Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South 2019060078, 2019060079, 9780367419073, 9780367816810

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of graphs
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Rethinking the social: social ontology, sociocultures, and social inequality
3 The South against the destroying machine: an interdisciplinary attempt to theorize social ontology for a decolonial project in the social sciences
4 Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity: the Tai mueang as a social ontology
5 Developmentalism and the misacknowledgement of socio-ontological difference: the coloniality of being in the Colombian Pacific basin
6 The social ontology of caste
7 Colonial social ontology and the persistence of colonial sociocultures in contemporary Indonesia
8 Social ontologies as world-making projects: the mueang–pa duality in Laos
9 Clashing social ontologies: a sociological history of political violence in the Cambodian elite
10 Social inequality, sociocultures, and social ontology in Brazil
11 Collectivity and individuality in contemporary urban Kenya: social ontologies in Nairobi
12 Pre-modern local collective structures and their manifestation in contemporary society: a case study from Japan
13 The socio-cultural making of inequality in today’s China: symbolic construction and collective habitus

Citation preview

“This volume explodes the idea that global integration yields cultural convergence. It shows the many layers and meanings of inequality and differences in the global south. In so doing, the authors illuminate how societies amalgamated old and new insights and definitions of their collective selves. This book is a model for the production of new area studies knowledge.” – Jeremy Adelman, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University, USA “The book provides an innovative conceptual framework for an understanding of the ‘social’ of ‘inequality,’ a subject becoming increasingly popular across disciplines of the social sciences. Chapters presented in the book also provide empirical case studies that both show the value of the conceptual framework suggested in the second chapter and the significant advance that such a comparative perspective could offer to the study of social inequality. This book will have a lasting impact on the field.” – Surinder S. Jodhka, Professor of Sociology, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South

Challenging the assumption that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South. Each social collective comprises an interpretation of itself – including the meaning of life, the concept of the human person, and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various social collectives have of themselves. This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. All chapters of the edited volume focus on the relation between social ontology and structures of inequality. They argue that each society comprises several historical layers of social ontology that correspond to layers of inequality, which are referred to as sociocultures. Thereby, the volume explains why and how structures of inequality differ between contemporary collectives in the global South, even though all of them seem to have similar structures, institutions, and economies. The volume is aimed at academics, students, and the interested public looking for a novel theorization of social inequality pertaining to social collectives in the global South. Benjamin Baumann is postdoctoral associate at Heidelberg University’s Department of Anthropology. Before joining Heidelberg University in April 2020, he was research associate at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. Trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist, his work examines rural life-worlds, socio-cultural identities, and local language games. His ethnographic research has focused on the interrelationship between religion, social reproduction and communal belonging in the border regions between Thailand and Cambodia. Daniel Bultmann is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and research fellow of the Department of Social Sciences at Universität Siegen. His work focuses on the political and historical sociology of violence and armed groups, peace transformations, and social inequality as well as on the production of knowledge in (post-)conflict zones, with his regional focus centered on Southeast Asia and Cambodia in particular.

Routledge Studies in Emerging Societies Series editor: Jan Nederveen Pieterse University of California, Santa Barbara

The baton of driving the world economy is passing to emerging economies. This is not just an economic change, but a social change, with migration flows changing direction towards surplus economies; a political change, as in the shift from the G7 to G20; and over time, cultural changes. This also means that the problems of emerging societies will increasingly become world problems. This series addresses the growing importance of BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) and ­rising societies such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, the UAE and Mexico. It focuses on problems generated by emergence, such as social inequality, cultural change, media, ethnic and religious strife, ecological constraints, relations with advanced and developing societies, and new regionalism, with a particular interest in addressing debates and social reflexivity in emerging societies. Higher Education in the Global Age Policy, Practice and Promise in Emerging Societies Edited by Daniel Araya and Peter Marber Critical Theory After the Rise of the Global South Kaleidoscopic Dialectic Boike Rehbein Changing Constellations of Southeast Asia From Northeast Asia to China Edited by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Abdul Rahman Embong, and Siew Yean Tham Eurocentrism and Development in Korea Kim Jongtae Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South Edited by Benjamin Baumann and Daniel Bultmann For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Emerging-Societies/book-series/RSIES

Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South Edited by Benjamin Baumann and Daniel Bultmann

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Benjamin Baumann and Daniel Bultmann; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Benjamin Baumann and Daniel Bultmann to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baumann, Benjamin, editor. | Bultmann, Daniel, editor. Title: Social ontology, sociocultures and inequality in the global south / edited by Benjamin Baumann, Daniel Bultmann. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in emerging societies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019060078 (print) | LCCN 2019060079 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367419073 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367816810 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences—Philosophy. | Ontology. | Developing countries—Social conditions. | Equality—Developing countries. Classification: LCC H61.15 .S585 2020 (print) | LCC H61.15 (ebook) | DDC 305.09172/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019060078 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019060079 ISBN: 978-0-367-41907-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81681-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figuresix List of tablesx List of graphsxi List of contributorsxii Acknowledgmentsxv  1 Introduction

1

BENJAMIN BAUMANN AND DANIEL BULTMANN

  2 Rethinking the social: social ontology, sociocultures, and social inequality

6

BENJAMIN BAUMANN AND BOIKE REHBEIN

  3 The South against the destroying machine: an interdisciplinary attempt to theorize social ontology for a decolonial project in the social sciences

23

LARA HOFNER

  4 Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity: the Tai mueang as a social ontology

42

BENJAMIN BAUMANN

  5 Developmentalism and the misacknowledgement of socioontological difference: the coloniality of being in the Colombian Pacific basin

67

ANDRÉS BATEMAN

  6 The social ontology of caste BOIKE REHBEIN AND TAMER SÖYLER

85

viii Contents

  7 Colonial social ontology and the persistence of colonial sociocultures in contemporary Indonesia

100

VINCENT HOUBEN

  8 Social ontologies as world-making projects: the mueang–pa duality in Laos

119

MICHAEL KLEINOD

  9 Clashing social ontologies: a sociological history of political violence in the Cambodian elite

136

DANIEL BULTMANN

10 Social inequality, sociocultures, and social ontology in Brazil

157

EMERSON FERREIRA ROCHA AND BOIKE REHBEIN

11 Collectivity and individuality in contemporary urban Kenya: social ontologies in Nairobi

180

FLORIAN STOLL

12 Pre-modern local collective structures and their manifestation in contemporary society: a case study from Japan

201

KIE SANADA

13 The socio-cultural making of inequality in today’s China: symbolic construction and collective habitus LUMIN FANG

219

Figures

9.1 Elite groups, by order of appearance in the Cambodian political field 13.1 MCA map of all variable categories: an underlying structure of urban China (Fang 2019) 13.2 Distribution of urban respondents in the MCA map of all variable categories (Fang 2019) 13.3 MCA map of all variable categories: an underlying structure of rural China (Fang 2019) 13.4 Distribution of rural respondents in the MCA map of all variable categories (Fang 2019)

153 225 226 227 228

Tables

10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 13.1

Sociocultures in Brazil 160 Characteristics of social classes 164 Dimensions from PCA applied to attitudes 169 Cohesion/Collectivity/Individuality/Situations/Idea systems 188 Cohesion/Collectivity/Individuality/Situations/Idea systems 194 Cohesion/Collectivity/Individuality/Situations/Idea systems 196 Legacies of socialist hierarchies as socialist symbolic domination223 13.2 List of habitus traits in urban society 231 13.3 List of habitus traits in rural society 232

Graphs

10.1 Social classes in the social space of self-confidence and lifestyles 10.2 Social classes in the social space of self-confidence and individualization 10.3 Semantic analysis of transcripts excerpts 12.1 The number of municipalities (1888–2014)

171 171 175 207

Contributors

Bateman, Andrés (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Andrés Bateman is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. He holds one master’s degree in Global Studies and another in World History. His research interests include critical social science, developmentalism, and epistemologies of the South. Baumann, Benjamin (Heidelberg University) Benjamin Baumann is postdoctoral associate at Heidelberg University’s Department of Anthropology. Before joining Heidelberg University in April 2020, he was research associate at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. ­ Trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist, his work examines rural life-worlds, socio-cultural identities, and local language games. His ethnographic research has focused on the interrelationship between religion, social reproduction and communal belonging in the border regions between Thailand and Cambodia. Bultmann, Daniel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Universität Siegen) Daniel Bultmann is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and research fellow at the Department of Social Sciences at Universität Siegen. His work focuses on the political and historical sociology of violence and armed groups, peace transformations, and social inequality as well as on the production of knowledge in (post-)conflict zones. His regional focus lies on Southeast Asia (Cambodia in particular). Fang, Lumin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Lumin Fang holds a Ph.D. in social sciences from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests are social inequality, group decision-making, and Chinese politics and society. Hofner, Lara (Freie Universität Berlin) Lara Hofner is currently enrolled in the MA Global History program at Freie Universität Berlin and is member of the editorial board of polylog. Journal of intercultural philosophizing. She studied in Berlin, Havanna, Penang, Vienna, and Curitiba, and holds a double degree in Philosophy with Area Studies and

Contributors xiii

Spanish and Portuguese Philology. Her main academic interest is globally oriented philosophy. Houben, Vincent (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Vincent Houben studied at Leiden University in the Netherlands, later becoming a lecturer of Indonesian history there. From 1997 until 2001, he was professor of Southeast Asian studies at Passau University, before becoming professor of Southeast Asian history and society at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he has remained since 2011. He has published several books and over 80 articles on modern Southeast Asian history, Indonesian colonial history, labor history, memory studies and area studies theory. Kleinod, Michael (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) Michael Kleinod is a postdoctoral fellow at the Southeast-Asian Studies Department of Bonn University. Working at the intersection of sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, his dissertation (2017) conceptualized ecotourism in Laos as “ecorational instrumentality.” His key interest: How can the manifold nonidentities with capitalism add up to its overcoming? Rehbein, Boike (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Boike Rehbein is professor of society and transformation in Asia and Africa at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Freiburg in 1996. His areas of specialization are inequality, social theory, and Southeast Asia. He has published more than 30 books. Rocha, Emerson Ferreira (University of Brasilia) Emerson Ferreira Rocha is adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Brasília (UnB). He studied social sciences in Juiz de Fora, Brazil, and received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Brasília in 2015. His work focuses on issues of inequality, in particular race and class in Brazil, and he has published more than 20 papers. Sanada, Kie (Universität Tübingen) Kie Sanada obtained her Dr. phil. from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in January 2017, under the supervision of Prof. Boike Rehbein. She currently teaches at Tübingen University. Her most recent publication is “Institutional Analysis of regionalism in Japan” (2019) published in Japan Forum. Söyler, Tamer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Tamer Söyler is Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Head of the Global Studies Programme at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt-Universität, an MA in Global Studies from AlbertLudwigs-Universität Freiburg and University of KwaZulu-Natal, and a BA in International Relations and Economy from Istanbul University. He also studied in India and the United States, and has worked in Brazil and Turkey. His main field of interest is critical thought and understanding, with a focus on social change and transformation.

xiv Contributors

Stoll, Florian (Universität Bayreuth) Florian Stoll is a postdoctoral fellow and works on his habilitation thesis at the chair of the sociology of Africa, University of Bayreuth. He conducted research in Kenya, Brazil, Germany and the UK. From 2016 to 2017 he was a visiting Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, New Haven.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our dedicated language editors, Abby Klinkenberg and James Barber, who turned our non-native English into readable and hopefully enjoyable texts. Special thanks also go to the student assistants Merle Groß, Saskia Lange, and Jona Pomerance at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies for helping us with streamlining the formatting, bibliographies, and graphs of all contributors.

Chapter 1

Introduction Benjamin Baumann and Daniel Bultmann

Global inequality is not only one of the most pressing social issues of the 21st century, but also a topic increasingly addressed in the social sciences. Most of the studies emerging at present, however, ignore the fundamentally different character forms of social inequality have all over the world. They expose a Eurocentric misconception of inequality that reduces it to its economic or material dimensions, and seek to resolve it through development and progress. While these studies help to explain social phenomena related to global inequality, like mass migration from the global South to the global North, for audiences in the global North, their potential to explicate the meaning and origin of contemporary forms of social inequality in the global South remains rather limited.1 What is even more problematic is that this framing of social inequality reproduces a hegemonic view of the world that is in our understanding one of the major reasons for global inequality and its continuing growth. We argue that in order to battle global inequality, we first have to understand its multiple and locally specific manifestations, as well as their particular histories, instead of reducing it to the form of social inequality that is dominant in the global North. This volume is an attempt to shed some light on the different ways in which societies in the global South understand social inequalities and how these understandings emerged in particular sociohistorical configurations. These include colonial conquest, postcolonial struggle, war, socialist revolutions, and the inexorable spread of neoliberal capitalism. The chapters collected in this volume deal with the relations between social structures, sociocultures, and social inequality in order to gain insights into social ontologies. Social structure describes the manifestation of social inequality in contemporary life-worlds. Socioculture captures the diachronic dimension of social structures, as it is about historically layered forms of social inequality and how they persist in the present in habitualized and institutionalized forms. Each society comprises an interpretation of itself – including the meaning of life, the concept of the person, and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various collectives have of themselves. This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. Social ontologies are the most encompassing and most deeply embodied meaningful structures that define what collectives are, how they structure themselves, and which entities can become a part of them. Social

2  Benjamin Baumann and Daniel Bultmann

ontologies render social inequality practically meaningful. Studying social inequality without an in-depth understanding of social ontology is, therefore, like the study of language without grammar. Many of the chapters deal with contemporary capitalist societies, but some are historical reconstructions of social ontologies to map the sociocultures that emerged from them and document how they persist in the present to render contemporary social structures and configurations of social inequality meaningful. The contributions herein study different societies around the world to illustrate that social structures can differ quite radically, and that social ontologies may be hardly compatible with each other. They vary in terms of the units, the goals, the organization, and even the concept of collectivity. Against this background, the volume also covers different units of the social, or different layers of meaning, ranging from small village communities to the largest nation-states and cultural areas. Apart from this, they cover a spectrum, which, for any reader, range from the familiar to the ‘exotic.’ The reader should realize while reading the contributions to this volume that their own social ontology will appear just as ‘exotic’ to those he or she experiences as ‘exotic.’ All contributions grew from the authors’ involvement in a research colloquium on comparative social inequality at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. The colloquium was initiated by Boike Rehbein when he took over the chair for Society and Transformation in Asia and Africa in 2009. Most of the contributors developed their Ph.D. theses within the colloquium’s framework or acted as supervisors and regional experts in the colloquium. Most have a social science background, while others self-identify as anthropologists (Baumann), philosophers (Hofner), and historians (Houben). We developed and tested the methodology and some of the theoretical concepts used in this volume in the course of a joint research project on the reproduction of social inequality in Germany (Rehbein et al. 2015), before we applied them in our research in various countries of the global South. The development of such a transdisciplinary and transregional framework was probably only possible in an area studies institute, and it matches the idea of New Area Studies that we seek to establish at our institute through a transcendence of disciplinary dogmas and geo-political regionalizations (Houben 2017). Most chapters in this volume make use of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital (Bourdieu 1984), as well as the concepts of social ontology and socioculture. Habitus and capital are defined along the lines of the theoretical chapter written by Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein, while they are operationalized with regard to the particular case under study. While some aspects of habitus and capital seem to be identical in all capitalist societies, others differ due to different histories, persisting sociocultures, and layers of meaning (or types of collective). While applying a basically identical theoretical framework and methodology, the following chapters contribute particular operationalizations and empirical results, which cannot be reduced to a general pattern or conceptual scheme.

Introduction 3

Socioculture and social structure were concepts we worked with from the beginning of the project. However, over the past two years, we developed an awareness that we are lacking an appropriate concept to capture an essential dimension of collective life in the global South. This feeling grew mostly from reflections on Baumann’s empirical work in Thailand and Rehbein’s work in India and Laos. Throughout our discussions, both repeatedly emphasized the ontological differences between multiple forms of collectivity and their simultaneous meaningfulness in contemporary societies of the global South. Our idea of social ontologies was partly developed as a response to Baumann’s engagement with the ontological turn in anthropology as part of his study of human/non-human interactions in rural Thailand (Baumann 2017). The concept intends to cover the social dimensions of the ontological, as well as the ontological dimension of the social. It looks not only at the ontological givenness of certain forms of collectivity in everyday life, but also at the practical meaningfulness of ontologically different forms of collectivity, within and between contemporary social configurations. While the contributions to this volume represent the authors’ individual takes on socioculture and social inequality, all try to add to our understanding of social ontology, its multiplicity in the present, and its growing homogenization under the global spread of neoliberal capitalism and the epistemic hegemony of naturalism. Instead of organizing the book along the lines of world regions in the global South with chapters focusing, for instance, on Asia, Africa, or Latin America, we decided to structure the volume according to conceptual foci. There are two reasons for this decision. First, we think that the delineation of world regions carries too many Eurocentric notions and produces artificial geo-political boundaries that do not accurately reflect the interconnectedness of localities. Second, we believe that the focus should be on conceptual similarities between the chapters, especially considering that concepts such as social ontology are relatively new and may be hard to comprehend for the uninitiated reader. Therefore, the volume moves from a theoretical overview introducing the main concepts of social ontology, socioculture, and how these concepts relate to inequality to chapters dealing primarily with the study and theoretical explanation of social ontologies to chapters that focus on the study of sociocultures. Due to the fact that social ontology is a comparatively new theoretical concept, the first chapters are also decisively more theoretical in nature, whereas the later chapters have a stronger empirical foundation. Yet, in most of the chapters, all concepts play an important role. Due to the fact that all chapters work with the same theoretical toolkit, the second chapter, written by Baumann and Rehbein to introduce the concepts of social ontology, socioculture, and inequality, is essential for the understanding of all subsequent chapters of the volume. After this theoretical introduction of our approach and shared concepts the chapter by Lara Hofner provides a conceptual history for a strong ontological understanding of social ontologies. Her conceptualization and philosophical discussion promote a reading of social ontology as a potentially decolonizing concept for the disciplines of the social sciences, as it provides a tool to expand upon the ‘multiple world thesis.’ The chapter is vital for setting the

4  Benjamin Baumann and Daniel Bultmann

stage for social ontology’s implications for decolonial activism and social justice in the global South. Benjamin Baumann’s chapter also promotes a strong ontological understanding of the social in his theoretical reconceptualization of the Tai mueang that emphasizes the role of non-humans for an understanding of Tai collectivity. The chapter introduces various concepts that may help to decolonize the debate on collective belonging in contemporary Thailand. Andrés Bateman shows how developmentalism miscomprehends socio-ontological difference through a study of inhabitants of the Colombian Pacific basin and how this area can be viewed as a place in which two social ontologies, the “Western” and the “black,” come into dispute. Tamer Söyler and Boike Rehbein explain the social ontology of caste and how caste, as a co-product of local social ontologies and colonial understanding, structures inequalities in India. In his chapter on Indonesia, Vincent Houben shows how Dutch colonialism created a colonial social ontology through the articulation of multiple sociocultures that still inform structures of legal pluralism, racialization, traditional power systems, and the circumscription of Islam in Indonesia to this day. The next chapter builds on Baumann’s outline of the Tai mueang, but is in many regards a complementary antithesis. Here, Michael Kleinod provides a materialistic reading of social ontology for the understanding of structures of appropriation within the precolonial, as well as the capitalist political economy of Laos. In his reading of the mueang–pa duality, based upon a “world-ecological praxeology,” social ontologies persist as they remain functional as world-making projects within changing symbolic-material structures. The chapter is not only a materialistic counter-project to Baumann’s hermeneuticontological approach, but also questions the possibility and necessity to transcend naturalism for an explanation of contemporary forms of social inequality. The last five chapters of the volume focus on sociocultures and Daniel Bultmann provides an example of how the concepts of social ontology and socioculture may be used to analyze elite, and thus political, conflicts. He shows how new sociocultures, such as colonialism, socialism, civil war and conflict, and capitalist transformation, each led to the emergence of new social groups in the Cambodian elite that have tried to position themselves and their social ontologies as hegemonic in the political field. Political conflicts in Cambodian history can be read as clashes between Cambodian elite groups with roots in conflicting sociocultures and differing social ontologies. Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein turn to the analysis of social stratification and distinguish five social classes in contemporary Brazil that, in these cases, can be traced back to earlier sociocultures of colonialism and subsequent industrial transformation. Among the various types of analyses that can be carried out, the authors use semantic analysis to construct six different habitus types for Brazil: the ambitious, the expressive, the conventional, the defensive, the hedonist, and the resigned. The chapter written by Florian Stoll combines the works of Randall Collins and Emíle Durkheim for the study of variances in individuality and collectivity in six milieus in the middle-income stratum of Nairobi, Kenya. Kie Sanada, in turn, shows how premodern structures of local collectives persist and manifest in today’s neoliberal administration management

Introduction 5

of community work in Japanese villages. Last but not least, Lumin Fang focuses on socialist hierarchies in contemporary China while uncovering five habitus types in the urban context and four in rural Chinese areas. She shows how symbolic domination strongly rests upon education, structures of employment, and – in rural areas especially – upon party membership and a traditional household registration system.

Note 1 We are using global South and global North here in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ sense (Santos 2014, 10, see Hofner in this volume).

References Baumann, Benjamin. 2017. “Ghosts of Belonging: Searching for Khmerness in Rural Buriram.” PhD diss., Southeast Asian Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Houben, Vincent. 2017. “New Area Studies, Translation and Mid Range Concepts.” In Area Studies at the Crossroads: Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn, edited by Katja Mielke and Anna-Katharina Hornige, 195–211. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rehbein, Boike, Benjamin Baumann, Christian Scheickert, and Michael Kleinod, eds. 2015. Reproduktion sozialer Ungleichheit in Deutschland. Konstanz und München: UVK. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Chapter 2

R ethinking the social Social ontology, sociocultures, and social inequality Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

1 Introduction This volume studies the symbolic foundation and practical reproduction of structural social inequality in various countries and contexts around the world. It argues that social inequality is incorporated in habitus, institutions, and discourses, and is reproduced from one generation to the next. These incorporated structures are specific to each culture, region, nation, state, and local context, due to the particular history of a given social unit in which earlier structures persist and shape later structures. We refer to the persistence of past structures in the present as sociocultures. Sociocultures are particular views of the world and the way social life unfolds. Since these views are embodied in human beings, they symbolically structure our understanding of social life, inequality, collectives, hierarchies, and their limits. It is this mostly implicit understanding that we refer to as social ontology. Social ontology defines the being of social collectives. It determines how a collective, such as a society or culture, structures itself: whether or not it has a hierarchy, what this hierarchy looks like, who is part of the collective, and who is not. Most readers would take it for granted that all human beings are, in principle, equal and should have equal rights and opportunities. Most of us would also take it for granted that human beings are individuals and, as such, the smallest units of any social collective. With this premise, inequality would then refer to individuals. We tend to interpret this inequality as economic hierarchy – the rich or those with the best professions are on top and the poor and unemployed are at the bottom. These assumptions are part of the liberal Western social ontology that is rooted in naturalism. However, there are and have been societies with very different assumptions and very different social ontologies. Some take it for granted – or, rather, their habitus, institutions, and discourses have incorporated – the notion that the smallest social unit is itself a collective, that the human being is a dividual, that there is no hierarchy or that hierarchy is ontologically given and determined by age, caste, rank, or gender. These social ontologies that differ from those of Western readers are the topic of this volume.

Rethinking the social 7

All authors draw on the same theoretical assumptions and concepts while using methodologies that are linked to them. They make use of the three main concepts that are explained in this chapter: social ontology, socioculture, and social inequality. The book chapters look at examples from many world regions, namely Latin America; East and South Africa; and South, Southeast, and East Asia. The question that guides this volume is how social ontology, socioculture, and social inequality are related and how this relation unfolds in each specific case. The case studies illuminate how collectives have been shaped by the historical layering of sociocultures and how these sociocultures and concomitant social ontologies shape contemporary social inequality. Most chapters are based on original fieldwork in their respective settings. Even though the guiding questions may seem theoretical, the volume offers a large body of empirical material on inequality around the world.

2  Social ontology Social ontology is not a concept that is firmly established in the social sciences, let alone in everyday language (see Hofner, Chapter 3 in this volume). We introduce it here as a preliminary attempt to point to the shared, unquestioned, and largely subconscious interpretation of a collective by the collective. Social ontology comprises the embodied system of social classification shared by a particular collective. It is meaningful, constructed, social, mostly subconscious, layered according to its sociospatial reach, and socially differentiated. In this section, we wish to outline these characteristics of social ontology, as it is variously interpreted in the chapters of this volume. This approach may sound like an idealistic enterprise, as if we accord the mind primacy over matter and the subject over structures. If anything, the opposite is the case: We rather assume that all human actions are symbolically mediated. The symbol, however, is a component of society and precedes any individual action or thought. We can change it, but we cannot construct it from scratch. In the end, symbol and structure cannot be reduced to one or the other – they rather coexist in embodied form. However, structures can be changed via symbols, while the opposite is less evident. We locate meaning not on an abstract mental plane, but as embodied, unfolding in everyday life as social practice. This understanding of the symbolic world is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, which would seem to put our approach to social ontology closer to Karl Marx than to Max Weber. Even though this may be the case, we still think that our approach can be introduced most clearly by recalling Weber’s idea of sociology rather than by drawing on Marx or Bourdieu. Weber never claimed that ideas take precedence over structures; he rather tended to acknowledge the contrary, very much in correspondence with the preceding paragraph (Weber 2009, 26). What is even more relevant to our approach is the fact that he dissolved the monolithic concept of society into several layers, all of which equally imbued with meaning. He proposed to start any sociological

8  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

enquiry by seeking to understand a subjectively intended meaning of an observable action and to then proceed to the ideal-type of this action, to the cultural norm, and – in the end, possibly – to a meaning that is shared by all humans. Weber, however, was not interested in the subjectively-intended meaning: The idealtypical meaning, which corresponds to social norms, is the prime object of Weber’s sociology and need not have anything in common with the meaning that a subject links to his or her own action (Weber 1972, 2, 9). An observer, who would point to shared norms and meanings, might be in a better position to explain the action than the agent, who would point to his or her motives, which could be deceitful or misleading (Weber 1972, 5). Weber declared a certain meaning to be ideal-typical if the associated action occurs repeatedly and is regarded as ‘normal’ in the respective layer of meaning – or, as we could translate for our purposes, in the social ontology of the respective collective. Sociology has to locate an action that it constructs as ideal-typical in a layer of meaning in such a way that this meaning can be considered a typical motive of that action (Weber 1972, 4). A typical motive is supposed to correspond to prevailing conventions and regularly work the same way (Weber 1972, 5). The overarching layers of meaning are the repertoire, which each and every action has to draw on in its creation of meaning, independent of the agent’s actual motives and subjectivity. Whoever wishes to understand a given action’s meaning has to take the opposite direction, at least to a certain degree, and locate the action in the overarching layer of meaning. Each layer, and all layers together, could be referred to as “culture.” Weber’s layers of meaning, however, are more specific and precise than the fluid concept of culture – they also support and clarify our approach. There is not one social ontology for each nation-state; instead, there are different layers with varying fields of coverage. Each layer of social ontology is embodied by a number of people, but none of them needs to be aware of it in any particular action or at any point in time for it to endure. Although social ontology is multiple, it is nevertheless meaningful. Each layer comprises a number of norms that we might call “grammar” such that not everything is possible. If someone greets you in a particular context – such as a culture, state, or subculture  – you are expected to reply in a specific way. If the other person offers you a handshake, you do not simply say “hi”; if the other is a young person from Southeast Asia and greets you by joining their palms in front of their forehead, you do not bow in front of them. This is what Weber means when he speaks of ideal-types as opposed to individual motivations. Idealtypical action is socially meaningful and, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, there can be no private social ontology (Wittgenstein 1999). It does not matter what you think when replying to the handshake, as long as you do it correctly. This is how it is done: This is the ideal type. The ideal type usually implies social classification, as illustrated by the examples in the preceding paragraph. Who deserves which kind of welcome? The young Southeast Asian pays you respect, but if he comes from an influential

Rethinking the social 9

family or holds an important position, should you not show some respect, as well? You know what to do if you are familiar with the particular culture, and especially, if you are familiar with the particular context. If you grew up in that culture, you master the correct behavior but usually cannot explain it, nor are you usually aware of it. Similar to the grammar of your native language, you simply know what to do and how to do it. The term ‘social ontology’ aims to capture the embodied assessment of the other person (or group). Most (or possibly all) of our interactions imply some sort of social classification. We have to classify the other in any given interaction in order to choose the correct register or grammatically correct pattern with which to respond. This process of classification is part of our habitus and social institutions. Some people are classified as young or as commanding respect – or as unemployed or rich or having a driver’s license. All of these are social classifications that exist in some social contexts but not in others and, even if so, they do not necessarily exist in the same way. Such classifications reproduce structures of social inequality via layers of meaning and are incorporated in habitus, institutions, and discourses. It is mainly the grammar of these classifications, and how it relates the units of social life, that our concept of social ontology wishes to grasp and that the chapters in this volume seek to explore. It is important to recall Weber’s notion of meaning, its development by the sociology of knowledge, and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, since both the social and the constructed character of the symbolic world, and especially social classification, are key to our argument. Many readers would easily go along with this, but there are influential traditions that are trying to get rid of either constructivism or sociology – or both. The most influential user of the term ‘social ontology,’ John R. Searle, who introduced the concept in his book The Construction of Social Reality (1995), disregarded both and interpreted the term in the framework of a naturalistic worldview. Searle uses the concept to refer to the logical structure of society, which, for Searle, is embedded in an ontological order of the world, comprising an atomistic theory of matter and the theory of an evolution of species. The realities that physics, biology, and sociology study are supposed to be independent of human construction; therefore, objective truth is possible: “[t]he physical facts that the dog sees and the physical facts that I see are exactly the same” (Searle 2006, 20). This belief, according to Searle, is a necessary component of Western, enlightened modernity (Searle 1995, 6). According to Philippe Descola (2013), this type of naturalism is not only Eurocentric, but also hegemonic, as it suppresses alternative ontologies under the dogma of a universal reality. Against Searle, we insist on an anti-naturalistic understanding of social ontology. Social ontologies are both constructed and social. If these two attributes are denied, as in Searle’s interpretation, the dominant order of society and its symbolic universe are naturalized and legitimized. In fact, this is exactly what Searle aspires to do: He wishes to reconfirm the Western view of the world, including the social world. He simply takes his own social ontology for granted, which makes it impossible to critically question or even understand it. This is also what we tend

10  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

to do in everyday life, where we usually take the world for granted as it is – and, in doing so, we take our interpretation of the world for granted, including our social ontology. This aspect of social ontology has been analyzed meticulously and convincingly in the Weberian tradition, as well. Under the heading of the late Edmund Husserl’s concept “life-world” (Lebenswelt), Berger and Luckmann (1980) studied the unquestioned status of symbolically mediated patterns of action. This interpretation of life-world comes close to our concept of social ontology, but is broader and not focused on social structures. Berger and Luckmann claim that the meaning of social practice is constituted in our everyday lives on the basis of typologies and structures of relevance that are components of a life-world or, more precisely, a social ontology. Against this tradition of the sociology of knowledge, social ontology could be characterized as the embodied understanding of a collective, its units, and their relations in everyday and pre-theoretical life (Berger and Luckmann 1980, 16). Social ontologies are part of our implicit, everyday background knowledge and are embodied during our primary socialization into specific language games. [L]anguage constitutes both the most important content and the most important instrument for socialization.  .  .  . The specific contents that are internalized in primary socialization vary, of course, from one society to society. Some are found everywhere. It is language that must be internalized above all. (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 133, 135) Against this background, social ontology refers to social classification. Social classifications are, however, not active processes or expressive acts, but tacit and largely inexplicable understandings of the social world. Berger and Luckmann talk of social place, limits, and relations in this regard. If we replace Berger and Luckmann’s “social stock of knowledge” in the following quote from The Social Construction of Reality (1980) with “social ontology,” it nicely summarizes some main points that we are endeavoring to make about social ontology: [Social ontology] includes knowledge of my situation and its limits. For instance, I know that I am poor and that, therefore, I cannot expect to live in a fashionable suburb. This knowledge is, of course, shared both by those who are poor themselves and those who are in a more privileged position. Participation in the [social ontology] thus permits the “location” of individuals in society and the “handling” of them in the appropriate manner. This is not possible for one who does not participate in this [social ontology], such as a foreigner, who may not recognize me as poor at all, perhaps because the criteria of poverty are quite different in his society – how can I be poor, when I wear shoes and do not seem hungry? (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 41–42)

Rethinking the social 11

Berger and Luckmann mainly analyze social ontology on the level of interaction and subjectivity – they do not deal much with social structures, which we argue must be understood in order to correctly grasp social ontology. What is embodied in a social ontology are not transcendental structures of knowledge or contextual patterns of interaction, but social classifications and understandings of collectivity, which determine people’s “place,” as Berger and Luckmann put it in the preceding quote. One’s place is not determined in interactions, but is incorporated in habitus and institutions on a level that is difficult to access, let alone change. All of this is compatible with the sociology of knowledge, but aims at a particular dimension of the life-world to which Berger and Luckmann did not pay much attention. Weber identified this level of the social as a layer of meaning and studied it, for example, in his sociology of religion. However, these studies were very much restricted to culture and did not deal with social structures or inequality. It is therefore necessary to include structuralist traditions in our approach to social ontology, as well. Bourdieu drew heavily on Weber, but Marx was equally relevant for his sociology. We follow Bourdieu in this practice. Marx points to the fact that differences in life-worlds and patterns of action depend significantly on social hierarchies. The capitalist and the worker have fundamentally different positions in terms of social hierarchy and therefore lead entirely different lives (Marx 1985, 476). In many regards, their life-worlds and social ontologies are directly opposed, even though they share a history and a common frame of reference. While the worker has to sell his labor in order to survive, the capitalist can live off profit and interest; the capitalist views this type of society as efficient and free, while the worker views it as drudgery and bondage. Marx obviously developed this line of argument from the “master–slave dialectic” in Hegel’s Phenomonology of the Spirit (1977), and both emphasize the social construction of knowledge. Social ontology, as such, is not constructed by a subject, in a context or even in life-worlds, but is rooted in and expresses deep, encompassing structures of society that are enshrined in language and incorporated over a given lifecourse. Within each structure, certain things are taken for granted – some thoughts are possible only for certain social groups, and many things are even unthinkable. Marx acknowledges that even the deep structures of society result from human action and are symbolically mediated. However, he did not spend much time studying subjective meaning or practices – just as Weber did not devote much of his writing to social structures or inequality. Despite this, all three components – inequality, meaning, and practice – play fundamental roles in both of their theory constructions, even while subsequent traditions that drew on their work often focused on only one of the three. Evidently, Bourdieu re-assembled the components in his sociology, which will be discussed in the following section of this chapter. Another thinker who tries to bridge structure and action is Cornelius Castoriadis, whose notion of the imaginary overlaps with our concept of social ontology (Castoriadis 1987). Castoriadis draws on Karl Mannheim and Émile Durkheim

12  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

in order to develop a theory of the social, which moves structures of meaning to the center of attention. The imaginary, for Castoriadis, comprises cultural patterns of interpretation and orientation (Wolf 2012, 68). Each pattern is linked to a distinct social world with a particular way of being and particular options for change. The concept of the imaginary points beyond Weber and Marx by allowing for multiplicity – not only in terms of layers of meaning, but also of frameworks of meaning; not only in terms of social structures, but also of structures within a particular social configuration. Charles Taylor has used the notion of the imaginary in a very similar way to Castoriadis, albeit without explicitly discussing his theory. Taylor, of course, draws on Wittgenstein, whose approach inspired Bourdieu to transcend the dichotomy of agency and structure – in his attempt to transcend the conceptual space between Marx and Weber (Rehbein 2013). Taylor writes: What I’m calling the social imaginary extends beyond the immediate background understanding which makes sense of our particular practices . . . this wider grasp has no clear limits. That’s the very nature of what contemporary philosophers have described as ‘background.’ It is in fact that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have. It can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines, because of its very unlimited and indefinite nature. That is another reason for speaking here of an ‘imaginary’, and not a theory. (Taylor 2007, 172–173) Our concept of social ontology tries to combine the practice-oriented approaches of Castoriadis and Taylor with Marx’s focus on social structures, Weber’s focus on meaning and Wittgenstein’s conceptualization of life-forms as emergent in language games. The argument that the social is meaningful as a form of life and is constructed through/with meaning in particular language games is our point of departure. We also agree with Weber that the meaningful world is layered, from the individual and singular to the all-encompassing and general. We draw on this Weberian tradition by proposing that structures of meaning play out in lifeworlds and function as quasi-transcendental, mostly subconscious foundations of everyday life, which we refer to as ontological. With Marx, we argue that the foundations of social ontology itself lie in social structures that are embodied by institutions and human beings. We also claim that these structures are differentiated according to hierarchies, which produce fundamentally different contexts for life-worlds. Finally, in addition to layers of meaning and hierarchies, we insert a third dimension of differentiation, which is that which emerges between different types of contexts. This third dimension is the imaginary, according to Castoriadis and Taylor. This dimension also refers to the notion of practice, as used by Bourdieu, and Wittgenstein’s concept of life-form, which will be dealt with in the following section.

Rethinking the social 13

Social ontology refers to the level of social classification within structures of meaning that are shared by a collective. It is determined by social structures, but, in turn, partly determines their meaning; it plays out on different levels of meaning (or extensions of the collective) and is negotiated in contexts of practice. These three dimensions co-exist and relate to each other. However, they do not form a coherent, logical system, since humans do not apply them in a conscious and logical way. They commit “errors,” try to change the social world, move between contexts and have different (and sometimes contradictory) interpretations of meaning. It is not possible to reduce the symbolic universe to a neat opposition of master and slave, to four layers of meaning or even to coherent monistic imaginaries. Practice crisscrosses categories and bends rules and everyday life is ‘messy.’ Any change of or within the game does not immediately reach all relevant contexts and persons, and it certainly does not change the broader understanding of what a game is. Even a revolution does not change an entire society overnight: some regions stick to the old regime, others remain outside the revolutionaries’ reach. Many institutions are not immediately touched by the revolutionaries, while others retain some resistance or inertia. This nuanced and varied process of transformation is even more so for less radical and smaller-scale social change. Shortly, change is very uneven. Many structures and patterns persist long after their (official) demise. This also means that systematically incompatible social ontologies co-exist in the present as aspects of contemporary habitus. Think of medieval entities such as aristocracy and guilds in European countries, of caste in South Asia, or of racism in the Americas: They have disappeared from constitutions and official self-descriptions of contemporary nation-states, but they are very much alive in reality as life-worlds and as components of social ontologies.

3 Socioculture We refer to these persisting realities as sociocultures, which refer to particular structures of social inequality that developed in historically earlier times but still persist today. Contemporary structures are also rooted in and shaped by previous sociocultures. New structures develop out of existing structures, just as any practice mainly draws on existing patterns, even if it consciously seeks to construct something entirely new. A  socioculture comprises the entire stock of patterns, which refer to social classification and inequality. In every society, remnants of sociocultures exist and continue to shape contemporary habitus, institutions, and official imaginations of the social. Social structures are rather persistent: Institutions like the aristocracy, significant titles like that of a Ph.D. or conventions like politeness in formal settings are not done away with from one day to the next. The structures – and especially the hierarchical logics – that lie underneath these remnants from earlier times are even more persistent. They change only after major transformations, such as colonialism in the global South or the bourgeois revolutions in the global North. These transformations shape new social structures, or new frameworks for social

14  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

inequality. It is such a framework that we refer to as socioculture. Sociocultures give rise to traditions, which seem out of date but remain significant. Alluding to Weber, we can think of society as layered, not only into contexts of meaning of different reach, but also into sociocultures of different historical origins. Each later structure is a transformation of all earlier structures, which partly persist as sociocultures. Sociocultures persist because they are embodied in institutions and habitus. Habitus, according to Bourdieu (1984), comprises patterns of action that have been acquired in particular life-worlds and are adapted to them. The patterns have an accepted and intelligible meaning in these life-worlds, but not necessarily in others. The patterns comply with a certain layer of meaning, a certain level in the social structure and a certain context of practice, as has been argued in the preceding section. We can now add that social structures are differentiated into various sociocultures. A pattern of action is embodied through repetition and training in particular contexts, and is thereby somaticized. This pattern is then automatically reactivated when a similar context arises. If the environment is stable, a permanent pattern for activity is acquired and incorporated, which implies standardization with regards to contexts of use and a somatization of segments of actions. Habitus is something like a psychosomatic memory: The conditions of the social world inscribe patterns of action into bodies, which then produce and reproduce the social world. Bourdieu explains an action by reconstructing the precise correlation between the production of the habitus and its application. The application can change the social structures, but only if the habitus does not fully coincide with them. Since it is usually shared by others, one could speak of an embodied cultural tradition, which is socially and culturally distinct. It is literally embodied, since it must shape human practice in order to exist – in this sense, the habitus is performative. Habitus, social structures, meaning and practice always have a somatic dimension – consequently, this is true for social ontology, as well. Since social ontology is somatic, it remains mostly subconscious and unreflective. It is part of who we are as persons. Therefore, all of us have difficulties dealing with, let alone understanding, people who have embodied different social ontologies. We do not understand, and often do not accept, people who have a different taste in music, but we are even more at odds with people who use other social classifications or have a different social ontology. In a country like South Africa, skin color is fundamental for social classification, while in Laos, ethnic categories are relevant, and in France, highbrow culture. If your habitus was formed in one of these countries, you would have problems understanding not only everyday life, but also the fundamental structures, of the two other nation-states. This becomes even more evident when looking at categories that do not even exist in other societies. A prime example of this is the caste system: Caste regulates behavior that Westerners would consider entirely personal, such as nutrition and partnership. In many cases, it also determines profession. The system distinguishes between varying degrees of ‘purity’ and attributes a particular substance

Rethinking the social 15

to each caste. The social ontology associated with caste differs fundamentally from that of contemporary European societies, as is most easily visible in the concepts of the individual and the community. The social world looks completely different in the two cases, and a consensus, or even an overlap, between the two systems is hard to imagine. Still, two seemingly contradictory systems can coexist, as evidenced by India, which established a Western-style democracy as well as many attendant Western institutions. Caste is only one socioculture that persists in contemporary India (see Rehbein and Söyler, Chapter 6 in this volume). Another example is that of village communities in Thailand (see Baumann, Chapter 4 in this volume). These collectives include ghosts or spirits in the intersubjectivity of the everyday world, but not human beings from other collectives. Any given person is interpreted as a collective of human and non-human beings and not as the smallest unit of a collective. To this extent, the Thai person can be interpreted as a ‘dividual’ rather than an individual. Descola refers to this ontology as animism; in his typology of four ontologies, this type would be the exact opposite to that of Western naturalism that we alluded to previously in our discussion of Searle (Descola 2013, 301). Each social ontology is linked to a particular interpretation – as well as a particular construction – of society. This means that different social ontologies, such as caste or forms of animism or naturalism, are embedded in different social structures. To interpret a Thai village in the framework of a Western democracy is as misleading as interpreting France in terms of caste. This is simply not how these societies work. In order to understand how they work, we need to take their social ontologies into account. A failure to acknowledge socio-ontological differences produces, for example, the omnipresence of paradoxes that characterizes contemporary Thai studies (Baumann 2017: 37–82). To study a society independently of its social ontology would be akin to studying a language independent of its grammar. The boundaries of a society are part of its social ontology. A village can be a society, just like a nation-state or a cultural space – these are what Weber’s layers of meaning refer to. Often, different conceptions (and limits) of society co-exist, since they belong to different sociocultures. This is exactly how we have to understand caste in India or village life in rural Thailand. India consists of several sociocultures: a huge variety of village societies, integrated precolonial states (ranging from republics to kingdoms), the caste system as re-constructed by British colonialism, the socialist postcolonial state, and contemporary capitalism. All are relevant, all shape actual practices, and all have different reaches (or belong to different layers of meaning). Especially in postcolonial societies, social ontologies with different and even contradictory concepts of society and collectives can co-exist as aspects of contemporary habitus. This is due to the fact that precapitalist sociocultures often clash with capitalism and naturalism, which were either imported or, usually, forcefully imposed from the outside. In many ways, a hierarchy of sociocultures and social ontologies emerges, with capitalism and naturalism emerging as dominant. The dominant groups in a particular contemporary nation-state mostly base

16  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

their power on capitalist structures, including institutions and habitus. Often, however, co-existence and ambiguity are the result, which some of the chapters in this volume demonstrate quite convincingly. Even in early childhood, people in the global South may alternate between life-forms that are rooted in different sociocultures. Aspects of mutually exclusive social ontologies become thus incorporated in a single habitus. The chapter on Thailand (see Baumann, Chapter 4 in this volume) very clearly shows how an animist ontology and a naturalistic, capitalist ontology co-exist in contemporary Thailand. While public discourse seeks to establish naturalistic social ontology as unquestionable with nation-state and ethnicity as its framework, village communities in northeast Thailand retain the village as the frame of reference for everyday life and thereby draw on an animist social ontology that imagines collectives in which humans and non-humans participate in each other’s existence. The villagers have no problem shifting between the two mutually exclusive ontologies or dealing with the apparent contradictions arising from their simultaneous existence. Even though their respective notions of the person – individual versus dividual – imply a contradiction in terms of self-interpretation, people do not experience a psychological or ontological crisis; they rather accept the meaningfulness of ambiguity as such. However, different social ontologies are usually only valid in and limited to specific contexts – they belong to different sociocultures. Not all Thais are equally capable of shifting between contexts, since many have not developed a rural habitus. Those who acquired their habitus in the capitalist socioculture and under the hegemony of naturalism do not share elements of the animist ontology to the same degree. Not only is language the prime medium of the symbolic world, it also illustrates our approach. We have national languages, which are supposed to have clear and binding grammars. However, many of these languages are also used outside the borders, and thereby outside the jurisdiction, of the nation-state. That is not to mention that most language use within the state does not comply with official rules, but to conventions of a smaller social unit, such as a subculture, profession, regional dialect, or even within a married couple. Such languages are often difficult to understand and acquire for outsiders. However, they are still just as systematic as national languages. With regard to the Lao language, for instance, it has been shown that the varieties of spoken language correspond exactly to existing sociocultures (Rehbein and Sayaseng 2004). Varieties of language can be used as empirical indicators of sociocultures. Linguistic variation can also bear a lot of information about social ontology, since social classification is often and largely expressed in language. In this regard, we strongly agree with the so-called linguistic relativism of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ernst Cassirer, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. These theories match our approach to social ontology since they suppose the socially constructed, subconscious, differentiated, and practice-oriented character of language. This is best expressed by

Rethinking the social 17

Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose concepts of forms of life and language game mark the units in the web of layers of meaning, social structures and practice: Here the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life. . . . It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (Wittgenstein 1999, aphorisms 23 and 241) Each language game that produces a forms of life is a social ontology – its limits, however, are context-specific. Most individual actions are merely repetitions of a larger unit – they supposedly correspond to a Weberian ideal-type. The same is true for many smaller social environments. However, an individual action or a small subculture may transform a larger social unit, or even all of humankind. Therefore, all layers of meaning have to be considered and the limits of a given language game cannot be established in advance. Against Wittgenstein’s relativism, we repeat our argument about social structures that not everything goes. Societies and language games do not appear out of nowhere, but develop out of historical structures. These earlier structures are sedimented in the present as embodied sociocultures. The sociocultures pre-configure the possibilities of the present. However, sociocultures do not form a neat progression toward the present as in theories of modernization, but they rather co-exist, intermingle, and play out in different layers of meaning and different contexts in a complex and largely unpredictable web. On the level of social ontology, the multitude is condensed into a comparatively small variety of sociocultures. Since social ontology, according to the approach of this volume, refers to social classification and inequality, general variation within a society is limited. It is greatest with regard to small communities, such as villages, but states have not developed many different hierarchies and few variations of states have come into existence in any particular region of the world. It would be a challenge to study all local sociocultures and social ontologies in the world, as the contributions by Bateman (Chapter 5), Baumann (Chapter 4), and Sanada (Chapter 12) demonstrate in this volume. However, all local sociocultures have been influenced by more encompassing hierarchies, especially by capitalism in particular. More encompassing structures emerge and integrate the large variety of local sociocultures.

4  Social inequality Contemporary social sciences tend to study inequality independently of social ontology and sociocultures, which is akin to pretending that all societies have the same structure or that all languages share the same grammar. Part of the reason for this ignorance is the disproportionate focus on economic inequality and the

18  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

treatment of economic capital as the major indicator of social inequality. The logic goes: All societies have adopted some kind of capitalism; therefore, social position is determined by a capitalist category – either capital (especially money) or labor (profession). This approach ignores that capitalism produces a distinctive social ontology, as well as the fact that other social ontologies persist, along with earlier sociocultures. Not all societies define an expensive wristwatch, a stressful management job, or membership in an exclusive club as important life goals. Only where such goals are pervasive can we apply a study of inequality which focuses on economic indicators. In order to distinguish our approach from the mainstream understanding of inequality, we speak of social inequality. We define social inequality as access to socially valued activities, goods, and positions. The values are negotiated by and in a given social ontology, which is socially constructed – in layers of meaning, sociocultures, forms of life, and practices. We refer to the values and their application as social classification. Social classification includes and excludes groups of people from particular activities, goods, and positions, and especially from collectives. This happens mostly in a subconscious manner, which has been argued by most of the thinkers we have referred to in this chapter and has been shown in some detail within the sociology of knowledge (Knoblauch 2005, 144).1 All social groups and individuals make use of social classifications of different reach that correspond to different layers of meaning. While some classifications are shared by only a few people, others are pervasive in a given society or even throughout humankind. The dominant groups are positively valued with regard to the most esteemed activities, goods, and positions in society, while the other groups are valued to a lesser extent or even devalued. Often dominant groups would be classified negatively by other groups, but their classifications are less influential since they reach neither the deeper layers of meaning nor the prevailing assessment of positions. Dominant groups are those that have access to the most highly valued positions and embody those characteristics that are necessary to do so. Such characteristics are embodied in the habitus and passed on from one generation to the next through conscious and unconscious training. They have to be applied in practice in order to be effective and are thereby constantly modified, but deep-seated characteristics are components of a social ontology and change very slowly since they are foundational to social existence and thus difficult to access. Characteristics of the habitus are acquired in social environments, via language games or forms of life. These are not homogenous and uniform, but subject to constant change. Habitus and institutions are more stable, but are frequently modified, as well. The more encompassing embodied layers of meaning (social ontology), as well as the sociocultures, however, are very persistent. While children usually do not fully understand their parents because practices and meanings have changed due to the invention of new and the transformation of old life-forms, they still share fundamental characteristics, values, and social classifications. One example would be that the young generation may listen to types of music and speak sociolects that are worlds apart from those of older generations, but they still share their

Rethinking the social 19

parents’ social position and societal views. Another example is that members of dominant groups around the world are self-confident, goal-oriented, and autonomous, while members of the lowest strata are not. These habitus traits are passed on from generation to generation – they persist even if conditions change. Even fewer fundamental traits of the habitus persist and are passed on even after society has changed. Bourdieu demonstrated this with regard to peasants in colonial Algeria (Bourdieu 1979) who moved to cities in order to find employment due to the privatization of land, industrialization of agriculture, relative overpopulation, and war. There, they did not simply adapt to capitalist institutions, but retained their rural habitus, which was determined by subsistence, family networks, and community-orientation. Their habitus did not comply with capitalism, a phenomenon explored in some detail with regard to Laos by Rehbein (2017), as well as by some of the chapters in this volume. Against this background, Bourdieu wondered how Algerians were able to develop a “spirit of capitalism” (Weber 2009) at all. He found that only those who attained a certain social position were able to “convert” to capitalism (Bourdieu 1963, 315): A  comfortable income, Western education, constant contact with European forms of life, and capitalist conditions of labor were necessary to create the conditions for a transformation of the habitus (Bourdieu 1963, 382). The majority of the Algerian population did not attain this position – even though they lived in a capitalist society, they retained a habitus that was considered dysfunctional and outdated. What is more, elements of this habitus were passed on to the next generation. A habitus emerged that was adapted to neither peasant nor capitalist society. We may refer to this as a “liminal habitus” (Baumann 2017, 217). The persistence of older types and characteristics of habitus and the preservation of social classifications in language, together with the slow and uneven change of institutions, are responsible for the persistence of earlier social structures as sociocultures. Common sense tells us that capitalism constituted a radical break with the past such that all of us more or less believe in the freedom and equality of all citizens in a capitalist society. We do not link this equality to earlier forms of inequality, but rather consider ourselves to be entirely equal citizens with identical rights and possibilities. We compete on a “level playing field” and those who win are either luckier or better than those who lose. We ignore that those who lose may have a habitus rooted in a non-capitalist socioculture and/or a lower social class. This misleading idea of society – or social ontology – tends to reduce inequality to economic indicators or personal capabilities. People compete for wealth or good professions within a nation-state; they start off as equals and become unequal due to their success or failure. As a result, persons can be grouped into strata that are defined by income, wealth, or profession. Inequality is explained as the outcome of personal merit  – therefore, we refer to this social classification as meritocratic (Jodhka et al. 2017). It is closely related to the naturalistic social ontology proposed by Searle, since the social construction of inequality is replaced by competition between equal individuals. The “fittest” individuals win.

20  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein

This social ontology does not reveal, let alone explain, its fundamental assumptions. Why should competition be about economic indicators? Why and how could the competitors be equal, even though they obviously differ both on a natural and social level from the start? Why should they compete at all? Why should they strive for a higher status? Why should society be stratified into economic levels? Why is society identical with the nation-state? All of this is taken for granted. It is part of our social ontology, which is characterized by capitalism, meritocracy and naturalism, and, perhaps most importantly, deemed universal. This volume deals with social inequality and not merely with economic inequality. It seeks to enquire into the social ontologies that are embodied in social structures and in the sociocultures they produce over time. Even in a contemporary capitalist society, social inequality is not only determined by the distribution of economic goods and money, but also by the distribution of other forms of capital and habitus, as well as by sociocultures. Social inequality signifies differential access to activities, positions, and goods that are valued in society. All chapters in this volume show that the disposal of capital is not so much a result of competition, but a heritage that is reproduced from one generation to the next. Only in capitalist societies is the distribution of capital and habitus the main root of social inequality. In other types of society, many earlier sociocultures persist. Sociocultures are also the predecessors and the foundation of social classes in capitalist societies – structures that configure social inequality in capitalist, democratic societies. Bourdieu (1984) has conceived of the unequal distribution of resources in a systematic and sociological way by analyzing them as capital, differentiated in economic, cultural, and symbolic terms. The social division of capital determines a society’s social structure. Any analysis of inequality has to consider not only the total amount of capital, but also the relative amount of each type, as well as the history of their acquisition (Bourdieu 1984, 109). This can be illustrated with regard to European societies: Newy rich persons may have more economic wealth than their aristocratic neighbors, but they will not make many friends in the neighborhood, nor be admitted to the golf club and therefore remain outsiders. They either lack social capital or the socially relevant networks, or perhaps both. They have not learned how to behave correctly in these circles; neither do they possess any old pieces of art handed down from previous generation of the family or attend one of the elite schools that all the neighbors have frequented and used to form their social networks. They lack cultural capital: the appropriate practical skills, cultural objects, and educational titles. Finally, their family names do not resonate with any neighbors; neither do they have any honorary titles that would be appreciated in the neighborhood. They lack symbolic capital. The examples illustrating the four types of capital identified by Bourdieu obviously pertain only to capitalist European nation-states. Cultural capital, especially, is assessed very differently in non-European settings, while social and symbolic capital are also constituted in different ways. However, general categories remain surprisingly close to those in European societies, which is

Rethinking the social 21

because most societies have a colonial past and almost all societies have experienced a capitalist transformation. In our research, we found that wealth, income, educational title, family networks, membership in organizations, family name, and honorary titles are meaningful operationalizations of capital in the global South, as well.

Note 1 We are well aware that we, two white, male authors, are also part of an excluding practice, insofar as we do not cite any female authors in the main body of this chapter. Women are not as included in academia as men. This is no coincidence, but a sign of the very kind of social inequality, rooted in sociocultures and social ontologies, we are outlining in this chapter. Genevieve Lloyd (1984) describes this exclusion of women from Western philosophy in her book The Man of Reason. As this chapter draws on debates held in philosophy and the social sciences during a time in which women were even more excluded from these disciplines as they are today, the omission of female perspectives is a result of a gendered form of social inequality characterizing academia. Our understanding of the world that led to the rethinking of the social we are outlining in this chapter is, however, also inspired by the more recent writing of female and queer scholars. We argue that our emphasis of the social dimensions of inequality is able to address the forms of inequality reproduced in academic writing, which are not reducible to any material or economic dimension, but highly symbolic.

References Baumann, Benjamin. 2017. “Ghosts of Belonging: Searching for Khmerness in Rural Buriram.” PhD diss. (microfiches), Southeast Asian Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1980. Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit. Eine Theorie der Wissenssoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1963. Travail et travailleurs en Algérie. Paris: Mouton. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Algeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. Entwurf einer politischen Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hegel, Georg. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jodhka, Surinder, Boike Rehbein, and Jesse Souza. 2017. Inequality in Capitalist Societies. London and New York: Routledge. Knoblauch, Hubert. 2005. Wissenssoziologie. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The Man of Reason. “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Marx, Karl. 1985. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte. Vol. 40, Marx-Engels-Werke. Berlin: Dietz.

22  Benjamin Baumann and Boike Rehbein Rehbein, Boike. 2013. “Bourdieu’s Habitusbegriff and Wittgensteins Sprachphilosophie.” In Pierre Bourdieus Konzeption des Habitus. Grundlagen, Zugänge, Forschungsperspektiven, edited by Alexander Lenger, Christian Schneickert, and Florian Schumacher, 123–129. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Rehbein, Boike. 2017. Society in Contemporary Laos: Capitalism, Habitus and Belief. London and New York: Routledge. Rehbein, Boike, and Sisouk Sayaseng. 2004. Laotische Grammatik. Hamburg: Buske. Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. Searle, John R. 2006. “Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles.” Anthropological Theory 6 (1): 12–29. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Weber, Max. 1972. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr. Weber, Max. 2009. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999. Philosophische Untersuchungen – Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Original edition, 1953. Wolf, Harald. 2012. “Das Richtige zur falschen Zeit – zur Schöpfung des Imaginären bei Castoriadis.” In Das Imaginäre im Sozialen. Zur Sozialtheorie von Cornelius Castoriadis, edited by Harald Wolf, 63–81. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.

Chapter 3

The South against the destroying machine An interdisciplinary attempt to theorize social ontology for a decolonial project in the social sciences Lara Hofner 1 Introduction Inequality is often studied without taking its social components into account, focusing primarily on economic factors. This volume holds that this is inadequate and tries to overcome this flaw by explicitly grounding inequality in social structures. Inequality cannot be properly understood, according to the premise of this book, if so-called sociocultures and social ontologies are ignored. This is equally true (or even more so) for the global South, where social structures differ to varying degrees from the more studied regions in the global North, and to which this volume gives special attention.1 It is the compound concept of ‘social ontology’ to which I will give most attention in my contribution. I will consider how social ontology has become a possible candidate for social science theory formation and whether its integration into the social sciences, where the concept is far from established, is useful. The extent to which this intervention is useful will be judged according to the project of decolonizing the social sciences. This chapter approaches social ontology by transcending narrow disciplinary boundaries. Social ontology is a concept that has been informed by different disciplines, especially philosophy and anthropology, but also by several sub-disciplines like Science and Technology Studies (STS), sociology of knowledge, and Feminist and Postcolonial Science Studies. Nevertheless, disciplinary assumptions weigh heavily on the concept’s usage, and prejudice and dogmatism have not disappeared from the scholarly debates. This chapter, therefore, aims at a better mutual understanding among disciplines, while venturing into post-disciplinarity. This, of course, is never fully possible, as my own positionality influences that which I am capable of thinking: I am a philosopher by training, but I am endeavoring to dive into anthropology and the social sciences for this intervention. Nevertheless, it is crucial to get a feeling of what the term might actually mean to some, since the import of ‘ontology’ occurs without friction, as every discipline has a different access or approach to reality or the

24  Lara Hofner

world. If ontology is world and reality, social ontology is social world and reality to the extent that every claim we make affects the reality and world we live in. The following citation could help to illustrate the notion’s more-than-theoretical reach: The problem with ontology is not knowledge or representation, but engagement with and for a world. And this engagement is not an implicit or unconscious one, as epistemological presuppositions are often characterized, but a matter of commitment to obligations that can, if necessary, become a ‘cause,’ what you live by and may die for. (Stengers 2018, 85) This sounds rather dramatic, but contributes to understanding what is at stake, even if we are talking not about ontology, the all-encompassing study of ‘all being’ as such, but rather about social ontology, the limited sub-field of all social being. This chapter attempts to clarify the general theorization of social ontology by following some conceptual histories, facilitating a better understanding of the implications of this research and contributing to a more detailed picture of the meta-reflections of several disciplines that underlie the empirical research in this book. At the same time, decolonial approaches in the social sciences are explicitly encouraged. To do this, I  will first go into some aspects of the anthropological debates labeled as the ‘ontological turn’ for a glimpse of how ontological questions may look like (Section 2). I will then move on to detailing contemporary social ontology discourse in analytic philosophy (Section 3). The second part is divided into a critique of one strand of social ontology research on the grounds of remaining within narrow Eurocentric boundaries on the one hand, and a brief account of the work of Sally Haslanger in terms of its utility for decolonial social sciences on the other. With the tools provided by Haslanger, I will then critically set social ontology into the context of the social sciences, drawing connections between some of the findings of the proceeding parts and the wider project of decolonizing the discipline (Section 4). I will conclude with some remarks concerning social inequality and social justice (Section 5).

2 Sketching the ontological field: anthropological insights “Ontology” is clearly a notion of Western philosophical origin and has a long history in the philosophical discipline, which I cannot delve into in this chapter.2 Despite this, a short recollection: Ontology alone – the ‘study of being’ – is a ‘big’ word loaded with presuppositions. Used for the first time in the early modern period by the German scholastic philosopher Goclenius (1613), from the beginning, it was tied to (Aristotelian) metaphysics and questions stemming back to

The South against the destroying machine 25

Plato’s Parmenides. Through the history of Western philosophy, the term has been made and remade, until Quine (1948) condensed (or trivialized) it in the 20th century to the general notion of inquiry “on what there is.” Especially from a philosophical-disciplinary approach, the inclusion of Southern, global or intercultural perspectives on ontology, let alone the idea of different or multiple worlds, is challenging; ontology as metaphysica generalis is predicated on strong claims to universal validity that seem to overrule any cultural, social, or geographical differences. Nonetheless, in anthropology, exactly this happened: In the so-called ‘ontological turn,’ anthropologists started asking how the perceptions of reality of communities under ethnographic evaluation differed. The earliest publications relating to a so-called ‘turn’ regarding ontology date back to the 1980s, but the debates are ongoing (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Not only are the implications of the turn for anthropology as a discipline contested, but also at stake is how the ontological turn should be defined. Rather generally, Holbraad and Pedersen write: The ontological turn is not concerned with what the ‘really real’ nature of the world is or similar orthodox philosophical or metaphysical agendas often associated with the word ‘ontology’. Rather, the ontological turn poses ontological questions to solve epistemological problems. Only, as we shall see, it so happens that epistemology in anthropology has to be about ontology, too. (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, x) To fully understand this definition, it might be helpful to shortly engage with the relationship between epistemology and ontology. In philosophy, most scholars agree on the primacy of ontology over epistemology because it is hard to imagine an ontologically neutral epistemological claim. Referring to the social world, it has equally been argued that ontological claims logically precede epistemological ones. If ontology relates to the nature of the social world and epistemology to what we can know about it, then the social world can only be specified by ontology (Hay 2007). This position is challenged by some with the counterargument that if ontology is considered ultimately prior to epistemology, it would have to be immanently grounded or explained out of itself, a philosophical way of arguing that is not accepted by everyone and is therefore undesirable for some (Bates and Jenkins 2007). Linking those considerations to anthropology: The relevant question is Bates and Jenkins’ “how is it that certain things come about and are held to exist?” (Bates and Jenkins 2007, 211) rather than Hay’s “what exists that we might acquire knowledge of?” (ibid). This is because the turn is largely about the meaning of different forms of being and not just about different perspectives on such being. As Heywood has put it, referring to a position before the turn: “It claims that epistemologies (forms of knowing or understanding) vary, but that there is only one ontology (form of being or existing). Many worldviews, only one world. The ontological turn, instead, proposes that worlds, as well as worldviews, may

26  Lara Hofner

vary” (Heywood 2017).3 In the following, the assumption of plural possible worlds will be called ‘the multiple world thesis.’ Before we come back to this thesis, I would first like to emphasize two important aspects to which anthropological ontology discussions have contributed. On the one hand, it has become rather evident that there is something called Western ontological categories; Philippe Descola has prominently called this ontological configuration “modern naturalism,” which, “far from constituting the yardstick by which cultures distant in both time and space are judged, is but one of the possible expressions of the more general schemas that govern the objectivization of the world and of others” (Descola 2013, 11).4 Ever since the Enlightenment, the universality of naturalism was not and could not be challenged, as it was the only available option. In any case, it was empirical anthropological evidence that questioned this universal truth claim about reality and tried to clarify its provincial nature. For instance, already in 1910, the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl wrote: Collective representations have their own laws, and these (at any rate in dealing with primitives) cannot be discovered by studying the ‘adult, civilized white man.’ On the contrary, it is undoubtedly the study of the collective representations and their connections in uncivilized peoples that can throw some light upon the genesis of our categories and our logical principles. (Lévy-Bruhl 1966, 4)5 On the other hand, the second point I want to mention is that only through the ontological turn has one of the core concepts of the discipline, namely cultural difference, been stripped of its cultural qualifier and compelled anthropologists to start asking what exactly differs from Western modern naturalism. ‘Culture’ had so far been one of anthropology’s core concepts and most scholars had held that while culture might differ, nature and objects do not (Heywood 2017). The questioning of this assumption, together with the insight of its metaphysical bias, led to the ontological turn. Concepts of radical difference or “radical alterity” emerged, as Heywood explains: how should ethnographers describe conceptions that simply do not make sense within our own conceptual schema? If your interlocutor tells you that the tree she is pointing to is in fact a spirit, do you, for example, describe this as a belief? You might, but to your interlocutor it is not of course any such thing: to her, it is a fact. Calling it a belief, as a number of anthropologists writing before the ontological turn have pointed out, is both to mislabel it and to call it mistaken without actually saying so. (Heywood 2017) One way to solve this and other problems of radical difference has been the multiple world thesis mentioned previously: “the practice of a world of many worlds,

The South against the destroying machine 27

or what we call a pluriverse: heterogeneous worldings coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity” (Cadena and Blaser 2018, 4). If something is a tree in one world, it can be a spirit in another without any logical conflicts of contradiction within one world. However, the assumption of multiple worlds places the logical contradiction on another level.6 The pluriverse obviously poses a severe threat to modern naturalism and its claims to universally valid truth that go hand in hand with the following premises: Like the God of Christians, reality, science, and ontology used to be employed solely in the singular and capitalized. While Christianity was thought to convey the ‘true knowledge’ of the ‘one true God,’ so Science (singular and capitalized) was thought to be the rational, incremental process of acquiring knowledge: the understanding of the ‘true’ and ‘universal’ nature of Reality (again singular and capitalized). (Giraldo Herrera 2018, 1) Basically, this “narrative of the one” is what we call Eurocentrism. It is this tradition and order of knowledge that, with the spread of colonialism and capitalism, has become globally hegemonic. For many scholars, exposure of the violence of the hegemonic Eurocentric tradition and its consequences has increasingly led to more overtly political agendas on an ontological level, especially because the West’s insistence on an objective world has turned out to be a political claim in itself (e.g. the entangled development of Western science and colonialism with other ongoing ‘civilizing’ missions disguised as progress). In anthropology, one of the most famous proponents of ontology as a political tool to fight the West’s hegemonic position is Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. His anger over the violent imposition of Western naturalism comes across quite clearly in the following quote: Ontological differences, to get to the point, are political because they imply a situation of war – not a war of words, …, but an ongoing war of worlds, hence the sudden, pressing insistence on the ontological import of our ethnographic descriptions, in a context in which the world (‘as we know it’) is imposed in myriad ways on other peoples’ worlds (as they know them), even as this hegemonic world seems to be on the brink of a slow, painful and ugly ending. No arbiter, no God, no United Nations Protection Force, no police operation to bring delinquents into line. (Viveiros de Castro 2015, 10) For Viveiros de Castro, the ontological turn is political because it frames the West’s universalizing colonial and capitalist demands as a “destroying machine”: “The global West is not a ‘world’ and recognizes no world … I would rather

28  Lara Hofner

characterize it as a ‘machine,’ destroying both politics and ontologies . . . A worlddestroying machine cannot fit with other worlds” (Stengers 2018, 86).7 Peace between modern naturalism and the pluriverse might be difficult, especially since the Eurocentric tradition has been effectively imposed on almost the entire global South, starting with European expansion. It is quite clear that the Eurocentric or Western view should not be imposed or projected on others, as it is not a shared view and doesn’t do justice to people elsewhere (Descola 1999, 82). It is because the Western view has been imposed for so long that it is still sometimes held to be the general standard, especially when it comes to measures of ‘development’ and notions like ‘progress.’ It is certainly true that many people in the global South have been trained to believe in a kind of ‘superiority’ of Western standards, as evidenced, for example, by ‘development’ regimes; what is missing in this picture is that ‘development’ and ‘progress’ are themselves deeply Western concepts (Allen 2015). Regardless of the observation that the imposition or projection of Western notions onto others is both morally wrong and not useful, this is an ongoing reality. This is why, in the reading of Viveiros the Castro, the ontological turn has become an attempt to advance the struggle against the Western destroying machine. By taking seriously the people who are studied in anthropological research and formulating a political agenda for doing so, the discipline is responding to the decolonial imperative and consequently serving as a tool (or weapon) against the destroying machine (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 295). As we can imagine, this is not an easy task. Initially, it was assumed that upholding radical ontological difference against modern naturalism would be enough to decolonize anthropological thought (Giraldo Herrera 2018, 4). A total incommensurability between the tree as a tree and the tree as a “spirit” has been postulated. It was hoped that by taking these other realities or worlds into account they would be sufficiently acknowledged. As much as this might be an empowering practice, it solves neither the problem of the destroying machine, nor that of persisting logical contradictions of the pluriverse (even though the latter might only exist within the naturalist paradigm). In turn, what has just started to become recognized is that: Western and non-Western peoples increasingly coexist in the same places, partially sharing common realities. Even if these realities are Colonized Selves, Decolonizing Ontologies articulated into distinct worlds and ontologies, they overlap and become subjects of dispute. Shamans and biomedical practitioners treating Amerindian or other communities share the realities of health and disease in these populations. Because of these common grounds, they often end up competing or interfering with one another. (Giraldo Herrera 2018, 4f) This overlapping of possible worlds might provide a starting point to come closer to the cause of the ontological turn in anthropology. In the friction of different concepts, practices, or worlds lies the option of entanglement. If no

The South against the destroying machine 29

longer in a state of war, the meanings of concepts, practices, and worlds might be expanded. If we go back to the question “how is it that certain things come about and are held to exist?,” anthropology relies on empirical material to understand and endeavor to find an answer. A little translation might help, but, as Giraldo Herrera has warned: Translation can be an important aspect empowering non-western ontologies. However, to proceed a step further in the decolonization of thought, we must reverse the process of purification to which non-western ontologies have been subject, and which contributed to the emergence and growth of Western science. (Giraldo Herrera 2018, 9) Accordingly, the determination of sociocultures and social ontologies in the global South, as proposed in this book, could contribute to reversing the process of purification. I will come back to this in Section 3. Generally, the specificity and structure of the social world has so far been widely neglected by the anthropological ontological turn, as the discipline has been busy with radical alterity on a material ontological level and also because the cultural realm has historically trumped the social. A shift of focus toward the social world and its different meanings is what the concept of social ontology as proposed for the social sciences might contribute to anthropological theorizing, especially as it is about the global South, where radical (or not-so-radical) difference frequently occurs.

