#title New Perspectives in Political Ethnography
#author Lauren Joseph, Matthew Mahler & Javier Auyero
#date 2007
#source <[[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-72594-9][link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-72594-9]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-08-23T01:53:06
#topics ethnography, politics,
#cover l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-9.jpg
** [Front Matter]
*** [Title Page]
New Perspectives in Political Ethnography
Edited by
Lauren Joseph
Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
Matthew Mahler
Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
Javier Auyero
Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
Springer
*** [Contact]
Lauren Joseph
Sociology Dept.
SUNY-Stony Book
Stony Brook 11794–4356
Email: [[mailto:lajoseph@notes.cc.sunysb.edu][lajoseph@notes.cc.sunysb.edu]]
Other Email: Qualitative_Sociology@notes.
cc.sunysb.edu
Javier Auyero
Sociology Dept.
SUNY-Stony Brook
Stony Brook 11794–4356
Email: [[mailto:jauyero@notes.cc.sunysb.edu][jauyero@notes.cc.sunysb.edu]]
Matthew Mahler
Sociology Dept.
SUNY-Stony Brook
Stony Brook 11794–4356
Email: [[mailto:mmahler@notes.cc.sunysb.edu][mmahler@notes.cc.sunysb.edu]]
*** [Copyright]
ISBN-13: 978-0-387-72593-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-0-387-72594-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007931383
© 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now know or hereafter developed is forbidden.
The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.
Printed on acid-free paper.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com
*** Contents
Introduction: Politics under the Ethnographic Microscope
Javier Auyero and Lauren Joseph
1. From Confusion to Common Sense: Using Political Ethnography to Understand Social Mobilization in the Brazilian Northeast
Wendy Wolford
2. Losing Face in Philippine Labor Confrontations: How Shame May Inhibit Worker Activism
Rosanne Rutten
3. Radical Outcasts Versus Three Kinds of Police: Constructing Limits in Japanese Anti-Emperor Protests
Patricia G. Steinhoff
4. Honor and Morality in Contemporary Rural India
Pamela Price
5. Routing Conflict: Organized Violence and Clientelism in Rio de Janeiro
Enrique Desmond Arias
6. Vicious Virtuous Circles: Barriers to Institution-Building after War
Tammy Smith
7. Are National Politics Local? Social Movement Responses to the 2004 US Presidential Election
Kathleen M. Blee and Ashley Currier
8. Professional Performances on a Well-Constructed Stage: The Case of an Institutionalized Advocacy Organization
Mirella Landriscina
9. Field Research During War: Ethical Dilemmas
Elisabeth Jean Wood
10. Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist Understanding of Political Engagement
Matthew Mahler
11. Afterword: Political Ethnography as Art and Science
Charles Tilly
About the Contributors
Index
*** Contributors
Enrique Desmond Arias, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, New York
Javier Auyero, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York
Kathleen M. Blee, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Ashley Currier, Department of Sociology and Women’s Studies, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
Lauren Joseph, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York
Mirella Landriscina, Department of Social Sciences, St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn, New York
Matthew Mahler, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York
Pamela Price, Department of South Asian History, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Rosanne Rutten, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tammy Smith, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York
Patricia G. Steinhoff, Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii
Charles Tilly, Department of Social Sciences, Columbia University, New York, New York
Wendy Wolford, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Elisabeth Jean Wood, Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
** Introduction: Politics under the Ethnographic Microscope
Javier Auyero and Lauren Joseph
Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedown; sit in the Orchestra Hall and the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research.
Robert Park
The revival of ethnographic research within sociology is undisputed. New journals, new books from major presses, and new hires at top research departments all attest to the renewal, growth, and increasing relevance of the ethnographic craft among sociologists. As ethnography is (re)gaining a well-deserved prominence within the discipline its empirical focus, theoretical underpinnings, and narrative styles are also expanding — traditional forms of ethnographic inquiry now coexist with more experimental ones.
From dealing drugs (Bourgois 1995), to emigrating and immigrating (Fitzgerald 2006; Smith 2006), prostituting (Murphy and Venkatesh 2006), working off the books (Venkatesh 2006), boxing (Wacquant 2003a), dancing (Wainwright et al. 2005), glassblowing (O’Connor 2006), designing objects (Molotch 2005), providing services in luxury hotels (Sherman 2007), and street vending (Duneier 2000) — the list of activities and subjects upon which ethnography has focused its attention in recent years is virtually inexhaustible. Ethnographers have been heeding Park’s advice: they have gotten the seat of their pants dirty in a myriad of places, researching all sorts of (more or less exotic) practices.
Yet, at a time when few, if any, objects are beyond the reach and scrutiny of ethnographers, it is quite surprising that politics and its main protagonists (state officials, politicians, and activists) remain largely un(der)studied by ethnography’s mainstream. It is indeed fair to say that both routine (party, union, NGO) and contentious (social movement and other forms of collective action) politics are far from the top of contemporary ethnography’s agenda. One figure should suffice to illustrate politics’ marginal status among sociological ethnography: out of 215 articles published in the last 10 years in sociology’s main journal devoted to ethnography, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, only 15 focus on politics as their main subject (see Hunter 1993; Ostrander 1993 for some of the few prior exceptions). It is time to move politics out of the shadows and into the center of ethnographic attention.
True, during the last decades a number of notable books have ethnographically explored the workings of both ordinary and extraordinary forms of political action. James Scott (1987), Robert Gay (1994), Faye Ginsburg (1989), Paul Lichterman (1996), Nina Eliasoph (1998), Richard Wood (2002), Ben Kerkvliet (2005), Adam Ashforth (2005), and Gianpaolo Baiocchi (2005) are some of the authors who come, or should come, immediately to mind; but these writings are too few and too far between to constitute a coherent corpus of ethnographic work — similar to the body of, say, ethnographies of poverty enclaves (Bourgois 1995; Sharff 1998; Newman 2000; Venkatesh 2002; Dohan 2003; Young 2003) or factory life (expanding from Roy ([1954] 2006) through Burawoy (1982) to Salzinger (2003)).
Let us take a very basic, agreed-upon, definition of ethnography as:
social research based on the close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space, in which the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the phenomenon so as to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way they do (Wacquant 2003b, p. 5).
