149–50 nominalism, 236–37 nomos (a shared principle of vision and division), 88, 93 norms and values, 29, 108–09, 154, 252 Nouvelle revue française (NRF), 140, 145, 148–49, 156, 160, 162, 163, 168–69, 170, 171, 172 objective relations, 113 objectivism, 3, 8, 25, 81, 106, 119–20 open system of dispositions, 200 oppression, 13, 27, 100; See also women organizational structures and mechanisms, 79–80, 89–90 Orientalism, 38, 129–30, 135 Orient–Occident, 146, 148 Ottoman empire, 63 Paris School of Medicine, 190 Pascalian Meditations (2000), 79, 97 pedagogic communication, 5, 41–43

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perception and representation, 106, 121, 219–20 performativity, 42–43, 82, 85, 201 Pétain, Marshall, 155, 158, 161– 62, 167, 171, 176, 185–86, 190 phenomenology, symbolic system, 104, 117, 120–24 physical beauty, 219–20, 222; See also women political, politics, politicians, 14, 64, 71, 77–78, 103, 106; in France, 11; activism, 10, 160; crisis, 36, 39; economy, 89; and literature, relation, 155, 168; rationality, 91; reforms, 64; rights for women, 68; social sciences and politics, relation, 79; in India, 20, 259, 282, 284, 290; of protective discrimination, 98 postcolonial futures, 96–100 poverty, 100, 209 poverty alleviation, 98 power, power relations, 28, 45, 69, 104, 124, 168, 171, 202, 238; and cultural capital, link, 23; and higher education, relationship, 12; knowledge and subjectivity, triadic relationship, 79; symbolic system, 111, 116 practical comprehension, 121 practical sense, 200, 244 practice, Bourdieu’s theory, 33– 34, 103–4, 106–8, 114–15, 119, 252; See also symbolism race, racism, 61, 188, 190, 192, 195

radicalism, 87 realism, 118 reality, construction, 115 reciprocity, 23, 235, 245 Red Flag Union, 263–64 reflection’ theory, reflectivity, 9, 113 Reformation, 92 Reforms in France, 64, 70, 176– 77, 182 regionalism, 193, 199 relational structuralism, 35, 117– 20, 125 relationships, network, 22–23, 86, 104, 115, 117, 122 religion, 16, 64, 113, 179, 233 religious conversion, 61 representations, 91, 106, 114, 122, 123, 163, 161–65, 184– 85 Revue de synthèse, 145 Revue des arts asiatiques (RAA), 136, 144 Rolland, Romain (b. 1866), 58, 139, 144–45, 163 Roman Empire, 60 romanticism, 163 Russia, Russian empire, 59, 60, 63; communism, 70 Sanskrit, 136, 138, 142, 148 savage mind, 90 Savant publications in France, 138, 139 scandal (literature as a mediatic event), 165–67, 172 school system, 7, 31, 60, 64–65, 69, 81, 83–84 schooling practices, 200, 232

Index science, scientific discourses, 95, 133, 188, 238; and faith, 134; myths, 187–88, 190; objectivity, 9 secularization, 67, 68 sexuality, sexual relationship, 16, 42, 205–6, 215, 217, 225 Shiv Sena, 274–75, 277, 284, 288 ‘short-circuit’ effect, 113 social change, 70, 73, 232 social class, 11, 203–5, 207, 209, 216; and ideological production, homologies, 117–18 social conditions, divisions, 10, 34, 69–70, 95–96, 106–07, 109, 121, 185, 200, 231–32 social life, 194, 230, 232, 252 social reality, 16, 80, 114, 122, 125, 200, 233 social order/relations, 13–15, 24–25, 27, 35, 37–38, 43, 86, 90, 111–13, 115–17, 120, 123– 24, 154, 157, 161, 164, 177, 179, 194, 237–38, 241 social sciences in India, 2–4 social security system in France, 10 socialism in France, 70 society, 95, 114, 117; and state, relation, 30–31 Sociological Bulletin, 16 Sociologie de l’ Algérie (1958), 56 sociology, 3–7, 20–21, 36, 45, 125, 200, 231; in France, 2–3; in India, 3, 14–18, 140; vs. ethnology, 231–34; for women, 202 Spain, imperial domination, 57,