3 Philosophical contributions to social ontology: degrees of utility The compound concept of social ontology denotes a well-established subfield in contemporary philosophical research, especially in the analytic tradition: The term ‘social ontology’ has only come into wide currency in recent years, but the nature of the social has been a topic of inquiry since ancient Greece. As a whole, the field can be understood as a branch of metaphysics, the general inquiry into the nature of entities. (Epstein 2018)8 With that being said, it is relatively easy to draw a definition of what social ontology in philosophy generally relates to: the nature of the social.9 This is a difference between the philosophical and the anthropological debates, as philosophy focuses rather on the ontological of the social, whereas anthropology has hinted at the social or cultural dimensions of ontological conceptions and their differences.10

30  Lara Hofner

Regarding the history of social ontology in philosophy, it is worth mentioning that it is largely a result of 19th century thought that entities formally held to be natural were uncovered as social. Karl Marx was one of the first to posit that certain categories are socially constructed; among many other things, he asked, for example: “How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?” (Marx 1906, 95). The political lesson learned from this kind of social criticism is that categories often held to be natural are, in fact, social, and that their use influences the interests and motivations of specific groups. This became relevant to members of the Frankfurt School, who argued that social categories are so persistent because we take them as natural. If those entities are to be changed (e.g. because they are oppressive), the line of the argument is that their social ‘nature’ must first be disclosed. Contemporary discussions in philosophy instead grapple with domains, or socalled ‘social entities,’ as varied as money, language, race, gender, and the constitution of social groups. Naturally, there are different opinions as to how social ‘things’ happen and where they originate. Possible candidates for the emergence of social entities are individual states of mind, actions, and practices. Additionally, it is an open question whether any distinction can be made between social and non-social entities at all. Another very broad differentiation is made between individualism and holism: The former argues that everything social is comprised of individual people, while the latter holds that the social is not reducible to individual people, that there is something more to it. Most of the theories can be attributed to one of these two options even if the distinction is vague. Of special interest for our interdisciplinary purpose is that philosophical social ontology sees itself as closely linked to the social sciences: “A good deal of the work in social ontology takes place within the social sciences” (Epstein 2018). Whether this is really the case has not yet been settled. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an impressive overview of social ontology, from its beginnings to today’s rapidly growing debates (Epstein 2018). While the details go beyond the scope of this project, I would like to contrast two differing social ontological approaches: the first, of little help for the purpose of this book because of its privileging the global North and a neglect of the global South, and the second, rather beneficial for the purpose of decolonizing the social sciences. I am picking out one example (rather coincidentally) of what I do not think is a very helpful rendering of philosophical social ontology in regards to what this book tries to propose, because of its privileging of a Western perspective. I am referring to the introduction of a recent issue of ProtoSociology entitled “Social Ontology Revisited” (Preyer and Peter 2018). The authors, who are both well established in the current debates (Preyer and Peter 2017), start with a description of what is most important in the contemporary discussions: “One of the leading questions in contemporary social ontology, philosophy of sociality, and social science is: how do we analyze ascriptions of propositional attitudes and another (sic!) mental states to groups?” (Preyer and Peter 2018, 7). In this framing, social

The South against the destroying machine 31

ontology seems to be a rather exclusive enterprise, especially if we take into account the provided examples: “The editorial board believes that blind reviewing improves the quality of the journal” (Preyer and Peter 2018, 7) or “the team believes that a café will be highly beneficial for the campus” (Preyer and Peter 2018, 10). These types of examples stem from an exclusively Western academic perspective. This is problematic because, as I  have shown, taking groups like an editorial board or university staff as paradigmatic is already a Western and Eurocentric choice. It makes a huge difference if I assume that these are editorial boards of which I have knowledge and seek to find out if this group can have a shared belief (a rather common assumption in Western modern naturalism) or if I ask how and why it is that I take an editorial board as an example of a group and hold it as a paradigmatic example to talk about shared beliefs (a critical stance toward Western hegemony). It is a moral necessity that Western and Eurocentric views should not be imposed on others, but this is what seems to be done, as the “leading question” of the mentioned example is deceptively neutral. Rather, the question is ontologically located within modern Western naturalism. This wouldn’t be so problematic if the non-neutrality were not disguised. But as long as Western examples are held to be the ‘natural’ social entities, they have to be revealed as originating in a very specific social configuration, which, in this case, is a Western academic life-world. If we do not include (radically) different collectives in our academic endeavors, how will we be able to even come close to understand what a collective belief might be? It seems rather unjust, then, that non-Western approaches have to justify why it is even worthwhile to deal with specific “other” social ontologies. What might still be underlying this consideration is the fundamental and rather old philosophical question of whether it makes sense to talk about ontology in plural terms: “The question arises whether ontology as a branch of ‘traditional’ philosophy would accommodate a ‘special’ ontology” (Henke 1997, 39). As has been shown in the anthropological section, if we aim to come closer to understanding what really differs out in the social world, we can only do but one thing: accept plural ontologies. Markedly, this does not deny that there might be still many theoretical issues to solve, as has been shown previously, but we simply should not be satisfied with the existing neglect of the global South and of the colonial experiences of countless social groups. This absence seems particularly implausible in social ontology, as colonialism has been proven to be about social impact. What is more, it might even turn out that the ‘special’ ontology of modern Western naturalism has had disastrous consequences, as I have previously illustrated with the political ontology debates. Admittedly, in the analytic philosophical endeavor, there are exceptions to this critique that mainly exist within critical gender and race theory. One of the most important proponents of this strand of theory is Sally Haslanger, who proposes an engaged approach to understanding reality that especially considers groups dealing with oppression. As Epstein similarly admits: “Part of the role of social

32  Lara Hofner

ontology is to analyze the concepts and categories that are ‘operative’ in a social system, but an equally important aim is to explore how we might otherwise construct social categories with the aim of social improvement” (Epstein 2018). Again, “improvement” is probably not the most innocent term we can use because in the West, it usually carries a connotation of a specific direction, like ‘development’ and ‘progress’ (as previously mentioned). Besides asking what ‘improvement’ means, there remains the even more pressing question of whether social ‘improvement’ is meant as globally inclusive or exclusively for Western societies. Before I come back to the social ‘improvement’ question, I will deal with some relevant proposals of Haslanger’s work. It is not very surprising that the multiple world thesis appears in relation to social worlds as well: There is something tempting about the idea that we live in different social worlds (or milieus); that what’s true in one social world is obscure from another; that some social worlds are better for its inhabitants than others; and that some social worlds are based on illusion and distortions. How might we make sense of this? (Haslanger 2012, 418) Making sense of this, Haslanger offers a relativist model of social truth (not to be mistaken for cultural relativism) that tries to explain how, in a disagreement on a social issue, truth can be ascribed to both divergent sides – as an alternative approach to the more common objectivist, subjectivist, and framework models. She and others hold that it is possible to make sense of contradicting statements if the proper contexts of use and assessment are allowed in evaluation. This is why they can be “in a sense, right, even though they, in a sense, contradict each other” (Haslanger 2012, 421).11 What remains open is the question of how one of the parties might accept that what the other party says may indeed be true. Put differently: “The problem is that if social truth is relative to milieu, then it would seem that we have no basis for adjudicating social truths across milieus” (Haslanger 2012, 423). In case we want to favor one party on moral grounds (as, for example, we might want to do in favor of the global South), according to Haslanger, we have two options besides pure exposure to the alternative social reality. On one hand, we do not have to be relativist about value, and it might be compatible with the relativist model to objectively privilege one of the social worlds involved (Haslanger 2012, 424f). On the other hand, we might introduce a notion of common ground and find reasons to privilege one social world over the other. On Haslanger’s account, social ontology cannot be easily separated from normative questions. Instead of avoiding them, she confronts them by suggesting how our research should be guided in that sense: “One step involves describing the social practice in question in a way that highlights those features that are relevant to normative evaluation. Another step invokes explicitly normative concepts to evaluate the practice as just, reasonable, useful, good, or not” (Haslanger 2012,

The South against the destroying machine 33

16).12 The first step involves looking at a specific social practice that might be set in a messy reality (for example, modern Western science, as we will see below). According to Haslanger, philosophers should not depart from ideal cases, but rather try to understand the complexity of a particular situation (as the publication of this particular volume and the following passages endeavor to do). The second step is indebted to a critical social theory that inquires about problems arising in non-ideal circumstances and provides a source of resistance to social injustices or social ‘improvement’ (as the decolonial project might be). These two steps are connected to each other: Even if social justice is only a distant hope, not to be achieved in our lifetime, and social change only minimal, we can gain much through clarity about our current circumstances: we become more aware of the injustices in which we participate; we can identify and perform acts of resistance. (Haslanger 2012, 29) Haslanger poses important questions in the research context: “How do we enact oppressive social structure?” and “What other ontologies have been ignored? Why? And at what cost?” (Haslanger 2012, 151). Departing from Haslanger’s ideas, this orientation is not so far from what this book proposes by taking social ontology as one of its key theoretical concepts: It provides empirical data and its interpretation regarding social worlds, especially from the global South, and thus brings attention to specific social practices that may not be the general focus. Haslanger’s work is visionary, but has mainly US social worlds in mind. To address global issues, further questions still need to be asked. For this endeavor, decolonial social sciences might be the best way forward.

4 A  decolonial reading of social ontology for the social sciences Having shed some light onto the philosophical and the anthropological debates, I now want to come back to the question of whether social ontology might be a useful concept for the social sciences. Naturally, this depends on how the concept is used and understood. What should have become clear so far is that the assumption of multiple social worlds is a necessary precondition for a morally acceptable concept of social ontology. We have acknowledged that modern Western naturalism has been uncovered as a political destroying machine for most of the global South, and we have equally seen (very briefly) how sense can be made of multiple ontologies with a relativist truth model. The question whether social ontology is a useful concept in the social sciences needs to be judged according to the decolonial project, which is, to a certain extent a self-reflexive question, as it touches on the foundations of the disciplines. Talking about social practices structuring social worlds, we should not forget that science itself is a social practice. Trying to grasp the complexity of social

34  Lara Hofner

phenomena via the social sciences cannot but reflect on one’s own social practices, as also should become clear from the following quote: The habit of the Homo Academicus to restrict and seal his specialist knowledge by constructing strict disciplinary boundaries as a basis for an indisputable coherent identity, reproduces an inability to grasp the complexity and fluidity of social phenomena in a modern/colonial world system. (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2016, 62) What I will sketch in the following, therefore, is a kind of reflexive application of the concept of social ontology to social sciences research on social inequality as envisioned in this volume. The authors of this book hold that social inequality is only properly understood if the underlying social aspects of sociocultures or social ontologies are taken into account. Boike Rehbein formulates accordingly: Social ontology is closely connected with the historically evolved structures of a society, or sociocultures. Sociocultures are hierarchies, which emerged in a certain period of time but persist beyond it into the present. They are the historical foundation of present inequalities and tend to decrease in their importance but take a long time to disappear. (Rehbein 2018) Therefore, when we talk about social inequality, we talk about the deep-rooted characteristics of living together on different scales and how we embody these daily experiences, only that who or what surrounds us also influences us all, simultaneously with our action. It is in this reciprocal process of acting in and thereby shaping the social world, while enacting it as we are shaped by it, that social structures evolve. Sally Haslanger formulated this similarly: “individuals stand in complicated relationships to the collectively formed and managed structures that shape their lives. Structures take on specific historical forms because of the individuals within them; individual action is conditioned in multiple and varying ways by social context” (Haslanger 2012, 11). This kind of embodiment of social structures can be called the habitus (in the Bourdieu sense) or dominant ideology (Haslanger 2012, 18), and is characterized by its partly unconscious or inarticulate existence.13 In the following, I  will now apply (very roughly) the aforementioned to the social practice of science. Indisputably, there is a strong and asymmetrical hierarchy involved when it comes to the “special” case of the practice of modern Western science and its habitus. As Santos explains: The global North is getting smaller and smaller in economic as well as political and cultural terms, and yet it cannot make sense of the world at large other than through general theories and universal ideas. Observed from the outside,

The South against the destroying machine 35

such a habitus is less and less convincing and can be viewed as the expression of a somewhat anachronistic manifestation of Western exceptionalism, even if it remains very destructive when translated into imperial politics. (Santos 2014, 19) This becomes visible in innumerable instances. Take this volume as an example: It will, as most academic literature is, be published in the global North by a publishing house in the global North, by editors and contributors from the global North, including myself. If we take science in general and academic publishing in particular as social practices, then we can regard this book as a micro-example of social inequality between global North and South. Social inequality is defined here as the “differential access to activities, positions, and goods that are valued in society” (Baumann and Rehbein, Chapter 2 in this volume). These values then form embodied social classifications, which build on inequalities because they include and exclude “groups of people from particular activities, goods, and positions” (ibid.). Some groups become dominant and positively valued, while others become inferior and less valued (global North vs. South, in my example). The dominant group (global North) is more influential than any inferior group, even if valuated negatively (destroying machine) because of their access to socially important positions and goods (publishing), which become embodied in their members (myself and others). This is normally held to be true for specific groups or collectives, but I  will continue with the more abstract categories of global North and South.14 The publishing example might illustrate this further: In academic science competition, the global North has access to the socially valued activity of publishing and its attendant networks, distribution circuits, reputation, etc. That it is, indeed, socially valuable to publish is grounded in a Western social ontology that has been well established since the ‘Copernican’ or ‘Scientific’ Revolution in the countless meanings and practices of modern Western science. Modern Western science and academic publishing are highly valued in social terms, but also exclude many people from its practice – like, for example, people in and from the global South.15 As is true for most cases of social inequality, the differences between the global North and South in regards to scientific production have mostly passed unnoticed, until very recently with the rise of Postcolonial Science Studies (Harding 2006) and Epistemologies of the South. As noted previously, this is because the global North is more influential due to its access to publishing (for example). This has become embodied in global Southerners and Northerners alike, for the deep-rooted characteristics and hierarchies previously described. As this unequal relationship of knowledge production is unjust, Santos prominently demands in Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide: “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, that is to say, that there has to be equity between different ways of knowing and different kinds of knowledge” (Santos 2014, 237). The answer to this claim has been the decolonization of thought as an emancipatory strategy: “Real emancipation

36  Lara Hofner

requires a decolonization of thought, a re-evaluation of non-western forms of art, of telling stories, of thinking, and understanding the world” (Giraldo Herrera 2018, 2). Consequently, a larger academic “decolonial project” started to emerge out of understanding the limitations of academic disciplines and science in general: The decolonial project aims to foreground subjugated knowledge, creative and intellectual foundations in the ‘global South’ and within the margins of the ‘global North’ . . . Decolonizing European Sociology could contribute, at least on an academic level, to unmasking the limitations of this discipline and its link to coloniality. (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2016, 60) Most of these decolonial agendas operate on an epistemological level, assuming that the unequal structures are mainly grounded in the field of knowledge production. What had been and continues to be overlooked is the power of the underlying ontological frames: to decolonize European Sociology entails not only scrutiny of the epistemic foundations of European thought. Rather, it involves attending to the ontological dimension of knowledge production itself. Relating the material conditions of knowledge with its ontology requires an interrogation of the paradigms that persist in re-establishing disciplinary boundaries, reiterating androcentric and Eurocentric knowledge traditions. (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2016, 59) This is the point where social ontology, as proposed in the second chapter of this book, returns to the fore. By gathering diverse empirical data, the contributions of this book are not trying to postulate a universal logic of society and its inequalities, but rather attempt to reveal differing social ontologies from a variety of collectives in the global South. As I have suggested, this publication also refers to the two bigger and abstract ‘collectives’ – namely, the global North and South, which compete for socially valued goods through the social practice of science. With the concept of social ontology, it is possible to come closer to an understanding of how people might belong to North or South, how they relate to each other and how different hierarchies might be structured. Acknowledging ontological differences in the structuring of social worlds becomes a decolonial practice if it explicitly refers to the foundation of one’s own discipline. Consequently, it is not enough to simply apply the concept of social ontology to empirical data gathered in the global South – it also has to be applied to the discipline itself. Social ontology as proposed in this volume might fulfill this double role if it is applied as recommended.

The South against the destroying machine 37

5  Conclusion, or the delicacies of social justice Most of the contributions in this volume deal with social inequality within different groups or collectives, like nation-states or regional communities, mainly in the global South, and base their considerations on empirical research. My goal in this theoretically framed chapter, instead, was an interdisciplinary survey of the concept of social ontology for the purpose of testing its theoretical capacity for reflexive applicability in the social sciences as a possible strategy to decolonize both the discipline and modern Western understandings of (social) reality. I drew on literature from various fields to approach the question of social ontology in terms of the social sciences. As an example of its application, I zoomed out to the bigger picture of structural social inequalities between global South and North, and examined how they become embodied, for example, in Western scientific social practices. While the example of academic publishing may have helped illustrate the larger links and connections between social ontology and social inequality, it surely has its problems as, for example, the status of social science might be contested (Harding 2006) and the group commitment of global North and South, respectively, challenged (Epstein 2018). Nevertheless, I hope to have shown that drawing on insights from different areas can foster a more encompassing understanding of the concept of social ontology than without this interdisciplinary undertaking. Similarly, this theoretical (maybe even meta-theoretical) contribution has asked whether the concept of social ontology is useful for both the theoretical endeavors proposed in this book and the rather abstract challenge of decolonizing the social sciences by allowing for the ontological difference of social worlds, provincializing modern Western science as only one of many social ontological configurations. By proposing a decolonization of the social sciences with the help of social ontology, the concept assumes political value as it opens the possibility of encouraging social justice in regards to marginalized groups, especially in the global South. Demanding the awareness that the social dimension of inequality also matters is already an act of resistance to mainstream literature on inequality. To resist is a moral obligation in view of the many different forms of violence committed by the global North, as has been articulated by Santos: As global capitalism and its satellite forms of oppression and domination expanded, more and more diversified landscapes of peoples, cultures, repertoires of memory and aspiration, symbolic universes, modes of livelihood and styles of life, conceptions of time and space, and so on, were dialectically included in the conversation of humankind through untold suffering and exclusion. Their resistance, often through subaltern, clandestine, insurgent cosmopolitan networks, managed to confront public suppression carried out by capitalist and colonialist forms of physical, symbolic, epistemological, or even ontological violence. (Santos 2014, 45f)

38  Lara Hofner

In the second chapter of this volume, we similarly read: “members of dominant groups around the world are self-confident, goal-oriented, and autonomous, while members of the lowest strata are not” (Baumann and Rehbein, Chapter 2 in this volume). So, what makes sense in view of this insight? Generally, what is probably most bothersome about the social concepts we are discussing is that we are mostly unaware or unconscious about the social characteristics that we embody and those that form us, and to which we very often have no access. Therefore, the social inequality that they produce is very persistent and difficult to change. Possible answers to such questions should take social ontology seriously, as knowledge about the workings of the social world that we embody is necessary or, as Haslanger puts it: “Social justice will never be achieved by just working to change beliefs, for the habits of body, mind, and heart are usually more powerful than argument. However, knowledge of the workings of social structures and their appropriation of bodies is crucial” (Haslanger 2012, 4). For any endeavors related to social justice, it is not very helpful to start with ideal cases, e.g. thinking about what justice is. Rather, it is advised to understand and gain knowledge about how the social is meaningfully embodied in very different parts of the world. By placing these considerations in conversation with the global South, we assumed that social inequality is constructed differently in different societies or groups. Therefore, this conversation is as much about social inequality, socioculture, and social ontology, this book is about awareness and consciousness about our own embodied social practices and the underlying social concepts such as those I have dealt with in this chapter. I conclude with what Sally Haslanger suggests regarding to social ontologies: We must distance ourselves from the objectivist tendencies to limit our vision of what’s real, but we must be careful at the same time not simply to accept perspectivist limitations in their place. I would propose that the task before us is to construct alternative, modestly realist, ontologies that enable us to come to more adequate and just visions of what is, what might be, and what should be. (Haslanger 2012, 112)

Notes 1 I am capitalizing as global South and global North to indicate that both of the terms are not uncontested. However, for now they are the best we have at hand to describe different regions with different realities and histories and to avoid falling back on other problematic denominations. I follow Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ characterization of both terms: “This is what we call the global North, a political, not geographical, location, increasingly more specialized in the transnationalization of suffering. . . . On the other side, our time is the time of the return of the humiliated and degraded. This is what we call the global South” (Santos 2014, 10). In this chapter, I use ‘global North’ and ‘West’ interchangeably.

The South against the destroying machine 39 2 It is significant to note that the “study of being” has been problematized in non-Western philosophical traditions in detail and, if we deal with the origins of ‘ontology’ as an inquiry of Western philosophy only, we deal with a history of exclusions. As I am dealing explicitly with the notion of ontology and its uses in Western academia, I will not be able to go into a detailed study of non-Western accounts of ‘being’ in this chapter. 3 Holbraad and Pedersen explicitly distinguish between the ontological turn and relativism, reacting to a frequent criticism: “Relativism imagines the world as inherently differentiated into different social groupings, cultural formations or historical moments, and then ‘localizes’ varying claims to knowledge, truth or morality with reference to them. The standard act of relativization, then, pertains to the relationship between the ethnographic data in which anthropologists are interested and the varying social, cultural or historical ‘contexts’ to which these data belong. For the ontological turn, by contrast, relativity is located not in the relationship between ethnographic data and varying social, cultural or political contexts, but rather in the relationship between the variable data in question and the varying ontological assumptions anthropologists must inevitably make in their attempt to describe them ethnographically. This is because the very terms anthropologists use to describe their data have built into them particular assumptions about what these data are” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 12f). 4 Descola has worked on this in detail, on the basis of the nature-culture divide that is, according to him, only mistakenly held as universally valid. It is, rather, unique to modern Western naturalism. He developed a schema of four different ontological systems: naturalism, animism, totemism, and analogism (Descola 2013). 5 Note that saying ‘primitive’ is not suitable as it includes an inappropriate value judgment on the people it refers to. For further discussion of Lévy-Bruhl, see Baumann (Chapter 4 in this volume). 6 I am alluding to a classic debate in philosophy between cultural relativism (postmodernist camp) and universally valid truth claims (defendants of scientific realism). In the 1990s, this debate ignited the so-called science wars. 7 The term “machine” refers back to Deleuze and Guattari, 1987. 8 Only referring to ancient Greece makes exclusions of non-Western philosophy visible again. 9 Within the naturalistic paradigm, both the word choices ‘nature’ and ‘metaphysics’ are possibly more than just coincidences. In fact, prominent theories of the social are also inspired by physics, biology and other natural sciences. 10 Holbraad and Pedersen distinguish clearly between anthropological insights into ontology and what they call “the ontology of social phenomena,” ascribed to Weber and Durkheim. They posit that it has only been the latter “which in recent years has continued into philosophical and social theoretical discussions about ‘social ontologies’.” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 4Fn1). 11 For more examples: Haslanger (2012, chap. 15). 12 Emphasis added. 13 I define social practice with Sally Haslanger: “social practices are patterns of learned behavior that, at least in the primary instances, enable us to coordinate as members of a group in creating, distributing, managing, maintaining, and eliminating a resource (or multiple resources), due to mutual responsiveness to each other’s behavior and the resource(s) in question, as interpreted through shared meanings/cultural schemas” (Haslanger 2018). 14 I am assuming that social relations between people and institutions from the global North and South are structurally unequal, and that today’s realities are sufficiently integrated to qualify as social. I do not assume that the global North and the South are homogeneous with in themselves – rather the contrary, that they are characterized

40  Lara Hofner by radical social variation depending on the specific context. Still, each might have enough in common to qualify as a social collective and referring to them is a politically engaged abstraction that might help to understand why structural social differences and social inequality persist, and why the decolonial project remains unfinished. 15 I do not want to suggest that there are no science publications from or in the global South, but rather that inequality is still a very significant factor.

References Allen, Amy. 2015. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Bates, Stephen, and Laura Jenkins. 2007. “In Defence of Pluralism in the Teaching of Ontology and Epistemology.” Politics 27 (3): 208–211. Cadena, Marisol de la, and Mario Blaser, eds. 2018. A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Descola, Philippe, ed. 1999. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. Reprinted. European Association of Social Anthropologists. London: Routledge. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture, edited by Janet Lloyd. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Epstein, Brian. 2018. “Social Ontology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/social-ontology/. Giraldo Herrera, César E. 2018. “Colonized Selves, Decolonizing Ontologies.” In Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings, edited by César E. Giraldo Herrera, 1–16. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71318-2_1. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2016. “Decolonizing Postcolonial Rhetoric.” In Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Manuela Boatcă, Sérgio Costa, and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 49–70. Farnham: Ashgate. Harding, Sandra G. 2006. Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues. Race and Gender in Science Studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Haslanger, Sally Anne. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. New York: Oxford University Press. Haslanger, Sally Anne. 2018. “Practical Reason and Social Practices (Final Draft).” http:// sallyhaslanger.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/2/7/18272031/haslanger_practical_reason_ and_social_practices__final_draft_.pdf. Hay, Colin. 2007. “Does Ontology Trump Epistemology? Notes on the Directional Dependence of Ontology and Epistemology in Political Analysis.” Politics 27 (2): 115–118. Henke, Holger. 1997. “Towards an Ontology of Caribbean Existence.” Social Epistemology 11 (1): 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691729708578828. Heywood, Paolo. 2017. “Ontological Turn, the.” Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, May. www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ontological-turn. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1966. How Natives Think. New York: Washington Square Press. Marx, Karl. 1906. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1: 81–96. Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Company.

The South against the destroying machine 41 Preyer, Gerhard, and Georg Peter, eds. 2017. Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Raimo Tuomela with His Responses. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality. Cham: Springer International Publishing. www.springer. com/de/book/9783319332352. Preyer, Gerhard, and Georg Peter. 2018. “Introduction: Social Ontology Revisited.” ProtoSociology, 1 July. https://doi.org/10.5840/protosociology2018351. Quine, W. V. 1948. On What There Is. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Rehbein, Boike. 2018. “The Study of Sociocultures and Social Ontology.” Unpublished Manuscript. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Sociology International Studies. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Stengers, Isabelle. 2018. “The Challenge of Ontological Politics.” In A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 83–111. Durham: Duke University Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2015. “Who Is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf? Some Comments on an Ongoing Anthropological Debate.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33 (1): 2–17.

Chapter 4

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity The Tai mueang as a social ontology Benjamin Baumann

1 Introduction Precolonial Southeast Asian social formations are frequently described as ‘cosmic’ or ‘galactic’ polities, a scholarly classification emphasizing a parallelism of macrocosm and microcosm characterizing conceptions of state and kingship in the region. According to this analytic model, the sociopolitical organization of the precolonial Southeast Asian polity coded in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features. Tai-speakers are predominantly lowland groups settling in the valleys of mainland Southeast Asia, and cosmic polities are known in Tai languages as mueang.1 The Tai mueang were thus usually lowland states.2 As a sociopolitical organization principle, the mueang nevertheless found its way into the vocabulary of non–Tai-speaking upland groups interacting with Tai cosmic polities over the centuries (Leach 1970, 287; Tooker 2012, 73–74). There is an ongoing debate in Southeast Asian studies as to whether the mueang, with its emphasis of hierarchical encompassment as organizational logic, is merely a ruling ideology and whether it was shared by those collectives the ruling center imagined as peripheral. Tooker argues that usual models of the cosmic polity reify the ruling center’s perspective “in a set of analytical concepts that reaffirm existing power structures” and skew our understanding “away from that of a socially enacted set of spatial codes that communicate and index hierarchical status between individual and groups, both dominant and nondominant” (Tooker 2012, 215). The chapter draws on this debate to propose an alternative reading of the Tai mueang. Reconceptualizing the mueang as a social ontology, it emphasizes the role of non-humans for an understanding of Tai conceptualizations of collectivity.3 This reading follows Sahlins’ recent reformulation of cosmic polities as: hierarchically encompassing human society, since life-giving means of people’s existence were supplied by “supernatural” beings of extraordinary powers: a polity thus governed by so-called “spirits” – though they had human dispositions, often took human bodily forms, and were present within human experience. (Sahlins 2017, 92)

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 43

This reformulation is part of Sahlins’ larger call for a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the sciences of society and culture, by which he means a: shift in perspective from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms – that is to say, from received Durkheimian, Marxist, and structural-functionalist conventions – to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing metaperson-others who rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. (Sahlins 2017, 117) I am drawing on Sahlins’ reformulation of the cosmic polity here to argue with Wittgenstein that structural-functionalist explanations of the Tai mueang as political ideology are culturally reductive and cannot answer why the mueang was meaningful for those populations that were regarded as non-Tai in the language game of the mueang (Wittgenstein 1967). Reconceptualizing the mueang as a social ontology will not only explain its meaningfulness for non–Tai-speakers, but also help us to understand the reproduction of emplaced sentiments of belonging in contemporary Thailand. The word mueang is usually translated as town or city, but it may also mean country (Haas 1964, 410). The Siamese empires of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya are classified as mueang, but the word is also used to distinguish capitals from towns, and towns from villages, in contemporary Thailand (Baker 2003). The word manifests the deictic character of the Thai language, whereby meaning is effective only in certain contexts (Widlok 2015, 87). Holt argues that simplistic translations of mueang as ‘city’ and/or ‘country’ are not able to transport the concept’s polysemous and deictic character and he classifies the term mueang, therefore, as “nearly untranslatable” (Holt 2009, 29). Tambiah locates the blueprint for the Tai mueang in the Indo-Tibetian concept mandala, which is always composed of two elements, a core (manda) and a container or enclosing element (la). A mandala is a cosmological design “based on a square divided by lines that connect the cardinal directions in concentric circles that move outward from a center” (Masilamani-Meyer 2004, 52). According to Tambiah, the mandala is a total social fact of Hindu-Buddhist thought that was brought to Southeast Asia during the region’s Indianization (Tambiah 1977). However, what is forgotten when the mandala is used synonymously with mueang is the former’s inextricable association with Hindu-Buddhism, creating the impression that the mueang is only meaningful in light of these religious language games when they have, in fact, revolutionized Tai imaginations of collectivity (O’Connor 1996, 82). Despite the common tendency to equate mueang and mandala, Holt makes the important point that the mueang is: a very archaic social conception intrinsic to the Tai people. . . . What makes the mandala distinctive from the mueang as a means of social and political organization is the fact that the principles of power have been recast

44  Benjamin Baumann

through religious language and hierarchical conceptuality of Hinduism and Buddhism. (Holt 2009, 30) With his classification of the mueang as a pre-Buddhist form of social organization and its transformation into Hindu-Buddhist mandalas, Holt draws on Mus, who argues that a shared ritual language of chthonic cults existed in India and Southeast Asia that facilitated the adoption of Hinduism and Buddhism in the region he calls monsoon Asia (Holt 2009, 22–24; Mus 2011).

2  The Tai mueang Mueang are usually portrayed as center-oriented sociospatial imaginaries, characterized by a fluctuation of centripetal and centrifugal forces. This fluctuation causes not only an inherent instability of these social configurations, but also the ambiguity of their external frontiers. The mueang is an inward-looking social imaginary, in which the center determines the identity of the whole mueang. The modern nation-state, in contrast, looks outwards to determine its identity in opposition to Others beyond its fixed external borders. Sukhothai and Ayutthaya were thus not only the major towns and the mueang’s center, but simultaneously the entire mueang. To study the hierarchy of political units in ascending order, a reference to the semantic field of the word mueang is necessary. It designates, on the one hand, both the main town and the principality, but more importantly it also defines the communes of different sizes, the smaller being incorporated into the larger, for on the vocabulary level there is no distinction – as there is in Western languages or Chinese – between, for example, territories of different status. (Condominas 1990, 36) In the mueang, smaller chiefdoms and vassal states at the peripheries of a ruling center demonstrated their allegiance toward the center via tribute, ritual recognition, and corvée labor, in exchange for military protection and the status conveyed upon local chiefs by the ruler in the mueang’s center. These peripheral units were usually connected to multiple centers, and their relative autonomy depended on their skills in managing their sometimes contradictory obligations toward these rivaling centers within and between mueang (Rehbein 2017, 28–29; Wolters 1999, 28). However, the farther one moves from a center, the weaker the center’s centripetal potency becomes. The center’s outer tributaries were thus usually semi-autonomous and linked to various gravity centers or became centers of gravity themselves when they attracted even smaller political domains in the same fashion as the more powerful centers. These tributary states existed by submitting themselves to several centers (Thongchai 1996, 73). A weakening of

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 45

the center’s potency means, likewise, that its sphere of influence shrinks and its satellites may come into the sphere of influence of other centers of gravity. The relations between former center and satellite may thus be reversed. The existence of rivaling centers and their centripetal potency explains the centrifugal force at the heart of every mueang. Thongchai emphasizes the totally different conceptualization of frontiers in the language game of the mueang, which always manifest as zones (Thongchai 1994, 74–80, 1996, 73). These zones constitute areas in-between, marking the limits of the center’s potency by a growing presence of ambiguity. The frontiers of a mueang are the ambiguous spaces where the spheres of influence of multiple centers of potency meet. The ambiguity of these liminal spaces seems as necessary for the functioning of the mueang as the unity and immobility of the center, indicating the sociosymbolic relevance of ambiguity for this social imaginary (Thongchai 1996, 84). However, the frontier zones did not only separate; they also connected, thus revealing the fundamentally relational character of the mueang. Beyond these limits there could be vast areas of forest and mountains forming a corridor between the two kingdoms. It was a border without a boundary line. Or one could say that it was a “thick line” with a broad horizontal extent. . . . It was the passages to, and through, the thick forests and mountainous borders that were meant when Siam talked about boundaries. (Thongchai 1994, 75–76) The ambiguity of these in-between spaces manifests in the form of a whole range of non-human beings inhabiting the forests and mountains that usually constituted the frontiers of a mueang. Although naturalist language games would classify some of these beings as humans, they were regarded as wild non-humans and therefore ontologically different from the domesticated humans in the center of the mueang.4 Practically meaningful spatio-symbolic frontiers are literally unthinkable in this social ontology without their simultaneous incarnation in non-human form. These non-humans were aspects of the frontier, while they simultaneously manifest its potency. In the mueang, humans seek relationships with these nonhumans to tap into the potency of ambiguity these beings incarnate and utilize it for their own and the collective’s well-being. Scholarly texts commonly label most of these non-humans as ‘spirits’ or ‘ghosts,’ an ocularcentric classification that approaches them first and foremost through their apparent invisibility and ephemerality. While this classification helps to frame these beings for modern readers socialized into naturalist language games, it distorts the lifeworldly perception of these beings that are not necessarily dead or deathless and whose presence continues to be felt with the entire body rather than being visually apprehended – although this also happens (Baumann 2016, 151).5 To counter the ocularcentrism of our analytic language that distorts life-worldy conceptualizations of these beings, I will use the term ‘numinals’ to talk about the non-humans that manifest the potency of the

46  Benjamin Baumann

ambiguous in the animist language game of the mueang. Drawing on Otto’s phenomenology of the mystical, the term numinals emphasizes ambiguity not only as the most characteristic feature of these beings, of which their constant fluctuation between visibility and invisibility is just the most ocular manifestation, but also their status as sources of potency (Baumann 2017, 341–343; Otto 1950).6 Numinous potency is an essential aspect of the mueang’s social ontology that remained meaningful in the reformulation of the mueang as Buddhist mandala. The potency of the ambiguous that the forest manifests as a frontier zone inbetween centers of potency was still acknowledged in early Buddhism, and the wandering forest monks in Thailand continue to derive their mystic potency from their ability to domesticate the numinals they encounter in these liminal places (Bailey and Mabbett 2003, 147). All social units in the language game of the mueang have a center that derives its potency from numinals whose numinosity is appropriated by a collective in an ongoing domestication process that usually takes the form of a cult. Domestication refers here not only to a taming of wilderness, but also to the establishment of lasting and ordered relationships between humans and non-humans in the form of institutionalized cults that revolve around notions of nourishment and fertility. Part of this institutionalization is the numinals’ emplacement in shrines, regalia and persons, which then function as the centers of emplaced collectives that manifest as worship groups (Errington 1989, 239). While the domestication of numinals harnesses their wild potency and puts it to human use, this process is never complete, and all numinals retain a fundamental ambiguity and capricious character as an ongoing source of their potency. The domestication of numinals is institutionalized in the form of periodically performed proprietary rituals. Given the commonality of these proprietary rituals throughout the region, Århem has recently identified a ‘domestication paradigm’ at the heart of Southeast Asia’s hierarchical animism, which is “most clearly manifest among the village-centered rice-cultivating and livestock-raising communities constituting the majority of indigenous societies in Southeast Asia” (Århem 2016a, 16; 2016b, 282). What held the mueang together was thus not a boundary in the modern sense of a demarcated line, but a centripetal potency accumulated in the center through numinal worship. In the mueang’s center, the centripetal potency was embodied by the king either as a ‘god-king’ (devaraja), if the dominant religion was Hindu-Brahmin, or as a ‘universal monarch’ (chakravartin) if it was Therāvada Buddhist (Denes 2006, 87). The potency was conferred upon, or subjugated to the power of the overlord and his ‘ancestral spirits’ or certain regalia (Davis 2016, 126; Thongchai 1996, 71). Vestiges of the appropriation can be found in the city or village pillars (lak mueang/lak ban) that mark most sites that once functioned – or still function – as centers in settlements modeled upon the mueang’s social ontology. It cannot be accidental that the white Tai in north Vietnam and the Thais in central Thailand recognize the symbol of a central pole or pillar as the symbol

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 47

for a central authority and that both call it by the same name: lak mueang a more formal term of the Thais is chaopho lak mueang. (Terwiel 2012, 19) At the lak mueang, the authority of the chieftain (chao mueang) was sanctified in annual rituals propitiating formerly undomesticated numinals. The thus emerging cults are crucial for the emplacement of these non-humans, as they establish orderly relationships between numinal and humans. The emplacement of these numinals at the lak mueang in the settlement’s symbolic center is their domestication. The application of honorifics like chao (master), ta (grandfather), pho (father), or mae (mother) to address these numinals indicates not only their integration into the social collective, but also their authority and the collective’s essentially hierarchical character. The regular propitiation of these emplaced non-humans and the acknowledgment of their status ensure the well-being of the emergent collective. Thongchai emphasizes the social relevance of these domestication rituals for the grammar of the mueang, which makes localized human/non-human interactions not only essential for the sense of belonging that unifies the people of the mueang in emplaced collectives, but also for an understanding of the mueang’s social ontology (Thongchai 1996, 71–72). The fundamental importance of numinal propitiation for collective identity formation is the reason why Thongchai argues that ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity are not relevant to the pre-19th century situation in Thailand (Wijeyewardene 2002, 130). The sense of belonging that is characteristic of the mueang’s social ontology is reproduced in ritualized human/non-human interactions and shared by people who regularly participated in these ritualized events. The practically meaningful reference value for collective identity formation in the language game of the mueang is thus not the mueang, or any other abstract symbolic construction, but ritualized interactions with numinals emplaced in locally meaningful centers. These ritualized events are thus not only essential to understand the center’s centripetal potency, but also the logic of collective identity formation in the mueang. Anderson uses the image of a “cone of light cast downwards by a reflector lamp” to describe the ideal structure of these center-oriented collectives, in which the ruler accumulates potency while he simultaneously personifies the unity of the collective (Anderson 1972, 22; Geertz 1980, 11–18). As a result, the center’s gravity force determined not only the mueang’s sociospatial expansion, but also its capacity to attract smaller social units and bind them in fixed relations of mutuality to the center. These smaller units reproduced the social ontology of the mueang in miniature. Under these secondary polities were yet smaller dependencies that also copied the same organizational logic. Condominas terms this system of potency continually replicated in miniature systèmes à emboîtment (systems of boxes) (Condominas 1990). Thus, a single social ontology structures all meaningful social units in the mueang from empire to town, village, and house, while also shaping the imagination of the human person as its smallest manifestation

48  Benjamin Baumann

in folk etiology (Baumann Forthcoming-b). All these social units have a center, while they are simultaneously containers that unite humans and non-humans in mutualities of being. In the language game of the mueang, the category tai classifies those who are socially dominant according to their sociospatial proximity to ritual centers, with peripheral groups classified as kha, or the ghost-like beings in the forests. Therefore, the categories tai and kha have a sociospatial, rather than ethnic, character in any modern sense and were used to explicate notions of social inequality in the essentially hierarchical language game of the mueang. It is thus the particular form of collectivity produced in the mueang that characterizes ‘the Tai’ and differentiates them most significantly from their regional non-tai neighbors (Holt 2009, 28–30). The term mueang was, according to Turton, in one form or another even more constant among Tai-speaking people than the term tai (Turton 2000, 6). In contrast to modern notions of ethnicity that tend to essentialize socio-cultural identities, the socio-cultural logic of the mueang is relational and stresses domesticity and proximity to ritual centers as the major criteria of collective identity. While this conceptualization of collective identity is essentially situational, its situationality is qualitatively different from that of constructivist identity paradigms that emphasize an individual’s rational choice of group memberships and their political impetus (Giesen 1999, 13; Sprenger 2016, 75). Collective identity in the mueang was deictic and varied in accordance to context or relevant speech act. A person may be tai in one situation but turn into a kha, as soon as the sociospatial distance to relevant ritual centers increases. A kha seen from the mueang’s center may turn into a tai, once that person is seen from a position further removed from the mueang’s center than their own. However, it is crucial to emphasize that these changing perceptions were not merely social classifications leaving the person’s ‘true identity’ unaffected, but different forms of being. Being tai is ontologically different from being kha in the language game of the mueang. While this ontological difference is used to articulate notions of social inequality, it is not reducible to this social function. The ontological difference between both forms of being emerges from the participation in the being of different emplaced non-humans that forms the basis of animist collectivity. What made the interaction between kha and tai in the mueang meaningful was thus a shared animist ontology with a domestication paradigm at its core. From this animist ontology grew the mueang’s social ontology as a distinctive language game that emerged from chthonic cults socially meaningful throughout the region (O’Connor 2003, 282).

2 Chthonic cults, animist collectivity, and the mueang Mus’ alternative regionalization, which refers to much of the Indian subcontinent, as well as large portions of Southeast Asia and southern China, as monsoon

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 49

Asia, is based on the identification of a shared ritual language that is premised on chthonic cults dedicated to “the lord of the soil.” His cult, and the particular relationship he has with the collectivity which offers him this cult, would characterise, better perhaps than anything else, the form of religion which I believe to have been common at one time to various parts of monsoon Asia. . . . The central fact is that each collectivity occupies a limited area, and that in basing religion upon its association with this area, its cults imply not only a contract with the soil, but also the recognition of other contracts in the neighborhood. (Mus 2011, 24, 37) This regionalization breaks not only with the geo-political units characterizing our scholarly common sense, but also with usual understandings of Thai animism (Mus 2011, 34). Scholarly constructions of Thai animism usually reproduce Tylor’s influential definition of animism as an early form of religion which anthropomorphizes ‘nature’ by ascribing life to inanimate objects and attributing souls to animals and plants (Harvey 2005, 5–9; Tylor 1871, 377–453). The attribution of human interiority to non-humans, which humanizes plants, animals, and stones by endowing them with souls, remains an influential idea that also shapes Descola’s re-reading of animism that initiated the ontological turn toward new animism in anthropology (Bird-David 2018, 307; Descola 2013, 129–130). We seldomly question this understanding and the classification of animism as a primitive religion, as they represent embodied foils for the scholarly imagination of our rational modern selves as is exemplified in Adorno’s critique of occultism (Adorno 1951, 463–474).7 The embodiment of this foil as an essential aspect of our scholarly habitus makes it so hard to think the relations of humans and numinals that we have learned to frame via this scholarly abstraction of animism, in different ways. Thailand’s public discourse appropriated this evolutionistic understanding of animism and uses it as a foil to imagine the country’s Buddhist modernity and Buddhism’s moral superiority by classifying animist conceptions of collectivity as forms of primitive superstition (khwam chuea ngom ngai) (Baumann 2018, 137). However, in order to understand the animist conception of collectivity that informs the social ontology of the mueang, we have to imagine animism anew and treat it not as primitive religion but as ontology. Pertaining to the latter, animism is not about the belief in ‘spirits’ animating ‘things’ in ‘nature,’ but about numinal being-in-the-world and how numinals relate with humans to form animist collectives (Baumann 2018, Forthcoming-a, Forthcoming-b). This reimagination will allow us to follow Sahlins’ call for epistemic disobedience and re-center the sociality of the cosmic polity in non-human being and its inextricable association with human being in the animist language games of the mueang. Although Mus shares Tylor’s evolutionist understanding of religious development from primitive to complex, his conceptualization of soil-gods manifesting in the chthonic cults of monsoon Asia goes beyond Tylor’s naturalist framing of

50  Benjamin Baumann

animism, which ascribes ‘souls’ to ‘objects,’ through its emphasis of bi-presence and the outline of a particular relationship that connects these soil-gods with the collective that offers them a cult as a form of consubstantiation. The identification of the stone-genie with the officiant, like that of the earth with the victim, is not a transference but a bi-presence. The stone does not cease to be the god, but for a while the god is at the same time the officiant. There is no contradiction in this, because it is a formless and permanent being that the god-stone in the stone retains, while it is a personality of a different order, projected on another plane, corporal and impermanent, that the delegate of the group offers to it. (Mus 2011, 28–29) While Mus is commonly portrayed as writing against Lévy-Bruhl, his conceptualization of soil-gods, whereby the deity can be “both amorphous as the earth and embodied in a sacred site or object” in a form of bi-presence, is an unacknowledged application of Lévy-Bruhl’s ‘law of participation’ (Chandler and Mabbett 2011a, 5, 2011b, vii; Holt 2009, 25). The ‘law of participation’ states that: objects, beings, phenomena can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us, both be themselves and something other than themselves. In a fashion which is no less incomprehensible, they give forth and they receive mystic powers, virtues, qualities, influences, which make themselves felt outside, without ceasing to remain where they are. (Lévy-Bruhl 1966, 61)8 While the commonly encountered polemic against Lévy-Bruhl reduces him to the problematic conceptualization of a ‘primitive mentality,’ it misses his insights into the relationship uniting human and non-human beings in animist language games that is currently re-discovered in anthropology under the label new animism (Baumann 2018, 141; Harvey 2005, 3). New animism is a counter project to Tylor’s structural-functionalist explanation of animism and part of the ontological turn (see Hofner, Chapter 3 in this volume). In this sense, it mirrors Lévy-Bruhl’s attempt to formulate the law of participation as an antithesis of the British school’s structural-functionalism and Sahlins’ call for a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the humanities and social sciences (Lévy-Bruhl 1966, 8–10; Sahlins 2017). The British school’s conceptualization of animism is universalist, stressing that animists and naturalists think identically, but that animists arrive at the wrong conclusions. Lévy-Bruhl’s approach is relativistic, (over-)emphasizing the incommensurability between the two modes of thinking. However, it would be wrong to label Lévy-Bruhl an intellectualist. Despite the frequent references to the words ‘logic’ and ‘mentality’ in his texts, Lévy-Bruhl emphasizes the essentially affectual reproduction and phenomenological foundation of the form of collectivity produced by the ‘law of participation,’ which is

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 51

“sensed rather than thought, experienced emotionally rather than reasoned intellectually” (Bunzel 1966, xii; Lévy-Bruhl 1975, 4–5). Sahlins contributed essentially to the rehabilitation of Lévy-Bruhl’s work in anthropology as he uses the law of participation to understand certain otherwise enigmatic effects of kinship bonds that are in anthropological texts often called ‘mystical.’ Participation is essential to understand the consubstantiality of humans and non-humans that characterizes the form of social collectivity exemplifying the mueang’s social ontology. I draw on Sahlins when I call this characteristic social formation that unites humans and numinals in mutualities of being animist collectivity (Baumann Forthcoming-a, Forthcoming-b). With the concept of ‘mutuality,’ Sahlins elaborates upon anthropological discussions of ‘dividual’ personhood. A notion that Marriott (1976), Strathern (1988) and Bird-David (1999) characterize as a collective of human and non-human beings that are not ontologically different, but merely distinguished by their grades of personhood (Sprenger 2016). ‘Dividual’ persons are ‘divisible’ and also ‘not distinct’ in the sense that aspects of the self are variously distributed among others, as are others in oneself. A person is constituted out of a plurality of constituent elements, which move the person to ‘participate in other realities.’ Dividuality is essentially an “incorporation of others in the one person, making her or him a composite being in a participatory sense” (Sahlins 2013, 19, 28). The dividual person is, thus, the smallest manifestation of animist collectivity in the language game of the mueang. I use the word ‘collective’ here in Latour’s sense, to differentiate the social units produced in the animist language game of the mueang from their rationalist equivalents in naturalist language games. Following Latour, I argue that the words ‘society’ and ‘community’ designate social formation brought about by scientific rationalism and the purification of naturalist language games. Purification is an ordering of knowledge that is characteristic of naturalism as it creates “two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (Latour 1993, 11). The language game of the mueang does not make an ontological split between human and non-human being, and numinals constitute an essential aspect of the intersubjectivity that produces the social meaningfulness of the everyday world. It is therefore more appropriate to speak of collectives when talking about the essential units of social life in the mueang.

3  Beyond dualism The organizational logic of the mueang is usually reduced to the dual opposition of center and periphery, as it was depicted in Tambiah’s structuralist model of the mandala. This dual opposition takes either the form of opposing peripheral villages (ban) with central towns (mueang), or the wilderness of the forest (pa) with the civility of human settlements (ban/mueang) (Holt 2009, 28–32; Rehbein 2017, 28–29, Kleinod this volume [Chapter 8]). In Turton’s and Thongchai’s historical reconstructions of the mueang’s social classification system, domesticated

52  Benjamin Baumann

space is always opposed to the wilderness of the forests, mountains, and other undomesticated sociospatial realms (Thongchai 2000a, 2010; Turton 2000). The term pa, which is usually translated as forest and/or jungle, is thus of central importance for an understanding of the mueang’s social ontology. Pa exemplifies cultural notions of wilderness that represent the antitheses of domesticity at the center of the mueang. However, despite the dualist outlook of this opposition at the center of the mueang’s social ontology, Turton stresses that a binary reading “would capture only part of the historically changing realities” (Turton 2000, 6). He emphasizes that the terms mueang, ban, and pa express graded notions of domesticity, and that it is this gradedness, and not their opposition, that renders them socially meaningful in the language game of the mueang (Sprenger 2016; Turton 2000, 21). Pa is not opposed to mueang, but is sociospatially in-between mueang. The social meaning of pa therefore derives not from its antithetical character, but from its ambiguity and liminality. There is no dual opposition between wilderness and domesticity, but only a social continuum of domesticity that moves along notions of interiority and exteriority. In this relational understanding of being, where something is always closer to a center or farther removed from it than something else, it is the relative proximity to a center that determines contextualized identity, and not the dual opposition from an Other, that modern identity politics universalize (O’Connor 1996, 70). Contemporary village life in Thailand’s lower northeast reproduces the sociospatial imaginary of the mueang as a continuum of domesticity and the social value of ambiguity.9 The ideal village is surrounded by rice fields (na), and thus is spatio-symbolically separated from the forest. But the na is more than just a semantic dividing line; it is the ambiguous sociospatial realm in-between forest and village. While villagers seem to elaborate upon the opposition of village (mu ban) and forest (pa) spaces in most contexts, this opposition is mediated by the rice fields (na) in-between on a scale that operates along domesticity as its central value (Stanlaw and Yoddumnern 1985, 152). The opposition of forest and village is thus practically meaningless without the ambiguous rice fields in between that separate village and forest, while they simultaneously relate both sociospatial realms. The sociosymbolic classification system operates, then, not on a dual but on a ternary organizational logic. Ambiguity, according to this logic, is not just a residue of a dual opposition that needs to be resolved, but a social reality as such. Thailand’s everyday language games recognize ambiguity as a meaningful state of being and do not require that it is resolved in order to form clear dual oppositions and unambiguous identities. The fundamental ambiguity of Thai society is not reducible to one or another ‘correct’ view. Rather than search for a way to overcome the ambiguity, analysts should perhaps accept it as an essential trait of Thai culture and society – one that can be resolved only at the price of a partial, perspective perception. (Cohen 1991, 46)

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 53

In this sociospatial imaginary, the forest (pa) represents the least domesticated sociospatial realm that is filled with mystic potency. However, this potency is regarded as chaotic and amoral, and the non-human beings that occupy this realm are therefore regarded as largely non-domesticable and potentially malevolent. Their domestication is dangerous, but nevertheless desired as they represent sources of potency. The forest’s uncontrolled potency is domesticated and converted into fertility and nourishment by physical and ritual human labor. The rice field is not only an ambiguous space in-between, but also the sociospatial realm where this conversion takes place (Davis 2012, 75). This process imbues the na with potency, while it simultaneously contaminates it. The domestication of the rice field is a never-ending struggle against wilderness, which constantly encroaches upon the fields that were arduously wrested from it. Potency is, moreover, premised on the continuing presence of wilderness in the domesticated center. Shrines used to propitiate emplaced numinals are frequently surrounded by groves or patches of wild vegetation. These patches within the spatial realm of ban are usually called pa and function to mark frontiers between house compounds or between houses and rice fields. Davis calls these groves “a small bit of wilderness” whose potency was enshrined but continually threatened to escape (Davis 2016, 126). A final domestication, in the sense of a total resolution of wilderness and its ambiguity, would thus destroy the center’s potency. The ambiguity of the rice field in-between village and forest is thus an essential source of potency and its convertibility into fertility. This potency manifests in the numinals associated with the rice field. These numinals are usually regarded as ‘guardians’ or ‘owners of the fields’ with whom humans need to enter a ‘contractual’ relationship in order to use the land (Mus 2011, 37; Tannenbaum and Kammerer 2003; Work 2019). While these classifications sound reasonable for modern readers, they rest on a materialistic and legalistic understanding of collectivity that distorts the life-worldy meaning of the relationship uniting humans and numinals in animist language games. The numinals associated with the rice field are not its ‘owners,’ but simultaneously the soil, a manifestation of its potency, and members of emplaced collectives in which humans and numinals participate in each other’s existence through mutualities of being. The constant renewal of this mutuality in the form of emplaced cults propitiating the soil in its numinal form guarantees the fertility of the rice field and the well-being of the animist collective. Again, it is important to emphasize that the relations of mutuality characterizing animist collectivity are not reducible to reciprocity, where humans compensate the non-human ‘owners’ for the ‘right’ to use ‘their land.’ The notion of mutuality that characterizes Thailand’s animist language games rests on an ontological participation in the other’s existence. Humans, soil, and numinals participate in each other as members of an emplaced animist collective. Numinals make this participation possible while they are simultaneously the soil and manifestations of its potency. We have to acknowledge these forms of bi-presence and consubstantiality to understand the language game of the mueang.

54  Benjamin Baumann

This language game is highly deictic, with in-betweenness and ambiguity as central values. The forest and the rice-fields manifest this ambiguity, which is simultaneously a source of their mystic potency. Both can be regarded as the wild opposites of the ban’s domesticity, while both are simultaneously aspects of ban and ambiguous places in-between. They are frontier spaces in the continuum of domesticity that characterizes the deictic language game of the mueang. This social value of ambiguity as in-betweenness still manifests in Thailand’s contemporary social-structure, where “one must look up and down the hierarchy to conform one’s position” (Hanks 1962, 1256). Hanks, therefore, identifies uncertainty and the resulting ambiguity as characteristic features of the Thai social order that differentiates it from rationalized social structures in the West. A rationalization of this in-betweenness and its dissolution into dual oppositions misses the relational logic of Thailand’s social ontology, in which clients (luk sit) seek meaningful relations of mutuality with potent human patrons (chao pho), just as they seek relations of mutuality with potent non-human numinals (Hanks 1975, 200).

4 T he emergence of Thailand’s ontological multiplicity The animist mueang preceded the mandala-like Siamese empires and the modern nation-state of Thailand. All of these sociopolitical configurations are called mueang, and despite their socio-cultural differences, they all retained the mueang’s animist conceptualization of collectivity as their fundamental social ontology. They vary, however, in the degree to which alternative social ontologies challenge the animist conceptualization of collectivity as the paradigmatic social ontology of everyday life. Nevertheless, the sociopolitical transformations of the Siamese and later Thai kingdoms happened largely on the level of socioculture, leaving the social ontology of the mueang untouched until the 20th century. This becomes evident when we look at the Hindu-Buddhist reformulation of the mueang as mandala that introduced the notion of civility to replace domesticity as the central social idiom to imagine the distinctiveness of the mueang’s center (O’Connor 2003, 286). Notions of civility and their opposition to primitivity fulfill not only crucial functions in the imagination of moral superiority in Hindu-Buddhist thought, but became political tools to legitimize the imperial expansionism of the socioculture that emerged from the adoption of HinduBuddhist language games in the center of the mandala-mueang (Thongchai 2000a, 2000b; Turton 2000). Notions of civility were institutionalized in the sangha, the order of Buddhist monks, which was part of the mandala-mueang, but also formed a parallel structure in itself. Buddhism imagines itself as the center of puritycum-civility, which explains why the Buddhist temple constitutes the center of every Buddhist village in the mandala-mueang (Rehbein 2017, 29–30). However, this self-imagination belies the fact that the domestication of numinals represents an essential source of potency for Buddhist monks. This domestication was institutionalized in Buddhist funerary cultures in the region, where

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 55

monks took over the shaman’s central function of sending the deceased’s soul to the ancestral village and thus became “farmers of the dead.” In Buddhist funerals, monks continue to purify the contamination produced by death through rituals of binding the potency of the impure into place (Davis 2016, 7; Formoso 2016, 124). As Davis observes, In funeral ritual, monks can be thought of as farmers of the dead; as farmers produce rice through practices of binding water into fields, so too monks produce sites of deathpower. . . . [B]inding power into valuable things or places seems to have emerged in agricultural practices and to underwrite much nonagricultural practice, including the ritualization of death by Buddhist monks. (Davis 2016, 7, 154) Davis’ discussion of Buddhist funeral culture shows not only how the mueang’s animist social ontology is reproduced in contemporary Buddhist rituals, but also that the agricultural imaginary of chthonic cults renders this social ontology meaningful. While the adoption of Hindu-Buddhist language games turned the Tai mueang into a mandala, the emphasis of ‘civility as purity’ did not erase ‘domesticity as fertility’ as the central paradigm of collectivization in everyday life, but merely reformulated it according to the court’s Hindu-Buddhist language games. This reformulation created a courtly socioculture that became the mandala’s social ideology, which remained relatively unchanged for some 500 years (Reynolds 1987, 152).10 That the animist value of domesticity continued to inform this socioculture, despite its public appreciation of civility, is also discernable in the term sakdina found in the Thai civil and administrative code of the 15th century. “The Old Thai term is a Sanskrit-Thai hybrid: Skt. sakti (power, the power of the god) bound to Thai na (rice field)” (Reynolds 1987, 152). The sakdina system characterizes the socioculture of the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, but continues its social meaningfulness in contemporary Thailand (Chiengkul 2017, 58). The sakdina system expresses notions of social inequality through the idiom of land and its potency. Every person in the Siamese kingdom, from viceroy to slave, had a specific sakdina rank determining the person’s official place in the hierarchical social structure. The only person outside the system was the king, who embodied the mueang’s entire potency as phra chao phaen din (the master of the land), and whose sakdina rank was therefore infinite. The sakdina system is sometimes portrayed as the Thai equivalent of European feudalism, and Reynolds argues that the system was underpinned by economic relations (Reynolds 1987, 152). While this may be true, this materialistic reading overlooks that these relations were expressed according to the rules of an animist language game that draws on the region’s shared ritual language of chthonic cults, in which potency rests in the land that needs to be domesticated. Moreover, the sakdina system emphasizes the inseparability of the human being and the land’s numinous potency as the human’s rank is expressed through the amount of embodied earthly potency.

56  Benjamin Baumann

The sakdina system imagined social inequality through the potency of land that needs to be transformed into rice fields (na) to convert its potency (sakti) into fertility in an ongoing domestication process. While this reading of the sakdina system may not explain how social inequality was reproduced practically, it helps to understand the cultural logic that rendered it meaningful. The Siamese and later Thai kings reproduced the agricultural symbolism of the mueang’s social ontology in the yearly First Ploughing ceremony that continues to be held at an imitation field at Sanam Luang near the Grand Palace, the center of the contemporary Thai polity (Quaritch Wales 1965, 91). As a manifestation of the soil’s potency, the king has the potential to unlock the land’s fertility through this annual ritual. Although the ritual was re-interpreted in its history according to the rules of Brahmanist and Buddhist language games, its animist meaning remained largely unchanged. The social ontology of the mueang produced the various sociocultures of the Siamese mandalas over more than 500 years, but its ontological premises remained largely unchallenged. This situation changed drastically during Siam’s semicolonial encounters in the 19th and 20th centuries, which entailed the elites’ formal adoption of naturalism and the emphasis of its universality in Siam’s newly emerging public sphere (Thanapol 2009). Although Thailand is the only Southeast Asian country that was never formally colonized, the term semicolonial emphasizes the colonial-like impact the colonial powers in the region had on Thailand (Jackson 2004, 2005, 2008). The major difference between Siam’s semicolonial configuration and the colonial configurations of its regional neighbors is that the Siamese and later Thai elites actively mediated Western culture’s impact on their subjects as internal colonizers. Deconstructionist readings of the modernizing reforms of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) expose this internal colonialism by revealing the new disciplinary mechanisms these reforms installed in his subjects through the complete alteration of everyday practices (Chittawadi 2011). Most of these reforms were, despite their public enactment, never designed to improve the living conditions of the Siamese subjects, but to create civilized images of Siam in order to prove the monarchy’s righteous claim of belonging to the ‘Victorian ecumene’ and simultaneously to deprive the colonial powers of their self-affirmed legitimacy to engage in Siam’s internal affairs as civilizing forces (Peleggi 2002, 15). This project of proving the kingdom’s civility is known as the elites’ ‘quest for siwilai.’ Siwilai was one of the first words that was transliterated from English to Thai in the middle of the 19th century as a translation for civilization (Thongchai 2000b, 529). Siwilai replaced the Hindu-Buddhist ideas of civility that characterized the Siamese mandalas by substituting the non-modern value of purity with the modern values of progress and development (O’Connor 2003, 295–297). Our civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress.’ Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs.