One would expect that this mode of inquiry would be one of the preferred tools among those for whom the study of politics is their profession — that is, political scientists and political sociologists. After all, ethnography is uniquely equipped to look microscopically at the foundations of political institutions and their attendant sets of practices, just as it is ideally suited to explain why political actors behave the way the do and to identify the causes, processes, and outcomes that are part and parcel of political life. But here, as with many other scholarly matters, common sense serves as a less than reliable guide. A closer examination reveals that ethnography is far from the favorite mode of analysis among political scientists and political sociologists, for whom surveys, secondary data (usually culled from newspapers), formal modeling, and statistical approaches constitute the standard methodological tools. To witness: peruse the issues of the American Journal of Political Science and the American Political Science Review for the last 10 years (1996–2005). Out of a total number of 569 and 369 articles, respectively, only one article relies on ethnography as a data-production technique (Soss 1999). Unfortunately, however, in concentrating, almost exclusively, on the models, charts, regressions, and correlations of standard political research, social science has missed a significant aspect of the ongoing reality that is politics: namely it has missed the nitty-gritty details of politics, its “day-to-day intricacies” (Baiocchi 2005, p. 16), its “implicit meanings” (Lichterman 1998), its passions, and its sacrifices (Mahler, this volume); in other words, the pace of political action, the texture of political life, and the plight of political actors have all been cast into the shadows created by the unnecessary and deleterious overreliance on quantitative methods in both political science and political sociology.
This volume aims to address this double absence: of politics in ethnographic literature and of ethnography in studies of politics. Focusing on case studies from around the world, the chapters in this book draw upon close-up observation of politics in action to scrutinize the dispositions, skills, desires, and emotions of a variety of political actors and the meanings that they attach to their practices.
Large-scale political transformations have ground-level sources and effects. The ethnographic microscope serves to capture these quite well. We do not believe that ethnography is the only way of studying politics. But the chapters included here reinforced our conviction that ethnography provides the “thickest” form of political information (Geertz 1973; Ortner 2006).
The chapters included in this volume are significantly revised and expanded versions of chapters first published in a double special issue of the journal Qualitative Sociology. In their attention to the microscopic aspects of politics, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that ethnography is particularly well-equipped to capture “the practice of politics (strategic choices), the signification of these practices (culture/meaning-making)” as they unfold (Blee and Currier, this volume), and the confusions, emotions, and uncertainties that, although inherent in all forms of political action, conventional political analysis tends to dismiss (or ignore) as either “noise” or anecdotal information with no relevance for what “really” matters (Wolford, this volume). Ethnography is also particularly useful to capture changing and/or persistent beliefs and their relationship to specific practices (Price, Rutten, Smith, all this volume) and the nitty-gritty details and effects of different forms of political action, networks, and tactics (Arias, Landriscina, Steinhoff, all this volume).
There are three other areas to which political ethnography can make a really useful contribution. Since they are not covered in the chapters included in this book, we would like to briefly summarize what we see as research topics for future ethnographic research on politics. Let us call them: repertoires-in-the-making, clandestine-connections-count, and official-rhetoric-confronts-daily-experience.
*** Repertoires-in-the-Making
Understood as the set of routines by which people get together to act on their shared interests, the notion of repertoire of collective action (first coined by Tilly 1977, and then deployed by a series of scholars, Traugott 1995) invites us to examine patterns of collective claim-making, regularities in the ways in which people band together to make their demands heard, across time and space. The notion brings together different levels of analysis ranging from large-scale changes such as the development of capitalism (with the subsequent proletarianization of work) and the process of state-making (with the parallel growth of the state’s bulk, complexity, and penetration of its coercive and extractive power) to patterns of citizen-state interaction. This term exhorts us to conceptually hold together macrostructures and microprocesses by looking closely at the ways in which big changes indirectly shape collective action by affecting the interests, opportunities, organizations, and identities of ordinary people. Furthermore, the notion makes clear the need for a simultaneous analysis of diachrony and synchrony with its emphasis on both the forms of protest and at their transformation.
The term repertoire is eminently political and cultural. Political, in that this set of contentious routines (1) emerges from continuous struggles against the state, (2) has an intimate relationship with everyday life and routine politics, and (3) is constrained by patterns of state repression. Cultural, in that it focuses on people’s habits of contention, on the form that collective action takes as a result of shared expectations and learned improvisations. The repertoire, then, is not merely a set of means for making claims but also an array of meanings that arise relationally, in struggle; meanings that, as Geertz puts it, are, “hammered out in the flow of events” (Geertz 2001, p. 76). Learning through struggle is thus at the core of the theatrical metaphor of repertoire: “Repertoires are learned cultural creations, but they do not descend from abstract philosophy or take shape as a result of political propaganda; they emerge from struggle” (Tilly 1995, p. 26). What do protesters learn? Tilly explains, “People learn to break windows in protest, attack pilloried prisoners, tear down dishonored houses, stage public marches, petition, hold formal meetings, organize special-interest associations. At any particular point in history, however, they learn only a rather small number of alternative ways to act together” (Tilly 1995, p. 26). How does this learning process affect subsequent ways of acting?: “The existing repertoire constrains collective action; far from the image we sometimes hold of mindless crowds, people tend to act within known limits, to innovate at the margins of existing forms, and to miss many opportunities available to them in principle. That constraint results in part from the advantages of familiarity, partly from the investment of second and third parties in the established forms of collective action” (Tilly 1986, pp. 390–391).
Political ethnography offers both a perspective and a toolbox to focus simultaneous attention on two issues that, located at the heart of the notion of repertoire, have too often been divorced, namely the impact of structural change on collective action and the transformation of the culture of popular protest. The ethnographic microscope can detect and dissect in situ, in real time and space, how the meanings of contention are formed and contested in interaction, and how this learning actually takes place (and in what ways, through which channels and mechanisms, the learning limits successive performances and how the innovation emerges).
*** Clandestine Connections Count
Clandestine connections between legal political actors are crucial in routine politics and in extraordinary collective violence and they have recently attracted some, still scattered, scholarly attention. Research on the origins and forms of communal violence in Southeast Asia, for example, highlights the usually hidden links between partisan politics and violence (Das 1990). Shaheed’s (1990) analysis of the Pathan-Mujahir conflicts during 1985–1986 shows that the riots can be “traced directly to the actions of religious political parties.” Paul Brass’ notion of “institutionalized riot systems” captures well these usually obscure connections: in these riot systems, Brass points out, “known actors specialize in the conversion of incidents between members of different communities into ethnic riots. The activities of these specialists [who operate under the loose control of party leaders] are usually required for a riot to spread from the initial incident of provocation” (1996, p. 12). Sudhir Kakar’s (1996) description of a pehlwan (wrestler/enforcer who works for a political boss) further illustrates this point: the genesis of many episodes of collective violence is located in the area where the actions of political entrepreneurs and those of specialists in violence (people who control the means of inflicting damage on persons and objects) secretly meet and mesh (see also Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2004). Linda Kirschke’s (2000) work on transitions to multiparty politics in Sub-Saharan Africa offers additional examples of the (usually masked) constant interweaving between party and state in the making of violence. In the Americas, we have several other illustrations of the effects that the activation of clandestine connections among political actors may have on routine and nonroutine forms of political action (Gunst 1995; Roldan 2002; Goldstein 2003, Arias 2006). Our own work on the dynamics of food lootings (Auyero 2006, 2007; Auyero and Moran 2007) unearths the concealed interactions between looters, political activists, and police forces that shaped the incidence and form of collective violence.
