Everyday forms of politics
An anthropological view of politics
from the perspective of everyday,
social life
Politics in everyday life:
an anthropological view
• Power: doing something as you would like (may
involve getting others to do what you would like)
• Distribution of valued resources:
– Which are?
– Note culture at the root of both of those issues: What
is valued? What is a goal someone might want to
pursue?
Forms of Power
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Violence and the threat of violence
Structural violence
The power to name or represent
Worldview (cultural hegemony)
The body (habitus)
The production of persons
Violence
• What are the forms of violence present in Life is
Hard?
Structural Violence
• Johan Galtung (1969): Violence
occurs where human beings’
health and psychological
wellbeing are affected, are
below their potential
• Thus, child malnutrition or
mental retardation due to lead
ingestion should be considered
a form of violence
• Not violence because not
personal?
Structural Violence
• Paul Farmer (anthropologist & doctor who
works in Haiti): “Structural violence is one
way of describing social arrangements
that put individuals and populations in
harm’s way… The arrangements are
structural because they are embedded in
the political and economic organization of
our social world; they are violent because
they cause injury to people.”
• He says: Deaths not due to tuberculosis,
cholera, malaria (medical causes) but to
structural violence (ways resources are
distributed)
• A very significant concept for public
health.
• Michelle Velasquez’s question.
Structural Violence in Life is Hard
• Distribution of hardship?
p. 138-139
• Conversation between
Yolanda and Elvis, p. 139140
• What are the
consequences for Violeta
Chamorro’s victory?
The power to name or represent
• p. 228
• To identified within a system of values; to compel others to
identified
• How are people “identified” in Life is Hard?
• p.245: “the terror that rules all men”
• Can be contested but with difficulty
Cultural hegemony
• From the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci in
thinking about how powerful institutions
maintain their rule through cultural worldviews
• To the extent that people take on that
worldview, they support those institutions
• So, people are ruled from within (rather than
without); they are ruled by their worldview
• Questions by Kevin Na and Chinedu Ijeoma
Onyebeke,
• That worldview is natural or commonsense, but
can be unstable
• Gendered and racial classifications as
“commonsense”
Power as encapsulated in the body
• p. 227
• Habitus: routinized
bodily habits and tastes
in music, food, bodily
postures etc
• p. 41
• Questions by Nadean
Hall, Violeta Daninska,
and Kelly Miller
New York City subway
The production of persons in hierarchies
• p. 281-282
• People produce themselves and are produced
– through their social relations and performances in ongoing
social life and everyday interaction
– as particular kinds of persons with particular tastes, habits,
and characteristics
– which positions them within a particular social hierarchy
meaningful in that culture (most common: class, gender,
race, sexuality)
Production of persons
• Makes the distinction between inside desires
(agency) and external forces (structure) moot
• Reveals how individuals are shaped by and shape
their culture
• E.g., Flora, p. 122
• E.g., Miguel, p. 245