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 57

It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. (Wittgenstein 1984, 7e) The quest for siwilai had little in common with the idealized process of enlightened modernization and rational development imagined by Elias as being based on the increasingly complex division of labor (Elias 2000), but was rather about the establishment of naturalism’s hegemony in the public sphere. Part of the project was the adoption of purified conceptions of social collectivity that characterize modern language games, where they are imagined as human universals. The most far-reaching consequences had the adoption of the modern ideas of race and nation-state. Thailand was chosen as a name over Siam in the renaming of the emerging Thai nation in 1939 to state explicitly that Thailand is the land of ‘the Thais.’ The renaming was intended to instill in the populace a sense of national identity in a time of transition fraught with internal crises and an attempt to monopolize the nation semantically for Thai-speakers in order to instill pride and equality with the West in the country’s citizenry (Keyes 1997, 209). In the era of high colonialism, the term thai had the advantage of meaning ‘free,’ emphasizing the uniqueness of Thailand’s encounter with the colonial powers in the region. The conspicuous name-change from Siam to Thailand fostered an ‘ethnic chauvinism’ that became an essential aspect of the official imagination of national belonging in Thailand’s contemporary public sphere that is inextricably linked to an idiosyncratic reformulation of development under the purified logic of siwilai. Being Thai implies the state of being civilized, which excludes everything that is labeled as ‘animistic’ or superstitious (Reynolds 2002). The Siamese elites introduced rationalized collective identity constructs mainly to counter accusations by the French that the Siamese represent a national minority that wields power over a majority non-Siamese population. These accusations evolved from the French’s imperial gaze upon their spheres of influence in French Indochina. More than any other imperial power in the region, the French legitimized their imperial conquest with a civilizing mission. Looking across the Mekong River, the French bemoaned that the majority of Siam’s non-Siamese populations were ethnically Lao and Khmer. Since both ‘ethnic groups’ were under the civilizing patronage of the French, they had a legitimization to seize the ‘Laotian’ and ‘Cambodian’ portions of Siam. According to the French’s rationalist understanding of ‘race’ and their modern ‘race politics,’ rule was only legitimate when the rulers and the ruled share the same ethnicity and/or race. Otherwise, it would become intolerable oppression and a legitimate reason to actively engage in Siam’s internal affairs (Streckfuss 1993, 129). From the Franco-Siamese crisis emerged the question of how to deal with the massive Lao- and Khmer-speaking populations in the northeast that were under the formal rule of the Siamese court. The Siamese elites sought to solve this question with the formal adoption of modern forms of knowledge. A major aspect of

58  Benjamin Baumann

Siam’s internal colonialism was thus the transformation of the mueang’s relational and deictic social classification system, in which identity is not the prerequisite of the social position, but the social position the prerequisite of identity. Revolving around the attempt of creating public images of a racially pure category ‘Thai,’ the Siamese elites adopted the modern ‘logic of race,’ which became an essential aspect of their quest for siwilai (Thongchai 2000b). The notion of racialized civilizational progress that was enshrined in the semicolonial logic of siwilai is, therefore, essential to understand the reproduction of social inequality in contemporary Thailand as its dual organization logic renders the dichotomies meaningful that are used for its symbolic reproduction. Depending on context, these dichotomies manifest in their national, regional, religious, ethnic, political, or gendered guises. The discursive functioning of siwilai in Thailand’s public sphere is thus responsible for the production of a dualist logic of othering structuring the articulation of social inequality in Thailand’s public sphere. However, while the Siamese elites tightly monitored the representation of collectivity in the public sphere, they showed remarkable disinterest in monitoring imaginations of collectivity in other contexts of social life (Jackson 2004). Since the hegemony of naturalism and rationalized identity concepts remained restricted to the public sphere, Siam’s semicolonial governmentality was significantly different from European governmentality, as well as colonial governmentality, which both fostered the subject’s self-regulation in everyday contexts through the forced embodiment of the state’s disciplinary gaze (Foucault 1991). However, the spread of mass-communication technologies to the countryside facilitated the discursive integration of the everyday under the regime of naturalist language games. The bifurcation of the elites’ disciplinary gaze, the hegemony of naturalism in the public sphere, and of animism in everyday life, and the inertia of the habitus Bourdieu labels hysteresis produced an ontological multiplicity that characterizes Thailand’s contemporary socioculture (Baumann 2018, 143–148; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 130; Krais and Gebauer 2002, 21–22). While Thailand’s reform Buddhism tries to become compatible with the hegemony of naturalism in the public sphere and its ideal of ontological monism, everyday life in rural Thailand remains characterized by an ontological multiplicity in which naturalist and animist language games and the forms of life they produce continue to co-exist as embodied aspects of contemporary Thai habitus. While the fundamentally different forms of collectivity imagined in naturalist and animist language games clash in the public sphere, social actors socialized into this ontological multiplicity have learned to contextualize the social validity of these mutually exclusive forms of life without producing cognitive crises (Baumann 2017, 2018).

5 Conclusion Wittgenstein argues in his persuasive critique of the universalism speaking through Frazer’s structural functionalism that all Frazer achieves with his rationalist

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 59

explanations is to make seemingly irrational practices plausible to people who think as he does. They do not help us, however, in our anthropological attempt to understand the lifeworldly meaning of these practices (Wittgenstein 1979, 1e). My portrayal of the mueang as a social ontology is intended to contribute to the epistemic disobedience demanded in Sahlins’ reformulation of the cosmic polity, as it reads the mueang not merely as an ideology determining the politicaleconomic imagination and organization of the precolonial kingdom, but as a social ontology determining the ontological character of the social collectives interacting in the mueang as mueang. I argue that this reading of the mueang brings us not only closer to the lifeworldly meaning of collective identity in the cosmic polity, but also helps us to understand collective belonging in contemporary Thailand, as it is an attempt to decolonize the language we use to speak about lifeworldly notions of belonging. As a social ontology, the mueang is a life form producing social practice that rests on an animist understanding of social collectivity in which humans and non-humans are united in mutualities of being and participate in each other’s existence to form animist collectives (Baumann 2018, 11; Sahlins 2013). Drawing on the concepts outlined in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of the volume, this chapter emphasizes the social dimension of the ontological in the sense of Wittgenstein’s forms of life rather than the ontological dimension of the social in the sense of Bourdieu’s doxa (Bourdieu 1979, 318–334; Wittgenstein 1999). In this sense, social ontologies define what collectives are, how they structure themselves, and which entities can become part of a collective. Actors embody social ontologies through their socialization into specific language games. The dialectic of social ontology and language games unfold in human bodies as habitus (see Baumann and Rehbein, Chapter 2 in this volume). Human practice has the capacity to alter both, but these alterations will always draw on the rules of existing language games to maintain their social meaningfulness. In this sense, social ontologies and the social structures they produce tend toward reproduction rather than replacement and change slowly over time. More importantly, older social structures cannot be replaced easily and continue to exist in the present in embodied form. In Chapter 2, we call this diachronic and embodied dimension of social structures sociocultures. Social ontologies produce distinctive forms of life that render these sociocultures and their concretization as practically meaningful social structures. Although novel language games may emerge, become hegemonic over time, and produce new forms of life, actors will rely on the embodied rules of older language games to generate meaningful social practices until these practices become socially unintelligible. However, a growing social unintelligibility does not automatically imply actors’ ability to master the rules of novel language games. The malleability of habitus decreases with age, which partly explains the generational misunderstandings characterizing everyday family life in rural Thailand. It happens frequently that parents and children – especially when the latter commute between urban and rural

60  Benjamin Baumann

life-worlds, and are thus exposed to urban language games for prolonged periods of their lives – cease to understand each other as they literally live in different worlds. Actors may thus master various language games throughout their social life and participate in multiple forms of life simultaneously. The probability of this multiplicity increases when actors’ primary, secondary, and tertiary socializations happen in alternative language games. The social ontology of primary socialization remains, nevertheless, the most influential in shaping actors embodied reading of the social universe (Baumann 2017; Baumann and Rehbein 2018). The organizational structure of the mueang is commonly portrayed as being premised on a civilizational logic in which the degree of civilization increases the closer one gets to the mueang’s center. This chapter argues that it was originally not civility that increases toward the center, but an animist conceptualization of domesticity that is established in ritualized human/non-human interaction and based on the fundamental notion of nourishment. The emphasis of civility and its opposition to primitivity that continues to shape the imagination of social inequality in contemporary Thailand are characteristic features of mandala sociocultures that emerged as Hindu-Buddhist reformulations of the mueang’s animist language game. The imagination of civility in the mandala-mueang was closely tied to Hindu-Buddhist conceptualizations of purity, until a secularized rhetoric of civilization emerged during Thailand’s semicolonial encounters that rests on the modern values of progress and development and the ontological divide of human and non-human being. I argue that despite the hegemony of this civilizatory paradigm in Thailand’s public sphere, everyday language games in the rural northeast continue to draw on the mueang’s animist language game to form meaningful social collectives. The mueang’s domestication paradigm is still discernable in everyday language games, and informs the concepts that are used to talk about human and non-human relationships. The social premise of this paradigm is the establishment of lasting relations of mutuality between human and numinals in order to utilize the potency the latter manifest for the well-being of emplaced social collectives. Drawing on Lévy-Bruhl, I refer to the social principle behind this domestication paradigm as ‘participation.’ While the social ontology of the mueang knows various ways of accumulating potency through participation, rituals of binding potency into place are the most common and still meaningful all over Thailand. The chapter argues that the principle of participation continues to guide the formation of emplaced social collectives in Thailand to highlight that the mueang’s paradigmatic form of animist collectivity retains its social meaningfulness as a social ontology of everyday village life. This social ontology persisted, not because it was functional in a political-economic sense, but because it was meaningful as a form of life throughout the region, enabling Taispeakers to engage meaningfully with human and non-human beings in their environment.

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 61

Notes 1 As there is no standardized transcription system for modern Thai, the word mueang is variously transcribed in the literature. I have standardized the various transcriptions of the word according to the Rachabanditsathan system to increase the chapter’s readability. I use this system for all other transcriptions of Thai words in this chapter. 2 I will follow the convention of using the term ‘Tai’ in reference to a greater language family of which the Thai-speakers of contemporary Thailand are but one branch. Languages belonging to this language family are spoken in a region that extends from Assam to Tonkin and from southern China to northern Malaysia. The term Thai refers to the majority population of Thailand. 3 This chapter draws on sections from the author’s dissertation manuscript and represents a revision of an initial conceptualization of animist collectivity as the social ontology of everyday life in Thailand’s rural northeast (Baumann 2017, 2018). 4 This also explains why ‘the Mlabri,’ hunter and gatherers living in the forest, were classified as ghost-like beings (phi thong lueang) (Nimonjiya 2013). 5 I am using life-worldy here in its social phenomenological sense, referring to the atheoretical and embodied knowledge that determines the meaningfulness of the everyday world and which, because of its embodiment, can usually not be explicated by actors themselves. The explication of this knowledge is thus an analytic abstraction, based on the intersubjective sharing of Thai life-worlds through the author’s thick participation in everyday and ritual contexts (Bourdieu 1977, 89–90; Jackson 1996, 7–8; Mannheim 1980, 73; Spittler 2001). 6 “For this purpose I adopt a word coined from Latin numen. Omen has given us ‘ominous,’ and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word ‘numinous.’ I  shall speak, then, of a unique ‘numinous’ category of value and of a definitely ‘numinous’ state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined.” (Otto 1950, 7). 7 See Kleinod’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 8, for a more nuanced reading of Adorno’s critical materialism and its relevance for a political-ecological reading of animism. 8 After severe criticism, Lévy-Bruhl stopped talking about a ‘law of participation,’ which he formulated as a non-modern antithesis of the Aristotelian ‘law of contradiction’ and the ‘law of the excluded middle’ in his first six books on ‘primitive mentality,’ and started to us ‘participation’ alone in his last book on the topic (Lévy-Bruhl 1975; Mousalimas 1990). 9 The author conducted over 15 months of anthropological fieldwork in a rural subdistrict of Thailand’s Buriram Province. 10 Drawing on Dumont, an ideology is the sum of collectively shared ideas and values (Dumont 1991, 287). Social ideologies are the ideational counterpart of social ontologies. Social ideologies are, in contrast to the latter, explicable and usually reproduced discursively. They manifest as publicly shared imaginations of the collective and its structure and constitution.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1951. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

62  Benjamin Baumann Anderson, Benedict R. 1972. “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.” In Culture and Politics in Indonesia, edited by Claire Holt, 1–69. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Århem, Kaj. 2016a. “Southeast Asian Animism in Context.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, 3–30. New York: Routledge. Århem, Kaj. 2016b. “Southeast-Asian Animism: A Dialogue with Amerindian Perspectivism.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, 279–301. New York: Routledge. Bailey, Greg, and Ian Mabbett. 2003. The Sociology of Early Buddhism. Cambridge: Canbridge University Press. Baker, Chris. 2003. “Ayutthaya Rising: From Land or Sea?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (1): 41–62. Baumann, Benjamin. 2016. “The Khmer Witch Project: Demonizing the Khmer by Khmerizing a Demon.” In Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond: Narratives, Cultural Contexts, Audiences, edited by Peter J. Bräunlein and Andrea Lauser, 141–183. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Baumann, Benjamin. 2017. “Ghosts of Belonging. Searching for Khmerness in Rural Buriram.” PhD diss. (microfiches), Southeast Asian Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Baumann, Benjamin. 2018. “Das animistische Kollektiv. Lévy-Bruhl, soziale Ontologien und die Gegenseitigkeit menschlicher und nicht-menschlicher Wesen in Thailand.” Zeitschrift für Kuktur- und Kollektivwissenschaft 4 (2): 129–166. Baumann, Benjamin. Forthcoming-a. “Animist Collectivity and Spirit Possession in Thailand’s Lower Northeast.” In Conceiving the Cosmos: Warping a Novel Anthropology of Spirit Possession, edited by Diana Espirito Santo and Maran Shapiro. Durham: Duke University Press. Baumann, Benjamin. Forthcoming-b. “The Growing Professionalization of Thailand’s Possession Complex in the Lower Northeast.” In A World Ever More Enchanted: Efflorescing Spirit Cults in Buddhist Southeast Asia, edited by Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Baumann, Benjamin, and Boike Rehbein. 2018. “Soziale Ontologie, Soziokulturen, Ungleichheit und Kollektive.” Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft 4 (2): 7–28. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “ ‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (S1): 67–91. Bird-David, Nurit. 2018. “Size Matters! The Scalability of Modern Hunter-Gatherer Animism.” Quaternary International 464: 305–314. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Entwurf einer Theorie der Praxis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bunzel, Ruth. 1966. “Introduction to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think.” In How Natives Think, edited by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, v–xvii. New York: Washington Square Press. Chandler, David, and Ian Mabbett. 2011a. “Introduction.” In India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa, edited by David Chandler and Ian Mabbett, 1–14. Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University.

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 63 Chandler, David, and Ian Mabbett. 2011b. “Preface to the Second Edition.” In India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa, edited by David Chandler and Ian Mabbett, VII–IX. Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. Chiengkul, Prapimphan. 2017. The Political Economy of the Agri-Food System in Thailand. Hegemony, Counter-Hegemony, and Co-Optation of Oppositions. New York: Routledge. Chittawadi Chitrabongs. 2011. “The Politics of Defecation in Bangkok of the Fifth Reign.” Journal of the Siam Society 99: 172–196. Cohen, Erik. 1991. “Sociocultural Change in Thailand: A Reconceptualization.” In Thai Society in Comparative Perspective: Collected Essays, edited by Erik Cohen. Bangkok: White Lotus. Condominas, Georges. 1990. From Lawa to Mon, from Saa’ to Thai: Historical and Anthropological Aspects of Southeast Asian Social Spaces. Canberra: The Australian National University. Davis, Erik. 2012. “Weaving Life Out of Death: The Craft of the Rag Robe in Cambodian Ritual Technology.” In Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China, edited by Paul Williams and Patrice Ladwig, 59–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Erik. 2016. Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia. New York: Columbia University Press. Denes, Alexandra. 2006. “Recovering Khmer Ethnic Identity from the Thai National Past – An Ethnography of the Localism Movement in Surin Province.” PhD doctoral diss., Faculty of the Graduate School, Cornell University. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis. 1991. Individualismus – Zur Ideologie der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag. Elias, Norbert. 2000. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Errington, Shelly. 1989. Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Formoso, Bernard. 2016. “Thai Buddhism as the Promoter of Spirit Cults.” South East Asia Research 24 (1): 119–133. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books. Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Giesen, Bernhard. 1999. Kollektive Identität. Die Intellektuellen und die Nation 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Haas, Mary. 1964. Thai-English Student’s Dictionary. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hanks, Lucien M. 1962. “Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order.” American Anthropologist 64 (6): 1247–1261. Hanks, Lucien M. 1975. “The Thai Social Order as Entourage and Circle.” In Change and Persistence in Thai Society: Essays in Honor of Lauriston Sharp, edited by William Skinner and Thomas Kirsch, 197–218. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Harvey, Graham. 2005. Animism: Repsecting the Living World. London: Wakefield Press. Holt, John Clifford. 2009. Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Jackson, Michael. 1996. “Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique.” In Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological

64  Benjamin Baumann Anthropology, edited by Michael Jackson, 1–50. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jackson, Peter A. 2004. “The Performative State: Semi-Coloniality and the Tyranny of Images in Modern Thailand.” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 19 (2): 219–253. Jackson, Peter A. 2005. “Semicoloniality, Translation and Excess in Thai Cultural Studies.” South East Asia Research 13 (1): 7–41. Jackson, Peter A. 2008. “Thai Semicolonial Hybridities: Bhabha and Garcia Canclini in Dialogue on Power and Cultural Blending.” Asian Studies Review 32: 147–170. Keyes, Charles F. 1997. “Cultural Diversity and National Identity in Thailand.” In Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Michael Brown and Sumit Ganguly. Cambridge: MIT Press. Krais, Beate, and Gunter Gebauer. 2002. Habitus. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leach, Edmund. 1970. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: The Athlone Press. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1966. How Natives Think. New York: Washington Square Press. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1975. The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mannheim, Karl. 1980. Strukturen des Denkens. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marriott, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism.” In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 109–142. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Masilamani-Meyer, Eveline. 2004. Guardians of Tamilnadu: Folk Deities, Folk Religion, Hindu Themes. Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftung zu Halle. Mousalimas, Soterios A. 1990. “The Concept of Participation in Lévy-Bruhl’s Primitive Mentality.” JASO 21 (1): 33–46. Mus, Paul. 2011. “India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa.” In Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, edited by Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, 15–91. Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. Nimonjiya, Shu. 2013. “From Ghost‘ to Hill Tribe’ to Thai Citizens: Towards a History of the Mlabri on Northern Thailand.” Aséanie 32: 155–176. O’Connor, Richard. 1996. “Rice, Rule, and the Thai State.” In State Power and Culture in Thailand, edited by Paul Durrenberger, 68–99. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies. O’Connor, Richard. 2003. “Founders’ Cults in Regional and Historical Perspective.” In Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors, Polity, and Identity, edited by Nicola Tannenbaum and Cornelia Ann Kammerer, 269–312. New Haven: Yale University Press. Otto, Rudolf. 1950. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John Harvey. London: Oxford University Press. Peleggi, Maurizio. 2002. Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Quaritch Wales, Horace Geoffrey. 1965. Ancient Siamese Government and Administration. New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp. Rehbein, Boike. 2017. Society in Contemporary Laos: Capitalism, Habitus and Belief. London and New York: Routledge.

Reconceptualizing the cosmic polity 65 Reynolds, Craig. 1987. Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Cornell University. Reynolds, Craig. 2002. “Introduction: National Identity and its Defenders.” In National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today, edited by Craig Reynolds, 1–32. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is – And Is Not. London: The University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 2017. “The Original Political Society.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 91–128. Spittler, Gerd. 2001. “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als Dichte Teilnahme.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 126: 1–25. Sprenger, Guido. 2016. “Graded Personhood: Human and Non-Human Actors in the Southeast Asian Uplands.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, 73–90. London and New York: Routledge. Stanlaw, James, and Bencha Yoddumnern. 1985. “Thai Spirits: A Problem in the Study of Folk Classification.” In Directions in Cognitive Anthropology, edited by Janet Dougherty, 141–159. Chicago: University of lllinois Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Streckfuss, David. 1993. “The Mixed Colonial Legacy in Siam: Origins of Thai Racialist Thought, 1890–1910.” In Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths, edited by Laurie Sears, 123–153. Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsins. Tambiah, Stanley. 1977. “The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Traditional Kingdoms in Southeast Asia.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 239: 69–97. Tannenbaum, Nicola, and Cornelia Ann Kammerer. 2003. “Introduction.” In Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors, Polity, and Identity, edited by Nicola Tannenbaum and Cornelia Ann Kammerer. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies. Terwiel, Barend. 2012. Monks and Magic – Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Thanapol Limapichart. 2009. “The Emergence of the Siamese Public Sphere: Colonial Modernity, Print Culture and the Practice of Criticism (1860s–1910s).” Southeast Asia Research 17 (3): 361–399. Thongchai Winichakul. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu and Chiang Mai: University of Hawai’i Press. Thongchai Winichakul. 1996. “Maps and the Formation of the Geo-Body of Siam.” In Asian Forms of the Nation, edited by Stein Tønnesson and Hans Antlöv, 67–92. Surrey: Curzon Press. Thongchai Winichakul. 2000a. “The Other Within: Travel and Ethno-Spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects 1885–1910.” In Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, edited by Andrew Turton, 38–63. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Thongchai Winichakul. 2000b. “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Siam.” Journal of Asian Studies 59 (3): 528–549. Tooker, Deborah. 2012. Space and the Production of Cultural Differences among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Turton, Andrew. 2000. “Introduction to Civility and Savagery.” In Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, edited by Andrew Turton, 3–33. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.

66  Benjamin Baumann Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: John Murray. Widlok, Thomas. 2015. “Ethnicity as Social Deixis.” In Ethnicity as a Political Resource. Conceptualizations Across Disciplines, Regions, and Periods, edited by University of Cologne Forum “Ethnicity as a Political Resource”, 85–96. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Wijeyewardene, Gehan. 2002. “The Frontiers of Thailand.” In National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand Today, edited by Craig Reynolds, 126–154. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. “Bemerkungen über Frazers The Golden Bough.” Synthese: 233–253. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1979. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Harleston Norfolk: The Brynmill Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999 [1953]. Philosophische Untersuchungen – Philosophical Investigations. Original edition. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Wolters, Oliver W. 1999. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective: Revisted Edition. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publication. Work, Courtney. 2019. “Chthonic Sovereigns? ‘Neak Ta’ in a Cambodian Village.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 20 (1): 74–95.

Chapter 5

Developmentalism and the misacknowledgement of socio-ontological difference The coloniality of being in the Colombian Pacific basin Andrés Bateman 1 Introduction When we cut all these mountains we will no longer be the blacks we are, we would be from another world. When we cut all this, we lose our culture, we lose our identity, we lose our credibility and we lose everything. We are no longer blacks, then we are white. (Inhabitant Nuquí 2 – April 2019)1

This comment from an inhabitant of Nuquí, municipality of the Department of Chocó2 in northern Colombian Pacific basin, evidences a particular form of being in the world based on a specific relationship with the land. Understood as a particular system of classification, sets of meanings, and symbolic values subconsciously intrinsic in collectivities, the quote evidences a particular social ontology that materializes in concrete sociocultures or embodied practices, institutions, and habitus.3 The emergence of this particular social ontology responds to a specific historical and geographical context. The Colombian Pacific basin is an area of approximately 10 million hectares of tropical forest that is recognized the world over for its concentration of biodiversity. Furthermore, close to one million AfroColombians live in the region, of which around 40% live in small villages along the rivers and river mouths (Oslender 2004). The Colombian Pacific basin was first inhabited by different indigenous communities, and later, with the forced introduction of enslaved population from Western Africa by the Spanish settlers, became a territory with a mostly black population. Additionally, the region was an important area where slaves escaped from colonial rule in order to create free maroon communities (Romero 2017). After the abolition of slavery in Colombia in 1851, these black communities continued reproducing their own social ontologies and sociocultures in a territory not yet accessible for hegemonic powers. Responding to the majoritarian presence of black communities with their own social ontologies and sociocultures, a series of social mobilizations of black collectivities took place in the late 20th century,

68  Andrés Bateman

demanding the issue of specific laws in line with their social ontology. This process concluded in the Law 70 of 1993, meaning that the territories of the Pacific basin inhabited by black collectives living according to traditional practices had collective ownership and certain autonomy in their inhabited spaces. Notwithstanding the autonomy given to black communities as a result of this law, certain legal and illegal interventions – such as the introduction of cocaleaf crops, cocaine trafficking, mega infrastructure projects, agro industry, and mining – undermine local understandings and uses of the territory in order to impose – by persuasion or by force – a Western/capitalist conception of land use. I argue that the Colombian Pacific basin is the scenario of an uneven dispute between two social ontologies: the Western and the black. In short, the first represents a teleological perspective of history; a series of dualisms such as human–nature, body–mind, and object–subject; individualism; and the pretention of universalism. Its economic system is capitalism, and its global dimension is the modern worldsystem. On the contrary, the black social ontology responds to a non-dual relation between humans and non-humans. It contemplates a relational existence of human, natural, and ancestral beings materialized in specific uses of the land, spiritualities, the conception of certain natural elements as part of the collectivity, and a communitarian economy with partial connections to the market economy. With this in mind, the chapter focuses on coloniality as one of the mechanisms of Western modernity to problematize non-Western sociocultures and render non-Western social ontologies invisible in order to reproduce the modern worldsystem. In addition, as a result of the misacknowledgement of non-Western social ontologies, developmentalism – as the most recent expression of Western modernity and its hegemony – resorts to violence and deterritorialization as one of its mechanisms of expansion. Due to the expansion of developmentalism, local collectivities face the transformation and further elimination of their sociocultures and finally, of their social ontologies. In sum, the aim of the chapter is to analyze the unequal differentiation of social ontologies and sociocultures, its colonial framework, and the mechanisms and effects of the imposition of a univocal vision of the world in the northern Colombian Pacific basin. To do so, the chapter contains four main sections. Section 2 analyzes the phenomenon of coloniality of being as the invisibilization and subjugation of non-Western social ontologies. Section 3 furthers enquires into the nature of developmentalism as a new stage of modernity. Section 4 describes specific developmental interventions in the region. Section 5 explores the use of violence as one of the main mechanisms in the expansion of developmentalism, and its effects in the transformation and elimination of the local social ontology.

2 Socio-ontological difference and coloniality of being In order to understand the idea of coloniality of being, it is necessary to understand coloniality in a general sense. Coloniality explains the subjugation of common

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 69

senses, imaginaries, expectations, and sensitivities of non-Western collectivities under an ongoing colonial context (Quijano 2005). Unlike the phenomenon of colonialism focused on the macro level or power, which is the control over the economic and political spheres, coloniality deals with the micro level of power. It emphasizes the colonial process of forging aesthetics, desires, aspirations, spiritualities, and other non-Western socio-cultural expressions to fit the hegemonic discourse of modernity. Moreover, the notion of coloniality argues that forging non-Western sociocultures and the subsequent transformation of social ontologies seeks the naturalization of the division of labor in the modern world-system according to race, sex, religion, and ethnicity. Coloniality identifies three main elements in the reproduction of power. First, it does not dominate by exclusively coercive means. It tries to change the affectional and cognitive structure of the colonized subject and turn it into a ‘new person,’ made in the image and likeness of the Western individual. Second, coloniality means the delegitimization of local forms of knowledge and system of beliefs. Non-acknowledgment of ‘other’ epistemologies has the aim of positioning the European epistemology as a fascination, desire, and will of colonized subjects (CastroGómez 2005; Quijano 2005). Finally, coloniality is the Western epistemological claim of objectivity, scientificity, and universality (Dussel 2005). To put it differently, the reproduction of the modern world-system consists on the transformation of non-Western sociocultures in order to eliminate non-Western social ontologies. From this perspective, the notion of coloniality contains three main ramifications: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being. The first refers to the normalization of the racialized structure of domination that emerged with the European arrival in the Americas in 1492 as reference to supposed uneven ontological differentiation between conquerors and conquered, but later expanded to the rest of the world with the complicity of biological sciences during the 18th and 19th centuries. Particularly, with the expansion of Europe around the globe, coloniality of power evidences the domination, transformation, and incorporation of non-Western collectivities into the racialized colonial structure. Coloniality of power identifies the fact that since the ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World,’ the reproduction of power in the peripheries of the modern world-system implies the normalization of the allocation of every collectivity in the racialized social structure (Quijano 2005). Second, coloniality of knowledge refers to the normalization and naturalization of the hierarchy between European and non-European epistemologies, languages, aesthetics, and forms of artistic and intellectual representations (Mignolo 2009). Coloniality of knowledge explains the mechanism to invisibilize and eliminate epistemological difference by naturalizing a hierarchy between knowledges. It is a device of power that, once naturalized, subalternizes non-Western forms of representation that become objects of knowledge, silenced and without the power of enunciation (Gómez-Quintero 2010). Third, and most importantly for the purpose of this chapter, coloniality of being has a direct link with the Cartesian nature of coloniality of knowledge, in which

70  Andrés Bateman

there is only one possible form of understanding and explaining the world. Considering that the Cartesian formulation cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’) implies that existence depends on a specific form of rational thinking, those collectivities with non-Cartesian rationalities do not exist on the same plane. Under this affirmation, the epistemological colonization becomes an ontological problem. The link between the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being lies in the idea that the human condition is only possible when an individual reasons in the Western manner, which means that any person with a non-Western epistemology does not exist in its fully human condition. As Maldonado-Torres suggests, the “Cartesian formulation privileges epistemology, which simultaneously hides both what could be regarded as the coloniality of knowledge (others do not think) and the coloniality of Being (others are not)” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 252). The negation of the existence of non-Western collectivities emerges from, or relates to, the negation of their epistemologies. The reduction of human existence to a particular way of reasoning, does not only deny the humanity of non-Western collectivities, but following the modern dualism between human and non-human, turns them into objects of study, transformation, and domination: In what was unmentioned and presupposed in Descartes’s formulation we find thus the fundamental link between the ‘colonialidad del saber’ (coloniality of knowledge) and the ‘colonialidad del ser’ (coloniality of being). The absence of rationality is articulated in modernity with the idea of the absence of Being in others. Misanthropic skepticism and racism work together with ontological exclusion. (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 247) To understand the implications of coloniality of being, Maldonado-Torres (2007) uses Heidegger’s concept of Dasein for its contribution in understanding ontology as contextual. Rather than thinking of ontology under a theological prism which “is seeking a more primordial interpretation of man’s Being towards God, prescribed by the meaning of faith itself and remaining within it” (Heidegger 1962, 30), Heidegger takes existence as grounded on particular spaces and historical moments. Therefore, it is necessary to think of human existence within a historical and social structure as the condition under which this being exists. There is not being without space and time and there is not being without being in the world. As Heidegger states: From what we have been saying, it follows that Being-in is not a ‘property’ which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could be just as well as it could with it. It is not the case that man “is” and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’ – a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never “proximally” an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 71

which sometimes has the inclination to take up a ‘relationship’ towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some other entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ‘meet up with’ Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world. (Heidegger 1962, 84) Understanding being as immersed in its context (Dasein) helps to comprehend the phenomenon of coloniality of being, inasmuch as the colonial condition forges the lived experiences and social ontologies of colonial collectivities. Taking time and space as determinant in the formation of social ontologies, exposes the colonial context as the scenario that divided existence between the fully human experience in the metropolitan centers and the colonized experience in the peripheries that is regarded as below the modern subject. The colonized lived existence is below the color line set by the modern discourse of race and represents what Fanon (2001) called the wretched of the earth (Maldonado-Torres 2007). Moreover, the color line defines the belonging to humanity. The racialized idea of Man introduce by Western modernity became the model for humans and humanity (Mignolo 2009); therefore, skin color began to define the closeness to a fully human existence and the specific living experiences under the colonial context. As Maldonado-Torres (2007) suggests, the “ ‘lighter’ one’s skin is, the closer to full humanity one is, and vice versa” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 244). The fact that the colonial context forges specific Dasein(e) to respond to the racialized modern world-system has two main implications. First, the allocation of every collectivity into the racialized modern world-system implies the problematization of non-Western sociocultures and the invisibilization and further elimination of non-Western social ontologies. Second, defining humanity according to the European living experience and phenotype surpasses the color line and creates a human line between those who have reached conditions of humanity, and those who have not. It creates a division between those in the zone of being, and those in the zone of nonbeing (Fanon 2009). The modern difference between the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing legitimizes the transformation and domination of non-Western collectivities, for they are below the human line. To the eyes of the Western Dasein, the wretched of the earth is a being that is ‘not there’ due to its racialized condition that gave place for a non-Western lived experience. This ‘not being there’ implies an extra ontological difference besides the difference between beings and their exteriority (trans-ontological difference) or between beings and other beings (ontological difference). It is an ontological difference between beings and what lies below, a semi-being, or what is dispensable (Maldonado-Torres 2007). This last ontological difference, called the sub-ontological or ontological colonial difference, is the relationship between a fully human, modern Dasein and a ‘sub-other.’

72  Andrés Bateman

The sub-ontological difference, as the denial of the human condition of nonWestern collectivities, is an eliminating of social ontologies and is the central feature that defines coloniality of being. Under this phenomenon, non-Western subjectivities and collectivities become a not-yet being or a sub-human being. As Maldonado-Torres (2007) summarizes: The coloniality of Being indicates those aspects that produce exception from the order of Being; it is as it were, the product of the excess of Being that in order to maintain its integrity and inhibit the interruption by what lies beyond Being produces its contrary, not nothing, but a non-human or rather an inhuman world. The coloniality of Being refers not merely to the reduction of the particular to the generality of the concept or any given horizon of meaning, but to the violation of the meaning of human alterity to the point where the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter. (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 257) Coloniality of being, as the negation of the non-Western human condition, reflects the universalizing of the Western experience of modernity and the incapacity of conceiving any social ontology different from itself. Furthermore, the misacknowledgement of non-Western social ontologies carries with it the disdain of non-Western sociocultures and the further division of sociocultures into two main clusters: those modern in the zone of being, and those non-modern in the zone of nonbeing. Inasmuch as social ontologies are fundamental for the emergence of sociocultures, the modern denial of the human condition of non-Western collectivities also means the denial of their systems of beliefs, practices, institutions, and habitus. The negation of the human condition of non-Western collectivities legitimizes the colonial intervention in territories inhabited by non-Western collectivities in order to expand and naturalize the modern world-system. The universalistic discourse of Western modernity demands the inclusion of colonized territories into a teleological understanding of progress that locates liberal capitalism as the end of history and Europe and North America as the societal models to follow (Fukuyama 1989). This means that under the discourse of developmentalism as the most recent expression of modernity’s social ontology, non-Western collectivities become the object of study and of interventions that, in denial of vernacular social ontologies, seek to transform, control, and naturalize colonial sociocultures to reproduce the modern world-system.

3  Understanding developmentalism as modernity As a new stage of Western modernity, the emergence of developmentalism after World War II represented a shift in the discourse over the socio-ontological difference, as it added levels of income and industrialization as the discursive metaphors to separate the zones of being and nonbeing. With US President Harry

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 73

S. Truman’s inaugural address of 1949, old imperialism died and a new period of economic, cultural, and social interventions under the name of development became the colonial banner to accomplish the expansive purpose of modernity (Escobar 2007). From that moment on, the problematization of the difference slightly changed its focus from racial and cultural features to the capacity of collectivities to participate in the global market. According to Rahnema (2010), after World War II, “for the first time in history, entire nations and countries came to be considered (and consider themselves) as poor, on the grounds that their overall income is insignificant in comparison to those now dominating the world economy” (Rahnema 2010, 178). This meant the economization of everyday life and a “forceful integration of vernacular societies into the world economy” (Rahnema 2010, 178). Just as the colonial difference positions the Western social ontology as superior to ‘others,’ the differentiating element became income and levels of productivity. This does not mean that the invention of the Third World (Escobar 2007) led to the abolition of the racialized international division of labor, but that there was a discursive shift in the definition and categorization of the difference. In other words, after the racialized definition of the ‘other’ lost its legitimacy, after Nazism applied it to the European subject (Césaire 1972), the discourse turned toward a differentiation based on living standards. From that moment on, the periphery of the modern world-system became the objective of interventions, not only for their cultural and racial traits, but also because of levels of income and their living standards. The inclusion of levels of income and living standards did not change the modern discourse over the difference, for there is not a socio-ontological variation on how the Western subjectivity refers and relates to non-Western collectivities. As a continuation of cogito ergo sum, developmentalism also fails to acknowledge non-Western social ontologies. This means that developmentalism reproduces the attitude of modernity toward socio-ontological and epistemological difference, and its inability to recognize humanity outside Western standards. Developmentalism, thus, reproduces the sub-ontological difference between Western and non-Western collectivities in which the Western subject is a fully human and developed Dasein, and the non-Western is an underdeveloped subject that has not fully reached its human condition, therefore ontologically inferior. However, contrary to previous forms of modernity under which non-Western collectivities would never reach a complete Dasein, developmentalism contemplates the unfulfilling promise of reaching the zone of being. This means that before developmentalism, the chances to become modern were null, for the ‘other’ had what seemed to be unmodifiable characteristics such as race and culture. On the contrary, developmentalism argues that if non-Western collectivities follow a specific path, they would have chances to develop and reach the zone of being. In short, developmentalism is a metaphor that “describes a process through which the potentialities of an object or organism are released, until it reaches its natural, complete, full-fledged form” (Esteva 2010, 3). The new discourse of modernity

74  Andrés Bateman

argues that the West is already in its full maturity and that following certain steps, underdeveloped regions of the world would be able to reach their adulthood. Moreover, as this biological metaphor indicates, whenever a non-Western collectivity does not follow the path set by developmentalism, it is pathological because it denies the teleology of biological maturation. Development was frustrated whenever the plant or the animal failed to fulfil its genetic programme, or substituted for it another. In such cases of failure, its growth was not development but rather an anomaly: pathological, and even anti-natural, behaviour. The study of these ‘monsters’ became critical for the formulation of the first biological theories. (Esteva 2010, 3) With this understanding of developmentalism in mind, the northern Colombian Pacific basin has been the site of a series of interventions to transform the territory and its inhabitants, in order to integrate them into the modern world-system; to mature them. These interventions have led to socioterritorial conflicts that threaten the compliance with Law 70, which permitted collective land ownership and the reproduction of the black social ontology and its sociocultures.

4 Developmentalism in the northern Colombian Pacific basin The developmental interventions causing socioterritorial conflicts cluster in megaprojects of infrastructure and extractivist economies. As for the first group, three main megaprojects characterize the discourse of developmentalism in the northern Colombian Pacific basin: the Port of Tribugá, the interoceanic canal, and the Pan-American Highway. The Port of Tribugá is a project dating back to the 1980s and intends to improve the connection between the Department of Antioquia and the coffee-growing axis to the Pacific Ocean and the international market. According to Sánchez Valencia (2018), promoter of the intervention, the project is not only a deep-water seaport, but it promises increasing Colombian international trade, generating direct employment, improving its competitiveness and, above all, boosting the socioeconomic development of the region in a sustainable environment. According to Prado Misas (2018), strategist of the project and former advisor to the Ministry of Transport of Colombia, the proposal entails a long-term infrastructure plan that intends to integrate the countries of the Caribbean and Pacific basins with the rest of South America and the world. The intervention is promoted as a “system of communication for the development of the Colombian Pacific region, in the context of articulation of the American continents, the Pacific basin and the Great Caribbean” (Prado Misas 2018, 66–67).4 Furthermore, according to Lucumí Rivas (2014), the construction of a deepwater seaport would receive the last generation of cargo ships and would decongest

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 75

the high flow and service time losses of the port of Buenaventura, currently the biggest port in Colombia. The Port of Tribugá would reach 20 meters deep after dredged, and the calm waters of the cove of Tribugá would allow the maneuvering of large draft ships, for it does not have river mouths that would fill it with sediment. Likewise, the area has potential for urban development due to its flat land of 2,800 hectares that would allow the construction of a city with more than 500,000 inhabitants. It would be the creation of a new metropolitan port equipped with all the key infrastructures for modern and global competitiveness (energy, airport, university, hospital complex, research centres, financial institutions, digital infrastructure, etc.). Designed in terms of sustainability and supported by innovative models of management, governance, ecological respect, culturalethnic respect, and with responsible territorial developmental policies. (Proyecto Arquímedes S.A. 2011, 2)5 Second, the interoceanic canal has been desirable since Spanish rule, for it has been a key to controlling the main commercial routes in the Americas. After Spain lost the dominance of the region in the 19th century, the United States, France, and England disputed the construction of a canal across México, Nicaragua, or Colombia (Mosquera 2013). In the end, it was the United States, capitalizing on the separation of Panama from Colombia in 1903, which built and opened the Panama Canal in 1914. Nonetheless, throughout the 20th century, the United States made unaccomplished plans to open a new canal by creating a series of commissions to assess alternatives to the Panama Canal (Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission 1970). More recently, even after the expansion of the latter finished in 2016, there have been important efforts to build a new canal in Colombia connecting the rivers of Atrato and Truandó in the Department of Chocó. This work that seeks a passage without locks for the transit of Post-Suez vessels, and that due to its complexity would overcome the challenges of the expansion of the Panama Canal (2016) and the Suez Canal (2015), would not only save the historical debt with the Colombian Pacific, but it would also substantially increase Colombia’s GDP. (Duque Escobar 2018)6 The last and probably most iconic infrastructure project is the Pan-American Highway that seeks to connect South America with North America. During the Fifth International Conference of American States in Santiago de Chile in 1923, the United States “proposed a hemispheric highway system that would pave permanent road links to every national capital in the Americas” (Miller 2014, 190). Despite the numerous efforts carried out by the United States and some Latin American countries during the 20th century, to this day, the highway is not yet

76  Andrés Bateman

completed. The missing section to finish the “dream of uniting North and South America by convenient means of overland communication” (Kelchner 1938, 723) is the Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia. Since the conception of the project, politicians and planners were aware of the characteristics of the Darién Gap and the difficulties the highway would face in that region. Depicted as a non-Western territory, committees and experts refer to the region as an obstacle to progress. Furthermore, notions such as taming the Darién Gap illustrate the relationship Western modernity has had with the region. In 1938, Warren Kelchner wrote in the Foreign Affairs Magazine that from about 50 miles south of Panama City to the Department of Antioquia in Colombia, “a distance of about 300 miles, the country is largely swamp land which few if any white men have ever penetrated” (Kelchner 1938, 727). The area shared by both countries represents one of the most biodiverse regions in the world and is the territory of different indigenous and black collectivities that have inhabited the territory for centuries. Moreover, nowadays, most of the Darién Gap is part of two national parks in both Colombia and Panama: the Darién National Park and the Los Katíos National Park, respectively. Due to its environmental significance, Molano (2017) argues that since the 1990s, with the emergence of environmentalism as a global movement, the PanAmerican Highway has come up against a ‘green consciousness.’ Moreover, in 1993, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) declared the conservation of the Darién Gap as one of its main objectives, and in 1994, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared Los Katíos National Park a World Heritage site (Molano 2017). With reference to extractivist economies, mining, forestry, and agroindustry (within which I include coca-leaf production) all stand out. Under their own conditions, each of these economic activities represent socioterritorial conflicts because all of them materialize a strategy through which “businessmen derive profits by making use of collective territories, [besides] they all have the characteristic that land appropriation is transitory and has no pretensions to exercise control over it for new uses” (Villa 2014, 72).7 With the exception of agroindustry, the socioterritorial conflict related to extractivism is not the dispute over the territory. On the contrary, mining – the epitome of the extractivist model – exercises a temporary control of the territory until that particular natural resource is exhausted. The particular case of mining presents two intertwined facets: first, the illegal occupation of indigenous and black territories by transnational companies; and second, the “legal framework that undermines the labour rights of artisanal miners” (Estrada Álvarez et al. 2013, 72). Estrada Álvarez et al. (2013) argue that while the government promotes large-scale mining by giving legal, tax, and security guarantees to transnational companies, it declares traditional and artisanal mining illegal. Additionally, the authors claim that exploitation requests currently cover an area of 2,738,108 hectares, equivalent to 59% of the total territory of the Department of Chocó (Estrada Álvarez et al. 2013). In the same vein, Villa (2014) argues that in Chocó, by the beginning of the 21st century,

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 77

gold mining represented 5% of the GDP of the department, and by 2012 it represented 35%. In the case of agroindustry, the most important products of monocultural extractivism are bananas for export, palm oil used in different industries, and coca leaf to produce and export cocaine. Among the environmental and human effects of these industries are the obstruction and canalization of waterbodies, water pollution, deforestation, desiccation of rivers, soil contamination, and other ecosystemic imbalances that not only affect the environment, but also make it impossible for the subsistence of collectivities in territories occupied by the industry. Furthermore, beyond the environmental and social effects of the agroindustry, this economic activity illegally occupies plots of land belonging to black collectivities. In the case of the palm oil industry, Estrada Álvarez et al. (2013) argues that in 2005, 93% of the total area occupied by industry belonged to collective territories. To close the section, there are two main elements to highlight. First, infrastructure megaprojects and extractive economies are accompanied by the illegal occupation of land and the violent displacement of black collectivities. Accumulation by dispossession entails periods of violence, massive displacements of collectivities, and the usufruct of natural resources. In this sense, the control over these territories, besides being militarily strategic and a way to control drug trafficking routes, is also an opportunity to generate income for armed groups (Villa 2014). On the other hand, as analyzed in the next section, the use of violence in the expansion of developmentalism reveals the socio-ontological dispute between developmentalism and black collectivities.

5 T he dark side of developmentalism: deterritorialization in the northern Colombian Pacific basin The use of violence in the northern Colombian Pacific basin responds to the subontological difference between the fully modern Dasein and the underdeveloped subject that has not fully reached its human condition. According to De Sousa Santos (2015), there is a gulf dividing the mechanisms to solve social conflict in the zone of being, and the zone of nonbeing; that is, different strategies to deal with conflict in the core and in the periphery of the modern world-system. Since the inhabitants of the metropolis have already embraced full humanity, it is through the dichotomy of regulation and emancipation that problems are solved. That means that what operates in the resolution of conflicts in the zone of being are codes of law, rights, negotiation spaces, and political actions that have the humanity of the individuals at their core. On the other hand, in the zone of nonbeing, the regulation/emancipation paradigm is unthinkable, for it rests on the assumption that the ‘other’ is a semi-being. In these territories, as a consequence of the invisibilization of non-Western social ontologies, the contempt of non-Western sociocultures, and the non-recognition of the humanity of their inhabitants, the dichotomy of appropriation/violence

78  Andrés Bateman

prevails (De Sousa Santos 2015). This means that the resolution of social conflicts bases its strategies on violence, deterritorialization, the transformation of sociocultures, and the further elimination of social ontologies. The particular case of the northern Colombian Pacific basin illustrates the dichotomy of appropriation/violence as the mechanism to solve social conflict in the zone of nonbeing, regardless of the collective legal achievements acquired by black communities in the Pacific basin with Law 70. Since the late 20th century, 429,624 individuals have been displaced from their territories and 11,701 have been assassinated in the region (Unidad para la Atención y la Reparación Integral a las Víctimas 2019).8 However, in a country with a long history of conflict, the use of violence in the expansion of developmentalism in the region is rather recent. Agudelo (2001) argues that it was not until the arrival of paramilitary armies in the 1990s that violence reached new levels. According to the author, with the endorsement of the Colombian national army, the deployment of a paramilitary presence aimed to break the new limitations to extractivism set by Law 70, set up a new territorial power and establish developmental activities. Apropos, according to some inhabitants of Nuquí, the construction of the Port of Tribugá, still in its planning stage, already increased violence in the territory and deterritorialization of collectivities. That is why I say, in Tribugá there has been two displacements . . . do you believe that the two displacements of Tribugá have been in vain? No. That has a political component. It is political and there are many things to come, and they will not be the only two displacements that will happen. Many displacements are going to happen because they need all the people from Tribugá to leave to make the port. (Inhabitant Nuquí 2 – April 2019) Considering that in the zone of nonbeing, it is the dichotomy of appropriation/ violence that has become the mechanism to solve social conflicts, the expansion of developmentalism does not recognize the legal achievements made under the dichotomy regulation/emancipation. This means that the legal progress accomplished by black collectivities with Law 70 does not necessarily represent an obstacle to the expansion of developmentalism. Not recognizing the legal provisions responds to the colonial socio-ontological difference, and its further condemnation of non-Western sociocultures. That means that developmentalism does not recognize non-Western practices, institutions, and habitus as legitimate, invisibilizes them and denies their existence in the definition and uses of the territory. Then, the Community Council is not worth it, the Indigenous Council is not worth (it), nothing is worth it because 5 years before, they take us out of here. How? They create a war here, they shoot two rifles and everyone here is gone, we leave. That is the history of Colombia. (Inhabitant Nuquí 3 and activist – April 2019)

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 79

The invisibilization of non-Western institutions and the use of violence in the expansion of developmentalism aims to transform black sociocultures and the further elimination of their social ontology. In particular, deterritorialization means a structural hindrance in the reproduction of the black social ontology. This occurs in two main ways. First, it means the displacement of collectivities from villages to marginalized sectors of cities, where sociocultures are forced to adapt to new living conditions. Second, deterritorialization also means the transformations of spaces and contexts that allowed the emergence and reproduction of a black Dasein. If the physical characteristics of a certain space hold the conditions for the emergence of a particular social ontology and its sociocultures, the transformation of the space precludes the reproduction of local sociocultures and social ontologies. Even when violent displacement does not happen, but territories become spaces of extraction, the material rooting of non-Western social ontologies loses its ground for there is no place to reproduce sociocultures. The transformation of the space means the transformation of sociocultures and the subsequent elimination of the social ontology. At least the fishing, as it is today, is artisanal, but it will not be that way anymore. . . . The port will come, irrupts and everything breaks. All that knowledge is going to be lost because this urban and developmental project brings a rupture of social cohesion because they begin to deconfigure the existing social fabric. (Interview at San Pacho Festival – April 2019) Restrictions in the reproduction of sociocultures through the expansion of developmentalism, deterritorialization, and violence is the exercise of power on both macro and micro levels. The elimination of non-Western social ontologies demands not only control over economic and political spheres (macro level of power), but also the transformation of sociocultures and the transformation of aspirations, desires, and longings of non-Western collectivities (micro level of power). The exercise of power on a micro level has a special impact on the young population, for they are considered to be more prone to the mainstream media influence promoting mass consumption, easy money, and other aspirational practices that belong to the Western socioculture. In this regard, a revealing example of the use of violence and deterritorialization to insert the northern Pacific basin into the modern world-system, in which young men are the main protagonists, is drug trafficking. To some young inhabitants of the region, drug trafficking from Colombia to Panama is a ‘fast’ way to reach the consumption levels developmentalism demands and imagines as necessary to reach a valued form of Dasein. Called pesca blanca (‘white fishing’), because fishermen collect packs of cocaine scattered in the ocean and take them to Panama, drug trafficking represents the fastest – but most dangerous – means of reaching the age of mass consumption suggested by

80  Andrés Bateman

Rostow (1959). Among others, the case of drug trafficking combines different elements through which power inserts individuals and collectivities into the dynamic of violence, into the capitalist market economy and into a body of aspirations that hinders the reproduction of local sociocultures and social ontologies. And many young men lost, many young men (have been) murdered by that drug issue, which has shown them that it is the way for them to get easy money. The city model brought the belief that money is the solution of every problem, that it is the solution for everything, and that the world moves through money. It is making people like robots thinking that money is only the way (out). (Inhabitant Nuquí 2 – April 2019) The transformation of sociocultures is already visible in some of the towns of the southern Pacific basin where the Colombian historical conflict, drug trafficking, and coca-leaf plantations have a longer presence. The town of Tumaco, close to the border with Ecuador, concentrates the most hectares with coca-leaf plantations in Colombia, and is one of the most important ports in the drug trafficking routes. One night I was talking with some young people who had been in their ‘things’ [referring to drug dealing] and one of them said. “Man, I do not buy shoes in Tumaco, I buy shoes outside.” They are shoes of 500,000 pesos [approx. 130€]. They send someone to buy three pairs of shoes or make a trip and buy three pairs of shoes. Of course, that is his world, his aspiration. Then get that money, no matter taking a risk with a trip to Panama or Costa Rica because he needs the money to give himself his cravings. That is his world, the world he found. Get money to buy fine things, expensive things to be well. (Inhabitant Nuquí 3 and activist – April 2019) The new world mentioned in the last quote is the result of systematic interventions to change sociocultures and eliminate social ontologies. Coupled with violence and deterritorialization, the misacknowledgement of non-Western social ontologies translates into categorizing non-Western sociocultures as backward, pre-modern, and isolated. In order to reproduce the modern world-system, developmentalism labels vernacular practices, habitus, and institutions as problematic, impoverishing, and underdeveloped. [The hegemonic discourse says] your way of life is bad, so that makes you feel so low in esteem, so low in capacity that you cannot face others. And that conditions you. (Inhabitant Nuquí 2 – April 2019) Labeling non-Western life standards as underdeveloped has the main intention of transforming sociocultures and eliminating social ontologies to make black

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 81

collectivities and their territories subjects of the capitalist market economy and transform them into an asset in the production and reproduction of capital. This conversion into capitalist assets means the loss of autonomy of black collectivities, total dependence on the market economy, and the transformation of territories into scenarios for the reproduction of Western social ontology. Transforming the context that gives place to the reproduction of the black social ontology means creating the material roots for the establishment of the modern/capitalist/Western social ontology. [With mono-cropping] the expectation is having a harvest in October, to cut all the banana crops, go out to the market, sell it and have some money in the pocket. That is not the logic of the black [Afro-Colombian person], nor is it the logic of the indigenous [person]. The logic is not to have the pocket full of money because if I have the pocket full of money I will drink and abandon my wife and abandon my children and I abandon my land and abandon everything. No, the logic is to have food on a daily basis. (Promoter of Law 70 of 1993 – April 2019) To close this section, it is important to highlight the dialectical relationship between the macro and micro levels of power. Evident in the use of violence and deterritorialization as the mechanisms to control both the political economic sphere and the subjective sphere, by intervening in these territories and changing the uses of the space, developmentalism eliminates the conditions for the reproduction of local institutions, habitus, and practices that reproduce the black social ontology.

6 Conclusions By analyzing the nature and scope of developmentalism as a discursive practice that goes beyond the economic and political realms, it is possible to identify its complex field of action. Besides dealing with the macro level of power, developmentalism also exercises the micro level of power by molding the imaginaries, expectations, and ‘common sense’ of collectivities in the peripheries of the modern world-system. The exercise of the micro level of power materializes through the problematization of non-Western sociocultures and has the main objective of eliminating non-Western social ontologies. The elimination of non-Western social ontologies responds to the colonial socio-ontological difference that links Western reasoning to a fully human experience, and non-Western reason to a sub-human experience. In response to the Cartesian premise that links existence with a particular form of reasoning, collectivities with non-Cartesian epistemologies acquire a sub-human condition and become the objective of the coloniality of being. In this sense, an epistemological formulation of human existence becomes a denial of the humanity of collectivities with non-Western epistemologies. The Cartesian formulation

82  Andrés Bateman

“I think; therefore I am” becomes “I do not think under the Western parameters; therefore, I do not exist.” The sub-human condition of non-Western collectivities legitimizes developmental interventions such as infrastructure projects, mining, and agroindustry that, coupled with violence and deterritorialization, seek to expand capitalism and transform vernacular sociocultures. The existence under a sub-human condition, or in the zone of nonbeing, means the presence of violence and deterritorialization as the transversal mechanism exercised by developmentalism to transform the material roots of social ontologies and preclude the reproduction of local sociocultures. The transformation of the territories produces the elimination of specific social ontologies for it eliminates the contextual conditions that give rise to a specific Dasein. In the particular case of the northern Colombian Pacific basin, the misacknowledgement of the black social ontology translates into a series of interventions that seek to transform the territory. To return to the first quote of the chapter, transforming the territory becomes a mechanism to eliminate black social ontology. The conversion of the territory into a capitalist asset contradicts the systems of classification, sets of meanings, and symbolic values subconsciously intrinsic in local collectivities. I argue that by eliminating the material root that gave rise to the black social ontology, sociocultures would lose their fundament and collectivities would become, as asserted in the quote, white. Keeping further discussion in mind, it is important to highlight that the transformation of territories and the further elimination of non-Western social ontologies in the northern Pacific basin reflect a complex form of inequality that goes beyond the unfulfilling promises of developmentalism. Following the claim of cognitive justice made by De Sousa Santos (2015) that seeks for a horizontal relation of every epistemology, it is necessary to assert the existence and validity of every social ontology regardless of its fundamental differences to the social ontology Western modernity deems universal. That means that fighting inequality requires the recognition of socio-ontological multiplicity, and efforts for the reproduction of vernacular sociocultures and social ontologies, as means to secure localized well-being and territorial autonomy. In short, fighting inequality requires not only thinking in terms of economic justice, nor cognitive justice alone, but also the constitution of a socio-ontological justice that challenges “the modernist ontology of universalism in favour of a multiplicity of possible worlds” (Kothari et al. 2018, XVIII).

Notes 1 The original versions of the interviews were in Spanish. Here I present my own free translation. 2 Departments are the political and administrative subdivisions in Colombia. 3 I take the definitions of social ontology and socioculture from Chapter 2 of this book, written by Baumann and Rehbein. 4 Henceforth, my own translation from: D. Prado Misas. 2018. “El Plan Arquímides.” Anales de Ingeniería 941: 64–69.

Developmentalism and misacknowledgement 83 5 Henceforth, my own translation from: Proyecto Arquímedes S. A. 2011. “Nuquí, Capital de Base Portuaria.” Proyecto Arquímides S.A. Boletín Enero 2011 3 (6): 1–12. 6 Henceforth, my own translation from: G. Duque Escobar. 2018. “El Canal Interoceánico Atrato-Truandó.” La Patria, 30 July. www.lapatria.com/opinion/columnas/ gonzalo-duque-escobar/el-canal-interoceanico-atrato-truando 7 Henceforth, my own translation from: W. Villa. 2014. “Resguardos y territorios colectivos en el Pacífico colombiano frente a la economía extractiva.” Semillas, 70–73. 8 Unidad para la Atención y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas is an institution created in 2012 as part of Law 1448 on Victims and Land Restitution.

References Agudelo, Carlos Efrén. 2001. “El Pacífico Colombiano: De ‘Remanso de Paz’ a Escenario Estratégico Del Conflicto Armado. Las Transformaciones de La Región y Algunas Respuestas de Sus Poblaciones Frente a La Violencia.” Cuadernos de Desarrollo Rural 46: 7–37. Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission. 1970. Interoceanic Canal Study 1970. Washington, DC: Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 2005. La Hybris Del Punto Cero. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Césaire, Aimé. 1972. Discourse on Colonialism. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2015. Una Epistemología Del Sur. Buenos Aires: CLACSO & Siglo XXI Editores. Duque Escobar, Gonzálo. 2018. “El Canal Interoceánico Atrato-Truandó.” La Patria, 30 July, Opinión. www.lapatria.com/opinion/columnas/gonzalo-duque-escobar/el-canalinteroceanico-atrato-truando. Dussel, Enrique. 2005. “Europa, Modernidad y Eurocentrismo.” In La Colonialidad Del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: Lander, Edgardo (comp.), UNESCO-CLACSO. Escobar, Arturo. 2007. La Invención Del Tercer Mundo: Construcción y Deconstrucción Del Desarrollo. Colonialidad, Modernidad and Descolonialidad. Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana. Esteva, Gustavo. 2010. “Development.” In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, edited by Sachs Wolfgang. London and New York: Zed Books. Estrada Álvarez, Jairo, Sergio Moreno Rubio, Freddy Ordóñez Gómez, Catherine Moore Torres, Julián Eduardo Naranjo, and Carlos Andrés Jiménez. 2013. Procesos SocioTerritoriales Pacífico: Itinerarios y Tendencias. Estudios Socio-Territoriales. Bogotá: ILSA, Instituto para una Sociedad y un Derecho Alternativos. Fanon, Franz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. Modern Classics. London: Penguin Books. Fanon, Franz. 2009. Piel Negra, Máscaras Blancas. Madrid: Akal. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16: 3–18. Gómez-Quintero, Juan David. 2010. “La Colonialidad Del Ser y Del Saber: La Mitologización Del Desarrollo En América Latina.” El Ágora USB 10 (1): 87–105. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Kelchner, Warren. 1938. “The Pan American Highway.” Foreign Affairs 16 (4): 723–727. Kothari, Ashish, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta. 2018. Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Authors Up Front.

84  Andrés Bateman Lucumí Rivas, Germán. 2014. “El Chocó Se Abre a Colombia.” Anales de Ingeniería 126 (929): 52–63. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 240–270. Mignolo, Walter. 2009. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Latin America Otherwise. Languages, Empires, Nations. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Miller, Shawn W. 2014. “Minding the Gap: Pan-Americanism’s Highway, American Environmentalism, and Remembering the Failure to Close the Darién Gap.” Environmental History 19 (2): 189–216. Molano, Alfredo. 2017. De Río En Río: Vistazo a Los Territorios Negros. Bogotá: Aguilar. Mosquera, José E. 2013. “El Gran Darién y Los Canales Interoceánicos.” Semana. www. semana.com/opinion/articulo/el-gran-darien-los-canales-interoceanicos-opinion-josemosquera/359443-3. Oslender, Ulrich. 2004. “Geografías de Terror y Desplazamiento Forzado En El Pacífico Colombiano: Conceptualizando El Problema y Buscando Respuestas.” In Conflicto e (in) Visibilidad. Retos En Los Estudios de La Gente Negra En Colombia, edited by Eduardo Restrepo and Rojas Axel, 35–52. Popayán: Universidad del Cauca. Prado Misas, Darío. 2018. “El Plan Arquímides.” Anales de Ingeniería 120 (941): 64–69. Proyecto Arquímedes S. A. 2011. “Nuquí, Capital de Base Portuaria.” Boletín Proyecto Arquímides S.A. 3 (6): 1–12. Quijano, Aníbal. 2005. “Colonialidad Del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In La Colonialidad Del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas, 201–246. Buenos Aires: Lander, Edgardo (comp.), UNESCO-CLACSO. Rahnema, Majid. 2010. “Poverty.” In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs. London and New York: Zed Books. Romero, Mario Diego. 2017. Poblamiento y Sociedad En El Pacífico Colombiano. Siglos XVI al XVIII. Cali: Universidad del Valle, Editorial Facultad de Humanidades. Rostow, Walt Whitman. 1959. “The Stages of Economic Growth.” The Economic History Review 12 (1): 1–16. Sánchez Valencia, Martín Emilio. 2018. “Cómo Avanza El Desarrollo Del Megaprojecto Portuario de Tribugá?” Red Acción. Revista de La Cámara de Comercio Del Chocó 1 (2): 12–13. Unidad para la Atención y la Reparación Integral a las Víctimas. 2019. “Víctimas Por Tipo de Hecho Victimizante.” www.unidadvictimas.gov.co/es/registro-unicode-victimas-ruv/37394. Villa, William. 2014. “Resguardos y Territorios Colectivos En El Pacífico Colombiano Frente a La Economía Extractiva.” Semillas, Conflictos ambientales en Colombia, 70–73.

Chapter 6

The social ontology of caste Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

1 Introduction From the perspective of contemporary Western societies, caste is the ultimate ‘Other.’ It is the symbol of the ‘Orient’ and seems to embody the ‘essence’ of India. This implies, on the one hand, the claim that Western norms are universal and, on the other hand, that non-Western social ontologies are exotic, singular, and deviant. From this point of view, the ‘rest’ has to ‘develop’ in order to ‘catch up’ with the West and to live up to its norms. Caste is a prime example of what is typically presented as ‘wrong with’ the rest. It symbolizes underdevelopment, non-democratic structures, inhumanity, a precapitalist economy, and oppression of the individual. We do not argue that caste is something positive. We need, however, to counter the persistent colonial assumptions and imagination about different ways of being in the world. By deconstructing the formation of exotic ‘others’ such as caste, we also challenge the reproductive epistemological mechanisms that are responsible for it. In other words, by unthinking Indian social ontology, we may be able to rethink it. An excellent starting point is Louis Dumont’s (1970) conception of the Indian as “homo hierarchicus.” Dumont elevated this stereotype to the status of an influential and rather coherent theory. In his attempt to understand caste, Dumont rightly tries to move away from Western concepts, most importantly class, but replaces them by opposing the West and the rest. This is how he developed an all-encompassing theory of hierarchy by constructing it based on a pure–impure binary (Dumont 1970, xxi). In the spirit of the period, Dumont conceptualized caste as an all-encompassing institution of Indian society. Once he established this core principle, the rest followed from his analysis that the basis of this order was the Hindu ‘religion.’ Such an all-encompassing conceptualization was typical of the structuralist trend, popular at the time in the domain of sociology. The structuralist temptation is easy to understand: When the analyst sets up the framework of investigation in this particular way, India becomes a perfect object of research. Not only that, but structuralism also provides the analyst with the conceptual tools for developing or supporting another binary; namely, the West and the rest. Since self-understanding

86  Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

and understanding-others took (and continue to take) different forms for the West and the rest, a careful analyst could emancipate his or her understanding from structural limitations and take a fresh look at social existence as a whole by decoding how the ‘other’ makes sense of his or her existence. From this perspective, ‘the other’s’ mode of being and understanding is fundamentally different. ‘The other’s’ sense of history, self, and others are so radically different that their self-understanding and understanding-others is nothing familiar. In this scheme, the West is historical; it has a sense of history, which is supported by evidence. India, as the ideal type of the rest, is seen as ahistorical; although it has a sense of the past, it is not based on evidence. Western peoples had developed a strong sense of individual selves, in contrast to Indian peoples, who had developed a holistic understanding of the self; an individual’s existence made existential sense only in the context of the community. Finally, mostly as a result of the aforementioned two qualities of the Western mode of being, while the Western peoples are egalitarian, Indian peoples are seen as hierarchical. The way structuralist sociology sets its framework of analysis makes it possible to create ‘the other’ successfully. If this all-compassing social-ontological analysis is responsible for creating the West–rest binary, one can challenge it by following a contrasting approach. India has to be studied just like any other society. Caste is a component of a social ontology, which, in principle, does not differ from any other social ontology. In order to uncover this ontology, one should start from the Indian perspective rather than from the Western norm. In Section 2 of the chapter, we explain the term caste and the original concepts used to designate it, namely varna and jati. The following section is dedicated to their historical evolution over the last three centuries. Against this background, we then try to determine which characteristics of the caste system continue to exist, and which configurations they form. The last section of the chapter deals with how the caste system influences the social ontology of South Asia and the everyday lives of people.