Political analysis tends to focus attention on “respectable” politics, on the “civilized” forms of political interaction, the sort that takes place in parliaments and government houses and that enjoys media attention. In many parts of the world, this kind of politics depends on clandestine, hidden connections (what one of us terms “the gray zone of politics” (Auyero 2007)). Students of politics should take the ambiguous and obscure zone seriously, making it the empirical focus of sustained research efforts. If, as Debora Yashar argues (1999, p. 97), rigorous scholarly attention needs to be paid to the ways in which “democracy is practiced,” the gray zone should not be excluded from neither serious theoretical nor empirical consideration. Visible state-society relations are undoubtedly important to the quality of democracy in many parts of the world, so are hidden and clandestine links between different political actors. There is indeed much work to be done on this crucial dimension and ethnography is particularly well-suited to inspect this hidden backstage of politics.
*** Official Rhetoric in Everyday Life
Conventional political analysis should move beyond the study of official rhetoric by looking at the ways in which it resonates (and, in the process, is transformed) in the everyday life of ordinary folks (Wedeen 1999). One last example on this area should suffice to make our case for political ethnography. In their splendid study of everyday ethnicity in the Transvylvanian town of Cluj, intensive fieldwork allows Brubaker and his collaborators to dissect “the everyday contexts in which ethnic and national categories take on meaning and the processes through which ethnicity actually ‘works’ in everyday life” (Brubaker et al. 2006, p. 9). Their study wonderfully shows that ethnography is not only an excellent methodological tool; it is also a “stance” — as Sherry Ortner (2006) puts it — to study the relationships between the discourse and practices of political leaders and “beliefs, desires, hopes, and interests” (p. 167) of the ordinary folk. In particular, Brubaker and his collaborators focus on the resonances of the “rhetoric of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,” convincingly illustrating the “disjuncture between intense and intractable nationalist politics and the ways in which ethnicity and nationness are embodied and expressed in everyday life” (p. 16)
From Tillyian “big structures and large processes” (such as the history of nationalist and nationalizing politics in East Central Europe) to small but highly significant practices (such as ways of answering the phone (p. 223)), the book shows the virtues and potentials of a rigorous and systematic attention “in fine-grained detail to the contexts and contours, the timing and trajectories, the meanings and modalities of ethnicity and ethnicization in everyday life” (p. 16). Moving away from “viewing nationalist politics from a distance, and from above,” which according to the authors “fosters a kind of optical illusion” (p. 167), they take an in-depth look at the disjuncture between “the thematization of ethnicity and nationhood in the political realm and their experience and enactment in everyday life” (p. 363). The result is an epistemological rupture of sorts which offers a corrective to “overethnicized interpretations of culture, society, and politics” (p. 363).
To study how ethnicity works, Brubaker argues, we need to study everyday experience. And for this, the author strongly implies, ethnography is fundamental. The same could be argued about all sorts of more or less contentious, more or less collective, and more or less routine politics. Ethnography, the authors of this volume will show, is useful for understanding how political hegemony is constructed, challenged, and reconstructed, how political habits are constructed, how activists make (or fail to make) choices, how “culture” enables and constrains individual and collective actions, how party or social movement politics connect (or disconnect) from everyday life, and so on.
All too often, theory testing in sociology is performed on what might be termed “stylized facts,” oversimplified descriptions generated by concepts and notions which usually fail to capture the fine-grained, microsociological, processes at work. As a result, much macrosociological work in political sociology rests on conceptually weak microfoundations and on an understanding of politics that removes from sight much of what politics is really about (power, yes, but also desires, sacrifices, emotions, etc.). The kind of political ethnography that these articles carry out (and the kind that we advocate) is an essential tool for providing a more solid foundation for sociological (both theoretical and empirical) work. Sociology, we strongly believe, needs more political ethnography.
Political ethnography, in the skilled hands of the contributors to this volume, is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rigorous. Regarding theory: the political ethnography undertaken here is designed to critically evaluate the strengths and limitations of central sociological concepts such as power, legitimacy, clientelism, habitus, mobilizing structures, political opportunities, social capital, and so on. Regarding empirical work: this volume exemplifies the virtues, challenges, and complexities of traditional fieldwork, an approach which still requires, to use Sidney Mintz’s (2000) apt phrase, “the same willingness to be uncomfortable, to drink bad booze, to be bored by one’s drinking companions, and to be bitten by mosquitoes as always.” We hope the articles demonstrate why sociology needs more of this “old-fashioned” field research.
The specific sociopolitical universes on which these authors focus their empirical attention are quite varied thematically and geographically: social movement politics in rural Brazil and the USA, community politics in India and urban Brazil, insurgent activism in Japan, the Philippines and El Salvador, party politics in Washington D.C., and local municipal politics in Philadelphia and Bosnia. Similarly diverse are the actors on which contributors focus their attention (professional politicos, militants, organizers, municipal officials, NGO activists). In order to dissect these worlds and to understand these actors, the authors employ various theoretical orientations (from Katz’s phenomenology to Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism and Tilly’s relational realism) and narrative choices (one voice, multiple voices; one style, multiple ones). Through these multiple problématiques, objects, orientations, and writing styles, the reader is introduced to the blossoming innovations in this slowly emerging field of inquiry.
There are numerous ways of ordering (thus providing a blueprint for readers) the chapters in this volume (by geographical area covered, by actors on which authors focus attention, by the preferred techniques used to produce evidence, by the authors’ theoretical inclinations, etc.). We think that the classificatory grid provided by Charles Tilly at the end of this book, centered on the kind of general analytic questions asked by each contributor, offers a helpful guide both for the reader and the ethnographic practitioner: (1) How does a specific cause generates its effects? (Wolford, Rutten, Steinfhoff, Price, Arias); (2) How can we explain the diverse processes that take place in apparently comparable situations? (Smith, Blee and Currier, and Landriscina); and (3) How can we ethnographers create knowledge that is both reliable and convincing about specific social processes? (Wood and Mahler).