311

60; defeated by United States, 60 Srikrishna Commission Report (SCR), 44–45, 259–62, 274– 81, 284, 285–86, 287, 288–89, 290 standardization, 84–85 The State Nobility (1996), 79 state; in anthropology, 77–80; categories and habitus, 90–94; and civil society, 45; role in imposing cognitive categories, 89; understanding the colonial context with Bourdieu, 94–97; formation, 78; legitimacy, 70; monolithic and univocal notions, 77; power, 32–33, 64, 78–79, 82– 83, 89, 91; and society, relation, 30–33, 78; role of totalization and codification, 32 statistical inquiry, 5, 94, 157– 60 stereotypes, 64, 73 strategy, notion of, 231, 234– 243, 247, 254 structuralism, 3, 81, 109–10, 114, 116, 117–20, 124, 233; structured structures, 14, 116, 124; structuring structures, 105, 116, 203 subjectivism, subjectivity, 3, 91– 92, 106, 120, 124; and objectivism, divide/relationship, 8, 22, 25, 35; and theory, 202 subordination, 106, 110, 120 subversion, 165–66, 172 surrealists, 38, 158

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symbolic systems, symbolism, 11, 19, 20, 33–38, 88, 158, 160, 164, 183, 185, 231–32, 249; Bourdieu’s theory, 103–5; as cognitive instruments, 124, 125; innovations by synthesis, 113–17; logical integration, 114; neo-Kantian view, 108; link with phenomenology, 120–24; political functions, 116, 125; relationship with pre-existing traditions, 105– 13; social significance, 114 Tablighi Jamaat, 283, 287, 289 TADA, 276 thought current, mode in social science, 110 thought, universal values, 164 totalitarianism, 58, 81 transformation, 14, 20, 26, 56, 98, 110, 117, 232 unemployment, 10, 209 United Kingdom: and France conflict, 64, 65, 69; and Germany, rivalry, 65; imperialism, 57, 58, 59, 63–69, 71–72; Labour Party, 70; protectionist policy, 66; social measures, 65 United States of America: international domination, 56, 60 universality, 82–83, 85–86, 89 values, see norms and values Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain in France 30, 40–41, 58, 71, 156, 158–59, 162, 166–67, 168, 172; women in, 177

violence, 45, 71, 100, 121, 177, 181, 260; economic dimension, 278; symbolic, 11, 35, 57, 112, 113, 116, 178, 179, 184, 194 Weimar Republic, 67 Western: civilization, 163 governmental practices, 91 William II, 65 woman, women’s, womanhood, 12–13, 16, 27; in France, 177– 78, 182–83, 199; construction by the State, 177; cultural and social factors behind political submission, 41; education, 180–81, 185–86, 193; guilt and the invention of the culture of sacrifice, 180–87; identity, 200; place in public life, 179; political rights, 68; resistance, 200; studies, 20–21; in war time, 70; in urban India, 28, 204–16; agency, 202, 209, 210, 213; lack of autonomy, 204; bodily image and embodied practice, 216–26; lack of communication, 205; identity, 41–43, 206, 215, 219, 221, 225; oppression and violence against, 27, 210–13, 219; perceptions, 204, 219–20; resistance, 13, 41, 219, 225; selfconstruction, 42, 201; self– esteem, 211 working class, 1, 7 World War I, 30, 57–58, 62, 68, 72, 144, 163, 168, 176, 180, 181 World War II, 4, 7, 30, 39, 60, 149, 155, 232; development

Index of Indian knowledge in France after, 136, 138–40

writers’ social role, 157, 162, 164, 165

313