2 Caste, varna, and jati ‘Caste’ is not an Indian term. It was introduced by Portuguese seafarers in the early 16th century. The Portuguese spoke of ‘casta’ because they discovered dividing lines between local communities when they established their trading posts along the Indian coast. They thought the main function of this social institution was to maintain a pure bloodline, since castes are supposed to be endogamous (Teltumbde 2010, 12). This sociobiological reading of the institution made sense in the framework of Christian philosophy in the late-scholastic period, while there is no indication that it made sense in an Indian framework. However, Western colonial powers continued to use the word and, in the end, it was adopted by those Indians who used English as an everyday language. General use of the word ‘casta’ after this hermeneutical intervention might also suggest that, despite widespread assumptions, the social ontologies of the early

The social ontology of caste 87

and late colonizers (namely, the Portuguese in the 16th century and the British in the 20th century, respectively), shared fundamental similarities with each other and, to a certain degree, also with the Indians. It would otherwise be difficult to explain how a concept such as ‘casta,’ which was familiar to the Portuguese selfunderstanding of social reality, could be so successfully utilized to make sense of a seemingly radically different Indian social reality. Indians and non-Indians, colonizer and colonized, as well as different sections of the Indian population, contributed historically to the social construction of caste and influenced and shaped our present view of the concept in multidimensional ways. This historical social construction borrowed as much from misunderstanding as it did from understanding. Although it is easier to speculate as to how differences between social ontologies of various peoples might have contributed to this social construction, similarities shared by social ontologies, which are always harder to identify due to self-centric thinking, played as much a role as differences in the formation and reformation of caste. Without taking these points into account, one will not be able to understand current discussions on caste. From this viewpoint, any attempt to reconstruct an original, indigenous interpretation of caste will be misguided. When and where would we locate the ‘original’ definition of caste? Certainly, caste existed before the arrival of the Portuguese, but it varied greatly between regions and over time. Available documents are scarce and shaped by immediate interests (Dirks 1992). According to a revisionist interpretation of caste by Hindu nationalists, who aim to make caste fit into the world of neoliberalism and meritocracy, there was a golden era during which India excelled in all aspects of life. This ideal society emerged out of competition, in which the best prevailed. The Brahmins, especially in their cooperation with the British, are said to have led to the decay of the system and thereby to India’s weak position in the world-system. In fact, before the Portuguese introduced the word ‘casta’ to Indian vocabulary, Indians used other words to refer to the same institution. The two Indian terms which were used to signify what caste referred to were varna and jati. While varna describes a clear hierarchical order, such as a class or rank system, jati also includes aspects of cooperation, community, and everyday practice. The institution of jati has changed incessantly over the centuries and is still undergoing strong transformations. The varna order, on the other hand, seems to have been much more stable over time while not playing a significant role in Indian practice and existing largely in the confines of texts, theory, and colonial rule. The concepts of varna and jati provide more space for incorporating empirical reality than the homogenizing category of caste. Even with such a broad categorical system as varna and jati, it is hard to provide evidence for nationalist claims that desperately try to connect their revisionist view of history with a liberal and supposedly meritocratic order. As will be argued in the following, hierarchy did play a role before the colonial era, but it did so together with elements of cooperation and collectivism. Later depiction of caste as a purely hierarchical system dismisses this reality. These characteristics have changed historically, have never

88  Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

applied to the entire population of India, and must be interpreted in the context of other social institutions (Dirks 1992). When one hears the word ‘caste’ outside South Asia, it usually refers to the varna order. In principle, four varnas are distinguished: priests (Brahmin), warriors (Kshatriya), merchants (Vaishya), and farmers (Shudra). The four varnas were already mentioned in the Vedic scriptures written sometime after 1200 BC. They have been traced back to Indo-Aryan immigration to South Asia and linked to the order used by Aryan peoples of the time: warriors, priests, and peasants (Bose and Jalal 1998, 10). Thomas Piketty (2019, 370) repeats this claim in his latest book. Whether there was Indo-Aryan immigration to South Asia and whether it introduced the correspondent social order is controversial in research today. It is much more likely that this order characterized only a small region of South Asia for a limited period of time, rather than its having been imposed on the entire subcontinent by invaders who did not even establish an encompassing empire. In the Vedas, the varnas are clearly explained (Rigveda 10.90). The order is outlined with reference to two characteristics that are still central to caste today: First, a hierarchical stratification, similar to a corporative society; second, religious legitimation for such stratification. The classification of the varnas is based on ritual purity. In this sense, the higher class is declared ‘purer’ than the lower class. Below, and excluded from, the varna order are groups that are declared ‘unclean’ and ‘impure.’ The members of the four varnas are not allowed to share water or food with them, as they would be ‘contaminated.’ This may sound unacceptable to a Westerner, but the social ontology of class in a capitalist society is not much different in that people do not want to associate with lower classes and even express varying degrees of contempt for or disgust toward them. In South Asia itself, the social ontology of caste usually refers to jati more than to varna. The term jati can be translated as ‘birth.’ A given jati can be assigned to one of the four varnas or to the so-called untouchables, but such an assignment is contested and changeable. The assignment of a person to a jati, on the other hand, generally happens through birth. Today, a jati is almost always associated with a varna, but before colonial times this was not necessarily the case as people often knew only their jati and often not even that. The Chinese traveler Faxian (1886) mentions several jatis in his Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (around 400 CE), but does not use the terms varna and jati, instead only mentioning the Vaishyas and the Brahmins. Even today, Kshatriyas are only found in a few regions of India, while Brahmins often count as a jati in practice. There are thousands of jatis in South Asia. Many of them are characterized by a profession, others by a particular religion, local origin, or tribe. What the jati system means in practice is a local and mostly hierarchical configuration of communities. Historically, tribes or other communities probably entered spaces already occupied by other communities and either merged or formed an unequal relationship with them. In many cases, the unequal relationship would imply services by the dominated community or communities to the dominant. In recent centuries, this mainly revolved around the dichotomy of owners of land versus

The social ontology of caste 89

landless communities, who were forced to work for the landowners. In any event, the configuration of jatis remains confined to a small locality, or even a village, up to this day. The jati determines the possible spouse, profession, rituals, status, and many aspects of everyday practice. “The local subcaste, or jati, established by ascription the group within which a person might marry and, more broadly, the social, economic, and moral circumstances of his life.” (Rudolph and Rudolph 1999, 29) The jati constitutes a community that is ideally endogamous and eats together. It constitutes a collective that is practical in everyday life, symbolically reinforced, and religiously legitimate. Even today, many partner advertisements in the press and on the internet still mention the desired jati of the partner. In earlier times, this was not necessary because partnerships were established within the immediate vicinity and the people in question were known to belong to the community. Jatis have connections to similar groups in other villages and often cover several villages such that they form a translocal community (Srinivas 1955). These aspects of partnership and marriage are not peculiar to India, but characterize many communities around the world. In the course of migration and globalization, the jati has spread across large territories and ultimately the entire globe. Jatis have become global, but in earlier times, they were open communities and have changed significantly throughout history (Rudolph and Rudolph 1999). The number, size and type of jatis differ from village to village. In Punjab and Rajasthan there are numerous villages inhabited by only one jati – sometimes a caste of farmers, sometimes agricultural specialists such as cattle herders. Toward the center of India, the average number of jatis in any given village is increasing. However, the configuration of jatis is always different. The allocation of a jati to a varna varies, as well. It is by no means certain that the varna order within the village is actually structured as in the Vedic literature: It depends on local configurations of numbers, power, wealth, political functions and history (Dirks 1992). The members of high varnas are mostly landowners, often Brahmins, which is the main reason for their high status. Where they are not landowners, Brahmins can have a low status (Jodhka 2012, 42). In some villages, the Brahmins can even be considered a poor and despised group. In a typical village, there are landowners, traders, specialists, farmers, workers, and Dalits (Marriott 1955), all of whom belong to different castes. The castes’ residential areas are separated from each other (Tirtha 1996, 64). The groups are connected through patrimonial relationships, land ownership, and money lending, but also through ritual relationships. Jati and varna are, according to the textual understanding, caused by karma, which determines the form in which one is reborn in the next life. When one is born again as a human being, birth takes place as member of a caste, which, in turn, determines the possibilities and duties of the person in present life. Karma teaching plays an important role in the legitimation of the caste system, and has also found its way into general social ontology. Karma teaching’s significance for everyday life and the reflective occupation with caste should not be overestimated, just as is the case for Christian concepts in Western societies.

90  Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

3  Colonialism and caste The exact structure of the caste system in everyday life has only been well documented for the past century or so. The villages, each with their own configuration of jatis, were largely integrated into principalities and other small state structures in the Middle Ages (which, in South Asia, roughly corresponded to the European Middle Ages). Each principality or state also developed its own caste order, which resulted from the particular configuration of villages, the structure of the power center, and the relations between the units (Ludden 2002). Many divergent forces combined to shape the particular caste configuration in each place (Dirks 1992). A configuration can be interpreted as a combination of two sociocultures, namely the village and the state. Each village, basically up to the present, has its own version of caste and its own caste structure, as outlined in the preceding section. This structure was transformed when the village was integrated into a state-like entity. However, state-like entities appeared and disappeared in South Asia over a period of several millennia before colonial times (Ludden 2002). Furthermore, there was a huge variety of political organizations, from monarchies to republics, in precolonial India, each of which re-shaped caste configurations on the village level in a particular way. For example, the caste system was transformed by the Mughals, who ruled northern South Asia from the 16th century onwards. The Mughals tried to integrate all entities and persons into a territorial state, which they structured according to an original military order, the Mansabdari system: Each nobleman received a rank number, which theoretically corresponded to the number of people he had to make available to the cavalry (Bose and Jalal 1998, 30). This system was increasingly extended to the administration and the rest of society. The Mughals tried to replace the caste system with the Mansabdari system. Non-Muslims were classified as Hindus by the Mughals and excluded from positions of power. Under the Mughals, the caste system advanced into Islamic society in that members of the higher-caste elite converted to Islam and took the caste system with them. As a result, the caste system became even more widespread than in earlier times (Teltumbde 2010, 19). The Portuguese landed on the Indian coast around the beginning of Mughal rule and established a trading post in Goa. They met people whose social organization and cultural traditions were unfamiliar. In contrast to the later colonial rulers from Great Britain, they made little effort to eliminate their ignorance. With their caste concept, however, they laid the foundation for the rigid and biological interpretation of the caste system. After the Portuguese, the Spanish, Dutch, and French also settled on the South Asian coast only to be ousted by the British in the 18th century. The East India Company of Great Britain conquered the territories occupied by other Europeans and, from there, extended its rule over Bengal and then over much of South Asia. Many small states resisted, some successfully, until independence in 1947. British

The social ontology of caste 91

rule never extended to all states of South Asia, but Britain gradually transformed much of present-day South Asia into a colony called India (Ludden 2002). Until the middle of the 19th century, India was owned by the British East India Company. The area grew from a base in Bengal to a region that included much of present-day South Asia and Myanmar. The East India Company mainly financed its rule through taxes (Bose and Jalal 1998, 48). After India was transformed into a formal colony in 1857, India was also used as a supplier of raw materials and as a market for British manufactured goods. The unequal structure of core and periphery developed, which dependency theory posited to be characteristic of the colonial system. The British colonial rulers completed what the Mughals failed to do; namely, to integrate the inhabitants of their South Asian empire into a unified system. Its defining characteristic increasingly became caste (Cohn 2008). First, the British tried to classify Indians by race, then by religion via varna from 1865 and increasingly via jati from the late 1870s (Banerjee-Dube 2008). Jati was interpreted as a guild that emerged from a tribe and fulfilled a function in the division of labor. While racist biology formed the backdrop of the classification in general, functionalism in the social sciences was the framework for the interpretation of jati’s role in society. The way in which Indian society functioned was initially unknown to the British. To understand it, they relied on texts and Brahmins who knew Indian scriptures (Das 1995, 35). The British regarded the respective classification system as historically unchangeable. Each interpretation, however, was rooted in the views of the Indian elite. The Brahman version of the story was also adopted by Indologists. Therefore, Western scholars from Karl Marx to Louis Dumont regarded Indian society as static and the present categories as rooted in the Vedas. Indological access was increasingly supplemented by ethnographic studies. The information-gathering process culminated under Commissioner Herbert Risley, according to whom the Indian census should be based on the “social precedence as recognized by the native public opinion at the present day and manifesting itself in the facts that particular castes are supposed to be modern representatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Hindu system” (quoted in Ghurye 2008, 40). The categories of the census, which intended to classify the Indian population according to castes, were derived from this. However, the category of caste was not as deeply rooted in Indian society as the British believed. At the beginning of colonial times, many Indians did not even know to which caste they belonged (Jodhka 2012, 1). Furthermore, Islam and Buddhism opposed the categories of varna and jati. Therefore, the British distinguished between Hindus and non-Hindus in reference to the Mughals and determined caste to be a peculiarity of the Hindus. In the beginning, all nonHindus were classified as Muslims by the British (Bose and Jalal 1998, 87); only in the early 20th century were other religious minorities included in the census as independent categories.

92  Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

While precolonial caste was mainly shaped by three sociocultures – the village system, states, and the Mughal empire – colonial rule deeply transformed all of them without replacing them. They persist to some degree, even today. Since both Mughal and British rule penetrated South Asia to differing degrees, and precolonial states were variable as well, the configurations of caste were highly unsystematic, even after the British had spent more than a century trying to systematize it across British India.

4  Caste today After India’s independence in 1947, political leaders were at odds with each other about the role of the caste system. The modernist wing under Jawaharlal Nehru advocated the official abolition of the caste system. Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, regarded caste as a non-capitalist and non-Western system of cooperation and solidarity (Banerjee-Dube 2008, XLIII). Ultimately, it was to be preserved as an independent Indian structure. After the separation between Muslim and non-Muslim India via partition, the role of the casteless – called ‘untouchable’ by the British – moved to the center of the debate about the caste system. A casteless leader of the independence movement, B.R. Ambedkar, stood up for their interests. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936 as a coalition of workers, peasants, and the casteless against the Congress Party, which had led the struggle for independence. After independence, Ambedkar became Minister of Justice; he wrote large parts of the Constitution, which was published in 1950, and brought about a ban on untouchability as a concept. However, he was unable to impose an official ban on the caste system in the Constitution. The idea of a “pollution-line” that would administratively identify untouchable castes was constructed during the early decades of the 20th century through collaboration between local reformist and British rulers (Jodhka 2012, 73). It sought to place the religious legitimacy of the caste system in the foreground. As a result of Ambedkar’s commitment, the term ‘Dalit’ gradually replaced the word ‘untouchable.’ In the late-colonial period, the British developed the term ‘scheduled caste.’ They assigned those jatis, which they interpreted as excluded, to this category and drew up a list that included all jatis of the category, which is still the basis of the state classification. The term ‘scheduled caste’ also continues to exist. After independence, a quota system was introduced for members of the scheduled castes, which reserved seats for them in proportion to their population in legislative bodies, state-funded educational institutions and jobs in the state institutions. Over the years, some provisions of the quota system have also been extended to the so-called Other Backward Classes (OBCs), the castes and communities above the line of pollution that are considered socially and educationally ‘backward.’ Those who can prove that they belong to any of these communities are entitled to access to specially reserved positions within the state system. The quotas, however, tend to exacerbate the confrontation between the castes instead

The social ontology of caste 93

of leading to compensation. The higher castes find the quotas unfair and some try to be included in the category themselves, i.e. to be devalued within the system in order to benefit from the quotas. Today, scheduled castes account for around 16% of the population. A recent empirical study found that in more than 70% of cases examined, Dalits are not allowed to enter the homes of members of the four varnas and cannot eat with them (Shah et al. 2006, 65). The most easily observable form of discrimination in rural India is the separation of residential areas (Shah et al. 2006, 73). In practice, the central belief is that the Dalits pollute the water. Therefore, in many villages, Dalits are not allowed use water resources. They often live near the wastewater. The attachment of the Dalits to certain professions and, in general, to impurity still exists today: “[T]he occupations identified with the ex-untouchables are still carried out almost exclusively by them” (Jodhka 2012, 95). In today’s economy, Dalits mostly work in connection with garbage, dirt, and noise. Only 2% of Dalits work in well-paid professions with regular employment contracts (Jodhka 2012, 162). Seen from below, untouchability is the decisive dimension  – an absolute barrier. Despite the existence of the caste system, village structures have changed due to economic growth, initially with programs such as the Land Reforms and Green Revolution, and later with the process of economic liberalization and the comprehensive introduction of capitalism since 1991. Rural elites have migrated to the cities and left the country to newly rich Shudras (Teltumbde 2010, 55). In the Indian Middle Ages, much of the arable land belonged to the nobility, who did not live in the villages, and to the villages as communities. In the villages, patrimonial relations dominated, in which the dependents were paid in kind. The British replaced the nobility with a colonial administration and turned land almost completely into private property (Jodhka and Prakash 2016, 30). Forms of common property have largely disappeared today (cf. Sharma 2012). Many landless Indians now replicate the landowners’ exodus to the cities. Partha Chatterjee (2012) has argued that the communal interpretation of economy is still relevant to a large part of Indian society today. While the market economy is primarily profit-oriented and distributes profit individually, the informal economy of India ensures the distribution of profit to all in order to ensure the survival of all members of the community. The market economy has prevailed in only a few areas dominated by large companies, while the distributive economy prevails in the rural and informally organized sectors of the economy. However, this does not mean that the relevance of caste disappears. While caste becomes less visible in the capitalist framework, many jobs are still determined by jati, and access to social positions depends on capital, which is unequally distributed among castes. Democracy and capitalism weaken the caste system given that the prerequisite is a free market of formally identical individuals. In fact, office and money are becoming more important than caste (Marriott 1955, 113), a transformation that is linked to the expansion of the market economy. At the same time, however, the

94  Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

informal economy remains India’s largest sector. Furthermore, the quotas in India have led to the increased use of caste in order to gain advantages (Gupta 2000, 144), which ironically strengthened the institution of caste. Now, “Each caste is proud of its caste heritage and has no hesitation in showing off its difference from other castes” (Gupta 2000, 124). More and more inhabitants of India have become aware of their caste (varna and jati), which is increasingly mobilized for a number of goals. Jati becomes a micro-collective determined by kinship, while large collectives (associations) are formed through alliances (Banerjee-Dube 2008, XXXI). Jati associations run increasingly parallel to administrative structures and are organized at the district, state and federal levels. Parallel to the politicization of caste in the sense of quotas and positions, a counter-movement to secularization can be observed that is linked to Hindu nationalism. The movement seeks to construct a nation-state that embodies an ancient Indian culture. Interestingly, this idealized culture is, in part, the artifact of the British colonial administration, which was based on classical texts and the worldview of the scribes (Dirks 1992). The caste system, referring to the hybrid that the British created through their rigid and sociobiological interpretation of Indian societies, plays a central role for Hindu nationalists. In the context of Hindu nationalist politicization, migration, and globalization, the jatis expand territorially and attain a clear position within the varna order. The all-encompassing system that the colonial administration thought it saw in reality is increasingly being realized and, at the same time, losing importance to capitalism.

5  The social ontology of caste The caste system has been the subject of numerous interpretations aiming at identifying a social ontology without explicitly using this term. The interpretations of B.R. Ambedkar and Louis Dumont have become particularly influential, even though they have been criticized comprehensively and in every detail. We believe that they raise central issues and therefore want to summarize them briefly. Dumont (1970, 32) criticized earlier interpretations of the caste system for neglecting its systemic character, religious legitimacy and comprehensive hierarchization. He suggested interpreting the system on the basis of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, i.e. according to a binary principle. Dumont identified the principle characterizing India in hierarchy, as opposed to ‘Western’ egalitarianism, hence the title of his work: Homo hierarchicus. He combined hierarchy with collectivism and egalitarianism with individualism. For Dumont, this religious hierarchy of pure and impure was able to explain all relations within Indian society (1970, 108). He also linked these oppositions to those of religion and secularism. Indian society was fundamentally defined by a religiously legitimated hierarchy of varnas, which also determined people’s views of the world from the ground up. The characteristics of hierarchy and religion are also at the core of Ambedkar’s interpretation of the caste system. According to Ambedkar, the Hindu order

The social ontology of caste 95

is declared sacred by its proponents, which he considers unique in international comparison (Ambedkar 2013, 45). “The Hindu social order is a ladder of castes placed one above the other together representing an ascending scale of hatred and a descending scale of contempt” (Ambedkar 2013, 16–17). Ambedkar identified three principles that defined the caste system: First, “From each according to his need. To each according to his nobility” (Ambedkar 2013, 24); second, the immutability of professions (also across generations); third, the immutability of caste. According to Ambedkar, the legal scholar Manu wanted to convert a small group of people (namely, the Brahmin caste) into “supermen,” who have rights toward the common people, but no duties (Ambedkar 2013, 41). The caste system is therefore an order of rule that serves only a small group of people. Of course, Ambedkar and Dumont directly oppose each other in many regards. The main difference lies in the fact that, for Ambedkar, caste is about power and domination, while Dumont focuses on its religious and symbolic aspects. Both thinkers, however, construct a dichotomy between the West and India. Against this dichotomy, we wish to point to the fact that the caste system does not determine all communities of India, but predominately those classified as Hindu. Furthermore, the system has been subject to constant change such that there was a changing relationship between hierarchy and cooperation, as well as between individual castes. After all, contrasts between West and East are neither as clear nor as binary as they appear in Ambedkar and Dumont’s interpretations. Our main criticism of Ambedkar and Dumont, however, is that they refer to a hybrid in its present form that was created by the colonial administration. Upon closer inspection, it is Western influence that accounts for the rigid hierarchy of caste. The all-encompassing order of the jatis through integration into the varna system cannot be proven for the period before colonial rule. As explained previously, the caste system was more of a local configuration, ranging from villages with a single caste and cooperative relationships to those with hierarchical structures. In some regions, caste seems to have hardly played a role, especially in the mountainous regions and parts of South India. The British created not only the clear hierarchical character of the caste system, but also the specific exclusion of the castes. Everything points to the fact that even before colonial rule, the casteless had a dependent, subservient, and oppressed position in society. However, they seem to have been members of society, entitled to rights and means of survival. They were members of unequal cooperative communities. The British interpretation transformed the casteless, as well as the non-Hindus, into the excluded who, in principle, had no rights. Since then, the castes who have lived below the “line of dignity” (Jodhka et al. 2017: 32) are not considered to be valuable members of society, but fundamentally unworthy. This dividing line is specific to capitalist societies and increasingly refers to the productive contribution of a social class in the historical implementation of capitalism. The class below this dividing line, the subclass, is characterized by the fact that it does not pursue any professional work and is therefore

96  Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

considered worthless. In India, we see the organization of the informal sector as a transformation of marginalized castes into a marginalized class. The jatis affected by this are castes, who are becoming members of a new class with the individualization and formalization of the economy. Hierarchy in the sense of domination appears as the prominent feature of the caste system, which was argued by Ambedkar. However, this characteristic is by no means specific to Indian society, but rather seems to characterize all societies organized as states, as well as all capitalist societies. It is an order of classes under the condition of an individualization of politics and economy. Individualization means the construction of the liberal individual, not the diversity of life forms, which is far more pronounced in India than in the West and dwindles as a result of normalization in capitalist societies. Compared to the West, India’s notion of hierarchy and community is characterized by the fundamental notion that people have different substances. It would not be shared by the ancient Greeks and certainly not by the philosophy of the “Enlightenment.” The different substances, in turn, are not individuals, but communities, which are linked to each other by cooperation. In this respect, the caste system differs from racism or exclusion introduced by colonial rule (Gupta 2000, 35). The caste system integrates all people and takes care of them: Each community has a specific role to play, which can be a professional activity, but also a ritual, political, or social function. In this respect, the idea of collectivism also seems to us to determine the caste system, following Dumont. The collective is the emotional and intellectual foundation of social ontology. However, the collective of the caste system must be determined more precisely. It is not collectivism in the sense of socialism or communitarianism, but an ontology of communities characterized by different functions and substances. Hinduism, unlike the other high religions, has no church that establishes a collective of believers. At best, there is an overall social body, but it does not have a uniform belief system. Rather, there are many Hindu religions, and even more ritual functions – potentially as many as there are jatis. Religion as the legitimation of social inequality is also not specifically Indian, but the special interpretation of ritual purity is definitively so. Ambedkar writes that the sacralization of the entire social order is specific to India. We can now determine even more precisely that the combination of ritual purity and social position characterizes the caste system. Linking concepts such as purity, honor, and dignity with social position is certainly just as little an Indian peculiarity as its religious connotation (Das 1995, 55). In the Indian context, however, they are linked to substantial characteristics, which, in turn, are innate or rather established with rebirth in humans. Vedic literature is characterized by the idea that purity is supposed to be the most important social characteristic, but it may have been raised to the level of importance it has for Ambedkar and Dumont only by colonial rule. The ‘substance’ of a person now needs to be examined more closely. For the contemporary Western mind, it goes without saying that a person’s boundaries

The social ontology of caste 97

coincide with the visible contours of his or her body and that a person has an identity that is stable in time and identical with itself. This is not self-evident from the Indian perspective, nor the perspectives of most other societies. McKim Marriott (1976) has characterized the human in the Indian perspective as ‘dividual,’ which indicates that a given person does not have an unchangeable identity, but is rather constituted by the relations and transactions into which he or she enters. An individual’s possible relations and transactions were – and, to a certain extent, still are – determined by the caste system. In other words, the caste system can be empirically determined by observing transactions. Although Marriott derives his thesis – in the spirit of colonial administration – from allegedly timeless classical texts and terms, we believe that his central idea makes the caste system understandable. While the Western understanding of the system interprets each person as an individual and ascribes to him or her a single position – which, moreover, is thought to be hierarchical in the Western sense – relations in Indian society cannot be reduced to a single dimension or hierarchical position. This reduction was carried out by the colonial administration and implemented throughout society, albeit with limited success. In independent India, the category of caste, as it emerged as a colonial hybrid, was neither processed nor abolished. Rather, democracy and capitalism prevailed and brought with them an interpretation of the human as individual and of society as one-dimensional, class-based hierarchy. However, the institution of caste as a community, the idea of the human as a ‘dividual’ and the importance of ritual purity do not disappear in one fell swoop. On the one hand, they continue to exist on the – very large – margins of society, as Chatterjee (2012) has shown with reference to the economy. On the other hand, they are reconstructed in the center of society, shaped by democracy and capitalism, and influence the unique form of contemporary Indian society today. The reconstruction of caste has been particularly strengthened and accelerated by the recent surge of Hindu nationalism.

6 Conclusion The combination of colonial rule and caste system has resulted in a particularly rigid and ontologically legitimized structure of social inequality that places the casteless and non-Hindus in an excluded position. People are bound to the caste by their birth; belonging is based on karma and is reproduced by the degree of ritual purity that determines not only social position, but also the practice of belonging to a given caste. The colonial hybrid continues to exist in contemporary Indian society as a socioculture, and determines the special configuration of capitalist classes that have emerged in recent decades. Classes are linked to the capitalist division of labor, but they are based on precapitalist structures, some of which were transformed into a rigid hierarchy of castes by colonial rule. This hierarchy consists of the four varnas, casteless, and non-Hindus categories, which did not play a role in

98  Boike Rehbein and Tamer Söyler

this form before the colonial era. Hindu nationalism tries to interpret the caste hierarchy as a class order and meritocratically legitimize it in accordance with the liberal model. British construction of caste is re-interpreted in the framework of 21st century capitalism.

References Ambedkar, B. R. 2013. Hindu Social Order. New Delhi: Gautam Publishers. Banerjee-Dube, Ishita. 2008. “Introduction: Questions of Caste.” In Caste in History, edited by Banerjee-Dube, XV–LXIV. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. 1998. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. London and New York: Routledge. Chatterjee, Partha. 2012. “Democracy and Capitalism in India.” In Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States, edited by Partha Chatterjee and Ira Katznelson, 283–312. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cohn, Bernard S. 2008. “The Census, Social Structure, and Objectification in South Asia.” In Caste in History, edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube, 28–39. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dirks, Nicolas. 1992. “Castes of Mind.” Representations 37: 56–78. Dumont, Louis. 1970. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Faxian. 1886. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Ghurye, G. S. 2008. “Caste and British Rule.” In Caste in History, edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube, 40–45. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, India. Jodhka, Surinder S. 2012. Caste. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jodhka, Surinder S., and Aseem Prakash. 2016. The Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jodhka, Surinder S., Boike Rehbein, and Jessé Souza. 2017. Inequality in Capitalist Societies. London and New York: Routledge. Ludden, David. 2002. India and South Asia: A Short History. Oxford: One World Publishers. Marriott, McKim. 1955. “Social Structure and Change in a U.P. Village.” In India’s Villages, edited by M. N. Srinivas, 107–121. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Marriott, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism.” In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 109–142. Philadelphia: ISHI Publications. Piketty, Thomas. 2019. Capital et idéologie. Paris: Seuil. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1999. The Modernity of Tradition. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Shah, Ghanshyam, Harsh Mander, Sukhadeo Thorat, and Satish Desphande, Amita Baviskar. 2006. Untouchability in Rural India. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage.

The social ontology of caste 99 Sharma, Mukul. 2012. “The Untouchable Present. Everyday Life of Musahars in North Bihar.” In Village Society, edited by Surinder S. Jodhka, 93–102. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Srinivas, M. N. 1955. “The Social Structure of a Mysore Village.” In India’s Villages, edited by M. N. Srinivas, 21–35. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Teltumbde, Anand. 2010. The Persistence of Caste. New Delhi: Navayana. Tirtha, Ranjit. 1996. Geography of India. Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat.

Chapter 7

Colonial social ontology and the persistence of colonial sociocultures in contemporary Indonesia Vincent Houben

1 Introduction This chapter focuses on how Dutch colonialism generated a particular social ontology, which still persists in Indonesia until today. Social ontology can be understood as the way in which social collectives have been crafted in practice and meaningfully embodied in order to structure society. My understanding of social ontologies takes up the considerations brought up in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of this volume. I define social ontology as a conflation of perception and reality; i.e., how both a normative dimension (the creation and maintenance of culturally accepted social inequality) and an operative mode of applying social inequality by means of particular technologies of rule craft people’s sociality. An important practical manifestation of social ontology is socioculture, which, as is explained in Chapter 2 of this volume, involves a social hierarchy that is habitualized and institutionalized in a certain historical period, but continues to persist. State bureaucracies have often been the most active actors in creating sociocultures, and colonial bureaucracies were no exception. Dutch colonization of Indonesia was much more than a superficial imposition of Western rule upon indigenous subjects, a thin veneer that was soon brushed off after decolonization.1 It was, instead, a deeply transformative process, since it introduced a new social ontology as a vehicle of discrimination and boundary making between various social groups, and as such, society as a whole was altered. Although modified further by postcolonial social transformations, the socio-ontological effects of colonization can still be traced in current Indonesian modernity. Mignolo and others have already pointed out that coloniality and modernity were structurally entangled, which, in turn, explains coloniality’s longevity. Despite the epistemic disobedience embodied in the Indonesian nationalist movement, after independence, political elites continued to pursue the trajectory of modernity through development, which essentially continued patterns of social inequality that had been laid out during the colonial era (Mignolo 2007). Particularly during the early decades of the 20th century, during the heyday of the colonizing effort within the imperialist spatial formation named the Dutch

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 101

East Indies, the Dutch tried to instrumentalize pre-existing local sociocultures in order to stabilize and perpetuate colonial rule. Beyond building upon traditional social arrangements, they purposely infused modern mechanisms of social distinction into colonized society. Colonial social epistemologies exemplify the inseparability of modernity and coloniality, which, in a next step, was turned into everyday social practice and upheld by generating several sociocultures. These were, on the one hand, similar to those in other colonized parts of Southeast Asia, but, on the other hand, specific to the Indonesian context. The core mechanism behind the creation of a coherent colonial social ontology in Indonesia was a process of ‘double translation,’ one involving both transfers from the Netherlands to Indonesia and within Indonesia itself, translating colonial knowledge on indigenous society into concrete social policies. In her book Dutch Culture Overseas, Frances Gouda explained how ‘Dutchness’ – characterized by civic freedom, the acceptance of political and religious difference, relative equality, etc. – was translated and transformed in the colonial arena into the morality and behavior of white superiority (Gouda 1995, 18). Although the term white supremacy (blanke overheersing) was primarily used in Dutch Southern Africa, parallel notions of racial distinction emerged in the East Indies. Besides the epistemological shift enshrined in the movement of ideas from the European mother country to the colony, concrete administrative practices and technologies of rule were applied to Indonesia, in line with developments in the Netherlands itself. Since 1900, the Dutch colony became more state-like, equipped with a modern interventionist bureaucracy and an overall strategy to bring the Indonesian population into the orbit of modern development. This was framed in contemporary terms as ‘ethical policy,’ a colonial ideology meant to uplift the Indonesian population from its state of ‘lesser welfare’ toward progress (LocherScholten 1981). Within the colony, Dutch officials tried to modernize-cum-colonize a range of complex social formations across a large number of islands. I argue that the major process was the crafting of a set of sociocultures, which primarily institutionalized horizontal distinctions, as well as hierarchy and social inequality. As a result, a social mosaic emerged, within which the colonial state could act as the main broker and facilitator, trying to keep a delicate balance between those at the center and in the periphery, as well as those on top and the people below. Colonialism did initiate far-reaching social change but then, for the sake of maintaining colonial rule, endeavored to freeze the social ontology put in place. It thereby produced social fixations that would largely withstand the change of time. Many inhabitants of the Dutch colony internalized colonial sociocultures to such a degree that they persisted as part of an Indonesian habitus far beyond the colonial era itself. The creation of a colonial social ontology did not emerge in a void, but rather was grounded in existing local and regional sociocultures. Precolonial Indonesian sociocultures were selectively taken up and transformed in a way that made these suitable for the imposition of Western rule. The widest format of precolonial rule

102  Vincent Houben

in the Indonesian archipelago was that of the mandala state (see Baumann, Chapter 4 in this volume). Oliver Wolters defined the mandala world as follows: the map of earlier Southeast Asia, which evolved from prehistoric networks of small settlements and reveals itself in historic record was a patchwork of often overlapping mandalas, or ‘circles of kings’. In each of these mandalas, one king, identified with divine and ‘universal’ authority, claimed personal hegemony over rulers in his mandala who in theory were his obedient allies and vassals. (Wolters 1999, 27) Besides these ‘Indic’ forms of cosmological statehood, another key example of a precolonial socioculture existed in the form of kinship networks. Tony Day has argued that family-like networks constituted and continue to constitute the relations of power that reached upwards to assume a state-like form in the history of Southeast Asia (Day 2002, 38–39). Ultimately, precolonial sociocultures were rooted in the village, where familial solidarity structures maintained a socioculture based on subsistence ethics (Houben and Rehbein 2011). The Dutch saw the mandala state, kinship structures and the village through the Eurocentric lens of feudalism, claiming that Indonesian rulers, clan leaders, and village heads wielded authority through a system of patronage. By incorporating these precolonial patterns of authority into the fabric of colonial statehood, older sociocultures were prolonged while transformed and instrumentalized due to their incorporation in a modern colonial frame. What used to be a flexible, diverse, and highly dynamic constellation of precolonial sociocultures converged into a single coherent and increasingly inflexible colonial social ontology aimed at establishing and maintaining Dutch rule in Indonesia. There was no Dutch master plan to develop a colonial ontology, but the drive to exert authority led the agents of colonialism to intervene in a number of social fields, thereby creating new sociocultures side by side which, over time and through their hegemonic qualities, converged into what can be considered as a single colonial social ontology.

2  Colonial sociological studies Colonial sociological studies constituted a venture rooted both in contemporary European social science and in the colonizing project itself. The way in which Indonesian society, and the changes it experienced under Dutch colonial rule, was perceived by specialists was instrumental in, if not the creation, then at least the affirmation of an official view of the institutions and practices of Indonesians. Therefore, the way in which colonial scholars assessed the development of Indonesian society forms a useful starting point for a discussion of how colonialism manifested in the social structure of Indonesian society. The study of Indonesian society emerged relatively late in the colonial era and was dominated by three scholars  – John Furnivall, Bertram Schrieke, and

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 103

Willem Wertheim – who were all part of the colonial bureaucracy and whose ideas endured. Taken together, these scholar-administrators were observers of the contexts to which they belonged to but, at least to some degree, strove to distance themselves from the prevailing Western hegemonic claims of the colonial mission. Their in-depth insights into the workings of the Dutch apparatus, and the social effects it produced, still inform current understandings of Indonesian colonial society. John S. Furnivall (1878–1960) was a British official from Burma and cofounder of the Burma Research Society. He was the first to try to paint an overall, structural picture of colonial society in the modern Dutch East Indies. He saw it as an example of a ‘plural society,’ which he defined as “a society, that is, comprising two or more elements or social orders, which live side by side, yet without mingling, in one political unit” (Furnivall 1944, 446). The only place where these elements met in one place was the market. He considered colonial society to be tripartite in nature, making a distinction between European, Chinese, and indigenous sections. Because of this division within society, Furnivall argued that there was no common social will, but instead a complete absorption into the capitalist market system to the benefit of Western enterprise. Thus, in a plural society like Indonesia, the community was organized for production instead of for social life (Furnivall 1944, 447–459). Furnivall’s ideas echoed the new liberalism that emerged in Britain before World War I, which was more focused on groups than the economic freedom of the individual, as was the case in the old-style liberal tradition of Adam Smith. According to Furnivall, colonial policies should not start from the free market, which would then lead to development, welfare, and autonomy, but had to evolve in the opposite direction. Furnivall’s ideas on the tripartite ethnic division of colonial society will be taken up below. Bertram J.O. Schrieke (1890–1945) studied oriental languages at Leiden University and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Islamization of Java. He then went to Indonesia as a colonial civil servant, where he became a scientific assistant in the Department of Indigenous Affairs. In 1923, he was appointed professor of anthropology and sociology at the Law Faculty in Batavia, and 12  years later, after his return to Europe, he also became a professor in Amsterdam. His two-volume selected writings were published in English in the mid-1950s and became widely known in circles of Indonesianists. The first volume contained chapters on historical themes such as Islam in the archipelago and the position of the regional heads (regents) under colonial rule, but also contemporary issues such as a description of Minangkabau society and how the colonial government dealt with communism. In addition, the theoretical problem of cultural borrowing was considered in this volume (Schrieke 1957). The function of regents in the crafting the colonial ontology of traditional power will be taken up again later in this chapter. Like Schrieke, Willem F. Wertheim (1907–1998) had been a colonial civil servant, in his case in the field of law. Despite coming from a wealthy family, he nevertheless opted for Marxism as his main scholarly orientation. In 1936, he became

104  Vincent Houben

professor at the Law Faculty in Batavia, returning briefly to Indonesia after independence (1956–1957) as a visiting professor and then continuing his work as professor of history and sociology at the University of Amsterdam. One of his major publications was on social change in Indonesia, which appeared in 1959. Besides giving an overview of Indonesian political history, this book focused on a number of shifts during the colonial era, which changed Indonesian society in the spheres of the economy, status system, religion, labor relations, and culture. The 19th century, as the colonial century per se, involved changes in all these spheres. Wertheim postulated that similar structural developments occurred across South and Southeast Asia. These transformations included the introduction of a monetary economy, peasant proletarianization through Western capitalism, the superiority of the white race coupled to the introduction of a color line, the rise of a ‘foreign’ middle class, the maintenance of the ‘old native ruling class,’ and the emergence of an “Oriental business class” (Wertheim 1959, 40–47). Besides class change, a range of concrete phenomena characterized colonial society in the Dutch East Indies: a colonial stratification based on race, the equalization of native land ownership, and the maintenance of compulsory labor services in agriculture and for the upkeep of roads and irrigation facilities (Wertheim 1959, 137, 140, 245). Taken together, these three colonial-era scholars highlighted both the internal division of colonial society and the fact that the Dutch saw Indonesia primarily as an area for economic exploitation. Their work ultimately led to theories of a ‘segmented society,’ which was considered as being particular to Indonesia in its colonial phase. Under such circumstances, the maintenance of a social order was, as the Dutch sociologist Jacobus van Doorn (1925–2008) later argued, only possible by mediation. Economic exploitation was facilitated by the Javanese regional heads and by the Chinese minority. Socially and administratively, the ‘Indisch’ – or mixed-race – people played an important role in bridging colonial divides (Van Doorn 1982). Although both Chinese and Indo-Europeans were vital for the functioning of colonial society, they were subjected to formal and informal discrimination by the dominant white minority. Taken together, the studies of colonial scholarship both confirmed and solidified basic features of the colonial social ontology that emerged under Dutch rule.

3  Colonial social change The way in which colonial sociologists of the time interpreted the structure of Indonesian colonial society needs to be placed, however, within a much broader historical context. This section summarizes what today’s historians have brought forward on the diachronic dimensions of Dutch colonial politics and society in Indonesia. Dutch rule in the Indonesian archipelago developed gradually over a long time period. During the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established trading posts along Java’s north coast and in coastal areas of other islands,

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 105

which in turn was part of an extensive Asian trading network. As such, colonial social formations were limited to a few circumscribed settlements where Europeans mixed with other groups. Only in the Moluccas, where spice cultivation was monopolized, and on Java’s north coast did the Dutch intervene directly in local society by building on indigenous social arrangements through the strengthening of local power holders. Cash crop cultivation for export and the extraction of mineral resources was promoted and gradually extended to the hinterlands of Java and other islands (Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi). It was only around 1910 that Dutch territorial control had been established throughout the entire Indonesian archipelago. Colonial relations predominated in rural areas, but were more clearly visible in urban social settings, where European presence was concentrated. In colonial cities, a differential residential pattern developed in which each social group occupied its own suburb. Rural areas, in Java and elsewhere, were subjected to change, too. While Moluccan and North Javanese societies had already been transformed during the VOC era, it was only in the 1830s that the Dutch altered village Java in the wake of the so-called Cultivation System. Under this state-run scheme, a large majority of Java’s peasant population was forced to limit rice cultivation and concentrate instead on the production of cash crops (sugar cane, coffee, indigo) for the world market. In order to mobilize the peasant population for this purpose, the executive powers of village heads and regional chiefs were strengthened by giving them salaries and tenure of office, thus introducing a new hierarchy into local Javanese society (Elson 1994). After 1870, Java was opened up to private enterprise and, by the 1920s, the island had become one of the world’s most productive plantation areas, further cementing social inequalities within the village sphere in order the serve colonial capitalism. Yet, in contrast to the Philippines and South Vietnam, no class dynamic consisting of, on the one hand, large landowners and, on the other hand, a homogenous underclass of rural proletarians, emerged in Indonesia. Richard Robison attributes this to the nature of Dutch colonialism and to precolonial social formations. Ownership of land was weak in precolonial times but, in contrast, colonial state intervention in the economy was strong. Therefore, indigenous power holders could not transform their traditional rights to land and labor into full landownership and became colonial officials in the service of the Dutch. The peasants, although working on plantations on a seasonal basis, remained within the village sphere. Besides securing their subsistence, there they engaged in independent smallholder production for the market. The Chinese were active in trading, buying up rural produce, selling commodities and providing credit to the rural population (Robison 1986, 10–18). Besides Dutch intervention into Indonesian society in order to secure political control and generate economic benefit, the archipelagic geography of Indonesia also necessitated a colonial format of dealing with existing horizontal social pluralism. It was here that colonial anthropologists helped serve the needs of the colonial state. They described the Indonesian archipelago as consisting of hundreds of

106  Vincent Houben

different ethnic groups, each with their own language, habitat, and socio-cultural organization. In colonial thinking, it was only through the Dutch presence that all these different groups could be tied together into one large social fabric. Although precolonial society had been highly fluid and contained significant human mobility, during colonialism, state-led migration and labor migration programs altered the composition of the population in many areas. After 1900, the Dutch set up a migration scheme, moving Javanese populations to the Lampung area in South Sumatra. In the context of the expansion of commercial agriculture, many Javanese were shipped to plantation areas outside Java, notably East Sumatra. Late-colonial society possessed its own particular social dynamics. In the early decades of the 20th century, under modern conditions of increasingly rapid social change, the social boundaries in colonial society became more marked both regarding both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Out of a situation in which many different groups lived side by side – increasingly, two competing groups were pitted against each other: the Europeans and their allies, on the one hand, who wanted at all cost to prolong colonial rule, and the Asians, on the other hand, who strove for political emancipation. On the micro-level, the prevailing European lifestyle increasingly diverged from its Asian counterpart. After 1880, more European women migrated to the colony, where they married and maintained European lifestyles together with their white husbands, thus erecting a color bar and eliminating much of the creolization that had characterized old-style colonial life. Similar developments also occurred elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Butcher 1979). Besides hardened horizontal segmentation, late-colonial society was characterized by a much more rigid power hierarchy that placed Europeans on top of society and indigenous people and Asian foreigners at the bottom. As such, the colonial social ontology acquired its full scope in this period. Power differences directly translated into income differentiation. Tax statistics from the year 1939 elucidate how official income was distributed unequally across Indonesian colonial society: In that year, 250,000 Europeans paid almost as much income tax as 60 million Indonesians. On average, indigenous people earned less than 200 guilders per year, whereas most Europeans averaged at least four times that amount. Somewhere in the middle were the Chinese, who played an important intermediary role in the colonial economy. However, most Indonesians fell outside of any official data on colonial tax returns. After 1900, Dutch colonial authorities noticed the problem of what they labeled as declining native welfare. Between 1901 and 1940, a shift in the tax burden occurred, from native land taxes to income taxes. Fiscal weight was still mainly based upon indirect taxation, predominantly consisting of government monopolies (salt, opium, pawnshops). During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the tax burden on the indigenous population, whose income was hit the hardest, rose sharply. Indigenous agriculture suffered particularly from a whole range of levies in labor and in kind, but mostly from the general decline in the price of food crops (Booth 1980). In sum, colonial society transformed over time, as the Dutch expanded their territorial control and the colonial state intervened in Indonesian society in an

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 107

increasingly deep manner. What began as a loose collection of different groups living together, intermingling and moving between insular places, was turned by the Dutch colonial state into a predominantly sedentary, segmented social structure marked by horizontal as well as vertical divides. Particularly between 1900 and 1940, “social pluralism” increased and, consequently, centrifugal tendencies were strengthened (Van Doorn 1982, 155). However, outlining the broad historical trajectory underlying this fundamental social shift toward social segmentation does not explain how, in practice, Dutch colonialism introduced new sociocultures and how these converged in a colonial social ontology that governed a transformed Indonesian society. It is this dimension that will be explored in the next sections of this chapter. Concrete constructions of colonial socioculture involved four major terrains: the creation of plural law, the establishment of racialized ethnicities, the reinvention of traditional rule, and the circumscription of Islam. In present-day Indonesian society, these colonial legacies can still be observed.

4  Legal pluralism In the VOC era, between 1600 and 1800, adherence to a certain religion was the main classificatory principle, making a clear distinction between Christianity and other religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and animism). Over the course of the 19th century, this categorization was abandoned and replaced by a new format of formal distinction. Racial legal stratification of colonial society in Indonesia became, according to the Dutch historian Cees Fasseur (1994), the “cornerstone” of colonial rule. In contrast to the British in India, who pursued a policy of legal unification, the Dutch chose a system of legal pluralism. Originating from Enlightenment thinking and based on principles of the French Revolution, legal dualism was introduced after 1800. Hitherto, Europeans would be judged under Dutch courts, and Indonesians under their own indigenous courts. The introduction of new legal codes in 1848 pertained to Europeans only, while Indonesians were supposed to remain subject to their own native judiciary, who rendered decisions on the basis of unwritten, customary laws. Article 109 of the colonial constitution (Regeeringsreglement) of 1854 distinguished between, on the one hand, Europeans and those categorized as such, and ‘natives’ and similar groups (Chinese, Arabs and others) on the other hand. With this, the racial criterion was turned into a comprehensive principle of Dutch colonial rule. This dualism was later modified, but despite extensive debates among Dutch officials, it was never abolished during the period of colonial rule. Instead, dualism was extended further and replaced by a trilateral distinction between Europeans, ‘natives,’ and ‘foreign Orientals.’ The latter shared public and criminal law with Indonesians, but private law with Europeans. Under political pressure in 1899, the Japanese acquired the same legal status as Europeans, which enraged the Chinese, who were never given similar recognition. Going further into the direction of creating legal boundaries, the Dutch Nationality Law of 1892 made

108  Vincent Houben

native Indonesians and all foreign Orientals in the Netherlands Indies into foreigners, whereas later they acquired the label of ‘Dutch subjects, non-Dutch’ (Fasseur 1994, 31–39). The dualist and tripartite distinction of population groups in the sphere of law created a colonial ontology of legal pluralism. Although all Indonesian citizens are considered equal in their rights, legal pluralism remained in place after Indonesian independence. Even within the sphere of ‘native law,’ further demarcations between groups in society were created and put into legal practice. A proponent of the ethical policy, Leiden professor Cornelis van Vollenhoven (1874–1933) took a legal inventory of the Indonesian archipelago and devised a system of customary law (adat) circles. In his inaugural lecture in 1901, under the title “The Exact Science of Law,” he outlined the necessity of attempting to synthesize legal plurality while simultaneously asserting that the peoples of the Dutch East Indies should not be Europeanized. In effect, their legal identity, based upon deep-seated customs, should be taken up as a point of departure to start a process of emancipation in the direction of more autonomy (De Beaufort 1955). Van Vollenhoven’s academic endeavors resulted in a series of 45 compilations of adat law in book form: the so-called Adatrechtbundels, published between 1910 and 1945. In total, 19 adat law circles were argued to exist in Indonesia at the time. Through its implementation in law practice, ‘invented’ customary law was turned into an instrument of colonialism. A reassessment of Van Vollenhoven’s adat law activities has been undertaken in the light of the current revitalization of legal and religious traditions in Indonesia. Nowadays, adat has become a generic term, including the morality, customs, and legal institutions of ethnic groups, and also increasingly a means to put forward political claims. Franz and Keebeth von Benda-Beckmann, however, question the coloniality of the Adat Law School attributed to Van Vollenhoven and his followers. They argue that they made a genuine effort to avoid legal ethnocentrism, and were not merely creating myth. According to them, Van Vollenhoven carefully analyzed the processes behind the social reproduction of ‘living law’ in the form of local legal traditions as a flexible social field. In addition, by codifying these, no attempt was made to musealize adat law, which their authors understood to be dynamic and diverse, but rather to capture and systematize it by distilling common features (Von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2011: 167–176). True as this might be for the well-intended intellectual fathers of adat law, by systemizing and making it accessible in printed form, the Adatrechtbundels were used in the framework of the late-colonial state to strengthen a colonial social ontology of difference. This structural effect was realized despite the fact that, at the time, many colonial officials disliked the recognition of adat law since it curtailed unilateral Western expansionism. Whatever the reasons for establishing and maintaining legal pluralism, it affected the everyday lives of Indonesians. Local courts for ‘natives’ did not have professional judges, but were headed by European residents, who had no idea of Indonesian legal notions and lacked the language skills to understand what Indonesian witnesses would testify. The criteria for singling out how racial classification

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 109

was put into practice, deciding whether one was subject to European or to native courts, were not laid down in any regulation, but were simply dependent on the ethnic ascription of the individual. ‘Foreign Orientals’ were treated as Indonesians in public and criminal law, but in Java, shared private law with Europeans. Equality before the law did not and, according to the Dutch authorities at the time, could not exist in colonial society (Fasseur 1994, 34–37).

5 Racialization Scientific research in the colonial era was conscripted by colonialism. In the West, naturalism had become the guiding principle of scientific research and, as such, racial classifications and hierarchizations were considered objective and backed by scientific theories. Everywhere in the non-Western world, group imaginaries rendered by the anthropologists of the time created racial regimes based on the physical characteristics of colonized people. Anderson and Roque (2018, 359) recently argued that the taxonomies of human difference, which were connected to various forms of racialization, constituted Western colonial regimes of the 19th and 20th centuries to an important degree. As such, identity, difference, inequality, and descent became interconnected and served as instruments of colonial biopolitics (Anderson and Roque 2018). Racialization, I argue, established the second socioculture that is characteristic of Indonesia’s colonial social ontology. Society in the Dutch East Indies was, according to the colonial view, divided into horizontal ethnicized ‘peoples.’ Racial categories were inscribed unto colonial maps, in an attempt to make ethnic units spatially consistent. At the same time, however, ethnicity implicated hierarchy; following the prevalent ideas of social Darwinism, it was assumed that these groups represented different levels of civilization. For instance, sedentary, rice-growing Javanese peasants were considered to be of a higher cultural order than the hunter-gatherers living in the forests of Kalimantan. A telling example of Dutch colonial classification was the ethnographic introduction published in 1940 by Johan Ph. Duyvendak (1897–1946), also a professor at the Law Faculty in Batavia. He considered the many hundreds of peoples in the Indonesian archipelago to represent the world of ‘primitives.’ The latter were characterized by relative isolation, dependence on nature, staticism and lack of social differentiation. He distinguished between Negritos (dark skinned with frizzy hair), Weddoids (from Wedda in Sri Lanka, with a lighter skin and curly hair), old Malays (Batak, Dayak, Toraja), and new Malays (‘cultured’ people such as Javanese, Balinese, and Buginese). The main scientific challenge for the future was, according to him, to make a detailed and accurate ethnographic study of each group. As an example, Duyvendak then provided an ethnographic sketch of the Mentawai people living on islands off the west coast of Sumatra. He considered both their material and spiritual culture to be a ‘very old type of general Indonesian culture’ (Duyvendak 1940, 23–28, 33). The limits and ambiguities of a social ontology based on race were exposed most visibly at the social boundary established between whiteness and indigenousness.

110  Vincent Houben

Whiteness was considered something that should be put under constant surveillance and protection. The in-between zone of racial mixture, embodied by the mestizo or ‘Indisch’ people, was therefore seen as highly problematic. The ‘problem of racial mixing’ clearly reveals the ascriptions and realities of social categorization in the colonial setting. Over the course of the colonial period, the distinction between Dutch proper (‘totok’) and mestizo became more and more marked (Houben 2009). Since the 17th century, Dutch males (soldiers, officials, and employees) had been stationed in Indonesia, and many had relationships with indigenous women. Unless legally recognized by their European fathers, the children born out of these forms of concubinage were categorized as ‘inlander’ (native). During the 19th century, the number of mestizo people grew and this, in turn, led to a greater awareness of the existence of a colonial precariat. In the growing cities, the difference between rich neighborhoods, where the white Dutch elite lived, and poorer ones, which were shared by ‘Indisch’ and indigenous people, became apparent. As a consequence, the problem of colonial ‘poverty’ emerged in public awareness for the first time. The existence of an impoverished class of people of mixed descent was considered to be a disgrace and a potential threat to white European superiority. Yet, as was the case in the Netherlands itself, the liberal colonial state was reluctant to intervene, leaving livelihood support to private charity and church organizations. Two social surveys (conducted in 1872 and 1901) showed that, at that time, the issue of white poverty was probably more a perceived than a substantial social matter (Bosma and Raben 2003, 223–230). However, the situation was quite different during the Great Depression of the 1930s; many ‘Indisch’ people who had worked in plantation business flocked to the cities, where they started small businesses, landed in the informal sector, or had to live on charity. Colonial behavioral codes, like the taboo on white-skinned people doing physical work, were transgressed (Meijer 2004, 121–123). Yet the racial colonial ontology, which entailed a racialized division of labor, was not called into question. As was the case with legal pluralism, this racialized socioculture directly affected the everyday lives of Indonesians. A concrete example is access to formal education, which was dependent on race. A strict division was made between European and ‘native’ schools. After 1900, rudimentary vernacular village schools were established, as well as a parallel system of Dutch-language primary schools. Colonial schools for Indonesians were more focused on vocational training, while Western knowledge was rendered through secondary and ultimately also tertiary educational institutions which were mainly aimed at those classified as ‘European’ and therefore very difficult to access for Indonesians. Only the children of Indonesian colonial officials could go to these European schools, but until the end of the colonial era, their number remained extremely limited, thereby strengthening the epistemic divide between colonizers and colonized (Groeneboer 1993).

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 111

6  Traditional power reinvented In order to elucidate contemporary power politics in the region, a journalist and long-time student of the region made the following remark: “Understanding the role of monarchs and princes, both in the past and present, is one of the keys to understanding how power is wielded today in Southeast Asia” (Vatikiotis 2017, 58). He adds that current cultures of leadership, the role of patronage and factionalism are linked to a specific period in history, in which colonial administrators purposefully preserved indigenous formats of power (Vatikiotis 2017, 99). The Dutch colonial scholar Schrieke (previously discussed in this chapter) dwelled extensively on the system of traditional rule in early Java. He pointed to the role of the monarch as perpetuator of the existing order, of which continuity needed to be maintained – at least at the level of appearance. The Javanese portrayal of history even allowed the overcoming of sharp breaks, of which Dutch domination was the most radical (Schrieke 1957, 7–12). Central to the Javanese idea of power was the notion of wahyu, a lighting substance emanating from the body of the legitimate ruler, who could therefore command absolute loyalty on behalf of the subjects. Their obedience depended on the personalized and sacralized kawula-gusti relationship, between subject and overlord (Anderson 1990; see Baumann, Chapter 4 in this volume). Since the Dutch had been present in Java since the early 17th century, they were aware of the singular nature of authority that emanated from local kings and their entourages. Therefore, they concluded a series of treaties with them during the 19th century, thereby maintaining the policy of incorporating traditional rulers into the fabric of colonial power. According to Johannes van den Bosch, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies from 1830–1835, the Javanese could only be administered through their own leaders. Therefore, a system of indirect rule was preferred, in which local power holders still possessed a certain degree of leverage but were, at the same time, incorporated into the colonial state structure. Since the introduction of the Cultivation System, the regional chiefs (regents) became the lynchpin of colonial control, collectively designated as ‘priyayi’ (originally the ‘younger sons’ of the ruler). Over the course of the 19th century, relatively independent priyayi families were turned into local administrative dynasties, which would guarantee a stable connection between the Javanese population and the Dutch colonial power. The loyalty of this indigenous administrative class to the Dutch was established by means of generous salaries, the maintenance of ceremonies of respect (hormat), inheritance of office (since 1854), and Western-style education (Sutherland 1979, 1–18). Not only regional chiefs, but also native rulers, were maintained in office during the colonial era. Although Van den Bosch and his successors considered the abolition of the Central Javanese Principalities at the end of the Java War (1825– 1830), in the end, they decided to keep these kingdoms alive. Demilitarized and dependent on Dutch income, the courts of the Susuhunan of Surakarta and the

112  Vincent Houben

Sultan of Yogyakarta were supposed to help to stabilize Dutch authority on the island. Their outlying apanage lands were included into the Cultivation System and became a valuable additional source of colonial income (Houben 1994). Later, during the Indonesian independence struggle (1945–1949), Surakarta supported the Dutch while Yogyakarta supported the incumbent Indonesian Republic. When sovereignty was transferred at the end of 1949, the Indonesian state abolished all native polities with the exception of Yogyakarta, which was granted special autonomy. During the New Order (1966–1998), led by General Suharto, a process of recovering ‘tradition’ occurred, which built, once again, on the cultural power of the Central Javanese royalty. John Pemberton extensively analyzed the colonial genealogy of the New Order discourse of traditional authority, in which the stability and order of tradition once more demanded strict loyalty from the people (Pemberton 1994). In many areas on the Outer Islands beyond Java, traditional rulers were also upheld by the colonial state and granted semi-autonomous status. The reasons for incorporating these rulers into the colonial fabric was twofold: maintaining existing power structures was a cost-saving device, and the instrumentalization of the esteem held by these rulers among their subjects also rendered Dutch presence in the archipelago more legitimate. Although a wide range of modalities governed the contracts between colonial state and indigenous rulers, at its core was always a trade-off between the recognition of Dutch sovereignty against the recognition of a certain internal autonomy on behalf of the Indonesians (Bongenaar 2005). The maintenance of indigenous traditional rule and the promotion of ‘enlightened’ European civilization as part of Dutch colonial ideology initially seem at odds with each other. Indeed, native rulers were often portrayed in the colonial context as representatives of ‘oriental despotism’ against whom the indigenous population should be protected. This portrayal legitimized Dutch intervention in pre-existing Indonesian forms of statehood. At the same time, however, during large parts of the 19th century, the colonial state showed restraint by pursuing a policy of abstention. Gradually, principles of ‘good government’ were introduced and some Indonesian rulers became modernizers themselves. As such, coloniality and the ‘invention’ of feudal power seemed to work well together and these twin processes produced yet another socioculture, that of traditional power, the effects of which persist in contemporary Indonesian political culture (Houben 1987).

7  The circumscription of Islam The fact that the majority of Indonesians were Muslim led to much apprehension on behalf of Dutch colonizers. The Dutch and a number of minority groups (Moluccans, Minahasans, Bataks) were Christians; there was always the fear that Islam would become the motor for widespread anti-colonial resistance. Indeed, during the Java War (1825–1830), the Aceh War (1873–1914), and on other occasions, Indonesian groups successfully mobilized themselves in order to engage in what they proclaimed to be a Holy War (jihad) against the infidels. Therefore,

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 113

the Dutch pursued an active Islam policy with the purpose of promoting a ‘tolerant,’ moderate, and localized Indonesian Islam against potential radical influences from the Middle East. The major architect of Dutch Islam policy in Indonesia was Christian Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936). He studied theology and oriental languages, spoke Arabic fluently, and was recognized as religious expert even among Indonesian Muslims. After pretending to have converted to Islam, he managed to visit Mecca for half a year in order to conduct research. Between 1889 and 1908, he resided in Indonesia as advisor of indigenous and Arabic affairs to the colonial government. After his return to Holland, he became professor of Arabic at Leiden University. Even then, he continued his advisory work, writing dozens of influential policy documents for the Dutch government. He remains a contested figure because he apparently led a double life, pursuing a progressive ethical policy stance while working as an instrument of imperialism by posturing as a good Muslim and having several Muslim wives and children, whom he later abandoned (Van Koningsveld 1987). Snouck Hurgronje’s sophisticated knowledge of Indonesian Islam was coupled with a normative approach, in which he strongly condemned political Islam since he considered it a threat to the existing colonial order. He advised the Dutch to engage in uncompromising military action in the Aceh region of North Sumatra, especially against the religious chiefs (ulama), which led to a huge number of casualties. At the same time, he actively supported Western education for an indigenous Muslim elite, who he felt should be given more autonomy and would be willing to cooperate with the Dutch with the purpose of developing Indonesian society further. He also convinced the colonial authorities that is was opportune to put a limit on the number of Indonesian pilgrims to Mecca. In that way, so he thought, orthodox influences of the Middle Eastern Wahhabis in Indonesia could be curtailed. In 1913, Snouck Hurgronje wrote a survey article on the nature of Islam in the Dutch East Indies. He soberly stated that Islam did not fundamentally differ from other world religions, of which the believers did not act in full accordance with religious prescriptions. Social life was not sufficiently characterized by pointing out that 35 million Indonesians were Muslim. Islam was a relatively young religion in the area and had focused more on conversion in great numbers than on promoting strict religious observance among its believers. In addition, Snouck Hurgronje argued that Islam had come to Indonesia through Hindu India, which had made it easier to adapt religion to Indonesian social life. The mosque and its personnel were important to the local communities, but non-observance of religious duties and the role of mysticism prevailed almost everywhere. These and other factors offered Holland a very advantageous opportunity, Snouck Hurgronje argued, to regulate its relationship to its Muslim subjects on a permanent basis. Indonesians would be open to Dutch guidance through education without having to turn their backs on “their old saints” (Snouck Hurgronje 1924, 361–391). These reflections of Snouck Hurgronje clearly show how the official Dutch view of Indonesian Islam evolved and how, as a highly influential academic

114  Vincent Houben

specialist, he successfully promoted a particular religious socioculture in support of Dutch colonial authority. By making a distinction between Islam in Indonesia and the Islamic heartland, a void opened up that could be used by the Dutch for the realization and perpetuation of their colonial project. The construction of an Indonesian Islam in contradistinction to the reformist global Umma focusing on the Middle East paradoxically also facilitated the rise of Islamic nationalist organizations with millions of followers. The two major ones – Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah – are still the largest contemporary Muslim organizations in Indonesia, and remain very politically influential.

8 Interdependencies and legacies of colonial social ontology in contemporary Indonesia The four discriminatory sociocultures of law, race, power, and religion that were introduced during Dutch colonial rule grew purposefully interdependent. The imposition of social distinctions governing these four social domains were intertwined in such a manner that a both hierarchical and segmented society could emerge and therefore be effectively controlled from the outside. A socioculturally and epistemologically segmented social configuration constitutes the core of the colonial social ontology that governed Indonesia. Colonial hierarchy was designed to cement European supremacy through the protection of traditional power arrangements and the promotion of nativism, which relegated non-European minorities to the margins of society. In addition, by outwardly claiming to be responsive to the social singularities in the domains of law, ethnicity, and religion, Dutch rule as a whole in Indonesia was given official legitimation. Finally, social policies were crafted in a way that facilitated the penetration of market capitalism in the colony. Taken together, these imposed colonial sociocultures aspired to produce a natural bond between the Netherlands and Indonesia on the road toward colonial modernity. Between 1945 and 1949, a decolonization war was waged between the Indonesians and the Dutch, which resulted in the political independence of the Republic of Indonesia. In its 1945 constitution, the new state strove for a clean break from the colonial past, but in fact, the colonial social ontology could not be erased simply by virtue of casting off Dutch rule. Through the constitution of 1945, Indonesia became a presidential republic based on principles of the people’s sovereignty and representation, religious neutrality, the equality of all Indonesian citizens (including those of foreign origin), and social justice. These principles were clearly inspired by Enlightenment thought and the American constitution. The Indonesian Revolution, as it is labeled in Indonesia, was primarily political in nature, but less so in the social sense, as existing social hierarchies were not fundamentally overturned. The European colonial elites were replaced by Indonesian Westernized elites, who had emerged after 1900 in the framework of the nationalist movement. Until the late 1950s, parliamentary democracy was

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 115

practiced, all ethnic groups were given equality before the law, the dominance of foreign enterprises was curtailed, and freedom of religion was guaranteed. Yet, in the state’s efforts to distance itself from its colonial past, minorities that had been close to the colonial power – particularly Eurasian mestizos and Moluccas Christians, many of whom had served in the colonial army – were ostracized, and thereby pressured to leave the country. Regional and religiously inspired revolts against central power were put down with relentless military force. During the authoritarian New Order (1966–1998), colonial sociocultures were once again revived. Until the early 1990s, the role of Islam in public life was severely curtailed. The legal system retained its basis in Dutch as well as Indonesian adat law. Although after 1945 – with the exception of the Sultan of Yogyakarta – all native rulers had been stripped of their power, the Javanese idea of power was still cultivated by the predominantly Javanese national elite. The idea of suku bangsa (a composite term of ‘tribe’-cum-‘people’) was further promoted and put the Javanese on top of the social ladder. This gave the regime of President Suharto a distinct neo-colonial character. After the fall of the New Order in 1998 and the initiation of democratic reform, some parts of the colonial social ontology were overcome, while others were retained. Nowadays, conservative Islam has gained a prominent place in the public sphere, which runs counter to its previous curtailment dating back to the colonial era. Recently, however, there have been attempts to counter Middle Eastern orthodox Islam by introducing the idea of Islam Nusantara, (un)intentionally referring back to the colonial ontology of moderate Indonesian Islam. Besides traditional formats of power, new authority patterns have emerged; for instance, among the rising Indonesian business elite. Nevertheless, older patterns of authority based on patrimonialism and clientelism still persist. Racial hierarchies and distinctions are also still promoted, which has recently provoked overt resistance by the Papuan minority. Only in 2019 was a bill put before the Indonesian parliament to replace Dutch criminal law, which was perpetuated by Indonesian law in the 1946 criminal code; but the draft of the new criminal code law has been highly controversial because, mirroring colonial laws, it will probably restrict civil liberties.

9  Concluding observations The Dutch colonial era in Indonesia was a deeply transformative period, a major factor of which was the crafting of several sociocultures as part of a single colonial social ontology, which was originally meant to stabilize colonial rule. After decolonization, this colonial social ontology has remained relevant since it continues to be functional in stabilizing existing power hierarchies, and has also been socially accepted as ‘natural’ and embodied in the Indonesian habitus today. The colonial social ontology introduced by Dutch bureaucracy built on both the invention of ‘tradition’ and the creation of inflexible social distinctions. The result was a complex social mosaic marked by vertical as well as horizontal boundaries, which

116  Vincent Houben

still haunts domestic Indonesian politics today, especially in times of heightened domestic conflict. The colonial social ontology emerged neither spontaneously from Western experiences on the ground, nor from a pre-conceived administrative grand vision of Dutch colonial officials. Foreign and Dutch colonial scholar-administrators were heavily implicated in its genesis. Through their contemporary analyses of colonial society, they contributed to the creation of the legal, racial, and religious categories upon which different sociocultures were institutionally built. Furthermore, the history of contact between Indonesians and Dutch, as it evolved over time since the early 17th century, also played an important role. Particularly the long 19th century, the time period in which coloniality unfolded its maximal reach by means of active interventions into the economic, social, and political fabric of Indonesian society, was a crucial epoch for the crafting of colonial sociocultures. In the case of Indonesia, these concerned four critical domains: that of colonial law resulting in legal pluralism, the racialization of population groups within the Indonesian Archipelago, the instrumentalization of traditional forms of power by keeping local power holders in place, and the promotion of moderate localized Islam. Colonial sociocultures were initially taken up and embodied by colonial subjects and remain relevant today, perpetuated by postcolonial generations. With the exception of Yogyakarta, no traditional rulers retained positions of power. However, personal respect for males and females of prowess remains an important aspect of contemporary Indonesian political culture. In the field of law and jurisdiction, legal pluralism is still practiced – besides modern written law with roots in the Dutch legal system, Islamic family law and adat law are still valid and can be drawn upon. Racial categorizations officially do not drive national politics and all citizens are considered to be equal, but on an informal level, value judgments on the level of civilization of different ethnic belongings are still very strong. Islam in current Indonesia is likewise a highly contested domain, in which reform-minded pious Muslims want to turn Islam into a state religion, while others advocate a moderate and localized form. This shows that the colonial social ontology and its history are of fundamental importance for a deep understanding of contemporary Indonesian society.