Wendy Wolford’s research in the sugarcane region of northeast Brazil, conducted over a 4-year period, documents the trajectory of the rural workers’ movement in a plantation settlement. Despite early success of the movement in which land was distributed among workers and commitment levels to the movement were high, Wolford’s research finds that several years later the movement was in crisis in the region. In this work, she focuses on interviews with one rural worker turned land reform settler, a former member of the movement whose reasons for joining and leaving the movement speak to what she calls the “fuzziness” of movement membership more generally. She points out that within any given movement there are varying degrees of engagement, and highlights the merit of interviewing along the continuum of movement commitment levels. More importantly, she uses this data to illustrate the fluidity and contradictions of social movement membership and identity. Rather than explaining away what she calls the “confusion” that emerges in subjects’ accounts of their behavior, rather than imputing an intentionality to their actions which creates a rational post-facto justification, she creates a self-conscious analysis of contradiction and silence that can more accurately account for the realities of social change and movement trajectories.
Rosanne Rutten’s research on plantation laborers in the Philippines traces the history of activism in that setting over the last several decades. Living in a sugarcane plantation community for extended periods of time between 1978 and 2000, she was witness to a gradual change in habitus for the workers from that of clientelist mode to activist mode. The feudalistic system of patronage and paternalistic mode of interaction on the plantations had created a context in which workers were indebted to planters through relationships based on personal dependency and loyalty. Rutten argues that shame, as an emotion and a behavioral disposition, functioned as an obstacle to face-to-face confrontations and claim-making by workers in this context of clientelism. Claimants, she found, were both vulnerable to personal humiliation when their claims were rejected, and felt embarrassment for breaching the established rules of worker-planter interaction. She documents the efforts of local labor movement groups to mobilize these workers over several decades, pointing out what she calls the “emotion work” undertaken by these labor groups which empowered workers to challenge the authority of planters. Over time, many of the workers developed a “radical habitus,” and were consistently engaged in various types of activism against plantation owners. By taking a long-view perspective of this case study, one that spans many years in the field, Rutten’s research has added yet another dimension to the role that emotions and behavioral dispositions play in both the reproduction of static social relations and in patterns of involvement in social movements.
In her study of anti-emperor protests in Japan during 1990–1991, Patricia Steinhoff examines the street demonstration as a social form through observation and limited participation. She finds that the limits of dissent within a society are established not only by the conditions set by law and formal regulations pertaining to demonstrations, but are more actively negotiated by police and protesters through direct interaction within the protest setting. By focusing her attention directly on the demonstration setting and observing patterns of direct contact she documents tactics used by police to control and minimize the effects of protests on the public consciousness. By stigmatizing and separating demonstration participants from mainstream Japanese public life, and by dividing more radical movement groups from other member groups within the broader coalition anti-emperor movement, the police and government forces succeed in using soft repression to limit the expression of dissent against the state. These tactics involve the use of several types of police to manage the rallies, including armed riot police whose presence exaggerated the threat of the anti-emperor movement to casual onlookers, raised the tension of these protests, and effectively manipulated the message that the protesters sought to portray to the public. Using fine-tuned attention to interactional patterns during these protests, Steinhoff’s study suggests that the boundaries of social dissent are constructed and reconstructed over time through direct contact between the state and political actors on the streets.
Pamela Price examines the changing meanings of honor, authority, and respect in rural India in the context of political and social shifts in local power structures. Under new conditions of democratization in which political power is increasingly dislocated from high caste status, the diversification of political officers has had an impact on the definitions of the qualities of respect and authority drawn upon by villagers. In previous eras, notions of respect were associated exclusively with those of high caste status who concurrently held political dominance in the village, and were based on hierarchical relations connected to fear and dependence. Since the decline of the village lords as political leaders and the rise of lower caste villagers to positions of political authority, Price finds that villagers increasingly define honor and respect in terms of moral and individual characteristics. During her research of 6 months of fieldwork in a rural Indian village, she closely analyzes the various words and idioms used by locals to describe concepts of authority and respect. Drawing on this meticulous and focused examination of language, Price concludes that shifting relations of power and authority have created new definitions of honor and respect that illustrate the emergent political and social conditions of the local setting.
Desmond Arias’s article examines the transformation of clientelist practices in Rio de Janeiro and the impact of the growing power of drug traffickers in favelas. He finds the emergence of what he calls a “two-tiered” system of clientelism, in which drug traffickers act as patrons to favela residents by distributing goods and services obtained through contacts with politicians. This mode of “neo-clientelism” signals a transfer of local power from the local neighborhood association leaders to the traffickers, contrasted with previous eras in which local leaders procured benefits for the community in exchange for allegiance to local politicians. While traditional practices of clientelism provided an effective means for the impoverished residents of favelas to link themselves into political organizations and to redress basic grievances, Arias argues that this new form of clientelism reduces residents’ already precarious identification with politicians and further removes them from the political process. Drawing on 2 years of fieldwork in three favelas in Rio de Janeiro, he concludes that criminal violence has been incorporated into the political process in a way that was unseen in prior configurations of clientelist practices.
In postwar Bosnia, Tammy Smith documents the low level of citizen confidence in institutions, and considers the impact of this condition for the rebuilding of institutions under the new democratic state. As residents recovered from a war in which state institutions were used to promote widespread violence and ethnic cleansing, Smith found that citizens are reluctant to endow governing organizations with the confidence that they will be effective in governance and nondiscriminatory in their policies. She bases her assessment on research conducted over 3 years within a local governance development program in Bosnia, which served as a training program for representatives from local governments and nongovernmental organizations as well as local citizens. She concluded that while citizens possessed interpersonal trust in individuals who worked in local institutions, this trust did not translate into increased confidence in institutions. Moreover, her data suggest that reliance upon interpersonal trust in fact undermines the development of institutional confidence, in turn undermining the strength of institutions. Institutions must begin to function again if the state is to transition from war to liberal democracy, she argues, and they will need citizens’ confidence and participation to do it.
How do social movement groups (SMGs) respond to national elections? Blee and Currier tackle this question by tracing the strategic choices of these groups and the tactics they developed over time. The authors analyzed continuous data on 15 SMGs over a 20-month period that extended across the electoral cycle. Ethnographic research using groups as the unit of analysis provided a context to view both moments of action as well as inaction or avoidance in relation to the election. Moreover, through fieldwork the authors were privy to the unfolding process of collective meaning-making or culture in progress as sequences of action were created. The authors argue that patterns of action by SMGs were path-dependent, with self-reinforcing sequences of action disrupted at turning points in their trajectories. It is during these turning points, they find, that the dynamics of meaning-making, or group culture, can be detected and analyzed for their significance and impact on paths of action. Further, by analyzing the timing of action in relation to the contextual field of the election and other groups’ activity, the authors also integrate the concept of timing as a factor to consider in research on SMGs. How SMGs react to a national election may vary, they contend, but it is in the different patterns of response — and the decisions made that produced such a response — that we can learn about the internal dynamics of SMGs.
Is institutionalization bad for social movement organizations? Can an advocacy group undergo professionalization yet continue to act as an independent entity and pursue radical or disruptive goals? Mirella Landriscina’s work engages these usually elusive questions in her examination of Philadelphia’s homeless politics while conducting research within a homeless service provider and advocacy organization called Project H.O.M.E. Her study focuses on how Project H.O.M.E. responded in 2002 to a push by downtown business groups for legislation that would curb what they saw as an unruly street population. This organization was well-established in the community and had extensive resources and networks, both to city officials such as police and to the business community. It was this connectivity that provided the setting for what Landriscina refers to as “conflictual cooperation” and communication among the actors, allowing for negotiation and arbitration regarding the problem of homelessness in the downtown area. Thus, she argues, the privileged position of an institutionalized organization can set the stage for playing a key role in managing conflict, but does not necessarily restrain the organization from acting in its own interests. Landriscina concludes that even from this centralized position in the dispute over homelessness in the city, Project H.O.M.E. remained an independent actor capable of posing challenges to authorities when the protection of homeless rights was at stake. Her research sheds light on the potential capacity of organizations to effect radical change when they have been incorporated into the mainstream of local politics.
Elisabeth Wood presents a methodological piece addressing the ethical dilemmas that arise during field research in conflict zones. She draws on 26 months of research in El Salvador during the civil war with actors across various political divisions, from armed insurgents to military and government personnel, NGO staff, and ordinary citizens. She outlines the multiple ethical and emotional challenges that she faced and highlights the spaces in which traditional research protocols were insufficient for providing concrete guidance as to how to resolve these dilemmas. Ethical challenges Wood encountered in the field included issues of informed consent, the protection of politically sensitive data, the dissemination of findings, and the repatriation of data, and were compounded by emotional challenges that included the stress and loneliness of working for long periods of time in field sites of violence and insecurity. Wood’s analysis points to the conclusion that ultimately the researcher must rely upon her own judgment in interpreting the generalized norms of ethical field research while navigating the exigencies of her field site. This chapter presents the practical, on-the-ground challenges of field research, the unanticipated and complex dynamics of one’s field site and the demands placed upon the researcher, particularly in politically charged settings, and supplies insight into how fieldworkers work through these intricacies during research.
Matthew Mahler, finally, pushes the boundaries of ethnographic research methods by drawing on works of political nonfiction, producing an analysis of “politics-in-action” with a view into the construction of the political self. By focusing on political practice and action, he taps into the sensual and physical experience of the political actor as animal — a living, breathing, suffering being whose engagement with politics is far more complex than traditional explanations of political practice can account for. To answer the question of why one engages in politics, he directs our attention away from categorical analyses such as rational choice theory that fail to consider the foreground of action in which the political actor is sensually and aesthetically drawn into political practice. Up-close observations and detailed depictions, he argues, can be found in the richly descriptive and vivid data of political autobiographies, biographies, and journalistic articles. It is in these accounts that this distinctive form of passion, in which the agent is engaged with the embedded and aesthetic attractions of his environment, can be reconstructed and brought to light for an embodied analysis of political practice.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank the authors who contributed to this volume (who graciously accepted suggestions for reviews and did so in a timely manner), Charles Tilly who wrote a very illuminating afterword, Teresa Krauss at Springer who was very enthusiastic about this project from the very beginning (and supported it throughout), two anonymous reviewers who made helpful suggestions to the book prospectus and this introduction, the numerous reviewers who provided sound advice to the contributors, and our colleagues and friends at the Sociology Department at Stony Brook University who provided the needed institutional and emotional support. Thanks to all!
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** Chapter 1. From Confusion to Common Sense: Using Political Ethnography to Understand Social Mobilization in the Brazilian Northeast
Wendy Wolford
The decade of the 1990s was a difficult one for the sugarcane region of northeastern Brazil. Local producers were hurt by falling international prices for sugar: from a high of almost one dollar per pound in the early 1980s, the price fell to an average of 10–12 cents a pound throughout the 1990s (World Bank Report No. 20754-BR 2002, p. 34). Price decreases were exacerbated by changes in the nature of state support: in 1989, the newly democratic Brazilian government began dismantling and progressively withdrawing its generous safety net for northeastern sugarcane producers (de Andrade and de Andrade 2001). Subsidies that had previously (since 1975) allowed northeastern producers to compete with their more efficient counterparts in the South were cut by more than 60% in 1989 (Buarque 1997). By 1995, 15 of 26 sugarcane distilleries in Pernambuco — the state responsible for a majority of the total sugarcane produced in the Northeast at that time — were either shut down or on the verge of bankruptcy (Lins 1996, p. 2). Production in the state had fallen from 20 million tons in 1989 to 14 million in 2000–2001 (de Andrade and de Andrade 2001, p. 147), and plantation and distillery owners were leaving their land for healthier industries elsewhere (particularly tourism on the coast). Common laborers were badly hurt by the crisis: in an industry heavily dependent on manual labor, an estimated 350,000 workers were unemployed in 1996 and considered unlikely to find work even during the harvest season.
Crises such as this one are not uncommon in sugarcane. As with most monocropped agricultural commodities, sectoral crises are a regular response to shifts in international supply and demand. In one important way, however, this crisis was different from the past: economic conditions combined with the increasing presence of the largest grassroots social movements in Brazilian history, O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (The Movement of Rural Landless Workers, commonly known as the MST). As the crisis deepened, the MST began effectively mobilizing former rural workers to occupy idle plantations and pressure the government to distribute the land. The MST’s methods centered on purposeful civil disobedience, particularly the occupation and symbolic appropriation of spaces such as large farms or plantations, government buildings, and public thoroughfares. The movement’s ideology reflected its leadership’s roots in the peasant culture of southern Brazil, and also brought together an eclectic mix of leftist radicals such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Mao Tse-Tung, and Mahatma Ghandi. Formed in southern Brazil in 1984 to fight for agrarian reform, movement leaders considered mobilization in the country’s poverty-stricken northeast to be a particularly important step to transforming the regional movement into a national one (see Petras 1997; also see Fernandes 1999; Stedile and Fernandes 1999; Navarro 2000; Robles 2001; Branford and Rocha 2002, p. 21; Wright and Wolford 2003).