Note 1 The Dutch novelist Hella Haasse lived as a child in late-colonial Indonesia and revisited the country in 1969. Her autobiographical novel Scrapes on a Rock (Krassen op een rots), which appeared in 1970, suggested that Dutch influence there had been only very superficial. Postcolonial scholars take the opposite view and argue that countries like Indonesia are still structural heirs to Western colonialism, which has put a major burden on their societies. My own view is that, indeed, Dutch colonialism altered Indonesia, but that this did not rob the Indonesians from regaining their own agency (to the extent that it was lost). Since elites have profited most from colonial ontologies, they are the main drivers for their continuation.

Colonial social ontology, sociocultures 117

References Anderson, Benedict. 1990. “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.” In Language and Power. Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, edited by Benedict Anderson, 17–77. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Anderson, Warwick, and Ricardo Roque. 2018. “Imagined Laboratories. Colonial and National Racializations in Island Southeast Asia.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 49 (3): 358–371. Bongenaar, Karel E. M. 2005. De ontwikkeling van het zelfbesturend landschap in Nederlandsch-Indië. Zutphen: Walburg Press. Booth, Anne. 1980. “The Burden of Taxation in Colonial Indonesia in the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Southeast Asian History 11: 91–109. Bosma, Ulbe, and Remco Raben. 2003. De oude Indische wereld 1500–1920. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Butcher, John G. 1979. The British in Malaya, 1880–1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Day, Tony. 2002. Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. de Beaufort, Henriëtte L. T. 1955 [1954]. Cornelis van Vollenhoven 1874–1933. Reprint. Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink. Duyvendak, Johan Philip. 1940. Inleiding tot de ethnologie van de Indische Archipel. Groningen and Batavia: Wolters. Elson, Robert E. 1994. Village Java under the Cultivation System, 1830–1870. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Fasseur, Cees. 1994. “Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia.” In The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherland Indies 1880–1942, edited by Robert Cribb, 31–57. Leiden: KITLV Press. Furnivall, John S. 1944. Netherlands India: A Study of a Plural Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gouda, Frances. 1995. Dutch Culture Overseas. Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900–1942. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Groeneboer, Kees. 1993. Weg tot het Westen: Het Nederlands voor Indië 1600–1950. Leiden: KITLV Press. Haasse, Hella S. 1970. Krassen op een rots. Notities bij een reis op Java. Amsterdam: Querido. Houben, Vincent. 1987. “Native States in India and Indonesia: The Nineteenth Century.” Itinerario Special Issue 1: 107–134. Houben, Vincent. 1994. Kraton and Kumpeni. Surakarta and Yogyakarta 1830–1870. Leiden: KITLV Press. Houben, Vincent. 2009. “Boundaries of Race: Representations of Indisch in Colonial Indonesia Revisited.” In Empires and Boundaries. Rethinking Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings, edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann, 66–85. New York and London: Routledge. Houben, Vincent, and Boike Rehbein. 2011. “The Persistence of Socio-Cultures and Inequality in Contemporary Southeast Asia.” In Globalization and Inequality in Emerging Societies, edited by Boike Rehbein, 11–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

118  Vincent Houben Locher-Scholten, Elsbeth. 1981. Ethiek in fragmenten. Vijf studies over koloniaal denken en doen van Nederlanders in de Indonesische archipel. Utrecht: HES. Meijer, Hans. 2004. In Indië geworteld. De twintigste eeuw. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Mignolo, Walter D. 2007. “DELINKING. The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3) (March–May): 449–514. Pemberton, John. 1994. On the Subject of “Java”. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Robison, Richard. 1986. Indonesia: The Rise of Capital. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Schrieke, Bertram. 1957. Indonesian Sociological Studies – Part Two: Ruler and Realm in Early Java. The Hague and Bandung: W. van Hoeve. Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan. 1924. “De Islam in Nederlandsch-Indië.” In Verspreide Geschriften (Gesammelte Schriften) Deel IV, 2e reeks, 361–391. Bonn and Leipzig: Kurt Schroeder Verlag. Sutherland, Heather. 1979. The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite. The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese Priyayi. Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong: Heinemann. Van Doorn, J. J. A. 1982. “A  Divided Society: Segmentation and Mediation in LateColonial Indonesia.” In Papers of the Dutch-Indonesian Historical Conference held at Lage Vuursche, the Netherlands, 23–27 June 1980, edited by Gerrit Schutte and Heather Sutherland, 128–171. Leiden and Jakarta: Bureau of Indonesian Studies. Van Koningsveld, Pieter S. 1987. Snouck Hurgronje en de Islam. Acht artikelen over leven en wekt van een oriëntalist uit het koloniale tijdperk. Leiden: Documentatiecentrum Islam-Christendom. Vatikiotis, Michael. 2017. Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson/Orion Publishing. Von Benda-Beckmann, Franz, and Keebeth von Benda-Beckmann. 2011. “Myths and Stereotypes about Adat Law. A Reassessment of Van Vollenhoven in the Light of Current Struggles Over Adat Law in Indonesia.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 167 (2/3): 167–195. Wertheim, Willem F. 1959 [1956]. Indonesian Society in Transition: A Study of Social Change. 2nd Rev. ed. The Hague and Bandung: W. van Hoeve. Wolters, O. W. 1999. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, edited by O. W. Wolters. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Cornell University.

Chapter 8

Social ontologies as world-making projects The mueang–pa duality in Laos Michael Kleinod

1 Introduction “Sociocultures” refer to structures of inequality that developed in earlier historical situations but continue to be effective in subsequent social contexts. This insight has been fruitfully applied in studies of inequality reproduction in various countries, including Laos, to account for the historical depth of recent social structures (e.g. Rehbein 2007, 2017; Rehbein et  al. 2015). Lately, this concept has been expanded by the idea of social ontologies to refer to the embodied grammar of the distinctions and inequalities of the social world (Baumann and Rehbein 2018; Baumann 2018). As a “working concept” (Baumann and Rehbein 2018, 9), its clear definition is still in the making; this volume is dedicated to this endeavor. A clear conceptual thrust is already established, however: the ontological turn in anthropology (see Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Hofner, Chapter 3 in this volume) that re-reads culture as constitutive of a comprehensive being-in-the-world rather than as a mere subjective representation of some objective state of affairs. This is a clearly innovative move and, depending on how it is read, largely aligns with the position taken in this chapter. Although the current ontological-turn framework does not intentionally seek to explain the persistence of older structures, it does suggest that they persist despite fundamental historical transformations, out of inertia.1 I would like to complement this view of ontological persistence from a more materialist standpoint. While inertia is certainly a necessary element of explanation, it hardly seems sufficient for the historical argument implied in ‘sociocultures’ and ‘social ontologies’ about their persistence through change; after all, explaining persistence with inertia is tautological. Conceptual issues are further discussed in the following Section 2, arguing for a reading of social ontologies as world-making projects. I will then provide an ideal-typical examination of precolonial Tai-Lao and capitalist frontier ontology, suggesting that they are similar, yet different (Section 3). Focusing on Laos, I attempt to further demonstrate that social ontologies also persist because of the peculiar setup of past and recent political-economic contexts; they do not just passively or inertly persist despite change, but also actively entangle, albeit inconveniently, with the respective

120  Michael Kleinod

historical status quo (Section 4). The general claim is that previous social orders persist in a twisted and mutually constitutive dialectic with very recent processes. This view relies on a “world-ecological praxeology” that combines Bourdieu’s praxeology (e.g. Bourdieu 1990), world-ecology (e.g. Moore 2015), and critical theory of societal nature relations (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002; Adorno 2004; Görg 2004). Arguing that precapitalist and capitalist ontologies are similar, if distinctive, in their appropriative orientation regarding the life-energy of humans and nonhumans, the chapter focuses on the ambivalent persistence of the mueang–pa duality in Laos. This examination suggests that social ontologies persist because they keep making practical sense within hegemonic world-making projects integral to certain historical modes of appropriating humans and nonhumans for survival and well-being.

2  Conceptual remarks As currently developed, the concept of social ontology corresponds to Weberianstyle interpretative sociology (Weber 1978, 20; Baumann and Rehbein 2018).2 Within such a scope, sociological explanation consists of ‘understanding’; that is, of reconstructing ascribed meaning on an (inter)subjective level. Informed by the ontological turn, this general scope is infused with the anthropological project of alterity (see Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), which presupposes an a priori mutual exclusivity of social ontologies. (Inter)subjective ascriptions are, of course, necessary to comprehend the logics of practice, and the ontological turn’s reading of worldviews as worlds is significant. Still, this current state of conceptualization seems hardly sufficient: Its peculiar mix of ideal-type construction and ontological alterity does not seek to explain social ontologies in terms of their social function, since doing so would follow a ‘rationalist’ desire, which would not do justice to the radical alterity of its subject matter. However, not only does the presupposition of pure alterity seem problematic, given the actual co-presence of allegedly ‘mutually exclusive’ ontologies, but socio-ontological ideal-types are also rather ahistorical categories that tautologically account for historical persistence with inertia. This framing results in a reluctance to explain the existence of the subject matter at hand, as it downplays the power structures within which social ontologies function. I  therefore take a somewhat different view, using the general thesis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002)3 as a formal proposition regarding how precapitalist social ontologies persist within capitalist frontier ontology: First, both animism and naturalism are forms of thought and reason; and, second, reason is an element of praxis, an ‘idea-tool’ to secure survival and well-being (Section 3). While to some extent at odds with one another, both animism and naturalism are similar in their principal aim to secure survival and well-being through the organization and appropriation of human and nonhuman life-energy. The Dialectic, contrary to how it is commonly perceived, represents a radical critique of ‘modernization’ and its characteristic form of thought, instrumental reason. Its radicalism consists

Social ontologies as world-making projects 121

not least in rejecting the possibility of an intellectual stance beyond ‘naturalism’; only a radical self-critique of reason could potentially allow for alterity.4 Ontologies always work and make sense when informing actual practice, which is, in turn, always political-ecological; i.e. they organize humans, nonhumans, and their relations in certain productive ways. To this extent, meaning always implies something that is meant, something nonidentical with meaning itself (Adorno 2004) which is shaped and organized in meaningful practice. I  therefore suggest, on praxeological grounds, that complementing interpretive sociology with Durkheimian and Marxian objectivities (see Bourdieu 1990) best conceives of the persistence of social ontologies. From this perspective, the ontological argument makes the most sense as social-constructivist argument in a strong, material sense: Social classifications are embodied, as well as objectified, so as to constitute a world made in practice. In this optic, meaning emerges within, and reproduces, certain relations of and between humans and nonhumans. Although (inter) subjective sense and objective sense are tightly interconnected, they are not synonymous. As in Marx, Bourdieu, and Adorno alike, objectivity develops through (pre)conscious practice but also ‘behind the back’ of subjective intentions.5 As a praxeological category, social ontology approximates Bourdieu’s concept of original doxa (e.g. Bourdieu 2001): a habitualized – that is, embodied and therefore largely pre-reflexive – (mis)recognition of arbitrary social classifications as natural, eternal, and absolute. Importantly, intersubjective ascriptions of meaning are not mere, perhaps false, ‘representations’ of some generally unrelated objectivity, but rather, driving elements in social practice (re)creating objectivity. It is due to the objectification of intersubjective doxic sense that the latter can be distilled in ideal-types like ‘animism’ or ‘naturalism’ out of observed practice in the first place. Thus, from a praxeological understanding of social construction in this strong sense, social ontologies represent world-making projects: Individual or collective classificatory projections materialize in the structured metabolism of organized bodies, objects, and environments to appropriate human and nonhuman life-energy.

3 Precapitalist and capitalist ontologies: similarity in difference A central assumption of the perspective just laid out is that animism and naturalism are both forms of reflexivity which, in turn, primarily acts as a practical tool of humans to “distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 31). “Nature”6 in this context is not itself ontologically presupposed as objectively existing, but is the necessary result of reflexivity, constituting its object. Like the material tool which, as a thing, is held fast as that thing in different situations and thereby separates the world, as something chaotic, multiple, and disparate, from that which is known, single, and identical, so the concept

122  Michael Kleinod

is the idea-tool which fits into things at the very point from which one can take hold of them. (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 31) The separation of the world into ‘ordered’ and ‘wild’ is found in both precapitalist and capitalist ontologies. As ‘idea-tools,’ they are not mere representations; they guide practical interactions between humans and nonhumans according to some divide between order and disorder. There are, of course, utterly different ways in which this basic property of ontologies plays out historically. The ideal-typical logic of precapitalist mueang social ontology is well captured by Baumann’s account in Chapter 4 of this volume. I will thus limit myself here to complementary remarks in light of the previously stated considerations; that is, with a stress on social structure and political ecology. What is termed here the mueang–pa duality denotes a precapitalist centerperiphery constellation on the basis of the mueang social ontology. It is all about power, understood as the command over people and resources,7 and an animistic idiom regulates such socioecological relations. Various kinds and levels of territorial tutelary spirits mirror and express social relations of power. For example, just as the village chief (naiban) is associated with the village spirit (phi ban), the rulers of mueang (chao mueang) are associated with phi mueang (spirit protectors of a mueang). Likewise, according to the relational integration of villages into mueang and smaller into larger mueang, tutelary spirits are integrated into elaborate hierarchies. Similarly, tutelary spirits are conceived of in political and economic terms: They are ‘masters’ (chao) of a place; phi meuang was explained to me by Makong peasants as ‘prime minister’ (nanyok) of all spirits in its meuang. The parallelism and entanglement of political and spiritual classifications implies that a chao mueang’s total power over lives (chao sivit meaning ‘master of life’) parallels that of tutelary spirits who kill humans when taboos are breached or as result of ritual malpractice. The dynamism of a specific group of humans living in and of a specific place became personified in spirits, the connection to which legitimized political rule, “long before the Aryans came to India” as “a network of cults throughout monsoon Asia, Indian [sic] and Indo-China alike” (Mabbett and Chandler, quoted in Holt 2009, 22).8 In this sense, animist collectives (see Baumann, Chapter 4 of this volume) are fundamentally political-ecological, mediating human sustenance and prosperity as they regulate the appropriation of human and nonhuman activity. Since it tends to be sidelined by the language game approach to social ontology, it is necessary here to stress the banality that the mueang social ontology principally expresses the general subsistence character of precapitalist social formations. With existence precariously “at the mercy of a capricious nature” (Scott 1976, 26) and peasants as bearers of this economy constantly “up to their neck in water,” culture, social organization and mode of production were oriented toward the safety-first principle involving a moral economy.9 Ritual practices were, and still often are, “disguised forms of insurance” (Lipton, quoted in Scott 1976, 5),

Social ontologies as world-making projects 123

indicating the way in which symbolic capital was central to precapitalist society in terms of concealing economic interest as a matter of honor and moral obligation (e.g. Bourdieu 1990, 146f). A certain notion of ‘wildness’ is thus integral to this form of sociality that commands comparably limited control over environmental conditions. More precisely, ‘wildness’ arises out of the mismatch between symbolic claims to power and actual, material dominion. The claim to universal power by a chao mueang, as master of lives (chao sivit) and master of the land (chao phaen din), was starkly contradicted by material realities like the friction of terrain, such that mueang power quickly ceased when reaching the uplands, or just seasonally: “Even the most robust kingdom . . . shrank virtually to the ramparts of its palace walls once the monsoon rains began in earnest” (Scott 2009, 61). In Marx’s prose, while the earth becomes an appendage of accumulation under the capitalist gaze, precapitalist political economy made humans “along other natural beings . . . an appendage of the earth” (Marx, quoted in Schmidt 1971, 81f). Put differently, precapitalist subsistence production and exchange were premised on the consumption of specific use-values and generally adhered to a notion of sufficiency – in stark contrast to capitalist exchange-value fixation which knows no “enough” (see Marx 1982, 247ff). So if, in the mueang ideal-type as mandala, “ ‘[a]ll beauty and civilization flow from the upper-level muang and percolate down into the villages” and at “each stage in this downward flow, civilization loses some of its luster’ ” (Davis, quoted in Holt 2009, 29), then there is a logical ‘wild’ point of reference, however fluid and relational. This logic is established by the domestication paradigm and its hierarchical character, regarded as the defining feature of Southeast Asian forms of animism (Arhem 2016), which is symptomatic of the overall appropriative character of the mueang–pa duality and its peculiar, contextual, and fluid sakdina frontier.10 Beyond mere seasonality and terrain (see Scott 2009), mueang power was restricted by the peculiar character of Tai-Lao notions of kingship – to which personal ability, animist-magical charisma, and Buddhist merit were central (again, ideal-typically speaking) – which was prone to constant contestation from within and without (Evans 2002). Similarly, mueang power – even if understood as claim over lives and land on an ideological level – was effectively a claim over people rather than land (Stuart-Fox 2008, 207; Ivarsson 2008, 26ff.; Scott 2009, 58; Evans 2002, 7). The sakdina frontier between lowland and upland socioecologies, however “relative, contextual and fluid” (Arhem 2014, 66), is thus a social construct in the strong sense: objective to the degree that mueang power was materially limited in the light of symbolic claims of rulers to universality. Central to the moral ecology of mueang ontologies is the aspect of tribute, which connects spirituality and politics: Villages or smaller mueang under direct influence of mueang power would be integrated in exchange relations of tribute (taxes, corvée, conscription) for protection. Animistic ritual largely follows a similar logic. As much as the mueang was materially dependent on villages, the latter depended on protection from powerful patrons. This logic of patronage, in the form of phu nyai (‘big man’) politics, remains a central feature of current Lao

124  Michael Kleinod

economies (e.g. Rehbein 2007; Evans 2002; Section  4 of this chapter). Where mueang power ceased so that communities could not be put directly into tribute relations (regions which tended to coincide with the forested uplands), and which therefore lay at the fringes of the sakdina frontier, such ‘wild’ potency was domesticated by other means. A frequently quoted tai proverb says, kep phak sai sa, kep kha sai mueang (‘to gather vegetables and put them into the basket, to gather kha and put them into the mueang’). Kha is often translated as ‘slave.’ Although it can be contended that this distorts the concept because of the transposition of European meanings of serfdom, kha nonetheless denotes ontological inferiority vis-à-vis the category thai (‘free’).11 The kha/tai distinction, furthermore, does not simply align with that of mueang/pa. While “[e]ven the highest lord of the kingdom was kha in relation to the king,” “[u]pland non-Buddhists were kha to all Buddhists” (Evans 2002, 21); kha were as much part of mueang as mueang populations could become ‘slaves’ (e.g. of other mueang; see Turton 2000). Moreover, uplanders often became enslaved by other upland groups who sold them to the lowlands. Thus, although not simply coinciding with the mueang–pa duality, the kha–tai duality still expresses a mueang claim on human life-energy, deriving from some beyond to be domesticated, not unlike how vegetables are put into a basket. Both dualities imply domestication, namely the integration of life-energy into the mueang; and the degree of kha-ness tends to increase with the decreasing ‘luster’ of the mueang’s civility. Commercial trade was another more everyday mode of tapping the potency of upland labor and land beyond the sakdina frontier. The lowland kingdom of Luang Phabang, for example, depended crucially on exchange with surrounding upland areas because of its limited ecological resources, while uplanders depended on lowland goods (see Walker 1999, 37ff). Upland-lowland exchange is was also one of Lan Xang’s economic mainstays due to its relations with Ayutthaya and its immersion in global trade networks (Evans 2002; Masuhara 2003). Thus, generally, the mueang’s material power over its domain was realized as claim on either labor (corvée, military service, slavery) or its produce (through taxation, trade), rather than on land itself. Dialectically put, the pa element was objectively external to the extent that it was intrinsic to the peculiar political-economic logic of the mueang, the result of the gap between symbolic claims to universal power and actual dominion due to the means of a subsistence orientation. While the concrete meanings of categories like pa and kha were contextual and relative to the oscillations of mueang power, give and take existed between mueang and pa; the political-economic lowland center did not rule the upland periphery directly. Ideal-typically speaking, the precolonial sakdina frontier of the mueang remained generally stable (abstracting from its typical oscillations) – something that would fundamentally change with the arrival of the capitalist ontology. Characteristic of the latter is the solidification of a hitherto fluid and contextual center-periphery duality into an outright dualism, which transforms an ambivalent ‘wildness’ vis-à-vis precarious ‘sociality’ into a purified dualism of human ‘Society’ vs. nonhuman ‘Nature’ whereby personhood and agency are located only in

Social ontologies as world-making projects 125

humans and their sociality. Modern rationality radicalizes the instrumental aspect of thought in its orientation toward the “exploitation of the labor of others, ‘capital’ ” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 2): The man of science knows things to the extent that he can [manipulate] them.12 Their ‘in-itself’ becomes ‘for him.’ In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. Neither it nor the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation. (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 6) From a world-ecological perspective, such ‘enlightened’ ontology is a moment of capitalist valorization: Because capitalist value depends on maximizing biophysical throughput relative to labor, abstract social labor (time) facilitating the exploitation of wage labor is complemented by abstract social nature facilitating the cheap appropriation of what is regarded and constructed as ‘nature’s free gifts.’ Nature, rather than waiting ‘out there’ passively, is actively co-produced by “all manner of knowledge-practices” that establish it as external to society and “as something to be mapped, rationalized, quantified, and above all, controlled in ways that eased the endless accumulation of capital” (Moore 2015, 62, italics original). This idea of abstract social nature is directly connected to the aspect of primitive accumulation, and thus bears directly on Laos: As capital “aims to maximize the unpaid ‘work’ of life outside the circuit of capital, but within reach of capitalist power” (Moore 2014, 293), it vitally needs and historically produces frontiers, i.e. spaces external to the capital relation ‘proper’ (labor vs. capital). This is, to an extent, similar to the mueang–pa duality whereby upland products were central to mueang well-being. Another important commonality here is ambivalence: Like the sakdina frontier, capitalist frontiers are, per definition, transitory and liminal zones par excellence – no longer beyond the pale of accumulation but not yet fully capitalized. However, in stark contrast to precapitalism’s sufficiency context and its generally stable frontier, capitalist frontiers are expansive due to their abstract accumulation drive (see Marx’s distinction between the C-M-C and M-C-M’ cycles in Marx 1982, 247ff). Both ontologies are crucially, yet not totally, different – both in terms of their conceptions of center and periphery, and of the appropriative drive these conceptions imply. These ontologies share a similar valuation of ‘domesticating’ the potency of a ‘beyond,’ which is a doxic social construction that depends on the peculiar ontology of the social that materializes in bodily dispositions and the environment. In both ontologies, the frontier between the subject and object of appropriation is a zone of transition and ambivalence as much as of violence and commerce. Fundamental differences include the contrast of duality and dualism, notions of statehood (claims on people vs. territory) and political power (personal vs. systemic), the fundamental orientation of social production and reproduction (use-value vs. exchange-value), and the specific character of the center–periphery duality (the

126  Michael Kleinod

location of personhood and agency). Ultimately, this comparison comes down to the observation that while the sakdina frontier was subsistence-based and stable over time, the capitalist frontier naturally expands due to its abstract exchangevalue fixation and leaves environmental plunder in its wake. A peculiarity of nature domination by recent global capital is its creation of artificial frontiers and, more generally, its particular ways of prolonging the struggle for existential survival.

4 Entangled frontier projects: persistence through change To see social ontologies as politico-ecological, i.e. world-making, projects casts sociality as the entanglement of such projects, which are similar yet different, as well as differentially powerful. That capitalist ontology is currently hegemonic (also Hofner, Chapter 3 and Baumann, Chapter 4 this volume) means that it defines the general context of ontological validity. However, at its frontiers, capitalism entwines with older symbolic-material structures that also never exist as pure ideal-types (see Weber 1978, 20). The peculiar worldmaking power of the capitalist frontier ontology in Laos (especially in its uplands), constructed as an untapped abundance of natural resources (Barney 2009), has been long in the making and evolved, in part, through the reproduction of older social structures. With the arrival of the French in the second half of the 19th century, a radically new rationale of power and wealth entered the Lao context. Where an elaborate political ecology had been in place on the basis of subsistence economies, the capitalist eye only saw “a single unending forest” with “villages and the rice fields  .  .  . only islands lost amid an immense ocean of greenery” (Garnier and Tips, quoted in Phimmavong et al. 2009, 505). The French colonial endeavor in Laos entailed the dual citoyen-bourgeois project of economic mise en valeur (i.e. capitalist valorization) and cultural mission civilisatrice (i.e. European Enlightenment). Political rule over people and land became defined by a fixed territory, while a “racially differentiated tax system . . . became the most important lever in forcing the population into the money economy,” with traditional administrative entities as “the key collaborators in this enterprise” (Gunn 2003, 78). Though primitive accumulation made inroads, “the French imposition was relatively benign” overall (Evans 2002, 52). In terms of productivity, la grande nation hardly managed to make the colonization of Laos a profitable project. The ontological status of the uplands as located at the fringe, or even beyond the reach, of the lowlands was hardly questioned, while the economic outlook, the symbolic claim on the uplands, was quite contrary to precapitalist moral economies (as discussed previously and later in this chapter). The following phases of war and socialism temporarily suspended the project of valorizing Laos in ways that produced the Lao uplands as what is regarded today a realm of untouchedness and abundance by investors, conservationists, and tourists alike. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Laos (most particularly its uplands) was the arena of frontier construction in a political sense, hotspot of the

Social ontologies as world-making projects 127

‘cold war’ between global capitalism and global communism in which the uplands and its people were central actors and victims. The ‘American war’ completely blurred the village/forest distinction such that villagers sought refuge in forests and caves for sometimes years, while unexploded ordnance endowed fields and forests alike with a new and lasting lethal danger that further increased upland ‘wildness.’ About one-fifth of forest cover was lost in that period due to bombing and defoliation, military infrastructure, relocation to the forest for survival, and rapid growth in the industrial forestry sector (Phimmavong et al. 2009, 506). By the end of the war, which left Laos with the depressing record as the most heavily bombed country in history, 20% of the population was displaced, about 40,000 people had died, and the national economy lay in ruins. The Communist takeover in 1975 resembled a coming of kha, or khon pa (see Evans 2002, 117), into the mueang when revolutionaries, many of them from upland groups, descended from their upland hideouts, which, like Viang Xay, were veritable and astonishing mueang in the pa. Hopes for further development in those upland revolutionary centers were soon frustrated as many of these places became more remote than perhaps ever before: Due to isolationist policies and restrictions on movement and trade, “many small-scale traders simply opted out and relied on subsistence production” (Rigg 2005, 47; Walker 1999). Former Communist strongholds like Viang Xay in the northeast and Mueang Phin in the central-east were not only littered with deadly unexploded ordnance, but have also turned into centers of ‘re-education’ for political dissidents (see Tappe 2013; Pholsena 2013). Given the weak state of the national economy, logging was further ramped up in the uplands, contributing to environmental degradation. Both historical phases, war and postwar socialism, thus capitalized on, and so reproduced in their respective ways, the rugged remoteness of the Lao uplands, the subsistence character of the economy, and the attendant moral ecology. Since the mid-1980s, the unblocking and valorizing of Laos begun under the French has nearly come full circle. A decade into the 21st century, frontiers are closing; for Siamese rosewood, for instance, Chinese merchants “would travel anywhere in the country for as little as 2 m³” (EIA 2014, 5). This is a far cry from French times, when “large areas of potentially valuable wood . . . were quite simply too remote and inaccessible to be commercially viable” (Cleary 2005, 272). This finalization of colonial aspirations runs under the motto of ‘turning land into capital’ (han thi din pen theun), certainly an adequate counterpart to the precolonial “gathering kha to put them into the mueang”. The complex, yet concordant, interplay of infrastructure development, land allocation, resettlement, village consolidation, investment, and nature preservation produces mosaics of primitive accumulation (Marx 1982; Baird 2011; Barney 2009). Exacted in the lowlands as well as the uplands, previous social structures inevitably inflect this phenomenon. Most obviously, a Leninist party executes a policy of cheap access for capital to land; the Party, in turn, appears as quasi-feudal “mega-phu nyai” (Evans 2002, 214), interfused with factions of powerful patrons who pass down rents to their entourages that are captured by granting exclusive access to land to investors.

128  Michael Kleinod

Due to the economic focus on resources, the mueang–pa ontology pervades the uneasy, yet productive, tension between development and conservation; namely, in the rather simplistic ‘naturalist’ alternative of nature-as-resource to be either profitably extracted or not, a most recent result of capitalist frontier ontology in Laos. A  system of national protected areas (NPA) was established only at the beginning of the 1990s and today covers about 15% of the country’s total land area. In contrast to early French rule, ‘untouched space’ in Laos today needs to be directly created through nature conservation. NPAs largely overlap with those areas which were fought over during the war and remained off limits during socialism. The army still has privileged access to the resources of Lao forests and also to NPAs, which they occasionally share with Vietnamese comrades (see Dwyer et al. 2016). The nexus of the Nam Theun 2 hydropower project and Nakai-Nam Theun NPA (NNT) shall serve here to highlight various ways in which precolonial ontologies and sociocultures are reproduced by the conservation-development relation. Nam Theun 2 represents a prestigious World Bank project that has, however, received much criticism (e.g. Goldman 2005; McDowell et al. 2014). In the years prior to construction of the dam in the Nam Theun valley in 2005, the future reservoir was to be cleared of forest and villages by the forestry company Bolisat Phatthanakhet Phoudoi (BPKP). Tasked with bringing development to the uplands of eastern Khammouan Province, BPKP’s leader, former army General Cheng Sayavong, turned pa into mueang at Lak Xao, boasting “company offices, villas, a hotel, a nightclub, a restaurant, a large Buddhist temple, a market, a 110-bed hospital, and an airstrip,” even a small zoo (Stuart-Fox 2008, 171). Cheng established himself as undisputed chao mueang tapping pa potency and ‘gathering kha’ by capturing wild animals in his zoo and bringing in minority children with his helicopter for educational opportunities. The BPKP guesthouse reportedly served meals prepared from animal species that have never been observed in the wild (Nooren and Claridge 2001, 167). In 1998, Cheng became Deputy Minister of Commerce and Tourism and Head of the National Tourism Authority (LNTA), apparently to prevent this phu nyai from his further ascent (Evans 2002, 220; see Dakin 2003). When the BPKP was moved from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Finance in 2002, Cheng retired from the LNTA. Only the valuable trees in the valley were finally cut, however, with the rest left rotting in the water, while the NPA was illegally encroached upon (EIA and Telapak 2008). The dam project itself paradigmatically demonstrates the productive link between development and conservation: The Nam Theun Power Company (NTPC) provides “US$1 million per year to the WMPA [Watershed Management Protection Agency] starting on the Commercial Operation Date (COD), for the whole Operating Phase of 25 years” (WMPA 2004). COD was in April 2010. NNT is the country’s largest NPA, which harbors outstanding biological and cultural diversity (e.g. Chamberlain 1997). The first “key objective” of WMPA is “the protection and rehabilitation of forest cover in the NT2 Watershed/NPA to assure adequate water flows with low sedimentation to the Nam Theun 2 Reservoir” (see

Social ontologies as world-making projects 129

WMPA 2004). Uncapitalized upland space is thus productive for dam operation, which depends on water regulation by healthy watersheds, a service acquired for “less than half of one percent of gross revenues” (ICEM 2003, 69). This (re)produces a certain mueang–pa duality in that conservation actively creates a ‘beyond’ of capitalization that is cheaply appropriated while electricity produced is sold profitably to lowland Thai mueang. Notably, consultant reports see this dam levy scheme as instrumental to the maintenance of cultural diversity and the conservation of biodiversity (e.g. Chamberlain and Alton 1997). This artificial frontier is roamed by rare, half-mythical species like the Asian unicorn (Saola) and remaining Vietic hunter-gatherers. Makong villagers continue a largely subsistenceagricultural existence mediated by animistic language games; if a villager falls sick or some other inconvenience strikes the village with foreigners present, the latter will automatically have to compensate financially for a sacrifice to the village spirit (phi ban). During annual rites such as the ‘feeding of the village spirit’ (liang phi ban), or its upland versions, villages cannot be entered by outsiders. The extent to which such upland collectives are constituted by phi ban language games comes out ex negativo with regard to evangelical Christianity, which is on the rise, especially in the uplands. This trend presents alternative routes to modernity (e.g. Baird 2009) and goes in hand with pragmatic considerations (Christian security networks, English training, sparing costs of sacrifices, etc.). Converts often remain within an animist ontology (see Holt 2009), while in turn, evangelical Protestantism itself enters into an animistic optic in terms of its ‘spiritual warfare’ against local spirits’ power in ‘strongholds’ of the ‘literal devil,’ such as among the ‘lost people’ of the uplands, manifesting in a very peculiar kind of frontier project (e.g. Sitton 1998). However, it may be exactly an animistic vision of Jesus as a superior spirit that potentially alleviates the fear of spirits and induces a peculiarly Protestant ethic (Weber 2013); animistic collectives are therefore disrupted not only when Christians refrain from working on Sundays, but also when the ‘feeding of the village spirit’ or other rituals are not contributed to, at least financially. On such a basis, Christian converts in many upland places are met with social ostracism and scapegoating. Similar forms of social pressure are exerted on people identified as phi porp.13 As reported by villagers in 2014, in a Makong village of NNT, a woman was identified as phi porp for making another woman sick; she was killed in accord with local police. Elsewhere, people are driven out of villages and form ban phi porp (phi porp villages), such as at Nakasang in the south of Laos. The village is striving as this kind of social ostracization, based on animistic ‘language games,’ increases with the competitive climate (see Hale 2017). Capitalist ontologies reproduce previous ones. The mueang–pa duality, for which domestication is positive and auspicious, still informs Lao views of the forest in ways that are often at odds with conservation efforts (Singh 2012a). The domestication paradigm informs official discourses and practices of development and prosperity that resonate with communities. As elsewhere, villagers at NNT participate in the longstanding and profitable cycles of trafficking in wildlife and precious timber (see Singh 2012b), fueling recent

130  Michael Kleinod

dynamics of social differentiation: Newly rich urbanites in Thailand, China, Vietnam or Laos tap the virile potency of the ‘wild’ by consuming rare animals or buying expensive furniture made from precious wood. Extracted cheaply by upland people at the upland frontier, this potency pays off as social and symbolic capital through conspicuous consumption in lowland centers of development. However, the productive entanglement of mueang and capitalist frontier projects is far from smooth. Even if local people actively participate in the illegal sellout of rare resources, they necessarily understand that “if there is no forest, there is no village.” They will, like the mentioned Makong, say: “We know that we must protect the forest, but we don’t know how because we’re so poor.” Although the mueang– pa dialectic entails an appropriative logic that principally aligns with capital accumulation, it may be at odds with it in other respects. Lao people often told me that natural resources are best protected by spiritual taboos instead of environmental law because spirits are always present while the law is not, and some conservation projects even seek to strengthen animistic lore (see Kleinod 2017, 219ff). Notably, precolonial ontology was based on a moral ecology that involved reciprocity, however hierarchical.14 Under capitalism, this reciprocal understanding of social hierarchy (e.g. one is rich in order to give to the poor) increasingly turns into a one-way street of appropriation, which potentially calls into question the legitimacy of existing power hierarchies. A  recent Lao proverb, reminiscent in its literary form of the precolonial proverb related previously captures this: khon hang mi bo khao khuk, khon thuk bo khao hong mo, ‘the rich don’t go to prison; the poor don’t go to the hospital.’ As a plain, matter-of-fact observation, this proverb expresses frustration with the increasing amorality of social hierarchies as the rich stand above the law while the poor do not have access to even the most basic social resources. It is no coincidence that poverty and wealth tend to concentrate in the uplands and the lowlands, respectively. While a socioecological critique is often implicit and ambivalent in rural “environmentalisms of the poor” (MartínezAlier 2013), it becomes increasingly vocal and radical among the educated urban middle-class that exhibits an ‘environmentalism of the rich,’ a quite new urban ethos – which is, at times, framed animistically.

5 Conclusion This chapter sought to demonstrate and advance the analytical value of social ontologies by casting them as socioecological projects of world-making. Using the case of Laos, it accounted for the persistence of prior symbolic-material structures on the basis of fundamental ontological similarities as well as differences which, in social practice, inextricably interfuse to constitute uneasy, yet productive, constellations – not only of meaning, but also of the practical organization and appropriation of the life-energy of humans and nonhumans. The centerperiphery relationality already present in a precapitalist context is reproduced over the course of various historical phases including capitalism’s current “Cheap Nature” strategy (Moore 2015, 53) and its attendant development-conservation

Social ontologies as world-making projects 131

tension. Patronage, a central element in precolonial moral ecologies and continuously reproduced throughout Lao history, is crucial for providing cheap access to land for investors today. Continued subsistence cheapens labor and land access in that certain reproductive functions are maintained by uncapitalized traditional moral-economic networks of mutual help that are maintained, not least, by ritual. Thus, as much as social ontologies and sociocultures persist due to inertia, they also productively entwine with capitalism’s frontier ontology and concomitant hegemonic world-making project: “Labor power ‘produced’ by peasant formations within reach of capitalist power, but not yet subordinated fully to the law of value, is labor power with a low value composition” (Moore 2011, 24). In the erstwhile sakdina frontier ontology – as embodied and enacted, political-economic, and ecological – ritual was a disguised form of insurance and legitimized social hierarchy. In turn, if capitalist economy stops veiling itself as morality and gets explicit about calculation (Bourdieu 1990), capital no less implies an ontology in its dualism of a ‘Society’ of human subjects vs. a ‘Nature’ of nonhuman objects. Like the sakdina frontier, capitalist frontiers are, by their very nature, ambivalent, transitional realms between non-capitalized and capitalized ecologies – good places, it seems, for numinals (see Baumann, Chapter 4 in this volume). Yet, the morality implied in the domestication paradigm of the mueang–pa ontology – the expected reciprocity between ruler and subject (or between sacrificer and tutelary spirit), however hierarchical politically and ritually – may also be at odds with global capital’s completion of the colonial débloquement and mise en valeur of Laos and its uplands. This leads us to a final call for caution regarding the conceptualization of social ontologies and their persistence. One claim of this chapter was that social ontologies persist because they remain functional and meaningful within specific hegemonic projects of world-making; the persistence of the muang–pa ontology and attendant social structures is thus explained by the peculiar quality of successive historical rifts. We thus cannot simply take ontological persistence for granted. From the observation that social ontologies persist in certain contexts, their future persistence cannot be deduced as if they were some kind of a priori eternal. If the general observation by villagers is correct, that there are fewer spirits around in this developmental context, and that spirits generally avoid electric light, or if, as related in this chapter, Christianity may beat animism on its own terrain – how to tell whether the complex, uneasy, yet productive entwinement of social ontologies that we observe will not finally turn out to have been just the practical, dialectical way in which modernization theory gets to have the final say, after all.

Notes 1 I leave aside here the deeper question of whether the term ‘ontology’ itself might already presume some kind of ahistorical invariant. 2 This is true also where a terminology of Wittgensteinian language games and LévyBruhl’s collectives is applied, such as in Baumann (Chapter 4, this volume).

132  Michael Kleinod 3 This choice of Frankfurt School literature must appear utterly at odds with current thinking about social ontology, such as that of Baumann (Chapter 4, this volume). However, the case Baumann makes for employing Lévy-Bruhl – that reducing him to a problematic conceptualization of ‘primitive mentality’ will miss crucial insights – is also true for the Dialectic. 4 Such reflexivity is often missed in criticisms of modernity by proponents of the ontological turn such as Viveiros de Castro, Latour, and their epigones, who regularly demonstrate a kind of negative adherence to the modernization paradigm in their positive valuation of ‘the non-moderns.’ 5 As in the ‘real abstraction’ from specific use-values in their exchange (see Sohn-Rethel 1978). 6 Referring to Southeast Asian animism in such culturally specific terms as ‘nature’ certainly appears problematic, and begs principal questions beyond the purview of this chapter. 7 For Baumann (Chapter 4, this volume) it is ‘potency’ that is central to mueang ontology, which I take here as one possible framing of ‘power.’ 8 The political ecology of chthonic cults is seen from the Luang Prabang chronicles which, for example, establish “the division of labor (wet and dry rice cultivation) and hierarchical (tributary) relationship between the lowland, river-basin-based Lao and the upland Kha” on the basis of a phi mueang ideology (Holt 2009, 36). 9 This does not mean to reduce mueang ontology to simple economics. Proponents of the ontological turn, however, tend to imply that this basic fact is of no concern. 10 In the context of “settled village culture, crop cultivation and livestock rearing” in Southeast Asia, forest animals “in their tangible, embodied form are not considered subjects in their own right” and are thus suitable for sacrifice, and are seen as “animals hunted for food” (Arhem 2016, 298f and 281). 11 In Lao, thai also translates as ‘people.’ 12 The translation reads “make them,” the German original, however, says: “sie manipulieren.” 13 The phi porp designates a malevolent spirit that possesses certain humans (often, yet not exclusively, women) and makes other people sick by devouring their entrails (see Rajathon 1954). 14 I prefer the term reciprocity over mutuality (e.g. Baumann, Chapter 4 in this volume) because it seems to more strongly imply relations of exchange and their hierarchical, unequal nature.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2004. Negative Dialectics. London and New York: Routledge. Arhem, Kaj. 2016. “Southeast-Asian Animism: A Dialogue with Amerindian Perspectivism.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, 279–301. London and New York: Routledge. Arhem, Nikolas. 2014. Forests, Spirits and High Modernist Development: A Study of Cosmology and Change among the Katuic Peoples in the Uplands of Laos and Vietnam. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Baird, Ian G. 2009. “Identities and Space: The Geographies of Religious Change Amongst the Brao in Northeastern Cambodia.” Anthropos 104: 457–468. Baird, Ian G. 2011. “Turning Land into Capital, Turning People into Labour: Primitive Accumulation and the Arrival of Large-Scale Economic Land Concessions in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 5 (1): 10–26.

Social ontologies as world-making projects 133 Barney, Keith. 2009. “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier.” The Geographical Journal 175 (2): 146–159. Baumann, Benjamin. 2018. “Das animistische Kollektiv. Lévy-Bruhl, soziale Ontologien und die Gegenseitigkeit menschlicher und nicht-menschlicher Wesen in Thailand.” Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft 4 (2): 129–166. Baumann, Benjamin, and Boike Rehbein. 2018. “Soziale Ontologie, Soziokulturen, Ungleichheit und Kollektive.” Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft 4 (2): 7–28. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chamberlain, James R. 1997. Nature and Culture in the Nakai-Nam Theun Conservation Area. Unpublished report. Chamberlain, James R., and Charles Alton. 1997. “Environmental and Social Action Plan for Nakai-Nam Theun Catchment and Corridor Areas.” Report prepared for IUCN, but not released. Cleary, Mark. 2005. “Managing the Forest in Colonial Indochina c.1900–1940.” Modern Asian Studies 39: 257–283. Dakin, Brett. 2003. Another Quiet American: Stories of Life in Laos. Bangkok: Asia Books. Dwyer, Michael B., Micah L. Ingalls, and Ian G. Baird. 2016. “The Security Exception: Development and Militarization in Laos’s Protected Areas.” Geoforum 69: 207–217. EIA, and Telapak. 2008. Borderlines: Vietnam’s Booming Furniture Industry and Timber Smuggling in the Mekong Region. EIA and Telapak. https://content.eia-global.org/posts/ documents/000/000/395/original/Borderlines.pdf?1468352166 Environment Intelligence Agency (EIA). 2014. Routes of Extinction: The Corruption and Violence Destroying Siamese Rosewood in the Mekong. London: EIA. Evans, Grant. 2002. A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Goldman, Michael. 2005. Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Görg, Chistoph. 2004. “The Construction of Societal Relationships with Nature.” Poiesis & Praxis 3 (1–2): 22–36. Gunn, Geoffrey C. 2003. Rebellion in Laos: Peasant and Politics in a Colonial Backwater. Bangkok: White Lotus. Hale, Erin. 2017. “Demonic Possession in Laos  – Is It Real, or a Pretext for Village Chiefs to Banish Troublemakers and Nonconformists?” South China Morning Post/ Post Magazine. www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2103274/ demonic-possession-laos-it-real-or-pretext. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten A. Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, John C. 2009. Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press. International Centre for Environmental Management (ICEM). 2003. Lao People’s Democratic Republic National Report on Protected Areas and Development. Indooroopilly: ICEM. Ivarsson, Soren. 2008. Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860–1945. Copenhagen: NIAS.

134  Michael Kleinod Kleinod, Michael. 2017. The Recreational Frontier: Ecotourism in Laos as Ecocapitalist Instrumentality. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen. https://doi.org/10.17875/ gup2017-1006. Martínez-Alier, Joan. 2013. “The Environmentalism of the Poor.” Geoforum 54: 239–241. Marx, Karl. 1982. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Masuhara Yoshiyuki. 2003. “Foreign Trade of the Lan Xang Kingdom (Laos) during the Fourteenth through Seventeenth Centuries.” In Cultural Diversity and Conservation in the Making of Mainland Southeast Asia and Southwestern China: Regional Dynamics in the Past and Present, edited by Hayashi Yukio and Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, 54–77. Bangkok: Amarin. McDowell, David, Thayer Scudder, and Lee M. Talbot. 2014. Nam Theun 2 Multipurpose Project: Twenty Second Report of the International Environmental and Social Panel of Experts. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/935151468263930670/pdf/883560WP0P07640E0Report00220and0LOM.pdf. Moore, Jason W. 2011. “Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-Ecology.” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (1): 1–46. Moore, Jason W. 2014. “The End of Cheap Nature: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation, edited by Christian Suter and Christopher Chase-Dunn, 285–314. Berlin: LIT. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso. Nooren, Hanneke, and Gordon Claridge. 2001. Wildlife Trade in Laos: The End of the Game. Amsterdam: IUCN. Phimmavong, Somvang, Barbara Ozarska, S. Midgley, and R. Keenan. 2009. “Forest and Plantation Development in Laos: History, Development and Impact for Rural Communities.” International Forestry Review 11 (4): 501–513. Pholsena, Vatthana. 2013. “A  Social Reading of a Post-Conflict Landscape: Route 9 in Southern Laos.” In Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, edited by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe, 157– 185. Singapore: NUS Press. Rajathon, Phya Anuman. 1954. “The ‘Phi’.” The Journal of the Siam Society 41 (2): 153–178. Rehbein, Boike. 2007. Globalization, Culture and Society in Laos. London and New York: Routledge. Rehbein, Boike. 2017. Society in Contemporary Laos: Capitalism, Habitus and Belief. London and New York: Routledge. Rehbein, Boike, Benjamin Baumann, Luzia Costa, Simin Fadaee, Michael Kleinod, Thomas Kühn, Fabrício Maciel, Karina Maldonaldo, Janina Myrczik, Christian Schneickert, Eva Schwark, Andrea Silva, Emanuelle Silva, Ilka Sommer, Jessé Souza, and Ricardo Visser. 2015. Reproduktion sozialer Ungleichheit in Deutschland. München: UVK. Rigg, Jonathan. 2005. Living with Transition in Laos: Market Integration in Southeast Asia. London and New York: Routledge. Schmidt, Alfred. 1971. The Concept of Nature in Marx. London: NLB. Scott, James C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Rebellion and Resistance in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Social ontologies as world-making projects 135 Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Singh, Sarinda. 2012a. Natural Potency and Political Power: Forests and State Authority in Post- Socialist Laos. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Singh, Sarinda. 2012b. “Borderland Practices and Narratives: Illegal Cross-Border Logging in Northeastern Cambodia.” Ethnography 15 (2): 135–159. Sitton, David. 1998. “The Basics of Animism Spiritual Warfare in Tribal Contexts.” International Journal of Frontier Missions 15 (2): 69–74. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. London: Macmillian. Stuart-Fox, Martin. 2008. Historical Dictionary of Laos. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Tappe, Oliver. 2013. “National lieu de memoire vs. Multivocal Memories: The Case of Viengxay, Lao PDR.” In Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, edited by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe, 46–77. Singapore: NUS Press. Turton, Andrew. 2000. “Introduction to Civility and Savagery.” In Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, edited by A. Turton, 3–30. Richmond: Curzon Press. Walker, Andrew. 1999. The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Watershed Management and Protection Authority (WMPA). 2004. Social and Environment Management Framework and Operational Plan (SEMFOP). http://documents.world bank.org/curated/en/225081468047117449/pdf/309400v10COVER0SEMFOP.pdf Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Max. 2013. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 9

Clashing social ontologies A sociological history of political violence in the Cambodian elite Daniel Bultmann

1 Introduction In the early 19th century, the precolonial elite of the Khmer royal court had a strict hierarchical social structure. The monarch’s immediate family members were at the top, followed by the Buddhist patriarchs (sanghareach) and the court Brahmins (baku). One level below were the literati, sages, high-ranking officials, and functionaries (Mak 1980, 144). Ideally, the elite social structure would mirror the Buddhist cosmological ontology: the king as Buddha, the sanghareach as the chief disciple, the royal family as the pantheon of the gods, the ministers as the deities of the second rank, and the provincial chiefs as regionally significant deities (Harris 2013, 51). As has been observed in large parts of mainland Southeast Asia, the hegemonic political system had a mandala structure with cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features (Wolters 1982). The label, which is derived from an Indo-Tibetan tradition, is comprised of two elements: a core (manda) and an enclosing element (la), or concentric circles with elements directed toward the core. On a political map, these kingdoms can be viewed as a patchwork of overlapping mandalas with no clear territorial demarcation. In this “galactic polity” (Tambiah 1973), power was exercised through patrimonial networks (khsai, in the Khmer language). Superiors gathered as many inferiors as possible, who paid tribute and provided labor in exchange for protection. This means that these political entities were neither bound nor fixed spaces. They were characterized by fluctuations in the geopolitical processes that ran through personal relationships, rather than ethnic or national structures. In the Tai language, this system came to be known as a mueang (Raendchen and Raendchen 1998), which might be translated as srok in Khmer, a word that has similar multiple meanings of civility and the wild (prey) (see also Baumann, Chapter 4, and Kleinod, Chapter 8, in this volume). It replicates a cosmic order at each level of the social structure; thus, the meaning changes in accordance with the speaker’s position and the direction of the speech. Sometimes it denotes a civilized realm, village, rural area, or, in recent language, “nation,” e.g., srok khmai (Bultmann 2018c, 34–38). In general, srok seems to refer to a social structure emanating from a symbolic and hegemonic power center

Clashing social ontologies 137

with which people are affiliated, as has been highlighted in David Chandler’s perspective of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when members of a srok had been, “more narrowly, those whose leaders (chaovay sruk) had received their official titles and seals of office from a Cambodian king” (Chandler 2008, 119). This chapter analyzes the processes of elite transformation in what, through colonialization, is now the Cambodian nation-state. It explores competition among elite groups for control of the state apparatus, and how they try to promote certain social ontologies for sociopolitical hegemony. Social ontologies are incorporated views of society: what it is, how it functions, and what or who belongs to it (see Baumann and Rehbein, Chapter 2 in this volume). These ontologies put forward and sustain symbolic hierarchies. They may coexist over generations and, to differing degrees, shape one another. This chapter analyzes the current Cambodian political elite as a fragmented social field (Bourdieu 1993) with factions fighting for hegemony or, as in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, over the definition of the ‘doxa’ of the field. Doxa is an incorporated, fundamental, and largely unconscious ontology, to use the volume’s vocabulary, according to which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident” (Bourdieu 1977, 166). Instead of having a doxa for each field that is shaped by struggles between orthodox and heterodox groups, as Bourdieu (1977, 159–170) describes it, fields such as the Cambodian elite consist of multiple social ontologies that compete for hegemony, or in his terms, orthodoxy. Each group has its own naturalized, incorporated and takenfor-granted view of what society is, how it functions or should be structured, who should be on top of it and why, and what defines a ‘good’ society. The chapter traces the creation of these competing elite groups through a historical account of significant sociopolitical transformations, starting with the precolonial elite. It argues that transformations such as colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, civil war and genocide, foreign occupation, and capitalism led to the emergence of new elite groups with differing social ontologies that correspond with hierarchical structures or sociocultures (Jodhka et al. 2017). Cambodia has elite groups with roots in the sociocultures of colonialism, communism, war, and, most recently, capitalist class transformation. Although these transformations bear some similarities to elite competition in other countries with similar histories, Cambodia’s history of elite formation is unique because of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), which resulted in large numbers of the preCommunist elite either being killed or resettling in diaspora communities around the world. In the aftermath of this period, a new political elite was created almost out of thin air by the Vietnamese occupation force. This new elite relied heavily on cadres of the mid-level Khmer Rouge and former Khmer Vietminh, most of whom were not previously members of the elite. This deep fissure in Cambodia’s ruling class still forms the basis for political violence today. Section 2 of this chapter narrates the ‘ruptures’ in the precolonial elite and its hegemonic social ontologies until the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, which caused a decisive split in the Cambodian srok elites. The Section 3 details the Vietnamese occupiers’ creation of a new srok elite, which is still in control of the

138  Daniel Bultmann

state apparatus, while the third shows how the old srok elite was reconstituted in the diaspora and along the border as an exile “government” operating from the refugee camps. It also examines the return of the old elite to the political arena through the Paris Peace Agreement and a peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), which has led to ongoing violent clashes between both srok factions. The following Section 4 examines the effects of the ongoing capitalist transformation on the elite, and Section 5 shows how elites have competed for control of the state apparatus and political space, and how their social ontologies of a good society differ. This is illustrated in Section 6 through an example which analyzes a sample of interviews with members of the Hun Sen elite, the royal family, intellectuals, and the new rich (oknhas). The focus of these interviews is the sociostructural history of the Cambodian elite and its social ontologies, starting with colonialization. Socio-cultural changes produce new hierarchies and new social groups in the political elite that put forward their own notions of (a good) society and who should be part of it (or the elite), and that compete for control of the state apparatus, be it through elections, the installation of patrimonial networks in state institutions, or violence.

2 Ruptures Becoming a French protectorate brought major changes to the Khmer srok, which until 1867 had been a vessel of the Siamese court and threatened by its Vietnamese neighbor. The court lay between two powers that had been fighting for regional dominance for centuries. Colonization by the French meant the creation of a Cambodian nation as an “imagined community” based on ethnic (Khmer) heritage and fixed borders (Anderson 1983; Edwards 2007). This intervention ended the geo-political fluctuations in the regional mandala structure and introduced hereditary succession to the throne. A royal council would elect the king from the descendants of the former king, Ang Duong; thus, the royal elite were delimited (Muller 2006). Compared to other colonial states, the Cambodian royal court remained largely intact. However, conflicts erupted over claims from outside the newly established royal succession (e.g., Pou Kombo, a monk), as well as French attempts to increase taxes and regulate land and slave ownership (by Sivotha, one of the king’s half-brothers; Tully 2002). Despite attempts to increase control over the protectorate, its elite structure remained largely intact. However, the bureaucracy was heavily staffed with Vietnamese from the Cochinchina colony, exacerbating the ethnic conflict. During the early years of colonialism, no new groups were added to the elite. However, this changed when the French implemented education reforms that included the construction of secular high schools (Ayres 2000). The alumni of these lycées, which were established during the 1920s and 1930s, would form the backbone of new political and military elites, including the Khmer Rouge, for decades to come. This new group of literati, neak ches-doeng in Khmer, learned

Clashing social ontologies 139

the principles of anti-colonial struggle from their colonial educators. At school, they were taught the benefits of democratic governance, national sovereignty, and the abolition of the monarchy. In addition, they received a historical ethnonationalist narrative of a nation in decline and despair and threatened by its neighbors after the demise of the great Angkorean empire (Edwards 2007; Chandler 2008, 167–185). While many of these early literati initially turned against the monarchy, more than they did against the French colonialists, their position on independence changed with World War II and occupation by the Japanese, who promoted independence movements they thought would become part of their envisioned imperialist ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.’ When the French, weakened by Nazi occupation at home, accepted a deal that would return Battambang and Siem Reap, the eastern provinces, to the Thai (as they had been in 1867–1907), the young intellectual and Buddhist monastic elites increasingly turned against them. Japanese occupation saw the development of a decisively anti-colonial movement. Previous resistance efforts had been aimed mostly at reforms, taxes, and power politics. But under the Japanese, the anti-colonial movement involved not only the elite, but also an armed formation with the Khmer Issarak, which cooperated and overlapped with small Communist cells (for decades comprising mainly of Vietnamese rubber plantation workers). This elite enjoyed independence under Japanese guardianship for only a few months before atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the French managed to return, an antiroyal and anti-colonial intellectual elite had been born. Many members of this elite became part of the Democratic Party, which struggled for full independence in a newly created parliamentary system that was meant to ease the pressure on the returning French while granting no real authority to the assembly. During these years, the elite came from the royal family, the court administration, and the intellectuals who had attended lycées in the capital. This did not change with full independence in November 1953 after young King Norodom Sihanouk’s ‘royal crusade’ and during his reign in the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, or ‘Communauté socialiste Populaire.’ The same held true for most of the Communist Party elite under Pol Pot. The core leadership of the Communist movement, dubbed “Khmer Rouge” by the king, was made up of intellectuals who had been educated at Phnom Penh lycées and later studied in Paris (Kiernan 2004). After completing their studies, the intellectuals returned to Cambodia in the mid-1950s and took over a diminished movement that, during an important party meeting in 1960, consisted of only a few dozen cadres. Because of King Sihanouk’s repressive regime, they went into hiding during the mid-1960s. Even the cadres – such as Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn, and Hu Nim – who had been part of the government during King Sihanouk’s leftward turn during the early 1960s fled to the northeastern forests after a series of rebellions in the Samlaut area in Battambang province (Kiernan 1975). Sihanouk believed that they had been organized and led by the Communists, and went after their political representatives.

140  Daniel Bultmann

Events took a turn in favor of the Communists when Cambodia was drawn into the Vietnam War. The Americans had already been bombing the eastern border region in search of the Vietminh’s ‘bamboo pentagon’ since 1965 (Owen and Kiernan 2006). The details of an agreement in which Sihanouk secretly backed the Vietnamese to construct the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia’s remote east were revealed. After years of dissatisfaction with Sihanouk’s erratic political maneuvering, the military and pro-American wing of the government, led by Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak and General Lon Nol, staged a coup. The king was voted out of office by the assembly while visiting France. A respondent with ties to both wings (Sisowath and Norodom) of the royal family referred to the coup as his “family souvenir” (Prince 2019). Increased bombing by the United States and a deal to form a coalition with Sihanouk and his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge, resulted in a steep increase in recruits for the Communists. When the United States pulled out of Southeast Asia after a peace deal with North Vietnam, it turned its back on the Lon Nol regime, which had long struggled with corruption and was then left to face singlehandedly the strengthened Khmer Rouge under Sihanouk’s protective umbrella. It was only a matter of time before the Communists would take power, and on 17 April 1975, they did just this. The new regime under the secret leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) immediately and irrevocably altered the structure of Cambodian society and its elite (Kiernan 2002). The Communist leaders, most of whom were intellectuals from the upper classes, set out to create an egalitarian society. People were forcibly removed from cities ‘infected’ by capitalist thinking and sent to labor in the rice fields to achieve thought reform. Money, trade, private property, and religion were abolished, and workers cooperatives and communal dining were introduced. Urban people with higher-class backgrounds were considered ‘new people,’ and peasants ‘base people’ of the revolution. The socialist transformation claimed 1.6–2.2 million lives due to starvation, exhaustion, illness, and executions (Tabeau and Kheam 2009). Members of the upper classes, the previous state apparatus, and the military were considered ‘enemies of the people’ and were often killed for committing minor infractions, or simply owing to their backgrounds, as some classes were considered too deluded by capitalist thinking to be capable of thought reform. In late 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, eventually capturing the capital, Phnom Penh, on 7 January 1979. Many of the elite were killed during the course of this regime, while others fled to the border as they were unwilling to remain in the country under another Communist regime, now controlled by Vietnam.

3  Reconstruction I The new regime installed by the Vietnamese occupiers, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), not only inherited a devastated economy, but also faced a severe shortage of skilled personnel to (re)make a state. The central leadership of the new state consisted of 25 people. According to Nayan Chanda, “an

Clashing social ontologies 141

initial search for those with secondary school education who could be considered ‘intellectual’ and given administrative responsibility . . . produced only 106 others” (Nayan Chanda, as cited in Slocomb 2003, 58). The Vietnamese primarily recruited new elites from two groups. There were the Khmer Vietminh, who had fled the country between 1973 and 1975 to avoid the early purges of the Vietnamtrained loyalists among the ranks of the Cambodian Communists. Among them were Pen Sovann (secretary-general of the party and prime minister in 1981), Chan Sy (prime minister after Pen Sovann’s arrest in 1981), Keo Chanda, Chea Soth, and Bou Thang. The Vietnamese also recruited mid-ranking Khmer Rouge cadres from the Eastern Zone who had fled to avoid purges during the final stages of the regime. Among them were Hun Sen (prime minister since 1985), Heng Samrin (head of state), Chea Sim (president of the National Assembly), Nhim Vanda, and Sin Song. The Eastern Zone cadres came from lower social backgrounds and rose to high positions because of the rupture caused by the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese occupation. Referring to recruitment patterns for the new political elite during the early stages of the occupation, a respondent stated: “A person who is blinded in just one eye is better than a person blinded in both” (CPP leader 2019a). The old elites were dead, had fled the country, or were unwilling to be part of the new regime. Yet, the new political elite, the ‘one-eyed’ and the Khmer Vietminh, did not trust each other, either. On top of that, members of the Khmer Vietminh faction also clashed with their Vietnamese patrons, which paved the way for the ‘one-eyed’ cadres from the Eastern Zone to take power. The conflict with the Vietnamese patron and the ‘one-eyed’ resulted in the near-complete replacement, demotion, or even death of the Khmer Vietminh faction. This shift in the balance of elite power relations became visible in 1985, when former Eastern Zone cadre Hun Sen replaced as prime minister the popular Khmer Vietminh Chan Sy, whose death was officially deemed to be the result of a heart attack during a trip to Moscow.

4  Reconstruction II A common narrative is that Hun Sen now presides over a centralized state and answers to no one (e.g. Karbaum 2011). And, in fact, there does now seem to be a heightened fusion of personality, party, and state (Path 2018). However, although the former Khmer Vietminh were demoted, they were not completely eliminated, and the Eastern Zone faction was not a totally united bloc, still demonstrating internal rifts and power struggles. Until his death in 2015, Chea Sim was one of Hun Sen’s major competitors. And of course, the old elites were not all dead. The old political and military elites formed guerrilla factions that operated from the border refugee camps and were, more or less, successors of the three previous regimes. The royalist ‘Front uni national pour un Cambodge indépendant, neutre, pacifique et coopératif’ (FUNCINPEC) under former King Sihanouk, the ‘Khmer People’s National Liberation Front’ (KPNLF) under Son Sann, and the Khmer Rouge’s ‘Party of Democratic Kampuchea’ (PDK) formed the ‘Coalition

142  Daniel Bultmann

Government of Democratic Kampuchea’ (CGDK) in 1982 (Bultmann 2015). Many members of the old elite fled to the border after the downfall of the Khmer Rouge regime or returned from the diasporas in France and the United States to which they had fled before the 1975 Communist takeover. The diaspora provided, and still provides, an important refuge for members of the old elite against the new elite under Hun Sen. The end of the Cold War meant that both sides lost vital support. Consequently, during the withdrawal of the Vietnamese troops and advisors, all of the factions agreed to hold elections and accept a two-stage UN peace mission from 1991– 1993. This led to the return of the old elites, who began to compete with the new Hun Sen-led elites for access to state institutions and resources (Widyono 2008). While the Khmer Rouge dropped out and resumed fighting, FUNCINPEC, to the surprise of many, won United Nations-supervised elections in the newly established parliamentary monarchy. The CPP, the newly formed party under Hun Sen, did not accept the results. It complained about election fraud and threatened secession of three provinces. Eventually, the victorious FUNCINPEC was forced into a co-premiership with the CPP. During the early stages of the co-premiership, both the old and the new elites competed for control of state institutions and resources. FUNCINPEC felt increasingly outmaneuvered by the CPP, which kept control over vital areas of the state administration. The lack of trust and competition during the campaign for the 1998 elections led each side to hold talks with the remaining Khmer Rouge to seek a merger. When Hun Sen was able to make a deal with one faction in Pailin, his co-premier Ranariddh felt pressure to counter with a deal with the last Khmer Rouge stronghold. In June 1997, he announced the formation of a coalition with Khieu Samphan. It included former FUNCINPEC minister Sam Rainsy and his newly formed party. This led to clashes in the capital in early July, with many FUNCINPEC members killed. Some of the opposition participated in the brief resumption of the guerrilla war, while others sought refuge in the diaspora.

5 Developmentalism and the post-war political arena After the 1997 clashes, the opposition elite suffered electoral losses, clearly exacerbated by fraud, and were politically sidelined, while FUNCINPEC never recovered. For Hun Sen, until today, civil society and the political opposition are artificial constructs forced upon him by foreign powers (Coventry 2017). Of course, there is an element of truth to this. Civil society, the political opposition, the diaspora, and, even now, certain parts of the state and military were spaces that had been occupied by the old elites and their militaries, a fact that has eluded many observers who have ignored the history of these political spheres and their social order (Bultmann 2018d). Over the past 20 years, Cambodia has experienced dramatic demographic and economic changes, including economic liberalization and rapid growth (Hughes

Clashing social ontologies 143

and Un 2011). Most Cambodians are too young to have experienced the Khmer Rouge regime and the subsequent civil war. With the increase in living standards, many are now demanding a more technocratic style of governance from the political elite, which has recruited its members from the same families for decades (especially the old elite opposition). Although a high percentage of the populace has been lifted out of absolute poverty, rising economic inequality means that daily lived reality increasingly fails to match expectations (Deth and Bultmann 2016). In 2013, the opposition was able to position itself as the best option for technocratic governance. It made several well-received promises and almost won the election with a new coalition, the ‘Cambodian National Rescue Party’ (CNRP), under the leadership of Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha. However, after months of protests that shocked the government into a short period of post-election reform, the government increased its repression of the political opposition, the press, academia, civil society, and the remnants of the CGDK. The government dissolved the CNRP, arrested several members of the opposition, put Kem Sokha under house arrest, and has threatened Sam Rainsy with arrest if he returns from exile. Those parts of the old elites still inside the country have been under great pressure to prove their absolute loyalty. However, economic growth has also created new elites: the new rich. Most of the new rich, at least at the beginning, were members of the party’s inner circle. Some were even Hun Sen’s childhood friends. The party formalized a patrimonial system to grant an old royal title, oknha, to businesspeople who gave more than $100,000 to social projects run by the state (synonymous with the CPP). Initially, the oknha title was bestowed on rich businessmen who had supported the party and Hun Sen during the 1997 clashes. Later, however, many entrepreneurs who returned from the diaspora or had benefited from higher education and amassed riches during the late 1990s and 2000s, also received the title. After the number of oknhas surged to approximately 2,000, the party raised the required contribution to $500,000. Increasingly, the party has been striving to integrate the new rich within this “elite pact” (Dahles and Verver 2014, 48–53), bringing them into its inner circle through marriage or pressure to make monetary contributions in exchange for business licenses and titles. The last group of elites, the ‘strongmen,’ or boros khlang, had lower-class backgrounds and hailed from villages. They rose to high-ranking command positions, mostly within the old elite, during the civil war and struck a deal with the government after the 1997 clashes. They managed to rise within the opposition forces because of the need for fighting skills after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. In addition, combat experience and the warrior ethos were very valuable during the civil war. They had much in common with the Hun Sen elite regarding habitus and social ontology because they, too, had risen from comparatively poor peasant backgrounds to high, albeit less stable, government positions. However, their main symbolic resource lost value dramatically during the peace process. They did not have the education, money, social capital, or other resources to

144  Daniel Bultmann

thrive in peacetime, since their skills were optimized for war and conflict. Their only option was to strike a deal and get appointed to powerless government positions. When the war ended, the strongmen who had not struck such deals became impoverished (Bultmann 2018a).