As sugarcane elites went bankrupt and MST leaders militated for land reform, the state government of Pernambuco expropriated 27 former plantations and distributed them among former workers and MST squatters (Buarque 1997; MEPF 1998). Seemingly overnight (although in fact it took much longer than that), sugarcane plantations were transformed: rural workers whose very identity had been produced through the hierarchical spatial and social segmentation of sugarcane production were given ownership of equal areas of land and theoretically turned into small farmers.[1] On one settlement, which I call Flora, in the municipality of Agua Preta, 46 families were given access to land in 1996.[2] The beneficiaries included the wife and son of the former patrao (literally translated patrao means patron or boss; in Flora’s case, the boss was renting the land from a nearby sugarcane factory), the elite administrative workers, the common workers, both legal and undocumented (the latter being those who were employed on the plantation without their legal working papers, an occupation category increasingly common after stricter labor compensation laws were passed in 1963), house servants, and the MST squatters who had occupied the property months before to press for its expropriation.[3] Agua Preta is in the heart of the southern sugarcane region in the state of Pernambuco and in 1999 had both the highest concentration of land ownership and the highest number of land reform settlements in the state.[4] The municipality is almost entirely dependent on sugarcane (and largesse from the mayor’s office) for employment and production, and the economic crisis of the 1990s hit everyone hard.[5]
When I first visited in 1999, national, state, and local MST leaders considered both Agua Preta and Flora to be strongholds of MST support and membership. When asked where I ought to locate my field research in Pernambuco, MST leaders suggested Flora as exemplary of the movement’s success in the region.[6] The entrance to the small grouping of houses that marked Flora’s center boasted a bright red MST flag, and movement activists were leading the monthly association meetings and organizing public demonstrations.[7] One such demonstration in September of 1999 brought over 200 rural settlers together from around Agua Preta to protest long delays in the release of state-subsidized production loans. The settlers were trying to move away from the regional specialty, sugarcane: at the urging of MST leaders, they were planting subsistence crops as well as bananas and coconuts for the market.
Four years later, however, the political and economic landscape looked very different. The price of sugarcane had increased to more than twice its low in 1999 and local factories were now paying approximately R$35 for a ton of cane, as opposed to between R$12 and R$15 in 1999.[8] Most of the settlers on Flora had gone back to work in sugarcane. The projects for bananas, coconuts, and cattle had not been very successful, and when the opportunity to work with sugarcane came up, they took it. The settlers were, in the words of one settlement president “dying of hunger” as they planted sugarcane again — either on their land or in the mills around Agua Preta. The MST was no longer Flora’s official political representative and the movement generally regarded its position in the region to be in crisis.
These changes that took place on Flora could be understood as rational responses to the changing price of sugarcane: the former rural workers left the movement because they no longer needed it, they could now earn their living planting sugarcane for the regional market. Or the changes could be understood (as the MST leaders understood them) as examples of false consciousness: the settlers were pulled back into sugarcane production because they could not free themselves from the hegemony of the plantation system. In some ways, both of these arguments are valid — planting sugarcane could be considered a rational response to changing prices, particularly in the context of the generalized dominance of sugarcane in the region. The difficulty with both of these arguments (and in fact, with the theoretical frameworks used to understand political consciousness), is that they rest on two problematic — if sometimes correct — assumptions.
The first assumption is that the MST was in crisis because people who had formerly belonged to the movement subsequently dropped out. Movements are generally believed to consist of members who join and drop out with precision (such that the movements succeed and fail in the same fashion). In fact, many people who “join” movements do so with some skepticism or even reluctance, ignorance, and bad faith — and many “leave” the same way: we cannot read political beliefs off of group membership. The rural workers on Flora had all believed they were part of the movement in 1999, but they were far from “ideal” members: they participated in demonstrations and state meetings, but they didn’t always understand that the movement was supposed to be composed of landless rural workers, not simply for them. In the same way, although none of the rural workers I interviewed on Flora in 2003 said they still belonged to the MST, not all were convinced that the movement’s withdrawal from local politics had been a good thing. The thick lines between inside and outside that social movements draw for strategic reasons (and that observers sometimes draw for political or solidarity reasons) are rarely — if ever — mirrored on the ground.
The second problematic assumption is related to the first. Both rational choice and Marxist attempts to understand consciousness assume an intentionality (people do things because they mean to) that is common of social movement theories in general. Although social movement scholars are bringing people, agency, and emotions back into the analysis (Auyero 2003; Wood 2003; Jasper 2004) and correcting for what has been called the structuralism of classical social movement studies (Goodwin and Jasper 1999; McAdam et al., 2001, p. 18), the focus on intentionality draws new lines in the sands of liberal subjectivity: people either join (and leave) social movements because they want to, usually because they decide it is in their best interests (they get fed up, they want to maintain their reputation, they believe in the cause), or they join and (more often) leave because they are manipulated or swept away against their will by people who decide it is in their best interests. Both of these positions assume a market-place of ideas and decision-making that invokes Liberal economic theory: believing in agency has come to mean believing in intentionality. At the risk of being cited for bad puns, one could say: the path to social mobilization has been paved with intentionality. Whether the focus is on the “people” who engage in collective action or on some set of hegemonic representatives (in this case, the sugarcane elites) who manipulate others, someone is making decisions with access to perfect information and in competitive political markets.[9] When we come across “informants” who contradict themselves, or who can’t explain their own motivations, we think of it as “noise” and it gets edited out: nonsense, by definition, does not make sense.
Instead of editing out these “unreasonable” answers, we need to add what Lila Abu-Lughod (2000, p. 263) calls a “counter-discourse,” where people are “confused, life is complicated, emotional and uncertain,” to our analyses of social change and mobilization.[10] In addition to bringing culture into studies of social movements (Wolford 2003, 2005; Rubin 2004), we need to explicitly incorporate that aspect of culture best described as “common sense.” Following others, culture can be conceived of as a continuum running from informal to formalized expressions: common sense, tradition, ritual, and ideology, where ideology is expressed in (and demonstrated by) highly developed, well thought out declarations (textual and oral), and common sense is “the simple truth of things artlessly apprehended,” (Swidler 1986).[11] It is, in the Gramscian sense, contradictory, fragmented, and never autonomous from hegemonic ideologies. It is the realm of culture that is most fraught with internal difference, most fluid (rather than contained within a recognizable group of people) and most readily changing in order to make sense of — and take advantage of — new situations (rather than rooted in tradition). The move to incorporate common sense does not mean structure, agency, and explanation should be abandoned in studies of social movements.[12] Rather, our ability to explain movement trajectories over time depends on our ability to incorporate common sense into the analysis.[13] When asked in 2003 why they left the MST, the land reform settlers in Agua Preta responded in ways that were contradictory, incomplete, attempts to justify post hoc a set of decisions that had often been made without explicit articulation or even understanding. Incorporating this “noise” into our analysis of political consciousness helps to explain that the question one might ask in returning to the sugarcane region, “why did the MST fail in Agua Preta,” is too black and white: in fact, the MST did not fail entirely (just as it did not succeed entirely), and the movement may even have planted the necessary conditions to rebuild its presence again. There was enough uncertainty and mixed emotions among the land reform settlers to suggest that if the movement becomes a strong political actor again in the region, at least some settlers would swear they never left (and perhaps they never did).