6  Clashing ontologies The following subsections provide examples of the life courses of four elite groups and their conflicting social ontologies (see Bultmann 2018a for an additional analysis of elite strongmen). The objective is to sketch basic patterns of the current elite’s social structure and conflict lines in terms of power politics, and also notions of principles structuring a good society and who legitimately should be part of the elite (or even of the Cambodian society, as such); however, an indepth discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. Each subsection is based on an analysis of sample interviews from the respective groups, data collected during field research from 2011–2019. 6.1  The Eastern Zone and ‘One-Eyed’ elite The Hun Sen elites were among the Eastern Zone defectors who returned to Cambodia in early 1979 to create a one-party Communist state. Common to these elites was a steep rise from comparatively poor peasant backgrounds (cf. Slocomb 2003). They secured a central role in the nation-state through an expulsion of the Khmer Vietminh from the ranks of the upper elites. They maintained this position during the peaceful transition to a democratic government and the subsequent capitalist transformation and developmentalist regime. All of the old elites who came to ‘retake’ their political positions were considered threats, and transition to a younger generation and the incorporation of the new rich into the elite is currently a litmus test for the aging Hun Sen loyalists. They themselves attribute their rise to three interrelated phenomena: fate and higher powers (reincarnation), loyalty, and a meritful habitus as men who were once poor and/or orphaned. Hun Sen himself frames Cambodia’s social ontology under his rule as an eclectic mix of traditional political ideas, socialist elements, and interpretations of democratic principles. He has put forth the idea that democracy and socialism are both governance principles in which people of lower socioeconomic status, such as his followers, can ascend to ruling positions through class struggle. This is supported by his frequent suggestions that he might be the reincarnation of Sdech Kân, a 16th century king who ascended to the throne through his status as a man of merit (neak mean bon) and a just dharmic warrior (neak tâsou). He toppled a king whose unjust rule against the dharmic moral laws of the cosmos had brought suffering. Hun Sen thus positions himself as a commoner who toppled unmeritous and harmful kings (Pol Pot and Norodom Ranariddh) and brought prosperity and peace by upholding the cosmic order through his own merit (Norén-Nilsson 2013).

Clashing social ontologies 145

In interviews with members of this elite, the topoi of merit, ascent of a commoner, and loyalty emerged as themes of a social ontology that framed their elite status. In discussing his ascendancy to high positions, a respondent laughingly declared that he, as an initially poor, relatively uneducated man, had “more power than the sons of the king.” He declared that this would be the result of “fate and reincarnation that decides over the course of [human’s] lives” (CPP leader 2015). Another member of the elite positioned himself as one of the early ‘one-eyed’ civil servants. He attributed his power and wealth to his “integrity and humility as a poor and uneducated orphan” who did not “ask for anything” except to be a “part of it.” He stated: “You did not need banks at that time. We did not have any, anyways. All I had was trust. Trust instead of banks, and it worked well.” He added, “Most (of the) superrich in the world, like Jack Ma or Bill Gates, come from poor families. They work hard, are trustworthy and humble, and rise to the top” (CPP leader 2019a). Like Hun Sen, he credits his ascendancy into the elite to his honor (being trustworthy, honest, and humble), and his “good heart” in intervening for clients as a patron. Another respondent stressed that he often resolved conflicts among his patrimonial clients or “the poor in the populace.” This has earned him their respect – and their gifts. He did not interpret this as patrimonialism or power, but rather as respect: “They respect me. Respect is no power as it comes from the heart” (CPP leader 2019b). Thus, a ‘good society’ was one in which men of merit from poor and uneducated backgrounds could rise and topple the old unjust elites who caused suffering and destruction. This social ontology of ascendancy is a combination of traditional dharmic concepts, socialism, and democracy that fosters a specific interpretation of class struggle and freedom (Norén-Nilsson 2013, 19). For the ‘one-eyed,’ elite status and hierarchy result from a fate-guided meritocratic class struggle that stabilizes the social order by virtue of the caliber of its leaders, the quintessential neak tâsou, who bring peace and prosperity by deposing unjust leaders. 6.2 Royalty This social ontology of ascending neak tâsou is not shared by the oldest elite: the royal family, which has been losing power for decades. The most dramatic rupture in royal respondents’ lives, as for all Cambodians, was the Khmer Rouge regime. Many who did not die had been abroad (i.e. due to studying in Paris) or fled the country, and due to a steep loss in status within the diaspora, had to take whatever jobs they could find in order to survive: “I grew up eating from a silver plate, to be honest, and all of a sudden, I was all by myself. . . . It was about accepting what you have to do to survive. . . . Everything was changing from white to black. My life took a 360-degree [sic] turn” (Princess 2019). Yet, of course, these members of the royal elite were highly educated and had valuable social resources in France and the United States; thus, they were eventually able to secure higher positions in business and other fields. Many traditions, such as marriage patterns, were also maintained. Most came from ‘traditional’ families and had to marry within the elite, specifically the royal family.

146  Daniel Bultmann

All of the respondents had returned to Cambodia between the late 1980s and early 2000s, often to fill vacant positions in FUNCINPEC ‘at the request’ of their family. Many had been commuting between Cambodia and the diaspora for decades, thereby developing a dual habitus based on two incorporated views of society. According to one respondent, this caused her to develop a “split personality. Even the way that I dress. Everything. The way that I have to behave: I have to change it completely from [when I  am in] the US” (Princess 2011). Some had settled in France as young children and had no memory of their birth country or had spent decades abroad without ever returning to Cambodia. They complained that in Cambodia, elites were often “drunk with power” (Princess 2019), and that they had had to adapt to a “completely new” society and political world upon their return. For some, this meant joining CPP-led institutions and becoming part of the patrimonial network that collected ‘contributions’ for ‘social causes’ – for example, the Cambodian Red Cross, which is headed by Hun Sen’s wife, Bun Rany, and organizes party funding. However, most members of the royal family in politics lost their government positions as a result of FUNCINPEC’s ouster and eventual demise. A respondent’s view of his and his family’s “plight” is instructive: [I want to] bring back the royal family to their positions because we lost everything. All we have are positions inside the royal palace, thanks to King Sihamoni. He created a list with all the names of the royal family. A very long list. And now we have a salary from the royal palace. Otherwise we would have (long pause) nothing to do. (Prince 2019) From the respondents’ perspective, the royal family received “natural support from the Cambodian people. . . . At its core, Cambodia is a very traditional . . . and social society,” where the family, respect, and traditions are the most important social units and hierarchical principles, a social ontology of the past: something that “we should keep” (Prince 2012). The royalty is the (threatened and stabilizing) core of traditional society: “For the Cambodian people, it is important to have a reference to the royal family because it is part of our identity” – an identity threatened by “modernity” as people “forget their traditions” (Prince 2012). However, there is another major problem: a “proper space” for the royal family. Another prince stated: I think that this is a part of our identity: the Khmer identity (pause). I will say that the royal family for me, we also have to adapt, also for the future. And I think that the royal family does not need to be involved in politics anymore. There is no advantage for the royal family to do politics. What I regret is that we don’t have enough positions and places in society and culture. There are things [sic] that give us assignments, but that is not enough. But just to be frank with you, the other side, they take all of it. . . . I can understand from the other side actually. They want to have that popularity because things, you

Clashing social ontologies 147

know, we don’t need to fight to be popular. We already are. And they want that. And it’s a shame. I  think that the space, there is enough big space to share. But the thing is that they don’t share. They keep it all for themselves. (Prince 2019) The royal family has fought for a share in the state, the political arena, and the elite. However, in the current political climate, many royals (with a few exceptions, such as Prince Sisowath Thomico, who is a vocal member of the opposition) do not dare to call this a political space. Instead, it is framed as a deeply felt need of the people: a non-political, purely social and cultural space. One prince closed his interview with: “I always say that, yes, I am a prince, but it is not easy to be a prince in this country” (Prince 2019). With the rupture caused by the Khmer Rouge regime and the family’s growing irrelevance, members of the royal family often struggle with autonomy and independence in their lives. They are increasingly marginalized, but still enjoy major privileges that hinge upon the goodwill of the Hun Sen elite and the royal palace under King Sihamoni. This situation is encapsulated in a statement made by a princess living in one of the most expensive gated communities in the capital: “I have a nice car and a driver, but I want to be independent. And I don’t trust his driving; therefore, I drive myself” (Princess 2019). For the royal family, elite status and hierarchy should emanate from a primordial Khmer identity that respects ‘traditional’ values and the family as central social units, both of which are threatened by ‘modernity’ or capitalist social ontologies – and other elites, who are not willing to share this space with the family. 6.3  The literati: the neak ches-doeng The situation is similar for the literati. Many belong to the political opposition, which has been banned; thus, many nowadays live in the diaspora. Others are members of civil society or are functioning as ‘advisors’ to the government and even the royal palace. Each respondent had a long-standing family heritage in politics. These ties reached back at least as far as the Democratic Party, to which many still felt indebted. Many intellectuals interviewed had strong anti-royalist sentiments. An opposition member, for instance, stated: “The kings were always afraid of us smart people, the intellectuals” (Opposition member 2011). Many referred to the Cambodian nationalist and anti-royalist intellectual Keng Vannsak to explain their grudges against the royal court, which they historically viewed as non-Khmer, a cultural imposition from India. Over the last decades, they have clashed with both the Hun Sen elites and the royalists. However, like the royalists, they are currently searching for a political space by adapting to the regime, contesting it, or seeking refuge in the diaspora. As children, the neak ches-doeng were educated at prestigious high schools, such as the Lycée Sisowath and the Lycée Descartes. They learned French poetry and philosophy. They also became acquainted with the ideals of the French

148  Daniel Bultmann

Revolution, from which they extrapolated anti-royalism, nationalism, and a call for sovereignty. Some managed to flee to the diaspora or had been abroad before the Khmer Rouge takeover; only a few remained in the country and survived, fleeing immediately after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. Many of these individuals organized political associations abroad, and later returned to join the CGDK’s non-Communist factions along the border. Over the decades, the group was relatively small, though stable. All of the respondents spoke of organizing political action, i.e., political associations and parties, with long-time ‘friends,’ most of whom they had met in school. Their main symbolic resource was education  – in their words, “being smart” (cf. Bultmann 2018b, 21–24). They often referred to themselves as “intellectuals” or even as being “above ordinary Khmer.” Because of their life histories and the rupture caused by the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese occupation, many considered the diaspora to be more than just a second home. One respondent, after living in the United States for decades, even referred to himself as an “expat” in relation to Cambodia (Opposition member 2012c). The intellectuals’ social ontology was shaped by Western liberalist ideas of “building a sane society devoid of corruption and oppression.” They were also influenced by technocratic principles, which, in their view, can be held by only the educated (Opposition member 2012b). At the same time, they defended deficiencies of the Cambodian state when arguing, for instance, that corruption is born of necessity, and is not just a flaw of the current government. Such a sentiment likely originated from the need to please the government on which these intellectuals have to rely for work as ‘advisors’ and freelance consultants”:’ They [the CPP government] are very dedicated. But because of the Cambodian government system, they have to be corrupted (raising his voice). Otherwise, you know, they couldn’t have anything to send their children to school, you know, to raise a family, to have a car, or to have house, and this and that, and so on. And I think that whoever is working at that level would have to be corrupted. But it’s not about hundreds and hundreds of hectares of land, you know. It’s not about oil and gas or forestry or fishery contracts. It’s not multimillion dollars of corruption. It’s what I call: it’s survival corruption. Even though it allows you to have a nice villa or a Mercedes or a Lexus and this and that, you know, because this is what the society wants, it’s wrong. It’s completely wrong. But I don’t blame those directors in the ministry departments. I have learned to respect them and maintain contact with them. Many of them are now becoming directors general and this and that. [They] continue to be very corrupt but continue to be competent. (Bultmann 2018b, 25–26) A truly good leader, most would add, should be “competent” and “farsighted and visionary.” Such a person should also go beyond “leader–follower thinking” and focus on individual capacities and skills instead of clientelist networks (Opposition member 2012c).

Clashing social ontologies 149

For all opposition members, especially those in the diaspora, it was clear that the social ontology of the Cambodian nation should not include the Vietnamese, or yuon, a usually derogatory word. They emphasized that as a ‘Western’ academic, I was unable to see that the Vietnamese were everywhere because of my inability to differentiate between Khmer and Vietnamese faces (e.g., Opposition member 2016). According to another respondent, they had “studied Khmer history, so [they] know [the truth]” (Opposition member 2012a). Statistics were often presented to prove that there must be millions of Vietnamese in Cambodia, despite the official count of a few tens of thousands. Many even used pre-Khmer Rouge statistics and added the ‘natural’ growth rates. They always suspected ongoing control and attempts to hide the presence of Vietnamese forces. One believed that hidden forces were the true reason for the Hun Sen faction’s unwillingness to organize joint attacks on the Khmer Rouge strongholds during UNTAC (this was subsequently done). The following excerpt of an interview provides an illustration: Opposition Member: We proposed that there should be united national forces to fight the Khmer Rouge. They could use the KPNLF, which was a viable force on its own and fought alone [sic] against the Vietnamese. So we asked the Phnom Penh side [sic] to join so that it could be the core of a combined state force. And at the same time, we [said that we should] go and force the Khmer Rouge to open their zone. But they didn’t want that. Because if they did that, everyone would have discovered all the foreign elements in them. Interviewer: Within the Khmer Rouge, you mean? Opposition Member: No, not them. Interviewer: Oh, you mean on Hun Sen’s side, with foreign elements? You mean the Vietnamese? Opposition Member: Yeah! So, since they couldn’t do that, at the end they said the most important thing is the election results. (Opposition member 2019) Others even believed that the Vietnamese had actually been behind the Khmer Rouge atrocities; secretly orchestrating the events from a hidden area in Phnom Penh so that it would appear as if Khmer were killing Khmer. While antiVietnamese sentiments are widespread in Cambodia, even within sections of the government, the literati, especially those who lived abroad for a long time, appeared to be especially xenophobic. The comparatively strong anti-Vietnamese sentiment of this group is the result of its relative deprivation from elite positions through the rupture caused by the Khmer Rouge regime and subsequent Vietnamese occupation (Bultmann 2018d). In the literati’s own view, to go against the Vietnamese is synonymous with clashing with the Hun Sen elite. Within the literati’s social ontology, elite status and hierarchical roles should emanate from education, technocracy, and Western-centric governance, and they saw their own

150  Daniel Bultmann

participation in politics as threatened by the Vietnamese and their ‘puppet’ masters. Some even declared that “the West,” meaning the French colonial class, should have stayed longer to install a “sane” and functioning political system (Literati 2016). Like the royals, the literati depicted the political arena in binary terms, often speaking about the ‘other side.’ This other side is more or less synonymous with Vietnamese (and now increasingly, it seems, also Chinese) forces that are responsible for the plight of the Cambodians – and the constant attempts to expel the literati from the elite in the Cambodian interior. 6.4  The ‘new rich’ and the oknha A comparatively new elite group became rich during economic liberalization. This subsection will focus on examples from two interviews: one with an oknha and another with a ‘new rich’ Cambodian who had recently served in the government. Neither had been part of the elite before capitalist liberalization. Many other oknhas, by contrast, had been members of the ‘elite pact’ for much longer because they had already belonged to the party’s inner circle for decades and had proven their loyalty, especially during the 1997 clashes. Consequently, they had received access to lucrative business licenses in exchange for a share of the government’s profits and loyalty to the ruling party (Dahles and Verver 2014). Yet, one of the following respondents returned shortly after UNTAC and had not been part of the government until 1997, with the other returning in 2002. They are interesting examples of how the ruling party uses marriage, licenses, and titles to integrate the new rich into its inner circle, thereby not only illuminating how the ‘elite pact’ works, but also the ways in which this pact might reach its limits in the near future. Interestingly, both came from families that had been comparatively well off before the Khmer Rouge. Both fled to refugee camps as younger children and settled in the United States during their teens. Thus, they preferred to speak English during their interviews. Both experienced culture shock in the United States and initially struggled in school, since they had never attended one before. Life in the United States, a place where they thought people “fly to work,” was difficult at first: “Language, new culture, new society, and a new method of learning. I think you can compare it to hell” (Oknha 2019). Both respondents’ parents had been well off and fairly well educated, with business backgrounds. They pushed their children to succeed in school. Both respondents eventually went on to higher education in technical fields. Their experiences began to diverge during the 1990s. While one stayed in the United States, the other returned and opened a construction business. According to the respondent, Cambodians’ lack of skills allowed him to secure major contracts quickly: “I  was the only professional or graduated engineer from abroad who could speak English” (New rich 2019). But the true key to becoming exceptionally rich was political loyalty: “In 1997, you had the fighting in Phnom Penh, yeah, between the political parties, the factions. So I joined the government

Clashing social ontologies 151

because business slowed down” (New rich 2019). In the end, he did more than just secure his business through CPP loyalty. He also went into real estate by marrying the daughter of an influential CPP politician. He needed influence, not just money, since the ability to buy licenses depended on having the necessary contacts and patrons. He explained that his drive to become rich was inculcated by his mother, and by experiences under and immediately after the Khmer Rouge. His mother “was very [much] striving for success at any cost.” The turning point in his life teaching him to accumulate as much money as possible was when she was robbed: When my mother was pick-pocketed [in 1979]. Yeah (pause) that’s where I wanted to become rich. I wanted to be successful. Interviewer: That shaped you a lot? New rich: Yes, it was from there on that all night, almost every night, before I went to sleep, I was telling myself I have to be rich regardless. (New rich 2019) New rich:

The other respondent needed the oknha title to gain access to business licenses after his initial success. During their interviews, both expressed awareness of the deficiencies of the system, but opposed changing the status quo. The new rich told the researcher, a German, that Cambodia should not lose its European Union Everything But Arms (EBA) trade preferences, which, during the interviews and the writing of this chapter, were being reconsidered because of the repression of the opposition. He argued that the government was just “20 years old”: “We are young. Don’t pressure us. Don’t blame us. But consider: We’re learning to walk. While we’re learning, don’t push us. Don’t punish us. EBA, you know. Be pragmatic; be real” (New rich 2019). In his view, it seems, CPP rule started with the 1997 coup. The oknha also feared political change, although he held no government position: “It’s that bad things might happen with change. In Cambodia, when they change something, they change the regime. So, every time they change the regime [raises his voice], it’s not good” (Oknha 2019). At the same time, he described the current political situation as one in which people were “tame.” Because of their past experiences and repression, they were afraid to initiate change. The oknha even went on to ask who posed the greater danger: the Khmer Rouge, who killed and repressed the populace for four years, or the current government, which had been keeping the populace “tame” and in fear for 40 years. The cracks in the ‘elite pact’ with the new rich are becoming increasingly visible because the rising economic elite cannot all be part of the inner loyalist network of the ruling elite. The oknha bought his way into the ruling elite and tried to maintain his position by paying whatever was required. However, just before the interview, he was denied a license that he desired and had to halt a major project. To stay afloat, this shows, he must remain in the patrimonial system that goes with the oknha title and not only transfer vast sums of money to the government, but

152  Daniel Bultmann

also prove his loyalty by word and constant action. Although he is still dependent on the pact, he is also a very vocal and public individual, occupying a powerful position. This political space is likely to increase for the new rich, and although one can still observe countless marriages between children of the economic and political elite, loyalty outside the inner family circles increasingly has to rely on less reliable relations and more repressive instruments (like stripping licenses in case of alleged or actual dissent, or insufficient money flows). Both respondents also shared a paternalistic view of change in society. They incorporated a belief in the superiority of ‘Western culture’; the oknha in particular spoke pejoratively about Cambodians, whom he considered to either be “diehard crazy,” caring only about “womanizing and drinking” if they were rich, or to be poor, lacking the means and knowledge to change their situation. The oknha stated that he was there to provoke changes: I always tell my staff here that right now I am very successful, but not because I’m smart but because I’m bringing the past back to the present, er, or the future back to the present: the culture, the practices, the modernity, the civilization, and so on. We bring it here. And then slowly modify it, instead of rapidly. (Oknha 2019) Tellingly, both respondents maintain extensive social media presences, promoting videos and educational materials in which they teach good practices in business and agriculture, or even lecture on moral issues and how to lead a successful and good life. Both have either written or are writing books about their lives and rules for success. The social ontology of the oknha and the new rich is a cultural hybrid that promotes paternalism and patrimony toward Cambodians by endorsing the view of a backward society and culture that requires the diaspora’s capitalist, civilizing, and technocratic knowledge (Brah 1996). This ontology clashes with all older elites, including that of the ruling party, but, at least at present, the new rich outside the inner family circles of the political elite voice their (at times harsh) dissent only indirectly – or behind doors. However, although political elites currently still manage to incorporate large parts of the newly rich through increasingly formalized (the oknha title) and institutionalized systems (the Cambodian Red Cross), the capitalist social ontology is set to become dominant. Yet, this – in the short and medium terms, at least  – will likely happen in a mode of coexistence and ambiguity.

7 Discussion This chapter could provide only an overview of the major fault lines within the Cambodian elite and its social structure, and not all social groups, internal variances, and frictions could be discussed. Nevertheless, it shows that the post-Khmer Rouge elites were exceptional, providing one of the few examples in history of a

Clashing social ontologies 153

major break in elite continuity and reproduction. The knowledge of the conflict between the divided old srok elite and the (surely more centralized) new srok elite is important for understanding Cambodia’s recent history and politics. Each socioculture (colonialism, civil war, communism and occupation, and capitalism) saw the emergence of a new social group that would compete for space in the political arena and promote a new social ontology. These new elite groups each put forward new social ontologies that structure hierarchies upon different principles (with themselves naturally on top of that hierarchy), although these are also clearly shaped or mediated by earlier ontologies (the Hun Sen elite, for instance, builds its leadership claim upon dharmic concepts of a just king, but gives it a decisive twist putting themselves and not princes of the royal family on top). The focus of this chapter on political elites as social fields (Figure 9.1) provides an approach to study sociocultures and their symbolic hierarchies beyond national ‘containers,’ as it also includes social groups outside the nation-state (i.e. diaspora groups competing for control over Cambodian state institutions). And some elite groups may have a longer lasting and deeper impact on the layers of society and symbolic hierarchies (e.g. the royalty) than others (e.g. military strongmen). Although there are shifting conflicts and alliances, these groups remain separate actors (e.g. alliances between the royalty, the literati, and the strongmen during the 1980s that had to be renegotiated or broken down during the transition to peace). Since there is, of course, no almighty elite, these groups compete over political and social hegemony against other elites and (though not the theme of this chapter) also against ontologies “from below.” Social ontologies within elite groups last over generations, but, as time progresses, they are subject to change, adaptation and hybridization (e.g. the royal’s current social ontology is formed by its experiences under colonialism, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnamese occupation, and capitalist transformation). Yet, distinct social ontologies survive through securing a certain “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein 2001, 30–33) within social groups and over time, not least, in their passing from generation to generation through family heritage. However, the deep rupture caused by the Khmer Rouge regime and Vietnamese occupation is an important undercurrent explaining the patterns

One-eyed

Royal family

Literati

Khmer vietminh

New rich

Strongmen Precolonial

Colonialism

Conflict, socialism, and occupation

Capitalism

Figure 9.1  Elite groups, by order of appearance in the Cambodian political field

154  Daniel Bultmann

of conflict and violence in modern Cambodia. Without understanding the Cambodian elite groups’ sociopolitical history, social ontologies, and inner divisions, it is impossible to fully understand the opposition, civil society, the role of the diaspora, the current state and military, and the recurring bouts of repression and violence in Cambodia’s political world.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ayres, David M. 2000. Anatomy of a Crisis: Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953–1998. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed.” In The Field of Cultural Production, edited by Randal Johnson, 29–73. New York: Columbia University Press. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge. Bultmann, Daniel. 2015. Inside Cambodian Insurgency: A Sociological Perspective on Civil Wars and Conflict. Burlington, MA and Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Bultmann, Daniel. 2018a. “Insurgent Groups During Post-Conflict Transformation: The Case of Military Strongmen in Cambodia.” Civil Wars 20 (1): 24–44. Bultmann, Daniel. 2018b. Insurgent Pathways to Peace: The Social Order of Post-Conflict Transition in Cambodia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Bultmann, Daniel. 2018c. “Persistenzen und Brüche in Kambodschas sozialer Ontologie.” Zeitschrift für Kollektivwissenschaft 4 (2): 29–57. Bultmann, Daniel. 2018d. The Social Order of Postconflict Transformation in Cambodia. Insurgent Pathway to Peace. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Chandler, David P. 2008. A History of Cambodia. 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Coventry, Louise. 2017. “Civil Society in Cambodia: Challenges and Contestations.” In The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia, edited by Katherine Brickell and Simon Springer, 53–63. Abingdon: Routledge. Dahles, Heidi, and Michiel Verver. 2014. “The Institutionalisation of oknha: Cambodian Entrepreneurship at the Interface of Business and Politics.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 45 (1): 48–70. Deth, Sok Udom, and Daniel Bultmann. 2016. “The Afterglow of Hun Sen’s Cambodia? Socioeconomic Development, Political Change, and the Persistence of Inequalities.” In Globalization and Democracy in Southeast Asia, edited by Chantana BanpasirichoteWungaeo, Boike Rehbein, and Surichai Wungaeo, 87–110. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Edwards, Penny. 2007. Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Harris, Ian Charles. 2013. Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Hughes, Caroline, and Kheang Un, eds. 2011. “Cambodia’s Economic Transformation: Historical and Theoretical Frameworks.” In Cambodia’s Economic Transformation, 1–26. Kopenhagen: NIAS Press.

Clashing social ontologies 155 Jodhka, Surinder S., Boike Rehbein, and Jessé Souza. 2017. Inequality in Capitalist Societies. New York: Routledge. Karbaum, Markus. 2011. “Cambodia’s façade democracy and European assistance.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 4: 111–143. Kiernan, Ben. 1975. The Samlaut Rebellion and Its Aftermath, 1967–70: The Origins of Cambodia’s Liberation Movement. Monash University: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. Kiernan, Ben. 2002. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kiernan, Ben. 2004. How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mak, Phoeun. 1980. “L’introduction de la Chronique royale du Cambodge du lettré Nong.” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 67: 135–145. Muller, Gregor. 2006. Colonial Cambodia’s ‘Bad Frenchmen’. The Rise of French rule and the life of Thomas Caraman, 1840–87. Abingdon: Routledge. Norén-Nilsson, Astrid. 2013. “Performance as (re)incarnation: The Sdech Kân narrative.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 44 (1): 4–23. Owen, Taylor, and Ben Kiernan. 2006. “Bombs over Cambodia.” The Walrus: 62–69. Path, Kosal. 2018. “A Cambodiam Fusion of Personality, Party, and the State.” Current History 117 (800): 215–221. Raendchen, Jana, and Oliver Raendchen. 1998. “Present State, Problems and Purpose of Baan-müang Studies.” Tai Culture 3 (2): 5–11. Slocomb, Margaret. 2003. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979–1989. The Revolution After Pol Pot. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Tabeau, Ewa, and They Kheam. 2009. Demographic Expert Report: The Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, April 1975 – January 1979: A Critical Assessment of Major Estimates. Phnom Penh: Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Tambiah, Stanley J., ed. 1973. “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia.” In Culture, Thought, and Social Action, edited by Stanley J. Tambiah. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tully, John A. 2002. France on the Mekong: A History of the Protectorate in Cambodia, 1863–1953. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Widyono, Benny. 2008. Dancing in the Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia. Boulder, CO and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Wolters, Oliver. 1982. History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Interviews CPP leader. 2015. Interview with high-ranking CPP member on 3 June 2015, in Siem Reap. CPP leader. 2019a. Interview with high-ranking CPP member on 5 April 2019, in Phnom Penh. CPP leader. 2019b. Interview with high-ranking CPP member on 10 April 2019, in Phnom Penh. Literati. 2016. Interview with Literati, 20 February 2016, in Washington. New rich. 2019. Interview with New rich and CPP member, 4 April 2019, in Phnom Penh.

156  Daniel Bultmann Oknha. 2019. Interview with Oknha, 11 April 2019, in Phnom Penh. Opposition member. 2011. Interview with Opposition member, 21 March 2011, in Phnom Penh. Opposition member. 2012a. Interview with Opposition member, 11 June 2012, in Phnom Penh. Opposition member. 2012b. Interview with Opposition member, 14 June  2012, in Siem Reap. Opposition member. 2012c. Interview with Opposition member, 12 September 2012, via Skype. Opposition member. 2016. Interview with Opposition member, 20 February 2016, in Lowell, MA (United States). Opposition member. 2019. Interview with Opposition member, 5 June  2019, in Phnom Penh. Prince. 2012. Interview with Prince, 7 June 2012, in Phnom Penh. Prince. 2019. Interview with Prince, 9 April 2019, in Phnom Penh. Princess. 2011. Interview with Princess on 26 June 2011, in Phnom Penh. Princess. 2019. Interview with Princess on 29 March 2019, in Phnom Penh.

Chapter 10

Social inequality, sociocultures, and social ontology in Brazil Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

1 Introduction This chapter deals with the relation between social classes, sociocultures, and habitus in Brazil in order to elucidate some shared, and some socially differentiated, aspects of social ontology. It argues that five social classes can be distinguished in contemporary Brazil, which are heirs of earlier sociocultures; namely, the colonial hierarchy and its subsequent transformation by industrialization. Despite Brazil’s long experience with capitalism and its rather solid class structure, elements of the earlier sociocultures persist in contemporary habitus. While all Brazilians seem to share an individualist and meritocratic social ontology, it plays out rather differently in the framework of different habitus types. While much research on Brazil tries to find a direct correlation between social structure and political orientation, we argue that formal politics is dominated by factional divisions within the upper classes, which do not correlate directly with habitus or class. The following analysis is based on more than 600 qualitative interviews, which followed the theoretical and methodological framework outlined in the introduction to this volume. Only half of these interviews have been fully interpreted. The sample is taken from urban areas across all regions of the country, within which most sections of Brazilian society are represented. Only the very top of the social hierarchy is missing, as in most sociological research. In this chapter, we work with a subset of 304 interviews, for which we have quantitative scores in a set of relevant attitudes, attributes, and environmental conditions. Section 2 of the chapter traces the recent history of Brazil in terms of sociocultures. We distinguish between a postcolonial, an industrial, and a liberal capitalist socioculture. In Section 3, we explore the class structure of liberal capitalism as an heir of previous sociocultures. We identify five social classes, which are analyzed in some detail. Section 4 deals with the construction of habitus types, distinguishing between six types: the ambitious, the expressive, the conventional, the defensive, the hedonistic, and the resigned. Section 5 correlates habitus types and social ontology.

2 Sociocultures Capitalist societies develop a hierarchy of social classes. This is because they emerge out of precapitalist societies, whose hierarchies are never abolished. In

158  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

European societies, only a small part of the population had full citizenship and political, as well as economic, rights after the transformation to a capitalist society. Meanwhile, women, people without property, foreigners, and, in some states, slaves were excluded in this regard, only gaining full citizenship over time; in some cases, merely a few decades ago. In the colonial societies of America, slaves and indigenous peoples remained excluded until the late 19th century, and in some cases well beyond that. In all of these societies, the groups that were underprivileged before the capitalist transformation remain underprivileged because they never received an equal status on the material and symbolic levels. Their underprivileged starting conditions were never compensated for. Precapitalist inequalities persist in capitalist societies in two ways. First, they do not disappear immediately. Second, they are transformed into hierarchies of social classes. The structure of social classes is a transformation of earlier structures, or sociocultures, which partly persist alongside the social classes themselves. Their persistence is due to the fact that they are embodied in habitus and in institutions. Through education, they are passed on from one generation to the next. Both the habitus and the institutions transform and slowly adapt to capitalism, but it takes generations until they become invisible. Within this context, the components of primary habitus are shaped early in life. They correspond to the social environment, the setting in which childhood takes place. Often, this environment is heavily determined by parents. Children learn from their educators, who would typically be their parents, family, and friends. The older generation has incorporated habitus traits, which correspond to earlier times, occasionally even an earlier socioculture. They occupy a certain position in the social structure, which shapes their habitus. The habitus then corresponds to the social environment, which is partly determined by the social position occupied in the respective socioculture. For example, old and new money are always associated with different patterns of behavior, or habitus, which are easily identified by either group. Andrea Lange-Vester (2007), for example, has shown the continuity of social position and habitus in families of German blacksmiths turned metalworkers over a period of 400 years. Like European societies, Brazil has a clearly visible hierarchy of social classes. However, the precapitalist origins of the Brazilian hierarchy are more visible than in most European societies. These origins are mainly rooted in the colonial slaveholding society. Slavery was abandoned in Brazil only in 1888, long after independence, and continues to persist in a transformed shape as part of a postcolonial socioculture. This socioculture was transformed by industrialization and accompanying immigration during the early 20th century, and the subsequent shift to a liberal democracy. We found that elements of the postcolonial socioculture persist in people’s habitus up to this day, especially among the rural population, informal laborers, and the ‘old money’ class, even though these elements are constantly transformed. Furthermore, facets of the postcolonial socioculture are embodied in institutions. That is why this socioculture persists to a certain degree, even though the majority

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 159

of Brazilians have embodied a habitus which rather comprehensively corresponds to a capitalist environment. Apart from this, the contemporary hierarchy of social classes is rather obviously an heir of the postcolonial hierarchy. In the postcolonial period, the main dimensions articulating structural position and sociocultures were property, bureaucratic entitlements, and slavery. These dimensions defined basically four groups or ranks in the social hierarchy: 1 2 3 4

The large landowners, masters of lands and people The administration with status prerogatives Free laborers, small farmers, and traders living in the interstices of the socioeconomic formation The mass of slaves

Arriving in the early 20th century, industrialization brought about a process of huge structural mobility in Brazil. Notwithstanding this process, the postcolonial socioculture persisted by and large through its articulation with rights and powers over property and specialized education. A new class emerged linked to industrialization, rural-urban migration, immigration from Europe, and the end of slavery. We can distinguish the following five classes or status groups from this period, which are mostly heirs of the postcolonial ranks: 1

The landowners, through conversions of economic resources and rationalization, gave rise to capitalists 2 Administration, converting status entitlements into educational and professional privileges, gave rise to functional elites 3 Free laborers and traders from the Brazilian countryside and the new contingent of European immigrants created an intermediary stratum comprising skilled laborers and a petty bourgeoisie 4 Free laborers, small farmers, and traders, once placed in the interstices of the postcolonial formation, filled then a lower intermediary stratum of unskilled laborers 5 The mass of slaves gave rise to a large marginalized underclass During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, while large property concentration closed the ranks occupied by a small number of capitalists, the extremely concentrated distribution of formal qualifications prevented almost any mobility of the lower strata from the recent postcolonial period up to the functional elites of the industrializing society. Thus, the upper and upper-middle classes experienced what, at least in sociological terms, could be considered an absolute continuity from postcolonialism to industrialism. As for the strata below this affluent social sphere, industrialization caused further differentiation. The creation of an industrial labor market and the expansion of the demand for services gave rise to skilled labor and a petty bourgeoisie. Freed laborers and traders of the postcolonial period in particular might have made their

160  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

way into this new set of economic positions. Also of note, European immigration – stimulated by a racialist public policy since the 1870s in Brazil – brought a large contingent of new laborers to occupy these positions. Below this stratum, those once living at the interstices of slave-holding society turned to the unskilled labor market and explored the new opportunities for selfemployment in a society undergoing urbanization. During the 20th century, the most significant mobility experienced by this class was that from rural to urban work. Finally, arising directly from the once enslaved population in the postcolonial society emerged a mass of people living under the socially defined line of dignity, making their living from precarious manual jobs and – especially in the case of women – from domestic work in a very servile (reminiscent of slavery) cultural framework. In industrial society, the main type of mobility experienced by this stratum was that from rural to urban poverty. Table 10.1 gives an overview of the relation between contemporary social classes and sociocultures in Brazil. Each cell of the table represents a hierarchical segment in one of the sociocultures and largely determines their social environment. The three sociocultures emerged in successive historical periods, namely in the 19th century, the early 20th century, and the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. They partly coexist up to this day, but the postcolonial and industrial sociocultures have slowly disappeared, since people migrate from the left to the right column of the table. They migrate physically from rural areas into the towns, and socially from one socioculture to the other. We estimate that much less than half of the Brazilian population is still rooted in the earlier sociocultures. The postcolonial socioculture developed after independence. It was a mere transformation of the colonial structure, since the plantation economy and slavery were retained. The abolition of slavery in the late 19th century set slaves free, but without giving them any means for social mobility. Thus, the postcolonial structure was little changed well into the 20th century (Buarque de Holanda 2002). This means that the oldest Brazilians alive have still experienced the postcolonial structure in their childhood and have passed on components of the corresponding habitus to their own kin. Even toward the middle of the century, the majority of

Table 10.1  Sociocultures in Brazil Postcolonialism

Industrialism

Liberal capitalism

Upper class Upper middle class Middle class

Large landowners Administration

Aloof Established Middle class

Lower middle class

Small farmers and traders Landless laborers

Capitalists Functional elites Skilled laborers and petty bourgeoisie Unskilled laborers Landless rural population

Marginalized

Lower class

Batalhadores

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 161

the population grew up in a rural setting, which was dominated by the postcolonial structure. Few people who are in their sixties or older today are entirely untouched by the postcolonial socioculture. Postcolonial society had no real middle class. It consisted of a white top and a black bottom, and a tiny segment of urban laborers and merchants, as well as any sorts of intermediaries in the commercial routes linking the shores to the countryside. The top strata were structured into large landowners and administration, while the bottom basically consisted of slaves and small farmers (cf. Freyre 2001). When the slaves were set free, most of them had to find jobs as rural laborers, remaining at the bottom of the hierarchy. Some migrated to the towns and turned into urban laborers, very few of them achieving upward mobility by gaining skills and formal jobs. Another portion of former slaves managed to acquire small plots of land and thereby did experience upward mobility. The structure of the top of society, however, was basically a reproduction of the colonial setup. The people who grew up as landless laborers, farmers, and large landowners embodied the postcolonial socioculture. Their children and grandchildren maintain elements of the corresponding habitus, while the administration has almost fully converted to the capitalist socioculture. Brazil turned into a developmental state in the early 20th century, especially from the 1930s onward, with postcolonial society transforming into an industrial one. Urban structures changed quickly and significantly, while rural structures remained rooted in the postcolonial socioculture. The urban population was rather small at the beginning, but outnumbered the rural population at the end of the military dictatorship. The urbanites developed a habitus, which differed significantly from the postcolonial socioculture. This industrial socioculture was stratified into capitalists, functional elites, and laborers. The laborers in turn were divided into two distinct classes, skilled and unskilled. This division largely coincided with skin color. Whereas the group of unskilled laborers consisted mostly of former slaves and their offspring, the skilled laborers were mainly European immigrants. A few highly educated immigrants made it into the elites, while a few Brazilian farmers made it into the ranks of skilled labor, thus some social mobility occurred in this transition. The postcolonial bureaucracy became the functional elite of the developmental state, retaining some elements of the former’s habitus (Stoll 2012, 65). A portion of landowners in this period invested in industry and became capitalists. The social hierarchies of postcolonial and industrial society are the foundations of the contemporary Brazilian hierarchy of social classes. The landless and unskilled laborers have transformed into the marginalized class, termed the “ralé estrutural” by sociologist Jessé Souza (2009). They are connected to a lower middle class, which could also be interpreted as an upper low class. This social class has its origins in the unskilled laborers and small farmers, but mainly developed in connection with the social programs rolled out by the post-military dictatorship governments (Arnold and Jalles 2014). This social class shares its origins and characteristics partly with the marginalized, but the two classes have distinct

162  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

differences in their relation to labor and the values of mainstream society. The members of the upper low class attribute a central value toward integration into society through work and family maintenance. However, they have to struggle to maintain their position above the marginalized and usually travel far to work (commonly having several jobs) in order to do so. This is why they have been referred to as batalhadores (Souza 2012), the “fighters” or strugglers. Both these classes are overwhelmingly black in skin color due to their historical roots. On the other hand, the opposite is true for the three higher classes, which have very few members of African descent. The middle class emerged from the social classes of skilled laborers and the petty bourgeoisie of industrialist society, many of them descendants of poor European immigrants. In its turn, the upper middle class, which we refer to as the established class, is heir of the functional elites of the industrial socioculture. Intergenerationally, with the large increase in higher education supply during the late 20th century in Brazil, a portion of skilled laborers and the industrial petty bourgeoisie were able to make their way up to the established class through professionalization. Finally, we refer to the upper class as ‘aloof’ because it is invisible, and considers itself a species apart from the rest of the population. Only most people born after around 1980 are fully rooted in the socioculture of liberal capitalism, which unfolded after the end of the military dictatorship, and adopted a liberal habitus. The industrial socioculture is being eroded by the contemporary structure of liberal capitalism, while the living conditions of postcolonialism have disappeared. In a few decades, it will be impossible to discern the historical roots of the capitalist class structure in Brazil, very much like in European societies.

3  Social classes We can distinguish between five social classes in contemporary Brazil: the marginalized, the batalhadores, the middle class, the established, and the aloof. This distinction is based on the differences in habitus and capital that we found in our interviews, as well as the study of sociocultures and the patterns of social mobility, or rather immobility, in our empirical material. Our first approach to identify these social classes was to scrutinize relevant categories of capital and habitus through the interpretation of interviews – i.e. more inductively than deductively. The most important categories are economic and social capital of the family of origin, social environment during childhood, quality of formal education, parental education, the highest title of education, income, wealth, professional class, social networks, self-confidence, autonomy, goal-orientation, and active, engaging attitude to life. The hierarchy of social classes only becomes visible when studying the categories in combination. Each characteristic taken in isolation only has a limited value. The correlation with other characteristics shows that many of them reinforce each other and that some combinations are much more likely than others, while many

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 163

combinations, although theoretically possible, do not appear in reality. However, in each statistically probable combination, one or two characteristics can be absent in any empirical case. For example, the son of a capitalist may not have a high educational title, or a football player from the lower class may be rich for the duration of his active career. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1984, 277) has referred to the relation between different combinations of characteristics as “family resemblance.” The members of a social class, from this perspective, resemble each other like the members of a family. They share many characteristics, but no two members are exactly identical. Two family members may share the same nose but have different hair color, which they may have in common with another family member. The capitalist’s son, who shares fewer than two-thirds of his relevant capital and habitus traits with his father, would not be a member of the upper class any more, while the football player, who is not only rich but also well-educated, well-mannered, and well-connected, may not be considered a member of the lower class anymore. According to our methodology, we would indeed assign these cases to different classes. However, they are very rare in our empirical sample. Given this inductive definition of social classes based on our reconstruction of sociocultures and on the extensive discussion of a few selected interviews, we moved on to work with our whole sample of 304 cases. In order to assign these individuals a social class, we started by implementing a Principal Component Analysis to a subset of attitudes. These attitudes are theoretically possible habitus traits, which may or may not be significant for any given macro social context. In the present study, we found three main dimensions to be relevant, which we will discuss later in this chapter. These three dimensions were used to place the individuals in five clusters, which correspond to social classes. Table 10.2 presents the typical relevant characteristics (listed in the first paragraph of this section) of these social classes. The almost linear progression from the lowest to the highest social class is immediately evident. This was to be expected, and results from a hermeneutic circle. In the first exploratory assessment of a few selected interviews, we assigned a case to a class if at least two-thirds of its characteristics – or more precisely, values of an indicator – are present. If many other interviews show family resemblances to this configuration of values, the hypothesis is confirmed. If not, the characteristics, or values, defining this class have to be changed. The result is a circular relationship between social class and those values that most clearly distinguish the classes. Our method to work the 304 interviews – clustering the individuals based on the dimensions obtained through a Principal Component Analysis applied to the attitude scales – can be said to reproduce this circularity. Income and wealth are indicators of economic capital. In Brazil, it is plausible to measure income in units of the minimum wage, which allows for a decent assessment and comparison. We estimated the amount of wealth with reference to real estate, car, and financial assets. The title of education only refers to the highest formal graduation and does not take the quality of the institution into

Goal or ientation

Self-confidence Autonom y Active attitude

Status of f amily dur ing c hildhood Style of par enting dur ing c hildhood

Self-doubting Ver y heteronomous Lacking active attitude Lacking g oal orientation Some what

Bar ely encouraging, roughl y caretaking and bar el y n ur turing Barely self-confident Barely autonomous Activ e

Poor

Discouraging, not caretaking and not n ur turing

Poor

Tough

Gener al perception of c hildhood Social surroundings dur ing c hildhood L ow

Self-employed, skilled and semiskilled w orkers Tough

Self-employ ed and unskilled workers

Occupation

L ow

Nar ro w, but helpful

N a rrow

Social networks

Wealth Educational title

Betw een 1–4 times the minim um wage L ow Basic education and technical qualification

Batalhador es

Around the minim um wage or under it Ver y lo w Basic or lower qualification

Income

Marginalized

Table 10.2  Characteristics of social classes

Goal oriented

Ver y encouraging, ver y car etaking and remarkabl y n ur turing Ver y self-confident Ver y autonomous Ver y active

Heterogeneous, but mostl y affluent Mid dle

Around fiv e times the minim um wage or above Average Technical qualification and prof essional education Wide and resourceful Exper ts, prof essionals and skilled workers Average

Middle c lass

Mostl y g oal oriented

Self-confident Autonomous Active

Encouraging caretaking and n ur turing

High

Affluent

Easy

Over ten times the minim um wage or abo ve High Prof essional education and (ver y often) a graduate Wide and r esourceful Exper ts and prof essionals

Established

Ver y g oal oriented

Ver y self-confident Ver y autonomous Ver y active

Encouraging, caretaking but not n ur turing

High

Affluent

Ver y high Prof essional or technical education and a graduate Wide and highl y r esourceful Employers, managers, exper ts and prof essionals Easy

Over 20 times the minim um wage

Aloof

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 165

account, even though this is a particularly important distinguishing factor in Brazilian society. We estimated the quality and reach of social networks on the basis of our interviews. For occupation, the official Brazilian codes were used when interviewing our participants. Three indicators refer to people’s childhood. They point to the development of the primary habitus and its relation to the family of origin. It is very obvious that support and reinforcement during childhood play a key role in a person’s life chances and that they correlate strongly with social class. We derive the values for the indicators from the interviews, which are often rather explicit and distinct in this regard. Even if a person misremembers or misrepresents his or her parents, it is quite clear what it means if the father spent time in jail or the mother had three jobs, for example. The list of habitus traits in the table is comprised of self-confidence, autonomy, an active attitude to life, and goal orientation. These characteristics turned out to be the primary habitus, most distinctive for social classes, correlated with the distribution of power and rights over economic resources. The numerical values were attributed by correlating each characteristic with its opposite, in a scale ranging from −5 to +5. Self-confidence refers to the belief of being able to master all problems in life. Autonomy is the embodied sense of freedom of choice. The active attitude to life implies being ready to deal with every problem and to pursue one’s goals. Goal orientation means setting oneself clear goals for one’s life. Jessé Souza (2009) has called the lowest Brazilian class ‘ralé’ because its members are despised by the rest of the population. We may want to use a more neutral term, which expresses the despisal but at the same time is less judgmental. Therefore, we speak of the marginalized class. This also allows us to point to the fact that all capitalist societies have this social class, which is constituted within the capitalist framework in the same way everywhere. It is a class that is considered useless and unworthy by the rest of the population. For this reason, Souza has characterized it as living below the line of dignity. This line marks the division between the lowest class and the rest of the population. The marginalized are by far the largest social class in Brazil. Assuming its strong association with economic positions such as decapitalized self-employment, unskilled work, and intermittent jobs, we would estimate this social class to make up between 30% and 40% of the population. This class is characterized by the lowest number of assets of any sort, such as income, wealth, formal education, and social networks. Regarding their early conditions in family and community, they not only lived under economic deprivation, but also experienced absence of care, nurture, and stimuli to develop and evolve socially valuable skills and abilities. Their general attitude toward life and society reflects self-doubt, lack of autonomy and a harsh difficulty to stabilize a long-term time frame based on goals. Relative to the other social classes, the marginalized are also more homogeneous with regard to assets, living conditions and attitudes. Considering the intraclass differences, most members of this class are remarkably similar in terms of how low they score across the social indicators considered.

166  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

The social class above the marginalized shares many of the characteristics and much of the historical and social background of those below them. From the perspective of the upper classes, these may be the ‘honest poor,’ a low class but one that does useful work and deserves a social existence. We retain Souza’s term ‘batalhadores’ to refer to this class. Concerning social origins, the main feature which differentiates this class from its social (and frequently physical) neighbors relates to non-economic aspects: Parenting may not have been particularly encouraging and nurturing, but neither was it neglectful or a hindrance. Typically, the batalhadores have basic or technical education and earnings slightly above the minimum wage. Their social networks are narrow, but not irrelevant to their life chances. As far as attitudes are concerned, they have a rather edgy self-confidence and sense of autonomy, which seems to persist thanks to an active stance toward life. It is worth noting that the batalhadores vary in particular in terms of the extent to which they are able to set goals. This heterogeneity across individuals in our sample translates to the instability of circumstances across time. Effectively, basic educational qualifications and even degrees granted by lower-rank private faculties render a rather insecure position in the labor market. As for the self-employed, their low level of assets and property turn the inherent risks of entrepreneurism into something likely to jeopardize their most basic resources for living, as it materially blurs the boundary between domestic and venture budget (Visser in Souza 2012). The batalhadores must constantly struggle not to be relegated to the lowest class. Any accident, illness, unforeseen expense, or break in relevant solidarity ties (e.g. family) can entail such a relegation. This social class may comprise up to 30% of the population. There is a strong dividing line between the batalhadores and the middle class, which is due to their different historical roots in the industrialist socioculture: unskilled workers on the one hand, and skilled workers and the petty bourgeoisie on the other hand. This division is reinforced by differences in skin color, which constitutes an important criterion of social classification in Brazil. The contemporary middle class originated from the skilled laborers group, who were partly rural-urban migrants but mostly immigrants. This group later spread to the other new urban occupations, such as services, white-collar employees and small entrepreneurs. Some of them managed to rise into the upper-middle class through education and the professional hierarchy. The members of this class typically have technical or professional education and an income of around five times the minimum wage or above. They are able to accumulate some wealth during their lives and have relevant social networks. Moreover, their early life says a lot about what separates them from the batalhadores. They not only lived in families and communities with economic resources available to them, but also their upbringing was exceptionally caretaking, encouraging, and nurturing, which distinguishes them even from the upper classes. Middle class members dispose of valuable positions and capital, but their volume and structure of assets do not allow for losses, especially in terms of human resources. While their relatively prosperous conditions set the long-term expectations toward upward mobility or, at least, toward

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 167

the maintenance of present position (which generally involves some movement, given the changes in the social structure itself), they are in no position to take the future for granted. Their remarkable affective investment in raising their children entails a pivotal articulation between morality and strategy. It might be better and more informative to refer to this class as a sort of extended petty bourgeoisie, comprising also the more affluent segments of the ‘working class,’ than as a middle class. It perhaps constitutes no more than 20% of the Brazilian population. The upper-middle class distinguishes itself from the lower classes in terms of the role played by educational degrees, but also – and perhaps more importantly – on the basis of its historical origins in the administration of postcolonialism and in the functional elites of industrialism. As discussed earlier in this chapter, this social class experienced a remarkable continuity through sociocultures in Brazil. Therefore, we call it the ‘established’ class. Some members of the industrial middle class (the skilled workers and the petty bourgeoise, with their large contingent of European immigrants and their offspring) might have made their way into to this class through intergenerational mobility, while some members of the upper class might have arrived there after experiencing downward mobility. Occasionally, this movement might not be regarded as an unintended setback by the individuals experiencing it. In some instances, this trajectory may be triggered by an optative change in aesthetic-practical orientations, since, as we illustrate later in this chapter, the upper-middle class and the upper class typically have different lifestyles. Generally, the established class members earn more than ten times the minimum wage, are wealthy, and can count on relevant social networks. They intensively invest in specialized education and work as professionals or, most frequently, as experts. During childhood, they lived in affluent environments. Also, their upbringing was encouraging, caretaking, and nurturing, although not to the extent of the middle class. This difference may be related to the more comfortable position of the established class. Parenting still conflates morally oriented care and strategic economic behavior, but a much safer position in the social space allows for a more relaxed way in approaching the deeds of intergenerational class reproduction. Members of the established class are possibly less self-confident, autonomous, and active than is the case in the middle class. Again, we believe that these differences may reflect the more “easygoing” character of their struggles for social recognition and economic rewards. The established class comprises less than 10% of the Brazilian population. As we have already noted, our sample is weak at the very top of social hierarchy. However, we interviewed a few large employers and very wealthy professionals. In our cluster analysis based on habitus traits, these people were grouped with a number of less affluent individuals constituting a group that differs from the established class. Although this group could be considered an upper section of the established class, the results suggest that it may, at least, elicit some typical characteristics of the ‘real’ upper class in Brazil. The latter is obviously the richest in terms of economic capital and economically relevant resources, like social networks. They may also be experts or professionals but, mostly, they are

168  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

employers or managers rooted in old money. A chief difference from the established class is the relatively lower investment in cultural capital, recognizable by the smaller frequency in graduate courses. As in the established class, upper-class members lived their childhood in an economically affluent context, but here we find a salient difference in terms of parenting. Although encouraging and caretaking, an upper-class childhood is not typically very nurturing, indicating that, differently from the middle classes, intergenerational economic strategies do not correlate directly with affective care. Regarding attitudes, members of the upper class are highly self-confident, active, autonomous, and goal-oriented, eliciting an energetic, ambitious, and probably eager stand toward (economic) life, a sort of lebensführung very different from the relative ease of the upper middle class.

4  Classes and habitus traits Even though some habitus traits are obviously differentiated according to social class, others are shared across class lines or differ within classes. These differences are partly due to the socio-cultural roots, which can differ in the same class or be identical for two classes. Furthermore, there are some aspects of the habitus, which seem to be shared  – albeit in slightly different versions  – by the entire Brazilian population. All of this is linked to differences in social ontology. Some aspects of social ontology are common for all Brazilians, but many differ strongly according to social class and habitus types. We propose to distinguish between six habitus types in Brazil. This classification is still rather preliminary, but not random and probably not very unrealistic. If we assume that the habitus traits discussed in the previous section differentiate the population vertically, i.e. along class lines, we found habitus traits that work along other dimensions. More precisely, we found three dimensions of differentiation in our principal component analysis of all the habitus traits we identified as relevant in our interviews. Table 10.3 shows these dimensions and their correlations with the attitudes.1 The attitude scales range from −5 to +5. The scores were attributed to each individual in the sample by three different members of the research team, all graduate-level social scientists, on the basis of the transcripts of the narrative interviews. For computation, the average score was considered. The plus and minus in the first column denote which pole was represented by negative or positive values, respectively. The last column shows the intraclass correlation between the three scores attributed to each interviewee and gives an assessment of the consistency of each scale. Three of the indicators (collectivism, autonomy, and idealism) were problematic in this regard but still useful for the interpretation of habitus in Brazil. The first dimension can be described as productive self-confidence. It refers to an embodied trust in one’s abilities and personality. It is an attitude that is linked to economic affluence, social respectability, and optimism. The opposite of this disposition is productive self-doubt. The second dimension distinguishes basic attitudes toward life. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on experimentation,

Table 10.3  Dimensions from PCA applied to attitudes Attitude Self-confidence (−) or self-doubt (+) Collectivism (−) or individualism (+) Heteronomy (−) or autonomy (+) Pessimism (−) or optimism (+) Passivity (−) or activity (+) Ascetism (−) or hedonism (+) Idealism (−) or pragmatism (+) Intellectual (−) or physical activity (+) Experimentalism (−) or traditionalism (+) Family (−) or selforientation (+) Unsatisfaction (−) or satisfaction (+) Goal orientation (−) or dispersion (+) Indiscipline (−) or discipline (+) Weak (−) or strong work ethos (+) Meritocracy (−) or egalitarianism (+) Support (−) or against (+) welfare policies Authoritarianism (−) or liberalism (+)

Dimension 1 Dimension 2 Dimension 3

Dimension 1

Dimension 2

Dimension 3

Intraclass correlation

0.3627

0.0490

0.0618

0.67

−0.1101

0.0286

0.5080

0.43

0.3466

0.0605

0.1076

0.48

0.3168

0.0888

−0.0539

0.60

0.3644

0.0029

0.0360

0.60

−0.0200

0.4034

−0.0115

0.61

0.0822

−0.2497

0.1434

0.49

−0.2480

−0.1932

−0.1303

0.74

−0.0104

−0.4582

−0.0462

0.54

−0.0347

0.3099

0.3807

0.68

0.3091

0.3091

0.0691

0.79

−0.3406

0.0547

−0.0925

0.70

0.3373

−0.1764

−0.0059

0.68

0.3013

−0.2555

−0.1562

0.64

0.0283

0.3642

−0.4740

0.80

−0.0271

0.0319

0.5209

0.67

0.1245

0.4261

−0.0618

0.86

Eigen value

Difference

Proportion

Cumulative

5.24082 2.52647 1.52879

2.71435 0.99768 0.36482

30.8% 14.9% 9.0%

30.8% 45.7% 54.7%

Observations Source: Radiografia do Brasil Contemporâneo (Ipea 2016)

304

170  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

fruition, and expression; and, on the other hand, the prominence of conventions, pragmatic ends, and conformity. It seems that the two poles correspond to roots in the industrial and the liberal capitalist sociocultures, respectively. The third dimension corresponds to individualization. On the one side is the disposition to believe that all success and failure, one’s actions and social position, are due to one’s self enterprise. We call this disposition self-centered individualism. On the other side is a disposition to, while sharing the pivotal belief in individual merit, systematically relate one’s self achievements to his or her immersion in social relations and communitarian ties. Accordingly, we call this disposition embedded individualism.2 Both dispositions are individualisms because all Brazilians seem to share the belief in the individual as the basis of society. This is one of the foundations of Brazilian social ontology. Our assessment of the narrative interviews suggests further differentiation of the second dimension into two separate tendencies, which creates four attitudinal poles within the dimensions. The tendencies are separate because they manifest differently in different classes. The first pole corresponds to hedonism for the lower classes and to expressivism for the upper classes. This difference relates to the reference of the latter to ‘distinctive’ practices of cultural goods. By asserting this, we are not implying hedonism has to do with non-cultural habits of consumption. For all classes, aesthetic fruition and expression are, of course, intrinsically cultural in the broader anthropological sense and, in sociological terms, integrated into the wider circuit of cultural production in the mass consumption society. Yet, Bourdieu’s (1984) argument of distinctive patterns of cultural consumption of prestigious cultural goods and services applies here. As for the prominence of conventions, pragmatic ends and conformity, in the economically stable classes, this tendency refers to principles like dedication and commitment, or, even more, devotion to social and communitarian duties, and most importantly, to economic endeavor. We call this disposition conventionalism. For the less affluent social classes, these same attitudes reflect a deep concern about social inclusion. The values of industriousness, commitment to family, and, to a lesser extent, to community are pivotal in this regard. Here, the sake of legitimacy, at which expressivism aims by claiming sophistication and conventionalism by asserting dedication, assumes dramatic features. The very integration in productive society is always at risk, so a pragmatic commitment to conventional or, for that matter, ‘traditional’ values, encapsulates the ceaseless attempt to protect oneself. In this sense, we call this disposition defensiveness. Graphs 10.1 and 10.2 show the relative position of the five social classes in Brazil’s social space defined by these three dimensions. In both graphs, productive self-confidence is the vertical axis. In Graph 10.1, lifestyle stands for the horizontal axis, while individualization does the same in Graph 10.2. The average score among the members of each social class in each axis determines their position in the cartesian planes. The position of social classes along the first dimension reflects that discussed in the previous paragraphs. Overall, this dimension has a hierarchical meaning that

Graph 10.1  Social classes in the social space of self-confidence and lifestyles Source: Radiografia do Brasil Contemporâneo (Ipea 2016)

Graph 10.2  Social classes in the social space of self-confidence and individualization Source: Radiografia do Brasil Contemporâneo (Ipea 2016)

172  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

justifies its representation in the vertical axis. The marginalized class is at the bottom of the social space. The middle and the upper classes are at the top. Between these classes, however, the relative differences do not correspond strictly to a hierarchy. The middle class is at the very top, along with the aloof. As we have already seen, the situation of the middle class, pretty much an extended petty bourgeoisie, intensifies its struggle for recognition and for welfare, both mediated by the economic sphere. The established class is positioned slightly lower relative to the middle and the aloof class. Again, this position may reflect the relatively ‘easy’ character of their struggles for social recognition and economic rewards. Finally, the batalhadores are on the edge. Yet, they are much closer to the middle and upper classes than they are to the marginalized. This quantitative fact evidences a qualitative one: the categorical difference between inclusion and exclusion. The positions along the second dimension shed light at new aspects. Expressivism is a most distinctive feature of the established class. The middle class is also expressivist, although to a lesser extent. From a Bourdieusian perspective, one would hypothesize that this expressivism of the middle class rather betrays a ‘cultural goodwill.’ This may even be true for the upper classes, since the historical weight of colonialism makes the upper classes in Brazil especially prone to a “cultural goodwill” toward the legitimate culture embodied, from their point of view, by Western Europe and the United States. The dominant class, in turn, is largely conventional, which coheres with the pursuit of legitimacy through the standard ‘traditional’ imaginary of the capitalist. The batalhadores are defensive, which expresses their restless struggle for social recognition and economic integration. Finally, the marginalized class shows tendencies toward experimentation or toward resignation. Graph 10.2 shows how the social classes are distributed along the types of individualism, which substantiate two approaches to the fundamental idea of meritocracy, mostly shared by all social classes in Brazil. On the one hand, there is a radical approach to meritocracy; on the other hand, a more tempered one. Self-centered individualism is a trait well represented within the upper class. Next to them comes the established class, also inclined to the most radical idea of selfdetermination. Despite their very different lifestyles, the two dominant classes are similar in terms of how they approach meritocracy. Interestingly, those who grow up in favorable conditions, long rooted in early sociocultures, are especially imbued with the belief that all achievements and failures in life are exclusively explained by their own efforts. The way this belief manifests itself in the narrative interviews is also interesting. For example, when asked to tell us something about their professional career, the interviewees of these classes generally talk about many situations when a relative helped them reach the next step. Right after, when asked to evaluate the relative importance played by their social networks, they attribute their achievements exclusively to their own actions. There are two reasons for this apparent contradiction. One explanation is more historical. As already discussed in the first section of this chapter, structural mobility in Brazil was huge during the second half of the 20th century. This fact

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 173

often blurs people’s appreciation of their relative position of origin in the social space. Nowadays, for example, a man whose father was a low-skilled (yet skilled) laborer during the 1970s frequently does not consider himself as coming from an industrialist middle class. Projecting the rankings of the present socioculture onto the past, he rather believes to have originated from a lower class. This sense of having performed long-range social mobility nourishes a more radical, heroic belief in self-achievement. The other explanation is more sociological. The socialization and sociability in the upper classes place individual choice as the central reference to define expectations and to trace plans of life. Thus, while providing as favorable conditions as possible, family, community, and social networks reinforce, at a more ideational level, the idea of a sovereign self as solely responsible for any personal achievements. Embedded individualism is characteristic of most members of the middle class and the batalhadores. They are very close in the social space along this dimension. In general, considering all the three dimensions,3 batalhadores are closer to the middle class than the middle class are to the established. Middle class members may be distinctive, but they are still close enough for the batalhadores to emulate their aspirations and strategies for social enhancement. Embedded individualism is grounded in a socialization and in a pattern of sociability that attributes a central role to significant others in defining expectations and tracing plans of life. It is worth noting that one should not confuse this more tempered sense of meritocracy with a standard left-wing political orientation or tendency. Embedded individualism expresses an understanding of life as a sort of joint venture involving family and, to a lesser extent, community, not a social critique of the ideology of merit. Finally, at the bottom of the social space, self-centered individualism is predominant. It characterizes many members of the marginalized class. Most likely, this is a reflection of the overall fragility of family and communitarian ties and social networks in this class, rather than an ideology transmitted through habitus and discourse from one privileged generation to the next, as in the upper classes.

5  Social ontology and habitus types In theory, any value along any of the three dimensions discussed in the previous section can combine with any values of the two other dimensions in any empirical person. However, some combinations are very unlikely, while others are frequent. Some of these combinations appear so often in our interviews that we define them as habitus types. Even though we appropriate Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, we do not think that it coincides with class. In our approach, habitus types are attitudinal patterns which translate socio-cultural patterns into schemes for action. Our concept of social class differs from Bourdieu’s, as well, since we also relate it to sociocultures and operationalize it as a statistical limit of social mobility. Some habitus types are diacritic of certain social classes, which constitutes a key fact for explaining social inequalities in our approach. No habitus type appears in more

174  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

than three classes. Yet, the two concepts do not coincide. Some habitus types are shared by otherwise very different social classes. We distinguish between six habitus types. They can be characterized as combinations of mostly extreme values of the three dimensions. We identified eight poles along these dimensions: self-confident vs. self-doubting, expressivist/ hedonist vs. conventional/defensive, self-centered individualist vs. embedded individualist. Our analysis shows that each habitus type shows stronger or weaker tendencies toward one of the two poles of individualism, but they do not define types. The other six poles each define a habitus type, since the respective characteristic is most prominent in it and much less so in the others. Against this background, the following types can be identified: The ambitious type is mainly self-confident, but also goal-oriented, optimistic, self-centered and conventional; the expressivist type is expressivist, as well as self-confident and liberal; the conventional type is conformist, but also traditionalist and ascetic; the defensive type is defensive, as well as self-doubting, embedded, and pragmatic; the hedonist type, of course, is hedonistic, self-doubting, expressivist, and selfcentered; and the resigned habitus type is self-doubting, as well as pessimistic and heteronomous. The ambitious type is the characteristic habitus of the dominant class, which is very much defined by self-confidence. However, it is also found in the established class. The established class, in turn, consists of a large number of people with an expressive habitus. This is Bourdieu’s distinctive habitus associated with an aesthetic and distinctive lifestyle. This type extends into the middle class. The characteristic habitus type of the middle class is the conventionalist, who cherishes traditional values. We also find the conventional type in the established class. Apart from the expressive and the conventional types, the middle class also hosts the defensive type, even though this type is prevalent among the batalhadores. It can be found among the marginalized, as well. The lowest class mainly consists of two opposite types, the hedonists and the resigned, both of whom are united by their lack of self-confidence. The three dimensions correspond to different depths of social ontology. The first dimension, i.e. productive self-confidence, constitutes a deep level defining dignity itself and, therefore, the effective boundary between citizenship and undercitizenship, despite the formal universalism of laws (Souza 2003). It underlies all the contexts of practice to the degree of defining who is and who is not worth existing in society. Productive self-confidence reflects the progressive dominance of capitalism over earlier sociocultures in Brazil. It comes with industrialism, progressively replacing social classifications of postcolonialism, and gets more and more rooted in the social ontology as Brazil moves toward the liberal capitalist socioculture. The second dimension, i.e. lifestyles, is located on a less deep level. It mainly determines the level of everyday interaction as well as consumption. Expressivism also separates the industrial from the liberal socioculture. Finally, the third dimension, i.e. individualization, relates to a more reflexive layer of meaning.