This sort of study requires an appropriate methodology: an analysis of contradiction, silences, and confusion can only be done through what Gillian Hart calls “advancing to the concrete” and employing the sort of political ethnographies that are the subject of this edited collection. Political ethnography has a dual meaning: it refers to the politicized nature of ethnography as a method that is uniquely suited to examining and exposing the power relations that inflect all social life. At the same time, it refers to the need for (and practice of) ethnographic investigations of politics, where elections and states are no longer the privileged site of political life, rather people are. This attention to location (rather than the local, see Gupta and Ferguson 1997, p. 39), to lived experiences (rather than rhetoric, see Burdick 1995; Edelman 2001, pp. 309–310) and to (un)intentions (as opposed to simply action, see Ortner 1995; Wolford 2003) will enrich our ability to understand and explain social movements. In the body of this paper, I use the textual tools of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1991) Weight of the World to work through two interviews conducted with a rural worker turned land reform settler on Flora, in Agua Preta, Pernambuco, Brazil.[14] He was formerly a “common worker,” not an administrative (elite) employee or an MST squatter. I call him Cicero although that is not his real name. The interviews were conducted in 1999 when Cicero said he belonged to the MST and in 2003 when he no longer “knew what to say about the movement.” The first interview was situated within the context of my seven months in Agua Preta. I also visited the area and met informally with the settler in 2001.
Cicero is not the kind of social movement member who usually finds his or her way into a study: he was not vocal in his opinions, he was not the “model” member on the settlement to whom researchers were told to speak, nor was he a contrarian who walked away from meetings (or the MST) in disgust and waited for his chance to “tell all” to the American researcher on the settlement. To the contrary, Cicero was quiet, he was uncertain what to think about the movement, and he rarely picked sides in a disagreement. In this, he was perhaps representative. His reasons for joining and leaving the MST resonated with the silent majority of settlers on the settlement (silent because they do not speak out or are not asked).
Analyzing Cicero’s discussion of why he joined — and then left — the MST leads to four key points. First, the confusion and contradiction Cicero presents cannot be easily dismissed as mistakes or unimportant; they are part of his attempt to reconcile his personal circumstances with the way he imagines the world ought to work. Second, the uncertainty Cicero feels about leaving the MST highlights the fuzziness of movement membership more generally — within any given movement, there are varying degrees of engagement, and interviewing along the continuum provides us with a more representative picture of movement politics than simply interviewing movement addicts and elites. Third, the pride that Cicero feels in owning his land has to be situated in a longer history of “captivity” on the plantations: as a former plantation worker, he feels a new freedom. For movement leaders, this freedom means freedom from the dominance of sugarcane, plantation elites, and the state, but for Cicero, freedom means being able to allocate his own labor time and to work where he wants. Freedom, for Cicero, means the right to reject the MST’s advice and ultimately to withdraw from the movement. Fourth, and finally, Cicero’s discussion of politics on the settlements highlights the extent to which participation in the MST laid the groundwork for future political participation. Even if the movement itself never regains its political strength in the region, the tools of participation that movement activists laid down will certainly be used again. Social movements may come and go, but they build on and generate broader repertoires of contention; these repertoires are easily missed if we privilege the movement as a bounded, easily defined object of study.
In presenting and analyzing Cicero’s interviews, I am not suggesting that he “speaks” in a way that is representative or original and therefore authentic or necessarily insightful. I am using his words to highlight the fluidity and contradictions of social movement membership and identity. He spoke for himself in our interview but he does not necessarily do so in this text. The interviews have been structured both by my presence and by the interview format, and the text was structured afterwards through analysis and academic publishing conventions.
*** Cicero, July 31, 1999
Cicero is a short, sturdy black man, perhaps the darkest man on Flora. He was singled out for his color in the casual, even affectionate way that people are in Brazil. People called him the “little black one,” and when Cicero worked in the neighboring mill before receiving land on Flora, the other men knew him as “Amaral,” the name of a nationally known soccer player who was as dark as he. Cicero was very friendly, with a quick smile; and unlike many of the former rural workers, he always looked me in the eye when I talked to him. I interviewed Cicero on the porch of his new house inside Flora, a fast but dirty walk along a red clay path from the settlement’s center. Cicero did not live in the house where we sat; he and his family had a little house in the town (na rua) of Agua Preta. When he received the government funds earmarked for housing, he built the brick house by the small stream that ran through his property. Cicero had planted manioc along the hillside behind his house, and he grinned broadly as we walked around his plot of land. Cicero’s wife and children were not with us during the interview; he had been walking alone to his house when I caught up with him. He said his wife weeded with him, but only occasionally. If the settlement ever got electricity, as the mayor had promised, Cicero said he would move the whole family into the new house.
Cicero remembered his life before the present without details. He was born in the mill where his parents lived, on a sugarcane plantation. When asked “what was it like,” he seemed uncertain of the question and answered as someone who did not feel they had the luxury of choosing the broad strokes of his life: “It was what we had to do, wasn’t it? What else were we going to do?” The family didn’t have land of their own, though they were sometimes allowed to plant garden crops on the land near their house. Access to land for planting had once been a regular condition of tenancy, or moradia, where workers lived on the plantation and worked a certain number of days per week in return for land to plant and a house to live on. The tenancy relationship was severely eroded after the 1960s when national legislation extended formal labor rules to the countryside and informal “gifts” such as access to land were increasingly unavailable (Juliao 1972; de Andrade 1988; Pereira 1997). In the 1970s, new government subsidies increased production, and it became even harder for workers to find land for their own subsistence.
After the transformation in tenancy norms, Cicero’s family displayed a mobility that has since become common to the sugarcane region: people exercise their “right” to leave a plantation when working conditions are deemed unbearable. From the point of view of the workers, this mobility offers some freedom in their otherwise highly circumscribed lives.
When he was very young, Cicero’s family moved around from mill to mill in the southern sugarcane region of Pernambuco until they ended up at a mill called Jotoba where his parents both cut and weeded cane. His father always liked their old bosses and never made trouble. Cicero said the boss at Jotoba was a good man because when his father died, his mother was hired to work in the Big House. Workers in the Big House were often treated “just like family,” in the region’s paternalist system of labor relations. Cicero’s mother eventually remarried and the whole family went together to yet another mill named Barro Branco.