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 175

In general, Brazilians share a naturalist meritocratic social ontology. The third dimension determines the way meritocracy is interpreted. Some families and groups conceive of individual endeavor by referring it strictly to personal choices and planes of life. Those who live in these contexts tend to judge their achievements as a univariate function of their own deeds. This is contrasted by those who attribute relevance to the social context, such as family and community. The habitus types can be distinguished not only by their core characteristics, but also by the discourses they offer in their interviews. Our transcripts were submitted to the method proposed by Reinert (1990), designed to identify semantic patterns in textual corpora. The method relies on exploratory statistical analysis, identifying clusters of text segments (roughly equivalent to syntactic sentences) based on the simultaneous occurrence of words. The results are displayed in Graph 10.3.4

doutorado intervir comunitário

chance

tributário fortuna auxílio mobilidade universidade mérito retorno saneamento lazer incluir alemanha diminuir garantir qualificação qualidade básico possível formar alimentaçao arte acesso moradia professor SALÁRIO acmia investir base renda digno

privado ensino estudo preferir recurso investimento

falta melhorar opportunidade

questão forma resolver

cultura

achar

PAGAR MILHÃO

bairro RECEBER

segurança

pessoa

muito

acreditar

todo

gente

LUZ

CARO

PETROBRÁS PREFEITO

EMPRESA

PAI LÁ PASSAR

FALAR VIR FICAR

AQUI

JÁ

CARRO MENINO CASA PEDIR PEGAR TIRO TARDE DEUS POLITICAL NOITE

MORAR FRENTE ÔNIBUS

OLHAR

TRÁFICO DROGA

NEGÓCIO

ALI

CABEÇA

RAPAZ

MEDO

RUA PO

PARAR ASSALTO

PORTA

POLÍCIA ATIRAR MATAR PÉ

LADRÃO

rico

LIGAR

MÃE ANDAR MULHER

CHAMAR

corrupção crise algo

mentalidade diferença interesse histórico forte preconceito atual punir governar racial colonizar solução entendimento colonização democracia vantagem ciclo ganância combater

MENTIRA

MÊS

GANHAR

QUANDO

país política mudar viver econômico brasil povo problema político brasileiro riqueza

PINTAR EMPREGADO

REAL

DIZER

cultural

governante

DIRETOR CUNHA

COMPRA ROUBO FILHO BOTAR PRESIDENTE VOTAR DAR VENDER COMPRAR AGORA CHEGAR DENTRO

classe né pensar grande existir coisa

desigual maior principal desigualdade

DESCONTAR

METADE

FACULDADE

VOTO ANA

AÍ

certo

EMILSON MANDATO

DINHEIRO

bom

realmente

FINGIR

CUSTAR

FAMÍLIA DEPUTADO

TRABALHAR

vida

sociedade

SALA

curso

educação

ASSINAR

ALUNO FUNCIONÁRIO BOLSO

ESTUDAR

relação

SENADOR SINDICALISTA

MÉDICO VEREADOR

VERBA

condição

mínimo local

social

AULA

plano

área

SOL REPASSAR

DEVOLVER

OFICIAL GUITARRA BELÉM

violento escola

transporte fator

importante

F2: 30%

PREFEITURA CESTA FOME

saúde procurar

público

distribução

CANDIDATAR CENTAVO DIRIGIR COMISSÃO PACIÊNCIA PALESTRA

ENGENHEIRO

CÉU

MACONHA

CHÃO

BANDIDO VIATURA

AVÔ TRAFICANTE ASSALTAR

IMPRESSIONANTE PERNAMBUCO FUMAR

F1: 46%

Graph 10.3  Semantic analysis of transcripts excerpts

176  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

In principle, the terms on the left-hand side are typical of the discourse of the upper classes, and those on the right-hand side of the lower classes. The ambitious type is rather well represented in the lower-left quadrant, the expressivist by the upper-left. The conventionalist type appears at the center, the defensive right of the center. The hedonist is located in the lower right corner, the resigned in the upper right. Although opposed to each other, these two habitus types are also most confined to a particular social class: the marginalized. These two habitus types constitute two contrasting ways of living in and dealing with a very similar type of social environment. The linguistic analysis captures this environmental similitude, which expresses itself in the major themes the interviewees consider relevant as related to their conditions of and prospects for life. Since the words do not express the habitus directly, but are also chosen consciously, often even with the intention of deceit or manipulation, there is no immediate and coherent correspondence between habitus types and the clusters of terms. However, the degree of correspondence is surprising. As we will see, the discourses can be distinguished by the type and level of education. These are connected both to social class and to habitus, however. We cannot infer from these words an understanding of social ontology, but there are certainly correlations, which we want to explore in the final paragraphs of the chapter. There is a principal difference between the patterns represented on the left and right sides of this graph. On the right, perceptions and evaluations focus on specific issues and are articulated with a strong sense of concreteness. On the left, evaluations are generally stated by resorting to abstraction. Let us take for example the theme health, pointed out by many interviewees as an important issue. On the right side, it is approached by reference to specific situations and concrete entities like the doctor (médico), while on the left, the references are to the more abstract concepts like public health policies (saúde pública). This difference has to do with formal education. The semantics on the right are associated with basic education or lower, while the left is associated with higher levels of education. The semantics in italic capitals are especially concerned with public security and other basic conditions in life, such as transportation. Public security, regarded as a matter of life and death, motivates a critique of society. This pattern is more associated with the marginalized class and, to a lesser extent, the batalhadores. We call it a semantic of the living space. The social ontology in this semantic is very local. The symbolic boundaries of the social cosmos correlate with the physical boundaries of everyday life. It may be tempting to interpret this fact using the classic distinction between community and society, which would be misleading. The semantics of living space emerges from a social context fully immersed in the capitalist economy, and therefore realizes impersonal relations, non-effective interactions, and non-traditional ranks. The local level of this social ontology is related to both quantitative and qualitative strictness in social circulation: quantitative in the sense that the amount of people and places interacted with is relatively narrow, qualitative owing to small distances between functionally differentiated institutional environments.

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 177

The semantics in capitals are centered around what we would like to call living functions: the production and reproduction of a socially meaningful life through labor and family. These semantics articulate a vehement critique of society. Mainly, it criticizes the state in terms of corruption and misplaced policies and the market in terms of anti-meritocratic allocations. Its social ontology traces a sharp boundary between the regular people, among whom the interviewees place themselves, and the people occupying higher ranks in society. The higher levels of functional differentiation are opaque, turning specialized institutions into somewhat phantasmagoric entities. While energetically asserting the ability to reach fulfillment through economic achievement and breadwinning, these semantics express a feeling of powerlessness before instituted powers, which resonates with a harsh sense that society is unfair. The function of the semantics of living is particularly familiar to batalhadores and the middle class. It is an interesting fact that members of the middle class, although typically expressivist in their stylization of life, are rather conventional when it comes to their critique of society. We call the pattern in standard ‘semantics of the republic,’ for its social ontology traces boundaries in terms of a civil society. Speeches in this semantics assume the form of ‘theses’ discussing public policies, social dilemmas of any sort, the economy, the demographics, political conjunctures, etc. The critique of society is characterized by the idealized conception of a conscious, active citizen. Education is mainly responsible for nourishing such an homme citoyen. These semantics appeal to universalist principles and to social inclusion as a fundamental value. At the same time, it establishes a ranking in terms of civic competencies, as a sort of political meritocracy. From these semantics’ point of view, Brazil does not have the human material necessary for a virtuous civil society. These semantics are spread among the middle and upper classes, and among them, to the more highly educated, and maintains a strong correlation with university degrees. The pattern in italics corresponds to a semantics of nationalist essentialism. This idea of culture is the key for its critique of society. Just as in the semantics of the republic, major aspects of society are discussed here by reverting to ‘theoretical’ reasoning. The discursive posture is very judgmental. Brazil, it is said, has major problems, prominently social inequality, poverty, and political corruption. The interesting thing is that all these problems are ultimately explained by culture. This idea of culture, in its turn, echoes the myth cherished by Brazilian society stating basically that Brazilian people may be warm, but they are incapable of ethically oriented behavior. Political corruption, generally understood as the major problem in Brazil, would be just one manifestation of a deeper-rooted corruption: the corruption of the people’s character itself. These semantics are most familiar to the middle and upper classes, albeit a little less commonly among those with graduate degrees.

6 Conclusion In contrast to most other societies, precapitalist sociocultures are not very obviously persistent. However, we clearly see the ways in which colonial and

178  Emerson Ferreira Rocha and Boike Rehbein

postcolonial structures have shaped contemporary classes. The chapter has also illustrated that contemporary habitus, as well as structural inequalities, are rooted in the industrial socioculture, which is associated with the developmental state under military rule and the preceding authoritarian governments. We argue that five social classes have emerged in liberal capitalism, which are heirs of five social classes of industrial capitalism. Furthermore, we distinguish between six habitus, which are linked to the class structure but not co-extensive with the social classes. Each habitus type is characterized by a particular combination of traits, with one extreme pole of three dimensions of habitus traits being the defining characteristic. The three dimensions were determined via a principle component analysis. We can infer preliminary conclusions about Brazilian social ontology. First, it became clear that all Brazilians share an individualized idea of society. They largely subscribe to meritocracy, as well, even though both are interpreted in different ways. We can mainly distinguish between a self-centered and an embedded interpretation of individualism. Second, each habitus type is the foundation of a particular attitude toward the world. We argue that the attitude is largely framed by the three poles that appeared as relevant for the construction of habitus types; namely, self-confidence vs. self-doubt, expressivism vs. conventionalism, and hedonism vs. defensiveness. We also examine social ontology on the linguistic level, which is partly reflexive and therefore only partly expresses social ontology directly. However, social ontology is, at least to some degree, the product of reflective, conscious activity, as well. This makes it even more difficult to find a methodology to clearly distinguish between conscious discourse, habitus, and social ontology. We do suggest, however, that there is a correlation between the three levels, even though they do not match. While certain issues or attitudes appear on all three levels, others are constrained to one or two. It is likely that the strong dividing lines between the social classes are components of Brazilian social ontology, apart from individualism and meritocracy. Otherwise, social ontology is very much fragmented into classes, habitus types, and, to some degree, levels of education. For this reason, this chapter focused on these parameters more than on trying to establish an all-encompassing view of society.

Notes 1 These results are borrowed from Rocha. 2019. Social Space and Class Structure in Brazilian Metropolitan Regions. Sociedade e Estado 33 (3): 779–801. 2 Of course, both types of individualism are ‘embedded’ in the usual sense of Karl Polanyi. Our use of the term in the present context is not evoking this definition. 3 Simply computing the pairwise Euclidian distance between the classes in the threedimensional space. 4 The clustering is hierarchical. Factor 1 distinguishes two major patterns, located at the right and left sides of the graphic, respectively. Factor 2 separates the cluster in italics from the cluster in standard type. Factor 3, omitted, distinguishes the cluster in italic

Inequality, sociocultures, social ontology 179 capitals from the cluster in capitals. The graph displays the most characteristic words for each cluster. Although it gives an insight of the semantics, interpretation must rely on representative sentences of each cluster.

References Arnold, Jens M., and João Jalles. 2014. “Dividing the Pie in Brazil: Income Distribution, Social Policies and the New Middle Class.” ECO Working Paper, No 1105, Paris. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio. 2002. Raízes do Brasil. São Paulo: Carrara Brasileira do Livro. Freyre, Gilberto. 2001. Casa-grande & senzala. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Lange-Vester, Andrea. 2007. Der Habitus der Volksklassen. Münster: LIT. Reinert, Max. 1990. “Alceste une méthodologie d’analyse des données textuelles et une application: Aurelia De Gerard De Nerval.” Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique 26 (1): 24–54. Souza, Jessé. 2003. A construção social da subcidadania: para uma sociologia política da modernidade periférica. Belo Horizonte: UFMG. Souza, Jessé. 2009. A ralé brasileira. Belo Horizonte: UFMG. Souza, Jessé. 2012. Os batalhadores brasileiros. Belo Horizonte: UFMG. Stoll, Florian. 2012. Leben im Moment? Soziale Milieus in Brasilien und ihr Umgang mit Zeit. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984. Philosophische Untersuchungen, Werke 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Chapter 11

Collectivity and individuality in contemporary urban Kenya Social ontologies in Nairobi Florian Stoll

1 Introduction: collectivity as a social ontology in contemporary Kenya 1 Recent decades saw a trend of urbanization and economic growth in many parts of Africa. Even in European and North American mainstream media, Africa can no longer be portrayed as the continent lagging behind the ‘right model’ of development. Also, it is significant in geopolitical terms that many parts of Africa have become major locations for Chinese investments. While the continent continues to undergo fundamental transformations, older patterns such as a strong rural foundation, membership in collectives, and economic inequality have not vanished. These historically established phenomena merge with recent developments. However, information remains scarce: Africa is definitely the continent least represented in international social science research. This chapter therefore aims to contribute to research on urban Kenya, particularly in terms of how collectivity and individuality refer to long-established sociocultures and recent changes in the context. Like many African countries and other spaces in the global South, Kenya has experienced a series of crucial transformations in recent decades. Economic growth, rapid urbanization, and new ways of life have changed the strong rural orientation of most Kenyans. To understand stratification and inequality, it is also necessary to study how historical sociocultures and new patterns of living merge. This is particularly important because neither Kenya nor many other African countries have a clear-cut structure of vertical classes with clearly defined positions as we find them in European countries, such as France (Bourdieu 1984), or South American countries, such as Brazil (Stoll 2012; Rehbein and Souza 2014). Similarly, Kenya does not have a longestablished hierarchy of sociocultures, as do many Asian societies with an administrative class (see Bultmann, Chapter 9 in this volume). Instead, the country’s social structure consists of significant precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial influences that show as many discontinuities as persistent patterns. Moreover, there are not many conceptual models that try to study the societal shape of middle-income groups – frequently called ‘middle classes’ – in African countries (with the arguable exception of South Africa). Economic approaches and anthropological case

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 181

studies dominate the field (for an overview of the debate on ‘middle classes’ in Africa, see Neubert and Stoll 2018). This chapter uses a framework that studies social ontology against the background of empirical research to identify specific social ontologies in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, in terms of collectivity and individuality in a rapidly changing environment. Today, we encounter a multiplicity of possibilities as to how individuals deal with collective affiliations and individual aims in their lives. These include a variety of socio-cultural aspects that comprise how people think and act. The main focus here is on those socio-cultural elements that define ways of life. Socioculture can comprise, for example, ties to religious communities, individualized lifestyles, and employment opportunities. Multi-collectivity and membership in different groups lead to tensions that individuals handle differently. For example, conflicts exist between groups with different lifestyles and generational clashes manifest inside of families about the right way to live. The empirical focus of this chapter is on the middle-income stratum of Nairobi. This group is located, by virtue of its socioeconomic possibilities and its symbolic standing, between the poor and the rich. This middle-income group is particularly suited to examine collectivity and individuality, as it is in the center of ongoing changes. A considerable share of middle-income Nairobians migrated from villages to towns and recently rose out of poverty. They are often torn between long-established networks, such as the extended family and church affiliations, and new, individualized ways of life. Also, the middle-income stratum owns sufficient financial resources to choose clearly visible ways of life and investment patterns. Does someone save to start a business or spend everything immediately in order to enjoy life? Do they support the relatives in the countryside, donate to church, or concentrate on the well-being of their nuclear family in Nairobi? These and other questions are intrinsically connected with the persistence and change of historical sociocultures. Historical sociocultures are specific orientations, customs, and actions that would theoretically be transferred from one generation to the other. However, changing social environments and expectations of individuals interfere with the acceptance of existing sociocultures. For example, migration to cities influences patterns of solidarity and value systems. Which connections and shared ideas do certain groups keep? This tells us a lot about social differentiation such that the study of change and the maintenance of historical sociocultures is a promising field of research to work toward understanding contemporary societies. The empirical data were conducted in the project “Middle Classes on the Rise.”2 In this study undertaken with Dieter Neubert, the author examined the socio-cultural heterogeneity of the middle-income stratum of urban Kenya. The question of collective ties and individualistic traits is a valid entry point to study the living conditions of inhabitants of Nairobi with a middle-income household. Since around 2000, a new middle-income stratum has been emerging in Kenya and many other African countries. This group is frequently labeled as “the African middle class” (AfDB 2011), but it can be misleading to transfer such a concept from its Euro-American origin to Africa. The concept carries many hidden

182  Florian Stoll

meanings, as economic definitions of middle class vary (Neubert and Stoll 2018), and expected characteristics of ‘middle classes’ may differ from those ascribed to the corresponding strata in an African context. Steady economic growth and migration into cities lead to the emergence of new middle-income groups. A large part of these groups had stronger connections to cities than previous generations. Rural communities usually had (and continue to have) an understanding of economy that is not mainly defined by individual possessions. Contrarily, individuals are expected to share their belongings with other members of their collective. With factual or even suspected prosperity, individuals are supposed to give more to relatives and friends. For decades, the “peasants in cities” (Mangin 1970) model  – villagers who work in cities and reinvest in their rural home areas – was the dominant pattern in Kenya. With the increasing size of cities, a differentiated and more urban middle group with multiple ways of life emerged. Higher earnings often forced people to decide if they wanted to live a more individualistic life or if they wanted to share their finances with relatives and neighbors. High demands from relatives in the countryside created pressure to fulfill their frequently unrealistic expectations. The “moral economy” of rural communities often leads to tensions with costly consumption practices in the city. If inhabitants of cities do not support rural communities sufficiently, relatives and neighbors may lose respect for them. Severing ties to extended family is not only emotionally unpleasant, but it also means giving up on a reciprocal network of social security. Distinguishing between social milieus with specific ways of life offers an entry point to study types of collectivity and historical sociocultures. Examining ‘situational’ (Collins 2005) collective memberships in a systematic manner allows research on ways of life and basic orientations of milieus to advance. The main focus of this chapter is not a study of social inequality; neither do I develop a macro-model of society. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the connection between milieus, everyday interactions, and collectivity. Membership in collectives such as ethnic groups or churches can be crucial to someone’s way of life and their consumption patterns. Ties to collectives frequently transcend vertical economic boundaries and concepts such as “class,” which consequently miss out on the nuanced cultural dynamics of such connections. It is also important to establish that orientations and actions in everyday life can be related to political positions. However, the relation between everyday attitudes and electoral behavior is not clear. In general, political parties in Kenya are based on ethnic and regional affiliations. Programmatic positions such as conservative, liberal, or socialist are not the main foundations of most Kenyan parties. The names and programs of parties frequently change, but the alliances and the leaders often remain. In spite of a democratic system with a constitution and free elections, regional ethnicity and political interests are strongly interwoven. Additionally, there is no programmatic party with a significant share of votes. In his article “ ‘Can Someone Get Me Outta This Middle Class Zone?!’ Pressures on Middle Class Kikuyu in Kenya’s 2013 Election,” Dominic Burbidge (2014)

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 183

examined how urban members of the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, are torn between liberal-democratic worldviews and ethnic solidarities. During the elections in 2007–2008, Kenya was shaken by ethnic unrest. Hundreds of thousands were driven away from certain regions by ethnically motivated violent groups in order to secure electoral success in the winner-take-all system. This chapter studies social ontologies in Kenya through the example of middle-income groups in Nairobi. Examining collectivities makes structuralcultural elements visible. Baumann and Rehbein define social ontologies in relation to a certain society: “Social ontologies are all the ontological premises that base a social group as a discursive community. They contain the sum of collective imaginations that are possible in a society as a discursive community and the logic that structures specific collectives” (Baumann and Rehbein 2018, 15f; my translation). Baumann and Rehbein critically reflect on Hansen’s concepts of multi-collectivity, roof-collectives, and sub-collectives in societies of the global South. They discuss whether it is possible to apply these and other concepts we commonly employ in the social sciences without Eurocentric shortcomings and without giving up on building viable theory (see Baumann and Rehbein, Chapter 2 in this volume). My text takes up this view and combines sociological approaches with results from empirical research in urban Kenya. It connects Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains (2005) with Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]) to study specific types of multi-collectivity in middle-income milieus. This framework offers access to social ontologies while endeavoring to determine the effects of certain historical patterns and recent developments. Studying milieus in a Kenyan city is particularly useful for understanding social ontologies because the urbanization processes of the last decades changed the significance of long-established networks for certain groups. Some migrants to cities weaken the ties to their home villages, while others transfer a considerable share of their income to the countryside. With the emergence of new urban ways of life, previously dominant orientations and ways of life became only some of several options. Rehbein and Baumann’s version of the concept socioculture is a promising addition to the study of social milieus. Socioculture reconstructs the historical dimension and constitution of meanings and routines in milieus. The study on middle-income milieus in urban Kenya for the project “Middle Classes on the Rise” (2013–2018) was the first such project in Africa. The author and Dieter Neubert collected data to identify groups with specific ways of life in the middle-income stratum of Nairobi and Mombasa. The focus was on finding distinctive milieus rather than identifying historical continuities and ruptures in the ways of life of such milieus. My research on milieus and specific use of time in Brazil’s Recife (Stoll 2012) demonstrated that it is productive to study ways of life against the background of their constitution. The following sections examine sociocultures of middle-income milieus in Nairobi, but they only touch upon processes of their constitution. A thorough analysis would require a separate project to fully cover the historic dimension.

184  Florian Stoll

2  Collectivity in the social sciences Research on collectivities examines groups in terms of their relations and social embeddedness. This perspective is an alternative to the common sociological process of studying classes and stratification that mainly considers income, occupational status, and capital. The focus on membership in collectives and its – often not specifically mentioned – correlate individuality leads to new questions: Do we reconstruct collectives by subjective feelings of belonging or by objectified criteria of membership? Which mechanisms constitute and maintain membership in a collective? Which boundaries are drawn against outsiders – are these boundaries impenetrable or fluid? Are collectives situational and limited to certain events and venues, or is membership significant for many contexts of life? Since the beginnings of sociology in the 19th century, collectivity has been one of its major questions. For many influential authors, collectivity was the outcome of structural conditions, but it was also the result of other societal influences. Consequently, explanations and analyses of collectivities remain piecemeal in most theories. A crucial point of reference is the debate on classes and class interest. The hope of Marx and other socialists for the proletariat to become revolutionary subjects refers to an implicit assumption about collective action based on class. Famously, Marx and Engels (2004) [1848]) suggest in the co-authored Manifesto of the Communist Party that similar living conditions of workers may lead to the construction of a social unit – a class with a common political consciousness. The history of the 20th century has shown in multiple ways that similar sociostructural positions among workers do not necessarily lead to a macro-collective. Other influences, from individual and occupational interests to nationalism, did not appear in the founding account of the proletariat as a transformative force. In Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen examines how a faction of the rich distinguish themselves from less affluent parts of the population by means of conspicuous consumption. Through this process, they become a socially exclusive collective. In Distinction (1984), Pierre Bourdieu applies a class concept that aims primarily at the critique of objectively privileged positions. His framework goes beyond the examination of collectives such as politically conscious classes or everyday life networks. Other classical sociological authors connected collectivity less with sociostructural positions. Instead, they saw stronger influences in values and other sociocultural aspects. Max Weber’s diverse oeuvre refers strongly to collectivity. He considers collectively shared values as foundations for action. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 2001 [1920]), he discusses how Calvinists and other Protestant sects are driven by the hope of being among the chosen few who will be delivered in the afterlife, which leads to a certain inner-worldly askesis and distinct work ethic in everyday life. Weber considered the values of the Protestant communities to be the seeds of Western capitalism. For Weber, incorporated value systems, like the assumed discipline of early Protestants,

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 185

translate into different everyday practices. As basic elements of a higher order, individuals themselves are seen as constituting specific types of economic, cultural, and legal systems. This argument is also the foundation for Weber’s study of different civilizations in The Sociology of Religion (1993). He examines a wide range of civilizations in terms of how their religious foundations shape other social institutions. Religious idea systems and the tension between expectations of salvation and everyday codes of conduct produced different models of societies with specific types of collectivities. Sociologist Robert K. Merton defined collectives as units of persons who share norms and values, as well as an emotional sense of belonging to a given collective. Merton refers to Weber when distinguishing between collectives and social groups because the members of the latter communicate and interact directly. Following this line of argument, it is possible to contrast reconstructed groups with collectives that share a sense of belonging. While groups can be understood as externally constructed units of individuals according to objectified criteria, collectives have a shared sense of identity and membership. Klaus P. Hansen (2011) established a whole research program around the question of collectives. That view opens a new perspective on cultural analysis and stratification. Hansen systematically studies types of membership in different areas of life, particularly in terms of multi-collectivity, the consequences of multiple situational memberships, and the web of normative systems associated with collectives. The following sections refer to the study of collectivity based on a new interpretation of Émile Durkheim by sociologist Randall Collins. Durkheim developed several understandings of collectivity in different stages of his work. He discusses collectivity with regard to the question of how social solidarity and individual freedom grow simultaneously. Durkheim asks in The Division of Labour in Society (2013 [1893]) why it is that individuals who gain more individual freedom become more dependent on society. His point is the parallel rise of personalization and solidarity. To understand the tension between freedom and social cohesion, Durkheim develops the types of societies making use of the terms ‘mechanic’ and ‘organic’ solidarity. In contexts with low complexity and a modest number of members, social orders based on shared customs and traditions suffice. The punishment for violations of collective morals help to maintain this type of societal life. In more complex, modern types of society, we encounter more differentiated divisions of labor with an abstract system of contracts. This system of interactions overlaps with older types of togetherness, but does not fully replace them. Durkheim calls this system in more complex societies mechanic solidarity. Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander (1988, 123–155) sees a continuity in different phases of Durkheim’s work. For Alexander, Durkheim searches for a theory to balance the impact of social order on individuals (and its counterpart voluntarism) with the fact of free will. Durkheim considers this relation from different angles. The macro-social scope of The Division of Labour in Society belongs, for Alexander, to Durkheim’s middle phase. In his later work after 1897, mainly in

186  Florian Stoll

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim discovers a model to explain social order without assuming the existence of a macro-system that oppresses individual elements. Alexander sees in Durkheim’s conceptualization of religious ideas in The Elementary Forms an explanation as to why individuals act with a free will but still reproduce the social order: They follow the rules society has created by internalizing religious ideas. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]), Durkheim reconstructs the coming together of Aboriginal Australians’ crucial components of social life. He assumes that these processes are universal and constitute, among other things, collectivity and shared idea systems. By studying a meeting of a tribal collective, Durkheim observes how shared convictions are charged with positive emotions through interactions. Also, such encounters create situational “sacred objects,” different types of solidarity, symbols of membership, and permanent idea systems. Several sociologists refer to The Elementary Forms in order to grasp collectivity. There are two main interpretations that build their theories on Durkheim’s complicated late work. First, authors such as Goffman (1967), Fine (2004), and Collins (2005) understand collectivity as situational connectedness and examine situational micro-interactions and their group dynamics. Second, Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (2003) refer to shared structures of meaning as the foundations of collectivity and study idea systems as well as how they are translated into action. The following sections examine shared idea systems and types of collective belonging in middle-income milieus in Nairobi with reference to Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains (2005). This theoretical background is useful for understanding the extent to which certain ways of life are embedded in collectives while others are more individualized. Collins does not examine social milieus. His approach contributes to the study of milieus because it allows for a better understanding of their composition. For example, it shows who interacts with whom and how often. By identifying the frequency of interactions and degrees of contact in everyday life, the study of interaction ritual chains gives a nuanced description of social milieus. Similarly, examining typical situations and their emotional dynamics contributes to a clearer picture of collectivity as membership and individuality as independence. The opposition of collectivity and individuality does not imply any judgment, but expresses how strongly being part of a milieu or group influences its members. From a micro-sociological perspective, Collins examines how processes and actions in everyday situations are enacted with reference to Goffman. Similarly, Collins goes one step beyond Goffman and argues that repeated participation in situations constitutes memberships in groups. Nevertheless, Collins never fully developed this line of argument. Therefore, I use Collins’ approach as a theoretical-methodical foundation to strengthen the concept of the milieu. Milieu research has a tendency to remain very general and to cluster people with similar orientations together. By studying situational dynamics, repeated interactions, and significant places, this research

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 187

adds an empirical dimension to the study of social milieus. ‘Situation’ has a similar reach to that of the concept of kleine Lebenswelt (small life-world; Rebstein and Schnettler 2014; Zifonun 2016) in German sociology of knowledge. While the concept of kleine Lebenswelt has a strong foundation in phenomenology and concentrates on subjective perception, the following research on milieus combines subjective and objectified influences on individuals. Collins argues, with reference to Goffman, that seemingly stable institutions, groups, and norms have to be accepted by participants in interactions (Collins 2005, 17; Vester 2010, 170); otherwise, their reproduction is under danger. For the co-existence of groups or institutions, a huge number of connected and repeated situations is necessary in which participants act in specific ways. Therefore, Collins adds the word ‘chain’ to Goffman’s ‘interaction ritual.’ Similar to religious ceremonies, situations are generally structured by a certain “interaction order” (Goffman 1967) with expected behaviors of the participants. Collins extends Goffman’s approach beyond isolated situations and shows why these are building blocks of larger social units. Interaction ritual chains (IRCs) consist of multiple situations that constitute the everyday life of individuals. IRCs are a mechanism that makes the “repetitive, iterative character of interactions” (Vester 2010, 170; my translation) obvious. Collins refers again to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms to develop a theory of emotional energy, which is charged by participating in IRCs. Involvement in repeated situations creates a stable flow of energy. This charge of energy can be extended through the use of meaningful symbols, but it can also end abruptly. In this interpretation, collectivity is participation in situationally limited types of belonging. It is bound to interaction orders “as memberships that are local, sometimes ephemeral, stratified and conflictual” (Collins 2005, xi). Religious ceremonies, festive occasions, and music concerts create such situational memberships. Many material and immaterial requirements like the right dress code, confidence, knowledge of language, and sufficient financial means are significant for successful and failed IRCs. These elements also draw boundaries against outsiders. Collins sees in Durkheim’s ritual concept a foundational theory as to why situational membership leads to shared moral convictions and ideas (Collins 2005, xi). In every situation, the participants constitute and respect “sacred objects” (Durkheim 1995 [1912], 35), which are something like road posts for actions. These entities are in most cases respected by the acting parties (Collins 2005, 16–25). Usually, the most important ‘sacred object’ in such interactions are the selves of those involved. Due to its transcendent connotation, I use ‘sacred objects’ metaphorically in the sense of extraordinarily meaningful entities. For Collins, regular and successful participation in IRCs is the analytical bridge between group structures and idea systems. Collectivity is the outcome of specific actions in certain situations. The emotional tie and the charge of symbols contribute, as well. This reading of Collins’ IRC is compatible with empirical research. In particular, the study of situations can shed new light on multi-collectivity. By examining how situations are connected and which areas of life are significant, this approach

188  Florian Stoll Table 11.1  Cohesion/Collectivity/Individuality/Situations/Idea systems Cohesion

Collectivity

Individuality

Situations

Idea systems

Intensity (Situational) Extent of of group belonging(s) personal connectivity interests

Type/number of Shared interactions norms and views/ symbols, sacred objects Permanent/ Self(In)dependence People, places, Situational or occassional identification from/on parties situation contact? group overarching?

offers new access to social milieus. This perspective shows how, and to what degree, individuals are involved in milieus as collectives. The intensity of membership varies significantly in each milieu. Similarly, individuality – understood as a certain level of independence – is the opposite direction of this approach. Table 11.1 considers crucial dimensions of collectivity. The case studies (see Sections 5.1–5.2) show its practical use.

3  ‘Middle classes’ in Africa, Kenya, and Nairobi Over the last two decades, many emerging and developing countries experienced significant economic growth. Hundreds of millions of families improved their socioeconomic condition. International media, development organizations, and financial institutions followed the rise of developing countries in Asia and South America, like China, India, and Brazil. Since about 2010, such institutions have also identified growth in many African countries. Economic reports like McKinsey’s Lions on the Move (2010), the African Development Bank’s The Middle of the Pyramid (2011), and a considerable number of journalistic articles such as The Economist’s “Pleased to Be Bourgeois” (May 12, 2011) raised global interest in a so-called middle class in Africa. All these publications referred to growth rates in daily expenditure and used the familiar Western notion of “middle class” in order to gain attention (for a critique of economic definitions of “middle classes,” see Neubert and Stoll 2018). Experts from a wide range of disciplines in African Studies reacted to the rather popular reports on African “middle classes.” They criticized these publications on the grounds of their lack of knowledge about realities of life in Africa, their focus on income, and the missing analytical distinction of the notion ‘middle class.’ The use of this notion carries many Western implications from European and North American social development. A transfer of ‘middle classes’ to Africa seems to suggest that the living conditions of the populations rapidly catch up with their counterparts in the global North. In a powerful critique of the debate, political scientist Dominque Darbon (2018) mentions that the talk about ‘middle class’

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 189

is not a neutral outcome of sober data analysis: Development organizations and governments often use the existence of so-called middle classes to emphasize the success of their politics. Similarly, he bashes suggestions from economists to direct parts of development aid from the poor to the middle strata. African studies scholar Henning Melber (2016) critiques the lack of a sound theoretical foundation and opposes the arbitrary use of ‘middle class’ to describe middle-income groups. Crucial elements of Northern middle classes such as similar occupational positions or shared political interests do not always seem to exist in the African context. Another critique (Stoffel 2017; Neubert and Stoll 2018) aims at the false objectivity of economic data for ‘middle classes.’ The numbers are defined by subjective estimates of researchers rather than by objective data, as evidenced by varying boundaries with partly contradicting consequences for ‘middle classes’ in the global South. Against talk of an underdefined and empirically hollow ‘middle class,’ the author and Dieter Neubert conducted an empirical study on socio-cultural heterogeneity in the middle-income strata of Nairobi and Mombasa. I will present outcomes of this research on milieus and their collective embeddedness with the example of Nairobi in the following sections. The milieu approach breaks down the black box of ‘middle class’ into distinctive lifestyle groups in the middleincome range. The study does not just vaguely criticize the vagueness of the ‘middle class’ as a concept, but offers an alternative model for empirical research. It gives an overview of main groups with specific ways of life and orientations. The project was the first research on social milieus in Africa and developed a framework tailored to suit the particularities of Kenya, including the significance of ethnic group affiliation or the specific types of global integration in economically strong Nairobi and tourist hotspot Mombasa. This framework had the aim of going beyond the common class analysis that was constructed mainly with reference to European and North American societies. Socio-cultural particularities such as persistent urban–rural relationships, the extended family as a household unit, and new urban ways of life are crucial for an understanding of contemporary Kenya. In the future, a revised version of this approach might be used in research projects in other African contexts. We decided to conduct research in Kenya because it had several characteristics that can be observed in many African countries, such as a new trend toward urbanization and rather stable economic growth. Our research was also facilitated by our good access to and existing contact with Kenyan academics. After the end of the authoritarian Moi era in 2004 and a difficult transition phase, Kenya found itself in the position of a country on the rise in the early 2010s. Today, Nairobi is a significant center for trade and international collaboration, well connected to other parts of the continent and beyond.

4  Data collection and methods Development organizations estimate that about 60% of the approximately 3 million inhabitants of Nairobi live in slums (UN-Habitat 2016; Oxfam 2009). Around

190  Florian Stoll

half of the urban population is poor. It is important to recognize that the validity of the data basis in these studies is often not clear and that their socioeconomic criteria vary. It is therefore difficult to give exact numbers regarding the size of economic middle-income stratum. Despite this, it is realistic to estimate that the group between the poor and the rich comprises around one-third of Nairobi’s population. The author and Dieter Neubert identified six main milieus within Nairobi’s middle-income stratum through empirical research. Biographic interviews, participant observation, and other sources like media were foundational for distinguishing specific milieus, which differ according to aims in life, perspectives on the future, and other socio-cultural characteristics. The data collection process followed the strategy of maximizing contrasts between ways of life. This research also sought to establish whether there is a unified middle class with a significant share of common characteristics or heterogeneous socio-cultural groups. The empirical research analyzed public groups such as members of Christian communities and stylish young urbanites – communities who lead distinctive ways of life that allow them to be meaningfully juxtaposed. We also included groups that were less present in public areas, such as those who had a focus on their nuclear family or live in closed ethnic networks. Interviews and observations were revised for of each phase of this research. For a comprehensive study of significant characteristics, we referred to the descriptive approach of the Sinus-Institute (Flaig et al. 1993, 71) and adapted it to research in urban Kenya. This approach constructs building blocks for milieus that show distinctive elements of each. Using empirical data, we made a matrix that showed significant, optional, and impossible components of milieus. The building blocks cover the dimensions of demography/social position, space and places, aim in life, work/ethics, ideals and role models, understandings of society, family/partnership/gender roles, leisure time/communication, and everyday aesthetics. Clustering typical orientations and areas of life lead to the construction of six main milieus (for the following list, see Stoll 2018a, 285f; also Neubert and Stoll 2015, 8): Neo-Traditionals have close ties with members of their extended family, as well as their rural and ethnic communities. This milieu involves a strong emotional bond, but also the sharing of finances. Additionally, members of this milieu often take political positions that favor their ethnic group. Social Climbers focus on saving for both individual advancement and to improve the situation of their nuclear family. Many of them work long hours and save a high percentage of their income in order to invest in a business or study. Members of the Stability-Oriented Pragmatic milieu try to maintain their current position and have fewer social aspirations than members of other milieus. This milieu involves moderate consumption with their family, with whom they spend most of their time outside of work at home. Characteristics of the Cosmopolitan-Liberal milieu include a clear stance in favor of civil values and against corruption and tribalism, combined with career

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 191

ambition. Members of this milieu often work in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and are active in human rights or environmental groups. Members of the Christian milieu (also Christian Religious) regularly participate in church-related activities and spend a large part of their leisure time with other parish members, away from their families. Their orientation in life focuses on religion, the church, and economic success. Young Professionals are between 20 and 35 years old, and mostly come from privileged families in upper or upper-middle strata. They combine hedonistic consumption practices, an international orientation, and career ambition in economically well-paid fields. These main milieus cover the majority, but not the whole population, of ‘middle-class’ Nairobi. Micro-milieus such as Hindu, Muslim, and other groups with specific ways of life also exist; however, they are considerably smaller than the described milieus. The sociological part of the project “Middle Classes on the Rise” was the first study on milieus in Africa and could not rely on census data. It is therefore difficult to provide numbers for the exact sizes of the milieus and their share of the population. Nevertheless, it was possible to identify specific ways of life.

5 Middle-income milieus and collectivity in Nairobi Nairobi is Kenya’s capital and East Africa’s strongest economic hub. It attracts individuals from Kenya and neighboring countries with job opportunities, cultural possibilities, and vivid nightlife. Nairobi is also the seat for local and international industries and banks. Several thousand non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are located in the city. The United Nations headquarters in Africa is also in Nairobi. Due to the attractiveness of the place, living expenses are comparatively high. There are also many socio-cultural differences that lead to the specific composition of middle-income milieus in Nairobi. These milieus have many characteristics that distinguish them from their counterparts in other cities such as Mombasa, Kisumu, and Eldoret (Stoll 2018a). Until the end of the 20th century, Kenya was a society with a strong rural basis. There were only a few urban centers such as Nairobi, Mombasa (at the coast), and Kisumu (at Lake Victoria). Today, about 27,5% of the country’s population lives in cities (CIA World Factbook 2020) – in comparison, around 90% of Brazil’s inhabitants live in urban areas (Stoll 2012). The hegemonic patterns of collectivity in the country were the connections to extended family, local community, and regionally based ethnic groups. Only a few small groups have no ethnic-regional foundation, such as the Swahili in Mombasa and the Nubi in Nairobi. Churches are also a significant influence, mainly those of various Protestant denominations. Churches in Kenya differ in number of members, geographic outreach, and political and financial power. Muslim influences were historically concentrated on the

192  Florian Stoll

Kenyan coast, but this is slowly changing, especially due to the impact of immigrants from Somalia, who are mostly Muslim. They also have a reputation in Nairobi for doing business in networks that include their extended family and even friends. Somalian Somalis – there is also a small subgroup of a Somali tribe from Kenya – are part of Nairobi’s society and are respected by most Kenyans for their economic enterprises, such as shops and restaurants. For a long time, Nairobi was a place where Kenyans came to earn money. The overwhelming majority of the population were “peasants in cities” (Mangin 1970) who made an income in the urban area to reinvest in the countryside. They supported their family and neighbors or invested in farming activities. This rural way of life is still very common, but it is no longer the main focus in Nairobi’s middle-income stratum. In particular, we see how growing financial possibilities and urbanism lead to diversified ways of life in the middle-income population. Yet, for the vast majority of Nairobi’s inhabitants, there is a tension between solidarities to one’s extended family and rural collectives, on the one hand, and fulfilling one’s personal wishes, on the other hand. Financial support for relatives and neighbors collides with wishes for individual advancement and consumption. Remittances to relatives frequently block efforts to start businesses or to pay university fees. We can also imagine the different milieus as different methods of dealing with the tensions between collective expectations and individual hopes. The type and intensity of collective ties vary significantly. Accordingly, other aspects such as aims for the future and investment strategies take various shapes. Two case studies of milieus demonstrate these heterogeneous approaches to life. Against a possible reading that might consider one milieu more ‘modern’ than other ones, it is crucial to understand all of them as different, equally contemporary responses to the aforementioned tension. 5.1  Case study 1: Neo-Traditional Milieu Until today, the majority of Nairobi’s citizens were not born in the city. Most inhabitants are urban transplants, having moved from villages into the city. To many of them, their place of birth or the village of their ancestors is their emotional home: In their places of origin are their relatives, neighbors, and friends. Regional origin adds the dimension of ethnic belonging, as almost all Kenyans identify themselves with an ethnic community such as Kikuyu, Luo, Luhja, or Kalenjin. In addition to the emotional aspects of ethnicity, it also contains a strong political dimension. Parties are not organized by programmatic foci such as conservative, liberal, or socialist – instead, they are mainly carried by ethnic-clientelistic ties. Most inhabitants of Nairobi remain in contact with relatives and friends in their rural home region. For the way of life of Neo-Traditionals, these collective ties are fundamental. Members of this milieu feel a strong sense of belonging to their rural community and usually also to their ethnic group. They first learn to speak vernacular language in their families and only afterward the two official languages,

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 193

Kiswahili and English. The attribute ‘neo-traditional’ underlines the fact that customs and traditions are main points of orientation for members of this milieu. However, such customs might have been established recently and also occasionally allow different interpretations. Reference to tradition and solidarity with a given rural community justify many actions and behaviors within this milieu, such as moral rules, the acceptance of authorities such as elders, and gender roles. One particularly significant characteristic is high respect toward parents and aged members of their communities. Other features include certain types of clothing, music, and the use of their vernacular language. Holidays and festive occasions, weddings, and rites of initiation bring Neo-Traditionals together. Nevertheless, few members of this milieu have sufficient resources to travel frequently to their rural home. They typically stay in touch with their relatives through phone calls, WhatsApp, and Facebook. In Nairobi, it is very common for Neo-Traditionals to live with relatives. In spite of strong emotional ties to their extended families and ethnic communities, they also have other contacts of varying intensity. A significant component of collectivity is the provision of financial support. Neo-Traditionals feel an emotional and social obligation to share their income with relatives and, occasionally, their neighbors or friends. Contributions to school fees, medical treatments, and weddings or funerals are expected by relatives and neighbors. While members of other milieus also give money to family members, the significance of these networks for Neo-Traditionals increases the moral obligation to give. Such expectations also act as a type of security because institutionalized security systems are few and limited. Participating in the “moral economy” of the community means sharing and receiving in a network of mutual solidarity. Some people in Nairobi with a middle income regularly give money to a dozen, or more, poor relatives in rural areas. Members of other milieus such as Young Professionals or Social Climbers loosen or cut these ties. They find ways to avoid payments that could interfere with their ways of life. Neo-Traditionals live in a social environment that considers material well-being to be something that should not be limited to an individual. High expectations of relatives can put pressure on these middle-income earners in Nairobi. The study with reference to Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains shows that the Neo-Traditionals are a milieu with high cohesion because they are part of a highly structured collective. Most members of this milieu spend most of their leisure time outside of work with relatives and friends from the same ethnic group. A surprising result of this research was the intention of several female interviewees in their mid-twenties to study abroad. Their main motivation, as they described in interviews, was to develop their home areas and help their communities. The community attained the status of an immaterial ‘sacred object’ in the sense of Durkheim. Such a ‘sacred object’ must be protected and maintained. The actions of the collective evolve around the community and, in spite of the lack of its material existence, it is very real to the members of this milieu. Similarly, the consumption and investment strategies of Neo-Traditionals support this

194  Florian Stoll Table 11.2  Cohesion/Collectivity/Individuality/Situations/Idea systems Cohesion

Collectivity

Strong ties (Rural) to other extended members family, of this neighbors milieu

Individuality

Situations

Idea systems

Economic Rural home; activities/ norms of the leisure community; time with land and extended farming family and (belonging) friends from home region Permanent Strong Individual as Extended Few contact identification part of the family, places situational with extended collective with ethnic ruptures; family and majorities sometimes ethnic group additional ties in Nairobi Individual interests – balanced with support for the collective

interpretation. The collective as a meaningful point of orientation strongly influences their economic activities: They spend their money on collective enterprises, ranging from family support to joint farming activities. Building a house or owning land in their home region is a symbol of belonging that keeps their families and communities alive. Owning a house or a piece of land raises also one’s position in the community. IRCs of typical activities such as working or spending time in a collective setting strengthens the belonging to the local or ethnic community in question. The dimension of the historic socioculture is crucial for this milieu. Over generations, established patterns of solidarity are, for this milieu, what the editors of this volume call a social ontology. Even today, regional-ethnic ties shape the actions of Neo-Traditionals. While members of this milieu adapt to new trends of urbanization, socio-cultural ties to the rural-ethnic collective remains strong (Table 11.2). 5.2  Case study 2: Social Climbers Members of the Social Climbers milieu have a very strong focus on advancing their socioeconomic status and occupational position. This aim in life structures their collective ties. Their main point of reference is the nuclear family. Individuals from other middle-income milieus, such as the Christian Religious or the Neo-Traditionals, also work hard to improve, but they have stronger ties to collective entities such as their church, extended family, or ethnic network. In other cases, they combine their pursuit of individual success with hedonistic consumption, like the Young Professionals. Social Climbers mostly come from families of

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 195

modest financial means and seek to improve their lot. The majority of members in this milieu are between 25 and 40 years old. This milieu does not tend to have economic support networks like individuals who grew up in middle-income families. Climbers reduce their spending drastically in certain phases. One interviewee reaches temporally saving quotes of 70% or more of his income. Members of this milieu forgo buying high-priced clothes or branded smartphones. Frequently, they extend their working hours and sacrifice leisure time to increase their earnings. They can sometimes be self-employed or have multiple sources of income. Climbers typically have already had some successes, such as owning a shop or taxi, or acquiring an academic degree. These and similar socioeconomic aspects distinguish them from the poor. Nevertheless, like the majority of Kenyans, most Climbers are in a precarious position. Frequent job changes, as well as the danger of debts through sickness, accidents, or expectations of relatives, threaten their fragile stability. Social Climbers seek to balance collective ties with their individual interests. Concentration on the nuclear family can lead to conflicts with the extended family. Their main focus is on individual advancement, but they often are confronted with demands, such as support for sick family members or school fees for cousins. Still, their identification with the collective is weaker than we saw with the Neo-Traditionals. The relatively low frequency of interactions with rural communities makes it easier not to bow to economic pressure from relatives. Most Climbers migrated from rural areas to Nairobi and have to deal with the expectations of relatives, as well as the local community. They use different strategies to reduce or avoid such demands. Collective solidarity translates into finances; finding the right way to cope with payments to relatives can determine if someone can continue their individual advancement. Many Climbers have found ways to limit such contributions; some strategies are modest payments to relatives and hiding financial means or shared investments with other family members. Many Climbers also pay the tithe, the voluntary church tax in the amount of 10% of their income. The analysis of IRCs confirms the trends of long working hours, focus on the nuclear family, and little available leisure time for Social Climbers. They meet colleagues during their working hours and develop friendships; these ties, however, are much weaker than the solidarity in the Neo-Traditional Milieu. The cohesion between Climbers is rather low because similar occupational interests are less significant than their relationships to the nuclear family. ‘Sacred objects’ are here materializations of hopes for a better future and individual improvement. Financial stability and sending the children to good schools or to the university were typical wishes of Climbers. This is significantly different from NeoTraditionals, whose ‘sacred objects’ were strong expressions of belonging to a collective. The particular feature of the Social Climbers is not their hope for individual advancement, but rather their consequent efforts in everyday life to reach this goal (Table 11.3).

196  Florian Stoll Table 11.3  Cohesion/Collectivity/Individuality/Situations/Idea systems Cohesion

Collectivity

Individuality

Weak ties to collective(s)

Strong personal interests

Situations

Idea systems

Interactions Individual in advancement/ workplace strong future situations orientation Low cohesion Only secondary Primary: Work and Consequent of this identification individual; nuclear striving for milieu with (in) family advancement; extended dependence situationfamily, ethnic from group overarching; group, and few situational church breaks Focus: Nuclear family

6 Conclusion This chapter examined types of collectivity and individuality in order to differentiate middle-income milieus in Nairobi. Collectivity, as well as the situational and situation-overarching ways of belonging to groups, differ significantly between milieus. Combining the study of milieus and collectivities makes it possible to study social ontologies, historical impacts, and recent changes. This research perspective is well suited to African contexts, because it is not based upon assumptions about social structures or institutional arrangements in and of the global North. Instead, this perspective refers to empirical findings from research in urban Kenya to construct particular milieus. This can include social ontologies, such as the relationship to the extended family and the ethnic group, but also comparatively new ways of life. Studying collectivities and social ontologies can also provide insights into how historical patterns such as urban-rural ties in Kenya are transforming. The research on situational cohesion shows the intensity of everyday life with other members of a milieu. It can also shed light on common aspects like ‘code-switching,’ which describes different mentalities and patterns of language use in different contexts (for example, code-switching between situations with friends in Nairobi and relatives on the countryside). My research refers to the milieu concept that originates in German sociology, which offers a nuanced alternative to the general and polyvalent term ‘middle class,’ which is common in international debate (see Neubert and Stoll 2018; Stoll 2018a). The collectivity-individuality opposition was the red thread that allowed us to distinguish between the different ways of life and basic orientations of social milieus. The theoretical backbone for studying collectivity as situational belonging was Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains, which combines Durkheim’s concept of ritual from the Elementary Forms of Religious Life with Goffman’s microsociology.

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 197

The two case studies in the chapter clarify the usefulness of this framework. Members of the Neo-Traditional Milieu maintain strong connections to relatives and neighbors in their home villages. They live with relatives in Nairobi and spend most of their leisure time either with them or going places with a specific ethnic composition. The rural place of origin and local community remain emotionally significant, which results in a moral obligation to support relatives financially (for instance, by providing money for food or paying school fees). Investments at “home,” such as running a farm with relatives or building a house, have a strong symbolic dimension and are crucial aims in life for members of this milieu. In contrast to the collective embeddedness of the Neo-Traditionals, Social Climbers follow a strategy of individual advancement. They work long hours and reduce consumption in hopes of a better life for both themselves and their nuclear family. Modest spending and a high workload determine the everyday life of this milieu. They have typically already some success and could rise out of poverty. For Climbers, it is crucial to regulate the financial demands of relatives because they can be a decisive factor in terms of individual investments (such as growing a business or allocating fees for an academic degree). This study of collectivity and individuality shows how distinct social ontologies in the same income range lead to socio-cultural differences. As carriers of social ontologies in the sense of Baumann and Rehbein, we can conceptualize milieus as ‘communities with shared discourses’ and ‘collective imaginations.’ Additional elements, such as Hansen’s understanding of ‘multi-collectivity’ and ‘roof collectives’ as larger units, offer promising additions for future research. These elements are compatible with the combination of milieu and Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains as presented in this chapter. Other open questions of future research in Kenya include the coupling of research on ways of life and inequality, as well as the study of the historical genesis of milieus. Identifying milieus was a first step to study middle classes, milieus, and stratification with attention to socio-cultural particularities in an African context. Its main objective was to create a theoretical-methodological framework and collect data to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the “middle class” in a specific African setting. The strong focus of this approach on empirical research and cultural phenomena was necessary because the analysis of middleclass milieus in Kenya could rely on almost no previous conceptual or empirical work. Future projects can build on these findings and develop dimensions regarding stratification and inequality. It would also be beneficial to systematically consider the local level. Middle-income milieus in Nairobi and Mombasa differ strongly and a connection between the socioeconomic history of both cities and its sociocultures could reveal how contemporary milieus have developed over time. Linking historical sociocultures and fieldwork would have the advantage of identifying continuities and ruptures in some of the least-researched regions of the world. Moreover, such a project could provide new insights into processes of rapid urbanization that have been shaping many parts of Africa over recent

198  Florian Stoll

decades. Identifying social ontologies can, therefore, be a powerful tool toward a truly global sociology.

Notes 1 Parts of this publication are based on the article “Kollektiv und Individuum im urbanen Kenia des 21. Jahrhunderts. Soziale Ontologien am Beispiel Nairobis” (Stoll 2018b). 2 This chapter is based on empirical data from the project “Middle Classes on the Rise.” It was part of the program “Future Africa,” funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Other members of this project were Erdmute Alber, Dieter Neubert, Lena Kroeker, and Maike Voigt. The author mainly collected the data for this contribution during field stays in Kenya between 2013 and 2018, spanning a total duration of ten months.

References African Development Bank (AfDB). 2011. The Middle of the Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa. Accessed 30 November 2019. www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/ afdb/Documents/Publications/The%20Middle%20of%20the%20Pyramid_The%20Mid dle%20of%20the%20Pyramid.pdf. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. “Rethinking Durkheim’s Intellectual Development. On the Complex Origins of a Cultural Sociology.” In Structure and Meaning, 123–155. New York: Columbia University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. 2003. “The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology. Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics.” In The Meanings of Social Life. On the Origins of a Cultural Sociology, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, 11–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumann, Benjamin, and Boike Rehbein. 2018. “Soziale Ontologie, Soziokulturen, Ungleichheit und Kollektive.” Zeitschrift für Kollektivwissenschaft 4 (2): 7–29. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burbidge, Dominique. 2014. “ ‘Can someone get me outta this middle class zone?’ Pressures on Middle Class Kikuyu in Kenya’s 2013 Election.” Journal of Modern African Studies 52 (S): 205–225. CIA World Factbook. 2020. Kenya. Accessed 19 February 2020. https://www.cia.gov/ library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ke.html. Collins, Randall. 2005. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2. print., and 1. paperback print. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Princeton paperbacks). Darbon, Dominque. 2018. “Turning the Poor Into Something More Inspiring. The Creation of the African Middle Class Controversy.” In Middle Classes in Africa: Changing Lives and Conceptual Challenges, edited by Lena Kroeker, David O’Kane, and Tabea Scharrer, 57–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Durkheim, Émile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York and London: Free. Durkheim, Émile. 2013 [1893]. The Division of Labour in Society. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fine, Gary Alan. 2004. Tiny Publics. A Theory of Group Action and Culture. New York: Russel Sage Foundation.

Collectivity, individuality in urban Kenya 199 Flaig, Berthold Bodo, Thomas Meyer, and Jörg Ueltzhöffer. 1993. Alltagsästhetik und politische Kultur. Zur ästhetischen Dimension politischer Bildung und politischer Kommunikation. Bonn: Dietz. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual. New York: Doubleday. Hansen, Klaus Peter. 2011. Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaften. Eine Einführung. Tübingen and Basel: UTB. Mangin, William. 1970. Peasants in Cities – Readings in the Anthropology of Urbanization. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 2004 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. New York: International Publishers. McKinsey Global Institute. 2010. Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential of African Economies. Seoul, San Francisco, London, Washington, DC: McKinsey. Accessed 1 September 2019. http://www.mckinsey.com/globalthemes/middle-east-and-africa/ lions-on-the-move. Melber, Henning. 2016. “Wie viel Klasse hat die afrikanische Mittelklasse? Annäherungen an ein Phänomen.” In Mittelklassen, Mittelschichten oder Milieus in Afrika? Gesellschaften im Wandel, edited by Antje Daniel, Sebastian Müller, Florian Stoll, and Rainer Öhlschläger, 49–68. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Neubert, Dieter, and Florian Stoll. 2015. “Socio-Cultural Diversity of the African Middle Class: The Case of Urban Kenya.” Academy Reflects No. 1, IAS Working Paper Series No. 14, Institut für Afrika Studien, Universität Bayreuth. Neubert, Dieter, and Florian Stoll. 2018. “The Narrative of ‘the African Middle Class’ and its Conceptual Limitations.” In Middle Classes in Africa: Changing Lives and Conceptual Challenges, edited by Lena Kroeker, David O’Kane, and Tabea Scharrer, 57–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Oxfam. 2009. Urban Poverty and Vulnerability in Kenya. Background Analysis for the Preparation of an Oxfam GB Urban Programme Focused on Nairobi. Accessed 1 September 2019. https://urbanhealthupdates.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/urban_poverty_ and_vulnerability_in_kenya1.pdf. Rebstein, Bernd, and Bernt Schnettler. 2014. “Sozialstrukturanalyse ‘feiner Körnung’ oder subjektzentrierte Lebensweltanalyse? Ungleichheitsbezogene und wissenssoziologische Ansätze der Milieuanalyse.” In Die Form des Milieus: Zum Verhältnis von gesellschaftlicher Differenzierung und Formen der Vergemeinschaftung, edited by Peter Isenböck, Linda Nell, and Joachim Renn. 1. Sonderband der Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie, 46–68. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Juventa. Rehbein, Boike, and Jessé Souza. 2014. Ungleichheit in kapitalistischen Gesellschaften. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Juventa. Stoffel, Tim. 2017. “Human Development and the Construction of the Middle Class in the Global South.” In The Rise of Africa’s Middle Class: Myths, Realities and Critical Engagements, edited by Henning Melber, 54–68. London: Zed Books. Stoll, Florian. 2012. Leben im Moment? Soziale Milieus in Brasilien und ihr Umgang mit Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Stoll, Florian. 2018a. “The City and Its Ways of Life: Local Influences on Middle-Income Milieus in Nairobi.” In African Cities and the Development Conundrum, edited by. C. Ammann and T. Förster, 275–301, International Development Policy Series, No.10. Geneva and Boston: Brill. Accessed 30 December 2018. https://journals.openedition. org/poldev/2576.

200  Florian Stoll Stoll, Florian. 2018b. “Kollektiv und Individuum im urbanen Kenia des 21. Jahrhunderts. Soziale Ontologien am Beispiel Nairobis.” Zeitschrift für Kollektivwissenschaft 4 (2): 207–234. UN-Habitat (United Nations Habitat) (2016) Urban Data. Accessed 1 September 2019. http://urbandata.unhabitat.org/explore-data/?indicators=hiv_prevalence_15_to_49_ year,slum_proportion_living_urban,urban_population_cities,population. Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. Theory of the Leisure Class. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Vester, Heinz-Günter. 2010. Kompendium der Soziologie III: Neuere Soziologische Theorien. Wiesbaden: VS. Weber, Max. 1993. The Sociology of Religion. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Weber, Max. 2001 [1920]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge. Zifonun, Darius. 2016. Versionen. Soziologie sozialer Welten. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa.

Chapter 12

Pre-modern local collective structures and their manifestation in contemporary society A case study from Japan Kie Sanada 1 Introduction Situated within the overarching theoretical framework discussed in Chapter 2 of this volume, this chapter will contribute to the discussion on social ontology by demonstrating a Japanese case study. Two decades ago, Japan would have appeared to be one of the most egalitarian societies among the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations. During the 1960s, the country experienced rapid inclusive growth and became one of the major players in the global market. Through a general increase in living standards and the proliferation of educational opportunities during the 1970s, the notion of Japanese society as a homogeneously middle-class society has emerged both inside and outside the country (Kariya 2012; Sugimoto 2010). Especially in the eyes of foreign observers, Japan appeared not only to have satisfied the Western standard of modern state operation of capitalism and democracy, but also to have established its accompanying, more efficient model of governance (Chiavacci and Lechevalier 2017). Yet, during the decades-long economic recession, following the burst of Japan’s economic bubble in the late 1980s, the term ‘disparate society’ (kakusa shakai) became a buzzword in the country’s media; the myth of an egalitarian society had begun to fade (Shirahase 2014). Borrowing from Baumann and Rehbein’s Chapter 2 in this volume, liberal Western social ontology has reached Japan; a process of state modernization through the implementation of capitalist economic principles, the bureaucratic administration of the nation-state and democracy, and a liberal discourse of society, consisting of an aggregation of equal and free individuals, has taken root. In this discourse, socioeconomic differences among people are considered justifiable based on the premise that everyone is free to achieve different socioeconomic statuses, as opportunities are equally available for everyone (Rawls 1999). This premise maintains efficacy in neoliberal regimes, which emerge through the redefinition of the boundary between the public and the private sphere of liberal regimes. In a neoliberal society, however, competition becomes even more inclusive and severe.

202  Kie Sanada

Interestingly, in 2016 and 2017, more than 90% of citizens still identified themselves as members of the middle class (CAO 2017). The persistence of an egalitarian discourse of an all-middle-class-society in Japan, however, does not mean that the unequal social structure of the past simply disappeared (Rehbein and Souza 2014). The pre-modern structures of social hierarchy continue to operate beneath the discursive layer of neoliberal governance in Japan. After providing a brief clarification of the theoretical framework of this chapter, I will trace the overall historical trajectory of the pre-modern structure of local collectives. From this point of departure, I will turn to demonstrate its manifestation in today’s neoliberal administrative management using empirical data, collected during fieldwork research for my doctoral dissertation, carried out between June and August of 2015.

2  Theoretical framework This chapter shares the overarching theoretical framework introduced in Baumann and Rehbein’s Chapter 2 in this volume in terms of three key concepts: social ontology, socioculture, and social inequality. Two concepts in particular – namely, social ontology and socioculture – originated from efforts to widen the scope of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social inequality beyond a French cultural context; hence, why it will first be necessary to introduce a brief recap of Bourdieu’s theory of social inequality. I will then clarify what characterizes neoliberalism in terms of what it consists of and its effects. Bourdieu’s theory of social inequality shows how it is symbolically perpetuated in the reflexive relationship between individual practices and the structures of social inequality via the workings of habitus (Bourdieu 1990, 1996). It is symbolic in the sense that the existence of social inequality is naturalized, and its process of reproduction is rendered invisible. Unlike the utopian view of individuals and society, Bourdieu presupposes that every individual is born into an unequal social reality, structured by the hierarchical power relationships of the past. However, regardless of the persisting efficacy of the social hierarchy of the past, people tend to consider a given ongoing social reality as equal and fair. This occurs because individuals incorporate the existing structures of social inequality via the workings of their habitus. As a result, the structures of social inequality are embodied, and its existence largely remains invisible. Nevertheless, individuals’ practices are necessarily tied to the existing structure of inequality. While individuals enact actions without reflecting upon the existence of structures of social inequality, they are perpetuated by individuals’ practices (Rehbein and Souza 2014; Swartz 1997; Bourdieu 1996). Indeed, Bourdieu was chiefly interested in a very specific hierarchical social structure of France, i.e. social class. In order to apply his theory to the case of Japan, I employ the wider concept of socioculture that points to the historically constituted – therefore locally specific – structure of social inequality. In line with Bourdieu’s theory of social inequality, this chapter understands individuals as willful and self-aware, and thus as possessing agency. At the same

Pre-modern local collective structures 203

time, the comprehensive meaning of a given practice becomes intelligible only in the light of socioculture. While a given individual subjectively represent the persisting social reality as equal and fair, socioculture expresses itself in his or her practice in terms of a particular interpretation of social reality; for instance, the social-boundary of a given group, its delimitation, its membership at large, the hierarchical relationship among the members, and so on. This essence of locally specific, socially differentiated existence is what this chapter understands through the concept of social ontology. This is why members of a given society are able to decode the meanings of a social reality at hand depending on their position in the shared sociocultures. Epistemologically, this theoretical framework requires empirical studies to make the locality’s socioculture intelligible; and at the same time, to understand a given social reality, these individual subjective representations must be taken seriously. As was already illustrated in the introduction, many layers of sociocultures can coexist. Each socioculture consists of its unique social ontology, and one practice of a given individual can be interpreted according to many layers of meanings. What underpins the numerous layers of meaning is the aforementioned unwitting reproduction of social inequality, concealed within the logic of freedom and equality. According to this framework, this chapter will address how pre-modern social structures are manifested and perpetuated in the neoliberal regional governance of Japan. Given this context, I must touch upon a theory of neoliberalism here. Neoliberalism has long been identified with the reorganization of liberal economic institutions through deregulation, privatization, and decentralization. This type of formulation, however, explained institutional changes as they are exogenously triggered. Regrettably, it led to the construction of a fallacy that the world regions would tend toward homogenization. Recent studies addressing the emergence of a variety of capitalist modes has, however, empirically challenged and invalidated this view (cf. Thelen 2012; Boyer 2005). Recent neo-institutional theory explains regime change as being endogenously, rather than exogenously, driven. Under this new framework, neoliberalization is marked by the dispatch of the decisionmaking and policy implementation process to the more time-efficient system of capitalism: the market, the private sector and, most importantly, the realm of selfresponsibility. Furthermore, neoliberalization actually occurs in the practical process of transforming neoliberalism, embodied in state ideology, into the “actually existing neoliberalism” that is operational in the sphere of everyday life (Brenner and Theodore 2002: 351). According to critics of neoliberalism, the fundamental ideology of this body of thought is embedded in its conceptualization of society and citizen (Rosa 2003; Bauman 2000). A neoliberal concept of society designates its citizens as self-regulatory members of a community. Through the top-down process of policy implementation, the state imposes this conceptualization onto citizens, expecting them to mobilize civic action to compensate for diminished public services (Williams et  al. 2014; Bauman 2000). While being affected by such policies, the manner and degree to which individuals and politically relevant collectives may adopt the neoliberal concept of self and its derivative discourses

204  Kie Sanada

are defined endogenously. In this manner, the impact of neoliberal reforms are, thus, heterogeneous depending on the local institutional contexts (Thelen 2012; Lechevalier 2007; Boyer 2005).

3 Socioculture Bringing the two theoretical considerations together, I posit the research question as to how the pre-modern social structure is manifested and perpetuated at present, while, at the same time, local residents view the ongoing social reality in tune with the neoliberal discourse of the community management by the selfregulatory citizens. In order to answer this question, I will pay particular attention to the spatial manifestation of socioculture created in the process of administrative demarcation in Japan. The first part of this section will explain why this particular focus has been chosen. The following subsections will then trace and demonstrate the overall historical trajectory of the pre-modern structure of local collectives. The spatial manifestation of socioculture is particularly important for the purpose of studying Japanese neoliberalism. The previous section argued that the effects of neoliberalization depend on the existing political structure of a given country. In the case of Japan, the effects of neoliberalization are most prominent in the reorganization of governance at a regional level. This is because Japanese state intervention is more prominent in the sphere of domestic economic development than in the sphere of social welfare, as is the case in many Western countries. Supporting this argument, Chiavacci (2008, 2010) shows that the social cleavage that has been reinforced in the Japanese political process concerns its rural and urban populations, unlike the rupture between social classes in Western countries. Further, Elis (2017) argues that widening regional disparity has been used as a political tool to enhance party political agenda in Japan. In this institutional setting, the dynamics that lead toward smaller government and financial deregulation directly result in cutbacks in the budget for regional policies and the decentralization of regional governance. On this basis, this chapter focuses on local communities in the Japanese countryside, which is governed by the central government. Particularly, I highlight a socioculture created in the process of administrative demarcation, namely the mismatch between living communities (seikatsu-son) and administrative units (gyôsei-son). Living communities are also called natural villages (shizen-son) or hamlets (buraku), pointing to the historically developed sociospatial boundaries of a given community. Administrative units are, on the other hand, created by the state for the purpose of centralized bureaucratic administration. Sociologists studying the Japanese countryside have written much about this mismatch, particularly due to the severe regional shrinkage that coincided with depopulation and an aging society in Japan. The gravity of a given situation, indeed, requires political interventions. However, scholars reported that the communal heterogeneity within an administrative unit tend to lead to the failure of such policies, especially

Pre-modern local collective structures 205

when the locally specific sociohistorical context is not carefully addressed (Hiwasaki 2007; Rausch 2006; Knight 1994a). What is important to highlight is that these sociospatial boundaries of living communities have been perpetuated over time and still hold relevance in today’s Japan. 3.1  The pre-modern structure Japan is a relatively new country, having only been founded in 1868. The preceding feudal era is referred to as the Edo period (1603–1868) presided over by the House of Tokugawa. It is called the Edo period, as the Tokugawa feudal government (bakufu) was situated in Edo, the city currently known as Tokyo. The rest of the territory was strategically divided among regional lords, whose households governed their fiefs and people. The regional lords were divided into three ranks depending on their closeness to the bakufu: shinpan, fudai, and tozama lords. The closest were shinpan, who all were direct relatives of the House of Tokugawa; such lords were entitled to have privileged positions in the bakufu, as well as a domain with fertile soil. The fudai were lords, who have long been faithful to the bakufu, with their domains located close to the territories of shinpan. Conversely, tozama lords are estranged from the central feudal government because these lords fought against the Tokugawa family in a battle that preceded the establishment of Tokugawa feudal regime; their domains were designated in the geographically remote and peripheral region (Howland 2002). Hokkaido and Okinawa were not a part of the regime’s territory. The feudal Tokugawa regime introduced four official castes: from top to bottom, samurai warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants, as well as two outcast classes. These classes were hierarchically related according to their occupational importance based on Confucian moral philosophy. Similar to India’s caste system, it strongly regulated the daily practices, behavior, and sociability of each caste’s members in terms of employment, domicile, food, clothing, and so on (McCormack 2013; Howland 2002). A sociological significance of this regulation is that people’s proximity in the social hierarchy was made identifiable with the similarity of their social practices. While an informal shift in social status has occurred during this period, the existence of social class divisions and differentiated social practices according to one’s status has itself remained largely unquestioned. Under the caste system during the feudal era, the farmers’ class, which included fishermen and foresters, organized their community on a self-administrative basis while cultivating the natural resources of their village as their common wealth. Such village communities existed prior to the establishment of the feudal regime; this suggests that the House of Tokugawa integrated existing units of local collectives into its governing structure (Sugimoto 2010; Pekkanen 2006). Despite the popular image of these self-governing villages as egalitarian communities, whose villagers live on the basis of mutual help in the peaceful countryside, this self-governance had been maintained on the basis of a steep hierarchy among the

206  Kie Sanada

villagers according to their lineage and wealth in a given community. McCormack (2013, 26) observes: Atop the hierarchy stood village headmen, who held primary responsibility for the payment of tax, the fulfillment of corvée duties, and the maintenance of order. Normally, they came from the oldest and wealthiest families. Next came those, usually also from families of long-standing residence, with sufficient land to be allocated a direct tax burden, who counted as full members of village councils. Below them were those with small plots including members of branch houses politically subordinated to main houses, then landless tenant farmers, and those in hereditary bonded service. The concept of lineage originally only had importance for members of the samurai class, as formally they were the only class to have the social privilege of a right to a family name (Howland 2002). However, similar to what Kawaguchi (2008, 72) has observed in his study of Chinese society, it also became meaningful for villagers of the farmers’ class over time so that they could hand over their relatively high social positions, transferring access to lands and profit onto the next generation. 3.2  The evolution of socioculture At the Meiji restoration in 1868, the central government established a modern nation-state, the Empire of Japan. Here, feudal social rankings were formally abolished. However, the abolishment of social ranks did not lead to the nullification of class structures and privileges of the feudal era (Howland 2002). At the dawn of the Meiji era, the elite of the former regime, particularly the former members of samurai class and rich merchants, occupied the majority of important positions in politics, the economy, military, media, justice system, academia, and many other sectors. The logic of domination, however, gradually translated from one of Confucian moral philosophy into that of intellectual competence (Howland 2002). In fact, the population whose members could attain university education at this time was limited to the heirs of the powerful of the feudal era. By the Sino-Japanese war in 1894, the elite of the feudal era had reproduced its higher socioeconomic position with a modern justification, i.e. meritocracy. In a lecture at Collège de France in 1991, Bourdieu (2014, 154) pointed out that the modernization process of France in the 16th century and of Japan in the 19th century is similar according to its character as a “conservative revolution,” which indicates that the group of people who initiated the revolution managed to install a social order for their own benefit. For the purposes of administrative centralization, the central government introduced the family registration law and the system of municipalities in 1871. Due to this reform, the feudal domains were abolished and geographically restructured into prefectures. Initially, the number of prefectures accounted for 306 as

Pre-modern local collective structures 207

the central government simply replaced the existing domains of the feudal era into the prefectural system. By 1889, the number of prefectures was reduced to 45 plus Hokkaido. At the municipality level, the total number of municipalities accounted for 71,314 in 1888 and fell to 15,859 the following year. In 2014, this number stood at 1,718 (MIA 2014) (Graph 12.1). Each municipal amalgamation drew new geographical boundaries in rural areas, incorporating more and more of the surrounding living communities into fewer prefectures. Nevertheless, the connection between land and people was maintained with family registration law. The new word ku, which means “ward,” was introduced to denote the same structure as feudal village communities (Shimada 2014; Kuroki 1969). This is to say that the Meiji government integrated the existing informal

Graph 12.1  The number of municipalities (1888–2014) Source: MIA (2014); the number of municipalities, www.soumu.go.jp/gapei/gapei2.html

208  Kie Sanada

self-governing social units of the feudal era as the foundation of its governance of the nation-state. 3.3  Continuity in contemporary society Despite the powerlessness of local residents to resist such a top-down process of administrative demarcation, the local residents have struggled to maintain the structures of their living communities. In the wake of the Meiji era, the exclusive right to own and to cultivate the communal natural resources of the feudal era was legally acknowledged to each ward member as the right for commons (iriaiken). In order to retain natural resources and the profits deriving from them, management organizations of commons were established across Japan. Due to this original purpose, the membership was only admitted to household heads that had a family registration in a given ward at the time of its establishment. In this manner, the sociospatial boundary of the feudal villages came to be institutionalized as the membership of management organizations of its commons. The Meiji government (1868–1912), as well as the following Taisho (1912– 1926) and Showa (1926–1986) governments, endeavored to modernize the land management of the country. For this purpose, regardless of the legal right acknowledged at first, the central government announced the centralization policy to shift the regulation concerning the commons, including its ownership and the right to cultivate from village communities to municipalities and to the state. As a result, 19.2% of the village communities gave up both ownership and the right of access to the land (Kuroki 1969). Other village communities with communal properties diversified the type of ownership and the right to access in order to resist this process (Yamashita et al. 2009; Kijima et al. 2000). According to Kuroki (1969), in 45.5% of cases, governments acquired property ownership, but the village community kept the right to access the property; 13.2% of the village communities registered communal properties under the private ownership of its representative, which could be a corporate body or private person, and chose to keep using the property as the common wealth; and 22.5% of the village communities endeavored to keep both the ownership and the right to access to their properties. Accordingly, ways of organizing property ownership and communal life have diverged from community to community over time. Village communities with management organizations of commons accounted for at least 12,071 in 2000 (Shimada 2014, 216). In addition, these organizations also show different degrees of consolidation. On the basis of the family registration law, introduced in 1871, a distinction between residents who already lived in a given community at the time of introduction of the municipality system, and those who moved to the locality at a later date, was installed. Shimada (2014, 216) reports that 45.5% of the management organizations still do not allow newcomers to acquire rights for commons, while 32.8% admit newcomers the rights only when they fulfill community-set conditions for membership. Due to factors such as depopulation, aging and urbanization, 21.7% of organizations grant

Pre-modern local collective structures 209

newcomers the rights without any requirements. According to the agricultural census of MAFF (2015), there are 138,256 agricultural village communities in Japan. Regrettably, there is no exhaustive survey concerning the actual situation of the diversification of the right for commons until today (Izumi et al. 2008). Nevertheless, it clearly shows that the number of communities that may operate within the local collective of the pre-modern era is much larger than that of the official municipalities (Graph 12.1). Besides the struggle of local residents to protect their land, the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa governments have actively promoted the installation of self-governance in the local collective as a foundation of state governance (Pekkanen et al. 2014). Governments encouraged local residents to form ward-associations (ku-kai) and promoted the continuation of self-governance within a village. During World War II, the formation of ward-association became compulsory, known at this time as tonarigumi (Sugimoto 2010). The national government took advantage of these local self-governing bodies to proliferate war propaganda, to carry out sanitation programs, and to facilitate mutual censorship within communities. During the post-war period, the US occupation force dissolved tonarigumi; however, the same structure emerged again as neighborhood associations (chônaikai). Pekkanen (2006, 85) defines neighborhood associations as “voluntary groups whose membership is drawn from a small, geographically delimited, and exclusive residential area – neighborhood, and whose activities are multiple and are centered on that same area”; he points out that they are “the most widespread of the local civil society organizations” in present Japanese society. While official governance was centralized via a series of municipal mergers (Graph 12.1), the number of neighborhood associations has reached 300,000, urban and rural combined, which are necessary to compensate for the lack of public services available for the maintenance of community life (Pekkanen 2006). Across Japan, these associations engage in similar activities to maintain community functions such as cleaning parks, shrines, and temples; changing the streetlights; night watch; fire prevention; organization of local festivals; and so on. Local ward offices, as well as local governments, are in collaboration with these neighborhood self-governing bodies to carry out their governing functions, e.g. circulating official information. This makes a neighborhood an officially recognized, and at the same time, informal, unit of administration and governance in contemporary Japan (Pekkanen 2006). On the one hand, being a part of a neighborhood association nurtures a sense of trust and strengthens the social network; on the other hand, choosing not to be a part of a local neighborhood association runs one the risk of being ostracized from community life. In addition, the local government recognizes only one neighborhood association with official powers, depriving local residents of any alternative. Thus, in case of personal disputes, the losers of a given conflict have no choice other than to simply drop out of its activities. Pekkanen et al. (2014) and Sugimoto (2010) point out that this exclusiveness and mild ostracism as sanctions function as a means of horizontal cohesion. Particularly in the countryside, this informal cohesion within the sociohistorical

210  Kie Sanada

boundary of the feudal village contributes to the support of local governance as the end point in the chain of regional authority. 3.4  Neoliberalization of regional governance Within this overall politico-historical context, Japanese regional policy took a neoliberal turn. The decades-long economic stagnation after the economic crash of the late 1980s, referred to as the ‘lost decades,’ has been seen as a series of short-term policy mistakes and an absence of reforms. However, it is increasingly recognized that this period has to be viewed in terms of being marked by the state’s struggle to augment efficiency in regional public management via politicoadministrative decentralization, financial deregulation, and privatization (Chiavacci and Lechevalier 2017; Tsukamoto 2012). This series of neoliberal structural reforms resulted in increasing the administrative responsibilities of regional governments, while reducing its financial capacity for the maintenance of local public services (Wirth et al. 2016; Tsukamoto 2012). As a result of such moves, existing regional disparity was further intensified and amplified, consequently weakening the political capacity of the regional governments across Japan (Rausch 2012; Tsukamoto 2012; Elis 2011). Although to different degrees, this impoverishment did not leave much space for local governments to resist the further advancement of the neoliberal shift (Nakazawa 2014). Since 2009, neoliberal institutional reorganization has entered a new phase, which is marked by the delegation of the decision-making and policy implementation process to the more efficient system of capitalism through the market, the private sector and the realm of self-responsibility. In a policy paper “The Declaration of New Public Commons” (atarashii kôkyô sengen) (CAO 2010), the then-government redefined the boundary of moral responsibility between the government and the people, and reassigned locals as ‘independent beings, not dependent on the government.’As it was touched upon in the second section, neoliberalization occurs within the existing institutional settings. In this sense, Japanese neoliberal state management is an endpoint to the aforementioned tradition of local self-governance. This declaration called upon citizens to seek to achieve a better society, with appeals made that citizens be driven by their human nature to value the pleasure of mutual help. Today’s regional governance promoted by Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has proceeded to make the transfer of policy implementation processes to the private sector and the realm of self-responsibility considerably more concrete. The ongoing policy program encourages local residents to deal with their own economic, political, and cultural alienation, which coincides with population loss and the aging of society, by mobilizing forms of ‘self-support’ through various innovative projects. Particularly with regard to community building projects, a decentralized form of regional governance promoted in the policy framework of regional revitalization, the central government inducts local projects that take the shape of a cultural re-branding of local products and/or spaces, the goal being to promote

Pre-modern local collective structures 211

tourism as well as enhance domestic relocation to underpopulated areas. In sum, as a result of these two phases of neoliberal institutional change, local residents have become formally integrated into the final link of the policy implementation chain, as it is today.

4 Socio-cultural manifestation in today’s Japanese society Until now, I have traced the overall historical trajectory of the pre-modern structure of local collectives. The sociospatial boundaries of the living community of the pre-modern era have been perpetuated in the century-long struggles at a local level to resist the centralizing process of the state. Due to its historicity, the manner and degree of socio-cultural consolidation differs from community to community. However, it has maintained its practical relevance in the majority of cases. Certainly, it is ironic to observe that this very structure is mobilized for achieving neoliberal regional governance today. After a brief review of existing studies, the following section will demonstrate findings from my case study from a socio-cultural perspective. In particular, it aims to show how the social ontology of the pre-modern collective structure manifests in the neoliberal discourse of today’s Japan. 4.1  Commons theory Given the apparently participatory aspect of neoliberal regional governance, some empirical case studies document local accounts of flourishing autonomy and empowerment. This line of argument became popular in recent times in combination with commons theory, born out of Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ published in 1968. Hardin emphasized the significance of state intervention for achieving sustainable environmental management, given the indifference of local residents regarding global environmental issues such as climate change and relevant international agreements. After half a century of research, the Nobel Prize winning author Elinor Ostrom (2010) rebutted Hardin’s thesis and conversely argued that the involvement of historically developed systems of communal resource management at a local level is the essential factor in achieving sustainable environmental management. Japanese authors have applied the latter theory to the aforementioned indigenous form of communal commons to similarly advocate the significance of involving the local networks of rules and knowhow for environmental management (e.g. Shimada 2014; Izumi et  al. 2008; Mitsumata 2001; Kijima et al. 2000). Civic engagement is, without doubt, an essential factor for sustainable communal management, and its importance was well illustrated in empirical studies on rebuilding communities affected by the Great East Japan earthquake and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan (e.g. Lahournat 2016; Hommerich 2012; Matanle 2011). Regrettably, though, the often hierarchical, undemocratic, and patriarchal nature of Japanese commons

212  Kie Sanada

management, which is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of sustainable development, remains outside of the focus of such studies. This trend in scholarship calls for more efforts to carry out empirical studies to capture the ongoing neoliberal policy as autonomy within heteronomy. Otherwise, the neoliberal mobilization of civic action by the state remains concealed within the empowering discourse of civic participation and engagement. 4.2  Case study My field research studied an extreme case, which highlighted an extraordinary degree of socio-cultural consolidation (Sanada 2019). As is the case elsewhere, its residents are hierarchically related to each other within a given community according to their socio-cultural differences, which are institutionalized as different membership types of management organization of the local commons. At the top of this hierarchy, there are the established families, who are descendants of the original members of the management organization of the local commons. This is followed by one type of newcomers, who are admitted partial memberships, with conditions set by the established families that they must professionally engage in the local fishing or forestry industries. Those who do not satisfy this condition form another type of newcomer, lacking any rights in the local commons. They may be residents who have been included in the community via the top-down process of administrative demarcation or who have moved to this village from other places seeking a rural lifestyle. In this village, the management organization functions also as the officially recognized neighborhood association, which organizes its community on an autonomous basis. This is to say, individual socio-cultural differences give individuals unequal access to communal activities and self-governance via the right for commons. For example, a township head of this village is chosen from and among the members of management organization by tradition. In this case, the right to vote and suffrage in this community are distributed unequally depending on the residents’ socio-cultural position, regardless of the fact that it is a matter within an official unit of state administration. Besides newcomers, it is also very difficult for females to become members of the commons management organization. Generally, a woman’s socio-cultural position depends on that of her father or husband. The community in question has engaged in a state-financed community building project within the framework of regional vitalization. Because the project has been carried out as an activity of a neighborhood association, its management and realization highlighted a clear socio-cultural division of labor. The established families of the village who occupied the highest socio-cultural positions organized other residents through being in charge of decision-making, planning, and organization of all community-building activities, and by interacting with local government officials and other stakeholders from outside the village. The majority of residents of the living community, who are from lower socio-cultural positions, were passive participants. They carry out the tasks that the participants with

Pre-modern local collective structures 213

the higher socio-cultural positions have decided upon. Residents with the lowest socio-cultural positions are socially excluded from the living community. Accordingly, they do not participate in the activities because they do not want to meet others, only to feel uncomfortable in their presence. The division of labor, however, is not organized as the direct expression of socio-cultural differences, per se. Instead, it is underpinned in their socio-ontological differences. Local residents with the highest socio-cultural positions were informants who were easy to access, as they are ‘motivated’ residents who actively take a part in community-building activities. They prefer to be interviewed at a public space such as a café or at their office, as they are more or less comfortable talking about themselves to an outsider, including myself, on behalf of the entire community. In their account, the project is depicted as stories of self-cultivation (seichô), self-realization (jiko jitsugen), finding a reason to live (ikigai), and pleasure (tanoshimi) as a result of participation in the projects. The project is introduced to me as a story of local empowerment. They understand and justify their representative position in the project based on their competence having studied and worked in Japan’s big cities, such as Tokyo and Osaka. In particular, they perceive themselves as being “human resources” (jinzai), “who have an interest (yûshi),” and “are motivated” (yaruki ga aru). I should note that this is a conventional picture provided in the dominant majority of the existing research regarding regional vitalization policies. Their account accords with the neoliberal discourse of the community management by the self-regulatory citizens. This neoliberal discourse is employed to justify the highest socio-cultural group taking up leading roles in the community building project; on the other hand, it functions to exclude others from taking up such roles. Out of their own goodwill, the ‘motivated’ informants did not introduce me to any of the ‘unmotivated’ (yaruki ga nai), ‘uninterested’ (kyômi ga nai) residents, who they considered to be ‘conservative’ (hoshuteki), and sometimes ‘lacking foresight’ (senken no mei ga nai). In fact, this labeling identifies residents who are socio-culturally ‘less qualified,’ such as females and the males who have partial rights to the local commons. Actually, the majority of residents of the village studied fall into this socio-ontological layer; they take part in the community-building project passively when they are asked to join. These members seemed to be uncomfortable talking about the local projects on behalf of the entire community. It was also difficult to convince these informants to give me their accounts of the local project. My requests for information were often declined, with self-diminishing remarks that their accounts would be “not useful” (yaku ni tatanai), that they were “not interesting” (tsumaranai), or that they were “not well-informed” (yoku shiranai). Instead, they suggested that I speak with the ‘motivated’ participants with whom I had already talked to. This group of informants seemed more comfortable talking about the local project on the street or at the market as chitchat among a small group of friends, and often on an ‘off-the-record’ (kokodakeno hanashi) basis. The residents with the lowest socio-cultural position were the informants that I had the most difficulty accessing as a researcher, owing to the fact that they do

214  Kie Sanada

not participate in community activities. For outsiders, they often remain unidentifiable. The actual process of getting access to these informants was socially troublesome. My existing informants personally recommended me not to go the neighborhood where non-participants live by describing the place as “such a place” (anna tokoro) where the residents are “tricky” (kawatteru). Also, in their eyes, it seemed pointless to talk to non-participants about the project, although my view as a researcher would dictate that non-participation is also a type of practice. The interviews that I did manage to have with this socio-cultural group of residents revealed that they experienced exclusion from the communal management regardless of their educational and working experiences in big cities. They actually possess socioeconomic competence of the same, or even a higher level. My informants explained their reluctance to participate in the community building project due to irrefutable “differences in their ways of thinking” (kangaekata no chigai). This difference makes them feel uncomfortable, and thus it is pointless for them to be part of the ongoing project. Furthermore, as the degree of discomfort became too great, they chose, ultimately, to withdraw from the community more or less completely. From the point of view of the active participants, the voluntary withdrawal of these residents appears to be a simple lack of interest. On the one hand, the residents’ accounts on the community building project of the village were differentiated according to their socio-cultural position. While the villagers share social ontology in terms of the common view on social boundaries within the village, its delimitation, its membership at large, and the hierarchical relationship among the members, each group’s account represents its socio-culturally specific view of the ongoing social reality regarding project and community management. On the other hand, local residents talk about the community building project using a neoliberal concept of society, which consists of self-regulatory and self-responsible members of a community. For the residents of the living community, the activities are equally available and free to participate in if the participants would be motivated and competent enough; from the perspective of the excluded, differences in their viewpoints prevents them from participating. In this view, the existence of the hierarchical structure of the past was naturalized with the logic of competence and motivation. This observation leads to the conclusion that the social ontology of the pre-modern era and the neoliberal era coexist in this village. Regardless of the logic employed, however, we saw that socio-cultural differences manifest themselves as a pattern of the division of labor. The socio-cultural bias among the central figures resulted in the socio-cultural bias in the overall framework of community building activities. Consequently, the locality’s socioculture has been reinforced via community planning and its realization. Finally, I  would like to emphasize that neither the socio-culturally privileged residents, nor members of other socio-cultural groups, nor city and state officials, possess any intention to reproduce their socio-cultural position, per se. As Bourdieu explained with his theory of social inequality, the historically constituted locally specific structure of social inequality has been symbolically

Pre-modern local collective structures 215

mediated and unwittingly reproduced via the neoliberal policy of regional governance affecting the community in question.

5 Conclusion This chapter aimed to contribute to a wider discussion on social ontology by tracing the historical trajectory of socioculture in Japan, particularly in the context of state attempts at regional governance. The pre-modern structure of living community has been actively perpetuated in the power struggle between the residents of the community and the state. At present, neoliberal regional governance of the state advances while mobilizing this particular socioculture. Many existing studies focusing on grassroots localism in contemporary Japan have documented the correlation between the locally specific configuration of power and the level of local participation in terms of gender (Love 2013; Knight 1994a), of right for communal resources (Yamashita et al. 2009), and of the length of residency (Hiwasaki 2007; Knight 1994b). Certainly, as Knight (1994b) reminds us, it is not possible to simply reduce state intervention as a whole to a case of state domination, particularly in the context of the severe regional shrinkage coinciding with depopulation and an aging Japanese society. However, given that the result of the study shows that the pre-modern structures of local collectives continue to operate in everyday practice at the locality beneath the layer of the Modern state governance in Japan, I emphasize the significance to continue the effort to critically review the ongoing social reality from a socio-cultural perspective. It is important to note that the sentiment of disappointment in regional vitalization policy has been growing among Japanese voters. However, the regional policies of the Japanese central government, regardless of its promise of redistribution, continue to become even more ‘regionally selective’ (Nakazawa 2014; Tsukamoto 2012). For instance, via the ‘smart community’ projects, the central government began to seek to digitalize the policy sphere of regional governance more actively. Similar to the German digitalization model ‘Industrie 4.0,’ the Japanese model ‘Society 5.0’ aims at boosting the Japanese economy via technological innovation. What differentiates the Japanese model from the German one, however, is its promise to “bring solution(s) to social problems (that arise from rapidly aging society, low birth rate, widening gap between the rural and urban area as such) via scientific and technological innovation” on the basis of “redistribution” (CAO 2016). The selected region of Tokyo was supposed to stimulate economic development in the surrounding area, when in fact the actual result was the continuation of a widening gap between Tokyo and the rest of Japan. Moreover, Japanese regional policy has been criticized in terms of its ‘ideological unification’ effect (Asano 2016). This points to the political trend to repackage heterogeneous social issues on a local level as problems of global scale, e.g. global warming, economic development, energy security, and so on. In this way, the residents of rural villages are uniformly treated as global citizens. However, it is questionable as to whether a local issue would be resolved without policy tailor

216  Kie Sanada

made at a micro level. In sum, the comprehensive criticism of Japanese regional policy may be the widening disparity between rural and urban, concealed within its unifying ideology of globalization. The scientific effort to enlarge the number of case studies of this kind, therefore, points to the possibility to contribute to elucidate the mechanism, under which historically constituted social structures of locality continue to operate in a form of socio-culturally differentiated social realities on a global scale. In this regard, social ontology may be the key concept in drawing a comprehensive picture of the ongoing social reality. Otherwise, the genuine empowerment of local residents, which grassroots localism advocates, remains a mere ideological instrument of neoliberal political mobilization.

References Asano, Shinichi. 2016. “The Grand Design of National Spatial Development and Regional Societies as Livingspheres.” Annals of Japan Association of Regional and Community Studies 28: 5–10. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. “Chapter 3. Time/Space.” In Liquid Modernity, edited by Zygmunt Bauman, 91–129. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2014. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1992, edited by Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Ponpeau, and Marie-Christine Rivière. Translated by David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boyer, Robert. 2005. “How and Why Capitalisms Differ.” Economy and Society 34 (4): 509–557. Brenner, Neil, and Nik Theodore. 2002. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’.” Antipode 34 (3): 349–379. CAO. 2010. “New Public Commons.” Accessed 25 March  2019. https://www5.cao.go. jp/npc/. CAO. 2016. “Society 5.0.” Accessed 14 February 2020. https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/eng lish/society5_0/index.html. CAO. 2017. “Overview of the Public Opinion Survey on the Life of the People.” Accessed 9 April 2018. https://survey.gov-online.go.jp/h29/h29-life/summary.pdf. Chiavacci, David. 2008. “From Class Struggle to General Middle-Class Society to Divided Society: Societal Models of Inequality in Postwar Japan.” Social Science Japan Journal 11 (1): 5–27. Chiavacci, David. 2010. “Divided Society Model and Social Cleavages in Japanese Politics: No Alignment by Social Class, but Dealignment of Rural-Urban Division.” Contemporary Japan 22 (1–2): 47–74. Chiavacci, David, and Sebastien Lechevalier. 2017. “Japanese Political Economy Revisited: Diverse Corporate Change, Institutional Transformation and Abenomics.” Japan Forum 29 (3): 299–311. Elis, Volker. 2011. “The Impact of the Trinity Reforms and the Heisei Mergers on Processes of Peripheralisation in Japan’s Mountain Villages.” Japanese Journal of Human Geography 63 (6): 44–56.

Pre-modern local collective structures 217 Elis, Volker. 2017. “The Public and Political Discourse on Socio-Spatial Inequality in Japan.” In Social Inequality in Post-Growth Japan: Transformation During Economic and Demographic Stagnation, edited by David Chiavacci and Carola Hommerich, 201– 212. New York: Routledge. Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–1248. Hiwasaki, Lisa. 2007. “Community Dynamics in Japanese Rural Areas and Implications for National Park Management.” The International Journal of Biodiversity Science and Management 3 (2): 102–114. Hommerich, Carole. 2012. “Trust and Subjective Well-being after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown: Preliminary Results.” International Journal of Japanese Sociology 21 (1): 46–64. Howland, Douglas R. 2002. Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Izumi, Rui, Haruo Saito, Eiko Yamashita, and Mika Asai. 2008. “The Comprehensive Report on Property ward (in Japanese).” http://izumi-seminar.net/zaisanku/zaisan-ku%20report.pdf Kariya, Takehiko. 2012. Education Reform and Social Class in Japan: The Emerging Incentive Divide. New York: Routledge. Kawaguchi, Yukihiro. 2008. “Chapter 4. Kinship Organizations and Social Stratification in Late Imperial China: A Study based on Lineage in the Pearl River Delta.” In Status and Stratification: Cultural Forms in East and Southeast Asia, edited by Mitsuhiko Shima, 63–94. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Kijima, Yoko, Takashi Sakurai, and Keijiro Otsuka. 2000. “Iriaichi: Collective Versus Individualized Management of Community Forests in Japan.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 48 (4): 867–886. Knight, John. 1994a. “Rural Revitalization in Japan: Spirit of the Village and Taste of the Country.” Asian Survey 34 (7): 634–646. Knight, John. 1994b. “Town-Making in Rural Japan: An Example from Wakayama.” Journal of Rural Studies 10 (4): 249–261. Kuroki, Saburo. 1969. “The Common and the Modernization of the Common Forest Act [Iriaiken to iriai rinya kindaika hô] (in Japanese).” The Sociology of Law 21: 18–49. Lahournat, Florence. 2016. “Reviving Tradition in Disaster-Affected Communities: Adaptation and Continuity in the Kagura of Ogatsu, Miyagi Prefecture.” Contemporary Japan 28 (2): 185–207. Lechevalier, Sébastien. 2007. “The Diversity of Capitalism and Heterogeneity of Firms: A Case Study of Japan during the Lost Decade.” Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review: 113–142. Love, Bridget. 2013. “Treasure Hunts in Rural Japan: Place Making at the Limits of Sustainability.” American Anthropologist 115 (1): 112–124. MAFF. 2015. “Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery.” Agricultural Census 2015. Accessed 3 April 2018. www.maff.go.jp/j/tokei/kouhyou/noucen/index.html. Matanle, Peter. 2011. “The Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown: Towards the (Re)construction of a Safe, Sustainable and Compassionate Society in Japan’s Shrinking Regions.” Local Environment 16 (9): 823–847. McCormack, Noah Y. 2013. Japan’s Outcaste Abolition: The Struggle for National Inclusion and the Making of the Modern State. New York: Routledge. MIA. 2014. “Ministry of Internal Affair and Communication.” Reference Material on Municipal Mergers of Japan (1888–2014). Accessed 2 April 2018. www.soumu.go.jp/ gapei/gapei2.html.

218  Kie Sanada Mitsumata, Gaku. 2001. “The Modern Implications of the Property Ward from the Viewpoint of a Commons Study: A Case Study of Ohara Property Ward in Shiga Prefecture (in Japanese).” Journal of Forest Economics 47 (3): 41–48. Nakazawa, Hideo. 2014. “Local and the Center (in Japanese).” In The History of Heisei, edited by Oguma Eiji, 218–266. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo. Ostrom, Elinor. 2010. “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.” American Economic Review 100: 641–672. Pekkanen, Robert J. 2006. Japan’s Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pekkanen, Robert J., Yutaka Tsujinaka, and Hidehiro Yamamoto. 2014. Neighborhood Associations and Local Governance in Japan. New York: Routledge. Rausch, Anthony S. 2006. “The Heisei Dai Gappei: A Case Study for Understanding the Municipal Mergers of the Heisei Era.” Japan Forum 18 (1): 133–156. Rausch, Anthony S. 2012. “A Framework for Japan’s New Municipal Reality: Assessing the Heisei Daigappei Mergers.” Japan Forum 24 (2): 185–204. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rehbein, Boike, and Jessé Souza. 2014. “Inequality in Capitalist Societies.” Transcience 5 (1): 16–27. Rosa, Hartmut. 2003, “Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society.” Constellations 10 (1): 3–33. Sanada, Kie. 2019. “Institutional Analysis of Regionalism in Japan: A Sociological Case Study from Owase, Japan.” Japan Forum. https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2019.1626471 Shimada, Daisaku. 2014. “External Impacts on Traditional Commons and Present-Day Changes: A Case Study of Iriai Forests in Yamaguni District, Kyoto, Japan.” International Journal of the Commons 8 (1): 207–235. Shirahase, Sawako. 2014. Social Inequality in Japan. New York: Routledge. Sugimoto, Yoshio. 2010. An Introduction to Japanese Society. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Swartz, David. 1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Thelen, Kathleen. 2012. “Varieties of Capitalism: Trajectories of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity.” Annual Review of Political Science 15: 137–159. Tsukamoto, Takashi. 2012. “Neoliberalization of the Developmental State: Tokyo’s Bottom-Up Politics and State Rescaling in Japan.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (1): 71–89. Williams, Andrew, Mark Goodwin, and Paul Cloke. 2014. “Neoliberalism, Big Society, and Progressive Localism.” Environment and Planning A 46: 2798–2815. Wirth, Peter, Volker Elis, Bernhard Müller, and Kenji Yamamoto. 2016. “Peripheralisation of Small Towns in Germany and Japan: Dealing with Economic Decline and Population Loss.” Journal of Rural Studies 47: 62–75. Yamashita, Utako, Kulbhushan Balooni, and Makoto Inoue. 2009. “Effect of Instituting ‘Authorized Neighborhood Associations’ on Communal (iriai) Forest Ownership in Japan.” Society and Natural Resources 22 (5): 464–473.

Chapter 13

The socio-cultural making of inequality in today’s China Symbolic construction and collective habitus 1 Lumin Fang 1 Introduction Since China launched a period of reform and economic liberalization in the late 1970s, it has switched its political economy from state socialism to a hybrid of market principles governed by socialist political institutions. This process has lifted millions of people out of absolute poverty (Whyte 2010), while simultaneously giving rise to an increase in economic inequalities and an unequal distribution of access to resources. Despite these changes and a rise in inequalities, studies show that Chinese citizens nonetheless view social inequalities as fair and deserved (Han and Whyte 2009; Im 2014). This chapter will show that this perceived justness of inequality has its roots in persisting sociocultures that are deeply engrained in the habitus of the people. Sociocultures are symbolic hierarchies that persist over time as habitualized and institutionalized forms (see Chapter 1 by Baumann and Bultmann and Chapter 2 by Baumann and Rehbein in this volume). They are defined as historically formed and symbolically mediated layers of social structures (Jodhka et al. 2017). This chapter argues that the socialist hierarchical system persists as incorporated classificatory schemes in different habitus types, as well as in administrative and political institutions. Symbolic domination plays a large role in maintaining these historical layers of social hierarchies. The social reality of inequality need not only be objective in the form of institutionalized unequal access to symbolic capital and recognition, but also anchored in subjective meanings; mirroring, sustaining, and maintaining these unequal hierarchies (Hacking 1999). The concept of a socioculture shows how these incorporated subjective meanings and schemes of collective and institutionalized practices have been developed historically, and how they continue to shape inequalities by giving them practical meaning. This means that sociocultures encompass structures of symbolic domination, providing a foundation for the maintenance of the status quo of social hierarchies that are incorporated in the body of the people, forming their habitus as a set of behavioral and cognitive (but for the most part unconscious) practical schemes. The habitus of a group has the tendency to reproduce the symbolic order within the social milieu in which it was formed. Hence, the approach shows how

220  Lumin Fang

collectives tend to interpret or construct themselves by arguing that a collective cannot be independent from the social and cultural environment of learning (Sawyer 2002). This also implies that individuals reconcile themselves with their roles and positions in society through the naturalization of an arbitrary social order and hierarchy that they are part of, a phenomenon captured by Bourdieu under the idea of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1990, 1977; Marton 2008). The concept of socioculture points to how symbolic domination and violence organizes the way in which collectives construct hierarchies of symbolic capital and how this defines and layers social roles (Bourdieu 1979; Vygotsky 1980; Rogoff 1990). This chapter argues accordingly that the state-socialist hierarchy or socioculture is deeply engrained in the habitus of the Chinese people, their classification of others, and their valuation of capital, and correspondingly, in Chinese political and administrative structures. This also means, however, that the study does not explore the role of all historically layered forms of inequality in contemporary China, but focuses rather specifically on how social hierarchies that evolved during the state-socialist period (1957‒1976) have transformed and persisted into the present to shape China’s social structure. It argues that the social classes that emerged in the process of China’s economic transformation are, at least to some extent, reproduced from an earlier order of domination; that is, they are legacies of the older socialist class system. This chapter explains how the concept of persisting sociocultures may help to elucidate structures of inequality in China today. Persisting socialist hierarchies in contemporary China are hypothesized to have their roots in sociocultures, which imply a socialist rule-based system that developed habitus dispositions and logics of practice from 1957–1976. Certain traits within different habitus types have their roots in this historical formation of a socialist hierarchical system, but nevertheless continue to shape practices, institutions, and meanings in contemporary China. Hence, the socialist hierarchical system persists from the state-socialist period to the present by passing on symbolically mediated dispositions of social practice (Rehbein and Souza 2015). In order to visualize how the state-socialist socioculture persists in different habitus types, as well as in administrative and political institutions, the chapter studies China’s contemporary social structure using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). The data for this is taken from the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey. Based upon the analysis of the survey data, the chapter uncovers five habitus types that can be found in urban areas, and four in rural China. The social structure and its modes of symbolic domination strongly rest on a high valuation of education, on Party membership as a resource, and on a traditional household registration system (hukou system). The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 introduces the socioculture during China’s period of reform, which is assumed to persist to this day, in which meritbased principles combine with socialist hierarchies. The focus is on how legacies of socialist hierarchies persisted despite the implementation of market-based reforms and economic liberalization. Section 3 introduces a quantitative analysis via correspondence analysis in order to visualize how symbolic domination and

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 221

social classes in contemporary China correlate. This section is further subdivided into subsections focusing on configurations of social classes in urban and rural areas, respectively. Section 4 explicates the interplay between domination, habitus, and social classes. This is based on five behavioral variables (cognitive ability, social interaction, self-discipline, adaptation to market system, and attitudes toward the future). These are again divided into habitus types in rural and urban areas, respectively. This last section, however, uses interview data to trace how the habitus contributes to the symbolic construction of social stratification in contemporary China.

2 Socialist hierarchies: a socioculture under China’s reform For a socio-cultural interpretation of China’s inequality after transformation, this section specifically deals with the socialist hierarchical system by elaborating how these historical hierarchies have persisted under economic reform. Here, legacies of socialist hierarchy are argued to be a socioculture that implies specific practice dispositions under the reform. Understood as habitus traits, these practice dispositions or norms have been not only anchored in the persisting socialist hierarchical system, but have also combined with meritocratic principles in a society of transformation. In this sense, the continuance of such a practice system signifies a mechanism for reproducing social inequality from the state-socialist period to the present, by passing on socialist symbolic domination as well as a practice system. During the period from 1957–1978, China established a Soviet model of state socialism. The social structure during this period was organized through a rigid redistributive hierarchy, which was designed based on one’s political loyalty and the goal of modernizing the country (Goodman 2014; Walder et al. 2000). The horizontally mutual interaction between customers and producers was highly weakened; instead, bureaucratic power played a decisive role in how resources and life chances were hierarchically arranged in accordance with political status. Launched in the late 1970s, China’s economic transformation has established a mixed regime featured by a coexistence of market force and redistributive power, which has further altered state-society relations (Wright 2010). This innovative approach is designed to stabilize the one-party ruling system through maintaining part of redistributive power, as well as socialist hierarchies. In state-socialist China, a dynamic interpretation of political consciousness highlighted differences and hierarchies. As a basic ideological principle, biological inheritability of political status established a class-as-caste model (Kraus 1981; Goodman 2014), which divided members of society through attaching privileged class labels and discriminating class labels. With the end of the Cultural Revolution, class structure in the form of a caste system no longer officially existed in China. An emphasis on ideological correctness also led to a large amount of returns in the form of resource allocation to come to reward the Communist Party members, because the Party members were selected as contributors who establish

222  Lumin Fang

and maintain the communist sociopolitical order (Bian et al. 2001; Walder 1995). Apart from this, until the re-establishment of the national education system after economic reform, Party membership was nearly the solo form of career capital in urban China (Dickson and Rublee 2000). Since the availability of a liberalized market, Party membership no longer brings about direct privileges in resources allocation; instead, it acts as a new form of career capital. On the one hand, in terms of career mobility in most industries, holding a college degree and professional skills appear to be more effective than being a Communist Party member (Sato and Eto 2008). On the other hand, under the one-party system, Communist Party membership is useful for those who expect positions in the Party and government systems, and sometimes even signifies a form of political connection for private entrepreneurs in market competitions (Dickson 2014). However, Party membership doesn’t necessarily signify benefits, but may also carry extralegal detention by Commissions for Discipline Inspection for suspected misconduct (Sapio 2008). This arbitrarily decided investigation is therefore presumed to affect the way in which the Party members deal with extra market activities. In order to realize the transition to an industrialized economy in an agrarian model scarce in capital, a household registration system was revived from ancient China and re-developed. This registration system was completely biased toward the urban population and divided people into being in agricultural hukou status and non-agricultural hukou status, in order to control domestic migration, temporary residents and targeted people, and consolidate public interests (Chan and Zhang 1999; Wang 2005; Chan and Buckingham 2008). Since the economic reform, this system has persisted and become much more flexible. In particular, the movement between rural and urban areas is both permitted and encouraged. Meanwhile, hukou status conversion (either from temporary residence to permanent residence, or from agricultural hukou status to non-agricultural hukou status) is allowed, according to merit-based selection and policy incorporation (Wu and Zheng 2018; Young 2013). From the establishment of state socialism to the initiation of the economic reform, China established an occupational structure based on the Soviet model of social and economic organizations. This model was different from the pattern typically found in Western industrialized nations, and ranked occupations in keeping with horizontal sectors and vertical work unit hierarchy in urban China (Zhou et al. 1996; Lin and Xie 1988; Kraus 1981). The former concerned a sector-based occupational rank, which was associated with the principle of the class struggle campaign and has been abolished since the initiation of the reform, while the latter concerned a cadre-worker dichotomy and a particular worker stratification based on state-collective dualism. This occupational structure has evolved into a dichotomy in employment structure, which is developed based on whether one is employed or even salaried by the public sector. First, market transformation has divided the employment system based on the ownership sector of organizational assets into two subsystems: the status of being employed inside and outside the state system. Second, the cadre–worker

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 223 Table 13.1  Legacies of socialist hierarchies as socialist symbolic domination Socialist symbolic domination

Symbolic recognition

Political affiliation

Member of the Communist Party Non-member of the Communist Party Agricultural hukou status Non-agricultural hukou status Rural-to-urban hukou status Status of being employed inside the state system Status of being employed outside the state system

Household registration system (flexible) A dichotomy in employment structure

dichotomy has been re-arranged as a new dichotomy based on whether one is in state-salaried posts in public sector work units (Brødsgaard 2002). Social and economic autonomy combines merit-based principles with the evolution of socialist hierarchies. In this chapter, socialist hierarchies that persist along with the development of a market economy are described as socialist symbolic domination, which signifies individual institutionalized unequal access to symbolic recognitions. The perceived symbolic domination is called socialist socioculture (elaborated in Table 13.1) (Fang 2019).

3 Quantitative configuration of social classes in today’s China The underlying structure of Chinese society can be understood by outlining the symbolic characteristics of social classes. In this section we will investigate how socialist symbolic domination and social stratification in today’s China are statistically correlated. The exploration allows us to observe the socialist symbolic configuration of each class and then show a socio-cultural configuration of Chinese society. Multiple correspondence analysis is utilized as a statistical tool. Universally applied for nominal categorical data, this data analysis technique is also known as “homogeneity analysis,” as it presents the structural associations between variables in a space of reduced dimensions (Abdi and Valentin 2007; Le Roux and Rouanet 2010). This statistical technique has been commonly used by Pierre Bourdieu and his followers to recognize characteristic differences between social classes. Raw data from the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) at the individual level is employed in the quantitative exploration. Launched in 2003, the CGSS has become an authoritative and influential dataset in observing the dynamics of social structure and quality of life in China (Bian and Li 2012). Since the raw data is numerical, all sets of data have been recoded categorically to correspond to MCA.

224  Lumin Fang

In this study, Max Weber’s theoretical contribution to social stratification is applied for operationalizing inequality in the context of a Chinese society in transition. Both the possession and exercise of capital are emphasized by Weber in recognizing an individual’s class situation (Weber 1946). I therefore use wealth (measured by property ownership, private vehicle ownership, and economic condition), social status (measured by social prestige and social influence), and power (measured by work unit type, strength of decision-making and social network) to indicate an individual’s class position. Political affiliation, household registration status (hukou status), and a dichotomy of being employed are the variables of socialist symbolic characteristics. In order to comprehensively present the configuration of each class, demographic (gender, age, marital status, and educational level) and relevant supplementary variables (self-identified socioeconomic position and change in socioeconomic position) are taken into account. Due to the particularities of rural society, two additional survey items are added to measure the possession and exercise of power: the individual’s current employment status (agricultural or non-agricultural work), and the extent to which a respondent is acquainted with his or her neighbors. Variable indicators are abbreviated as codes in the statistical model. My statistical investigation focuses on urban and rural China respectively. The urban-rural divide has becoming increasingly evident since economic reform, which characterizes China as ‘one country, two societies.’ Technically, it is appropriate to use the 2015 CGSS dataset2 to explore urban and rural societies respectively. This dataset creates 6,470 samples in urban areas and 4,498 samples in rural areas. The proportion of urban samples to rural samples corresponds to a statistical result that is reported by the World Bank: About 55.5%3 of the population of China live in cities. 3.1  Configuration of urban social classes Figure 13.1 comprehensively presents the structural root of inequality in urban China, by revealing how the variables of inequality are associated with those in other categories. The first quadrant (upper right) describes the urban middle class and above, as items of better economic condition such as more properties (PO2, PO3), vehicles (PV1), and higher self-identified economic status (EC4), higher social status (SP1, SI1), and stronger power (DP1, WU1) are located here. Compared to economic items, those of social status (SP1 and SI1) are located further away from the center point. In other words, social status is a more indicative than economic capital in recognizing an individual’s class situation. Demonstrated in the first quadrant, rural-to-urban hukou status, Communist Party membership, and the Party and government agencies employment are close to the socioeconomic features shown in this social class. The distance to the central point implies that being employed by the Party and government system (WU1) is one of the most evident characteristics of the urban middle class above, while being a Communist Party member doesn’t reflect a representative trait. Aside from these indicators,

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 225

Figure 13.1 MCA map of all variable categories: an underlying structure of urban China (Fang 2019)

a higher educational level (S10, S11, S12, S13) is a clear determinant of this class in urban China. The finding further illustrates that some merit-based principles developing in parallel with economic reform have been integrated into the evolving arrangements of socialist hierarchies. These class features are projected onto the first quadrant of Figure 13.2, whose shade of dark grey suggests a rapid growth of the middle class in urban China. The second quadrant (upper left) relates to the marginalized urban working class, whose respondents are characterized as agricultural hukou holders (AHS) involved with small individual business (WU5) in urban areas. In today’s China, representatives of this class are rural-to-urban migrants who move from the countryside to cities for job opportunities, but are not permanent urban residents. Quadrant 3 (lower left) presents a cluster of respondents who are in a worse economic condition (EC1, EC2) and lower self-identified socioeconomic position (SIP3). These features signify a vulnerable urban group of the lower class. Symbolically, respondents from this class are more likely (but not evidently) to be

226  Lumin Fang

Figure 13.2 D istribution of urban respondents in the MCA map of all variable categories (Fang 2019)

recognized as non-members of the Communist Party (NPA). Demographically, this segment of respondents is older in age (A1), and lower in educational level (S1, S3). Further implied by the second and third quadrants of Figure 13.2, there are many marginalized people living and working in cities, who may not actually benefit from living there. Indicator items of no change of socioeconomic position (CSP2) and relatively weak power (DP3, SN4, SN5, WU2) are clustered in the fourth quadrant. All these variable categories relate to the position of the working class in urban Chinese society. Characterized by a lack of meritocratic traits (i.e., higher educational level), working class people haven’t benefited from the change in opportunity structure since the economic reform. Respondents from this class are more gathered together as non-agricultural hukou holders (NHS) and being employed outside the state system (OS). The proximity of item IS (status of being inside the state system) and WU2 (status of being employed by enterprises) identifies a group of being employed by state-owned or holding enterprises, which to some

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 227

extent characterizes this urban working class. In addition, the role of employment status in defining an individual’s class position depends on other factors, because the distance between IS and other inequality variables shows less evident similarities. Represented by the darkest grey in Figure 13.2, the urban working class denotes a mainstream group in urban China. The majority of the population in urban China are living below average conditions. 3.2  Configuration of rural social classes Figure 13.3 shows the configuration of social classes in rural China. Overall, socialist symbolic characteristics appear more apparent in informing social classes in rural society than in the urban society. At the same time, there is evidently a dividing line between the socialist hierarchical system and the emerging class. The first quadrant (upper right) depicts rural privileged class, which is strongly connected to the village Party branches and administrative offices (CPM, IS, WU4), and also exhibits institutional advantages of non-agricultural hukou

Figure 13.3 MCA map of all variable categories: an underlying structure of rural China (Fang 2019)

228  Lumin Fang

status (RHS, NHS). Accordingly, power advantages (DP2, WU4) of this class appear more prominent. It is worth noting that, relatively higher educational levels (S6, S7), as merit-based indicators, are also the evident signs of recognizing this privileged class in rural China. Quadrant 2 (upper left) and quadrant 3 (lower left) combine to capture a marginalized class with a lower self-identified socioeconomic position rating (SIP3) and more jobless people (ES4). Symbolically, respondents from this class are more often not members of the Communist Party (NPA) and do not possess agricultural registration status (AHS). Lower educational level (S1, S3) is an evident feature of this class, which is also associated with a characteristic of never being in nonagricultural work (ES3). The fourth quadrant (lower right) presents an emerging affluent class in rural China. Respondents from this class have more evident economic advantages with more properties (PO2), vehicle (PV1), and higher selfidentified economic status (EC4) than respondents from the privileged class, and tend to identify themselves in a middle socioeconomic position (SIP2). This class is characterized by a lack of access to any socialist symbolic attributes, but rather

Figure 13.4 D istribution of rural respondents in the MCA map of all variable categories (Fang 2019)

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 229

seek opportunities in a liberalized market, such as in non-agricultural work (ES1, ES2) and individual business (WU5). As a social class that has emerged along with the economic reform, this rural affluent class largely consists of respondents who were born during the era of reform (born after 1970s, A3). Figure 13.4 presents how respondents are distributed between rural social classes. The shade of dark grey in quadrants 2 and 3 denotes that the marginalized class still accounts for the majority of population in rural China. In comparison people from both the privileged and affluent classes consist of a relatively small section of the population.

4 Socialist symbolic domination, habitus, and social classes It has been statistically demonstrated that the persisting socialist hierarchical system to some extent makes a socio-cultural contribution to inequality in today’s China, as social structure in both rural and urban societies is partly reproduced from the hierarchical arrangements carried over from state socialism. Based on this finding, this section explores whether the unequal access to habitus that has been anchored in socialist hierarchies contributes to the reproduction of inequality in today’s China. Quantitative findings empirically inform my qualitative research design, and I therefore presuppose habitus traits anchored either in socialist symbolic domination or developed along with economic liberalization. The unequal distribution of these habitus traits signifies a hypothetical mechanism for producing and reproducing inequality. In order to validate this idea, two specific research targets are developed in this section. The first is to construct habitus types in today’s China, and the second is to figure out how human habitus explains the symbolic construction of social classes. Semi-structured interviews are conducted for collecting qualitative data. Interview questions are designed based on the operationalization of habitus, which was never developed by Bourdieu. Technically, the operationalization process in qualitative research focuses on concretizing the meaning of a concept in relation to a certain context (Lune and Berg 2017). In line with this principle, I choose the following behavioral variables as relevant to obtaining and exercising capital under China’s reform, which were also taken into account by the 2015 CGSS as survey items (Fang 2019): • • • • •

Cognitive ability (examined according to habitual language use and media consumption) Social interaction (interaction manner, frequency, and contact) Self-discipline (use of leisure time, sense of responsibility, and motivation of problem solving) Adaptation to market system (personal investment activity and attitude toward risk-taking) Attitude toward the future (self-confidence in one’s own ability and confidence in public policies)

230  Lumin Fang

Due to the urban-rural dualist structure, interview questions that concern these examination items are correspondingly developed from an urban-rural dualist perspective. In addition, a documentary method is applied as an analysis tool for interpreting qualitative data. This method is regarded as an effective means for observing human habitus, as it allows researchers to reconstruct the subjective implicit meanings that underlines actions or utterances (Bohnsack 2014; Nohl 2010). The implication of social actions has been incorporated into the body of the individual subject and described as an individual’s frame of orientation. In the application of the documentary method, ‘frame of orientation’ is equivalent to ‘habitus,’ which is oriented by prior experience and memory rather than determined by regulations and rules (Pazzani 1991; Bohnsack 2014). The documentary method will supplement the overall methodology, by helping the researchers to reveal the implications of the interviewees’ actions and elaborate their habitus traits. 4.1 Habitus types and the symbolic construction of social classes in urban China Habitus types in urban society are constructed based on the interview data collected from ten interviewees, who are: a rural-to-urban construction worker, a senior engineer in private enterprise, a professor in a state university, a civil servant of a Party agency, an express delivery man, a self-employed individual, a worker in a state-holding enterprise, a private entrepreneur, a worker laid off by a state-owned enterprise, and a technician in a private company. As reflected by the interview texts, habitus traits appear to be heterogeneous in urban society (see Table 13.2). The construction of habitus types only makes sense when taking urban socioeconomic opportunity structures into account. Goal-orientation suggests a core competitiveness index in a transforming society, as it explains why some people adapt to changes better through emphasizing humans’ motivational disposition of developing abilities (DeShon and Gillespie 2005). In urban China, the expansion of market forces leads motivational disposition to further concern two specific dimensions: mastery motivation and selfprotection motivation. Within the framework of these two motivations, shown in Table 13.2, I therefore construct five habitus types based on the combination of dispositional attributes (Fang 2019): The first is defined as ambitious habitus type, which is characterized by positive mastery and a motivation for self-preservation. The second is called professional habitus type, which describes people with positive mastery motivation and moderate self-protection motivation, while the third is flexible habitus type, which is characterized by moderate mastery motivation and self-protection motivations. The fourth habitus type is called passive habitus type, which refers to negative mastery motivation and moderate self-protection motivation. Negative mastery and self-protection motivations constitute the fifth type called deprived habitus.

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 231 Table 13.2  List of habitus traits in urban society Cognitive ability

Social interaction Self-discipline Adaptation to market system Attitude toward the future

Speaking either dialect or Mandarin Only speaking Mandarin Only speaking dialect Information learning via traditional media Information learning via social media No interest on information learning Attention to news relevant to particular issues Attention to general news No attention to news No intention Relaxation-oriented social interaction Business-oriented social interaction Killing time at leisure Busy in work and no leisure time Learning professional knowledge regularly Investing money with systematic judgment Investing money with heuristic judgment No idea about investment Self-confidence Concerning industry prospects Expecting government regulation No idea

Ambitious and professional habitus types are found among those from the urban middle class and above (e.g. professors, private entrepreneurs, senior engineers, and civil servants), including the middle class of the socialist elite, which has a close connection with Party and administrative power (Fang 2019), and aspirational middle class, which is more associated with professional skills (Goodman 2014). These two habitus types are neither socialist nor capitalist sociocultures, as they are found to absorb valued traits from both socio-cultural systems (Fang 2019). Passive habitus can be regarded as a vestige of the socioculture of the socialist worker, which denotes a reluctance to market transformation and a strong expectation of job security. This habitus type is more likely to be found among non-cadres employed by state-owned enterprises and public organizations (e.g. an interviewee who is a worker in a state holding enterprise) and represents the urban working class. These three habitus types are anchored in socialist symbolic domination of employment structure. The socio-culturally symbolic construction establishes class status by reinforcing habitus differences in dealing with market competition. Combined with quantitative findings, this mechanism justifies the socialist symbolic configuration of both the urban middle and working classes (Fang 2019). Flexible habitus signifies a typical capitalist socioculture, as it has emerged since the economic reform. This habitus is found to contribute to the marginalized

232  Lumin Fang

urban working class, particularly to the group of rural-to-urban migrants (i.e., interviewees who are a self-employed individual and a junior technician in a private company). The distinctions between flexible and passive habitus are, to some extent, socio-culturally rooted in the household registration system. The role of hukou status in informing social classes concerns two aspects. On the one hand, it concerns a series of policies biased toward urban dwellers by economically benefiting those of a non-agricultural hukou status. On the other hand, even though rural-to-urban migrants are motivated to master opportunities in cities, this collective still tends to be more anxious about the future and conservative in decisionmaking (Fang 2019). Deprived habitus type is characterized by a lack of traits desired by the labor market. This habitus is the maker of the urban lower class, particularly of rural-to-urban migrant workers (i.e. express delivery people and rural-to-urban construction workers) and urban laid-off workers (i.e. interviewee who is laid off from a state-owned enterprise). 4.2 Habitus types and the symbolic construction of social classes in rural China Habitus types in rural society are constructed based on the interview data collected from seven representative interviewees, who are two village cadres (in different hukou status), a village cadre who was an entrepreneur, a self-employed individual, two peasants, and a traditional Chinese physician. As reflected in the interview data, habitus traits in rural China appear to be less heterogeneous (listed in Table 13.3). I continue to apply goal-orientation motivation as a competitiveness index to see if an individual has adapted to a transforming society. The opportunity structure of rural society is more simply constructed, relating goal-orientation to learning and performance motivation. In particular, learning motivation describes habitus traits of

Table 13.3  List of habitus traits in rural society Cognitive ability

Social interaction Self-discipline Adaptation to market system Attitude toward the future

Speaking either dialect or Mandarin Only speaking dialect Information learning No interest on information learning No intention Relaxation-oriented social interaction Motivational social interaction Killing time by entertainment Busy in work and no leisure time Learning professional knowledge Investing money No idea about investment Self-confidence Industry expectation Social security dependence

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 233

perusing an adaptive response to a transforming world, and performance motivation concerns a human tendency to seek favorable judgments (Bell and Kozlowski 2002; DeShon and Gillespie 2005). Based on these two motivational dispositions, a series of habitus traits found in rural society are reduced to four main habitus types (Fang 2019): The first is referred to as determined habitus type, which consists of positive learning and performance orientations; the second is the combination of negative learning motivation and positive performance motivation, otherwise known as performative habitus type; the third, pragmatic habitus type, is comprised of positive learning motivation but negative performance motivation. Finally, the depressed habitus type is characterized by negative learning and performance motivations. Determined habitus is either socialist or capitalist socioculture. This habitus type signifies the human tendency to integrate the acquisition of new knowledge with the validation of competence (e.g. interviewees who are village cadres with business experience or the traditional Chinese physician). In contrast with determined habitus, performative habitus can be seen as a typical socialist socioculture, which is more likely to be found among village cadres in the majority of less-developed rural areas (e.g. an interviewee who serves as deputy secretary of a small village committee). These two habitus types combine to denote the privileged class in rural China. Pragmatic habitus is regarded as a typical capitalist socioculture in rural society, as it has developed along with economic liberalization. This habitus type is characterized by not being anchored to socialist symbolic domination, but rather being willing to seek opportunities in a market environment (e.g. an interviewee who is a self-employed individual in a coastal village). In today’s China, the affluent class that is largely concentrated in welldeveloped rural areas is contributed to by the habitus. Socio-culturally, the Chinese Communist Party members and cadres in rural society tend to construct themselves according to collective determined and performative habitus. In particular, the characteristic of seeking influence and favorable political judgments differentiate determined and performative habitus types from pragmatic habitus types, and further construct a privileged class both socioculturally and epidemiologically. Associated with quantitative results, this mechanism, to some extent, symbolically justifies the economic advantages of the rural affluent class and the power advantages of the rural privileged class (Fang 2019). The depressed class places an emphasis on the human tendency to hold a view of being incapable of changing anything and highly dependent on the social security system (e.g., two peasants). This habitus type is the primary marker of the rural marginalized class, which has been statistically found to constitute the majority of China’s rural population.

5 Conclusion This chapter has analyzed inequality from a socio-cultural perspective under the Chinese economic reform. Defined as a structural relation that consists of an entire practice system as well as a series of taken-for-granted values, socio-cultural traits

234  Lumin Fang

contribute to the making of social stratification. The concept of a socioculture explains how the logic of human practice or habitus is mediated by symbolic domination and how this process relates to inequality. In this chapter, legacies of socialist hierarchies are put forward as a socioculture in the form of socialist symbolic domination, which signifies a certain socioculture in a transforming society. In particular, this perspective allows us to anticipate a social structure that has emerged out of a state-socialist hierarchical system, developed alongside economic liberalization. In statistical terms, applying multiple correspondence analysis to 10,968 samples created by the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey, it has been found that both rural and urban social structures are partly reproduced from a state-socialist hierarchical system. Meanwhile, legacies of socialist hierarchies manifest more evidently in the rural social classes. These findings verify the socialist sociocultural hypothesis regarding the underlying structure of Chinese society. Empirically informed by quantitative results, a qualitative exploration focuses on constructing habitus types and associating habitus with the socio-culturally symbolic construction of social classes. Five habitus types (ambitious, professional, passive, flexible, and deprived) are constructed in urban society and four (determined, pragmatic, performative, and depressed) are identified in rural society. Apart from this, the symbolic domination of the employment structure and the household registration system has been found to provide a mechanism of unequal distribution of habitus that reproduces inequality in urban China. In rural China, unequal access to Party membership and village cadres gives rise to differences in class status by reinforcing habitus distinctions in seeking political influences. In sum, as a socioculture, socialist symbolic domination – as well as habitus – contributes to the reproduction of inequality in present day China.

Notes 1 This chapter is partly reformed from the empirical findings of the author’s dissertation. 2 The 2015 CGSS raw data that is associated with this article can be downloaded from the website of Chinese National Survey Data Archive (in Chinese): http://www.cnsda.org/ index.php?r=projects/view&id=62072446 3 China urban population data (% of total population) is released by the World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=CN& most_recent_year_desc=true

References Abdi, Hervé, and Dominique Valentin. 2007. “Multiple Correspondence Analysis.” In Encyclopedia of Measurement and Statistics, edited by Neil J. Salkind, 651–657. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Bell, Bradford S., and W. J. Kozlowski. 2002. “Goal Orientation and Ability: Interactive Effects on Self-Efficacy, Performance, and Knowledge.” Journal of Applied Psychology 87 (3): 497.

Socio-cultural inequality in today’s China 235 Bian, Yanjie, and Lulu Li. 2012. “The Chinese General Social Survey (2003–8) Sample Designs and Data Evaluation.” Chinese Sociological Review 45 (1): 70–97. Bian, Yanjie, Xiaoling Shu, and John R. Logan. 2001. “Communist Party Membership and Regime Dynamics in China.” Social Forces 79 (3): 805–841. Bohnsack, Ralf. 2014. “Documentary Method.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, edited by Uwe Flick, 217–233. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. “Symbolic Power.” Critique of Anthropology 4 (13–14): 77–85. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Standford University Press. Brødsgaard, Kjeld Erik. 2002. “Institutional Reform and the Bianzhi System in China.” The China Quarterly 170: 361–386. Chan, Kam Wing, and Will Buckingham. 2008. “Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?” The China Quarterly 195: 582–606. Chan, Kam Wing, and Li Zhang. 1999. “The Hukou System and Rural-Urban Migration in China: Processes and Changes.” The China Quarterly 160: 818–855. DeShon, Richard P., and Jennifer Z. Gillespie. 2005. “A Motivated Action Theory Account of Goal Orientation.” Journal of Applied Psychology 90 (6): 1096–1127. Dickson, Bruce J. 2014. “Who Wants to Be a Communist? Career Incentives and Mobilized Loyalty in China.” The China Quarterly 217: 42–68. Dickson, Bruce J., and Maria Rost Rublee. 2000. “Membership Has Its Privileges: The Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communist Party Members in Urban China.” Comparative Political Studies 33 (1): 87–112. Fang, Lumin. 2019. “Symbolic Capital and the Reproduction of Inequality in Today’ s China.” PhD diss., Humboldt-Universita¨t zu Berlin. Goodman, David S. 2014. Class in Contemporary China. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Han, Chunping, and Martin King Whyte. 2009. “The Social Contours of Distributive Injustice Feelings in Contemporary China.” In Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China, edited by Deborah Davis and Feng Wang, 193–212. Standford: Stanford University Press. Im, Dong-Kyun. 2014. “The Legitimation of Inequality: Psychosocial Dispositions, Education, and Attitudes Toward Income Inequality in China.” Sociological Perspectives 57 (4): 506–525. Jodhka, Surinder S., Boike Rehbein, and Jessé Souza. 2017. Inequality in Capitalist Societies. London and New York: Routledge. Kraus, Richard Curt. 1981. Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Le Roux, Brigitte, and Henry Rouanet. 2010. Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Lin, Nan, and Wen Xie. 1988. “Occupational Prestige in Urban China.” American Journal of Sociology 93 (4): 793–832. Lune, Howard, and Bruce L. Berg. 2017. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. Boston: Pearson Education. Marton, Karl. 2008. “Habitus.” In Pierre Bourdieu : Key Concepts, edited by Michael Grenfell, 49–66. Durham: Acumen.

236  Lumin Fang Nohl, Arnd-Michael. 2010. “Narrative Interview and Documentary Interpretation.” In Qualitative Analysis and Documentary Method in International Educational Research, edited by Ralf Bohnsack, Nicolle Pfaff, and Wivian Weller, 195–217. Opladen & Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Pazzani, Michael J. 1991. “Influence of Prior Knowledge on Concept Acquisition: Experimental and Computational Results.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 17 (3): 416–432. Rehbein, Boike, and Jessé Souza. 2015. “The Incorporation of Symbolic Inequality.” Transcience 6 (1): 21–32. Rogoff, Barbara. 1990. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sapio, Flora. 2008. “Shuanggui and Extralegal Detention in China.” China Information 22 (1): 7–37. Sato, Hiroshi, and Keiya Eto. 2008. “The Changing Structure of Communist Party Membership in Urban China, 1988–2002.” Journal of Contemporary China 17 (57): 653–672. Sawyer, R. Keith. 2002. “Unresolved Tensions in Sociocultural Theory: Analogies with Contemporary Sociological Debates.” Culture & Psychology 8 (3): 283–305. Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich. 1980. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Walder, Andrew G. 1995. “Career Mobility and the Communist Political Order.” American Sociological Review 60 (3): 309–328. Walder, Andrew G., Bobai Li, and Donald J. Treiman. 2000. “Politics and Life Chances in a State Socialist Regime: Dual Career Paths into the Urban Chinese Elite, 1949 to 1996.” American Sociological Review 65 (2): 191–209. Wang, Fei-Ling. 2005. Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Whyte, Martin. 2010. Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wright, Teresa. 2010. Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China’s Reform Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wu, Xiaogang, and Bingdao Zheng. 2018. “Household Registration, Urban Status Attainment, and Social Stratification in China.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 53: 40–49. Young, Jason. 2013. China’s Hukou System: Markets, Migrants and Institutional Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zhou, Xueguang, Nancy Brandon Tuma, and Phyllis Moen. 1996. “Stratification Dynamics under State Socialism: The Case of Urban China, 1949–1993.” Social Forces 74 (3): 759–796.