From Barro Branco, Cicero began working in the mills on his own. He was seventeen years old when he began gathering sugarcane (cambitando) in the large trucks to take to the distillery. He liked working with the trucks because it was easier than working in the fields, “the cane cutter or sharecropper is more beaten down, he has to cut a ton of cane just to earn four or five reais.[15] For people who are good with a scythe, you can cut two or three tons a day. And I can make this much money with just one or two trips with the truck, depending on the truck. If the truck was well-built, well, there were trips when I would earn R$5.00 just on one.” Cicero always lived on the mills where he worked and remembered his bosses giving him land to plant. He liked his bosses well enough, saying cryptically that “I don’t want to see a boss for any reason when things are going well, I only want to see them when someone in the family is sick.” By the time I met him, Cicero had a world-weary sense about him, having already been “all around this world, my god! I’ve already lived in Jotoba, Pamosca, Ferrao, in Alagoas, Espinheiro also in Alagoas, Japaranduba, which is next to Palmares, and other places too.” He had been married for more than 20 years (he said with a grin, “I love my little old lady a lot,”) and he hoped to stay put for a while: “Now that I have this little house here in Agua Preta, I’ve settled down. Here, what I have is mine: this was my dream. And thank god I will stay here for the rest of my life.”
When Cicero arrived in Agua Preta, he worked on the mill that would become Flora. He worked as an undocumented worker (clandestino), hired by the man who had been renting the property — about 450 hectares of land, since 1982. “In those days,” when Cicero first arrived, the fields were well-planted: “It was full of cane here, some 100 people worked here... [The former renter] was planting, and all these mills around here were full of cane.”
After six years of working illegally, Cicero received his working papers. He began working with the cattle, planting cane for feed and tending to the animals. This was roughly when the plantation “began to go bankrupt, [the boss] brought himself down. He went under.” In 1993, most of the settlers on Flora agreed, the renter stopped planting sugarcane. He harvested a second and third growth from the cane already in the field (called ratoons), but was unable to maintain production in the face of reduced government subsidies and falling world sugarcane prices. This was the beginning of the industry-wide crisis in Agua Preta. It was also the beginning of the demand for agrarian reform and the MST’s political presence in the region. The MST was only one of several organizations pushing for land distribution, but they were the most committed to aggressive action and arguably forced the rural trade unions, the Catholic Church, and other social movements to take up the cause. The MST had actually begun organizing in 1989, but local leaders initially had trouble mobilizing support among rural workers who were embedded in very different land-labor relation than the family farmers of southern Brazil where the movement began (Wolford 2003).
In the mid 1990s, MST leaders and members joined the state agricultural workers’ federation, FETAPE, in a massive occupation of the largest sugarcane operation in Latin America. The distillery, Catende, had been a site of political dispute since 1993 when 2,300 people were summarily laid off. In 1994, the mill stopped paying its still-employed workers their legally mandated “rights” (direitos) which included back pay, bonuses, fines for late payments, unjust termination rewards, and holiday pay. By 1995, political protest had resulted in the expropriation of several mills belonging to Catende, but most of the squatters affiliated with the MST were not eligible for land (the unemployed former workers were given first priority), and they moved on to occupy new plantations. In 1995, 13 families arrived on Flora after having occupied other mills nearby and camped out alongside the street under their black plastic tents. On Flora, they occupied a small riverbank in the interior of the plantation. At that time, the land was not actively productive: “Not at all,” Cicero said, “they weren’t planting anything here at all.” The National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (hereafter INCRA) had actually evaluated the property during the faint-hearted agrarian reforms of the 1970s. The property was slated for expropriation then, but nothing happened for over twenty years. The owner remained in debt to the state for nonpayment of loans received, and the land was rented out to medium-sized sugarcane suppliers. After three nonviolent (but difficult) expulsions, the federal agrarian reform agency (INCRA) expropriated the property on March 7, 1996. Cicero learned late that the expropriation was finally going to go through: “I didn’t even know about it, I only came to know after they had already signed everyone up. But then there were three people who didn’t want the land, and so I threw myself into the middle, thank God. I am very grateful to the administrator here. He gave a push for me to get this land.”
Cicero had never owned his own land before, and he thought that the expropriation was a good idea: “I thought that I would have a little piece of land to plant on. I said to myself that I wouldn’t have to live any more on anyone’s back (as custas de seu ninguem). Because we used to spend all of our time battling for other people. You arrive one day, and that day they have work, the next day you go back, and then there isn’t any. When I got my piece of land, I considered myself a man rich in the grace of God. Because here I work when I want, no one is going to look at me, whatever I want to plant, whatever I want to do here in my house, no one is going to beat me up, because it’s mine. They gave this to me free and clear.” Cicero repeatedly expressed his relief in no longer having to beg for the handouts that are a common feature of the paternalistic and poverty-ridden political culture in the Northeast: “After I arrived here in Água Preta, I worked in the summer for the person who rented the mill, but in the winter I was always unemployed. I got tired of always standing in the doorway of the city council, abusing this person or the other, or the mayor, getting money to do the weekly shopping from one person, getting R$100 from another. Today, thank God, I don’t need this.”
After receiving his land, Cicero considered himself a member of the MST (“yes, I am”) because “if it weren’t for the good will of the movement, I would not be here on the settlement.” When I asked if he had participated in a mobilization or a march, he said yes, but could not elaborate further. He believed that “until now the movement has been helping me a lot. Because all of these credit projects that come out, it’s because of their work, isn’t it? The money that comes out, all of these projects, it’s the will of the movement.”
Even though Cicero was fairly representative of the MST members in Água Preta, he was by no means an “ideal” MST member, mostly because he spent very little time actually planting on his land. He did not see farming as a practical means of ensuring his subsistence and in the way of most rural workers in the region, he believed that money generated food rather than the other way around (meaning that he valued paid labor over subsistence farming). The MST had developed in southern Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s before moving up the coast into the Northeast and North, and the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná are well-known as the center of small family farming in the country (see Cazella 1992; Paulilo 1996; Wolford 2003). Immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Italy, primarily, had settled there in the 1800s and early 1900s looking for land of their own to farm.
This farming ideal — where land sits at the center of production and social reproduction — is at the heart of the MST’s vision for an alternative future.[16] In Água Preta, the manifestation of this peasant vision was the focus on eradicating sugarcane from the settlements and the drive to teach the settlers how to plant a diversified portfolio of crops, from which they would derive the majority of their subsistence. Local MST leaders were particularly insistent that the settlers not plant sugarcane (as opposed to other commercial crops), as this crop seemed to both epitomize and maintain the settlers’ dependent conditions in the region.
In 1999, local MST leaders and agronomists were trying to convince the settlers that they should plant food crops on their land. They oversaw the preparation for, and distribution of, the government-subsidized production projects, which specified three alternate products for production and sale: bananas, coconuts, and milk. When I first spoke with him, Cicero had planted some of his bananas and a field of manioc, but he spent most of his time away from his land “taking care of the family.” In our discussion about work, he went back and forth, arguing that taking care of the family meant finding a job and then arguing that survival meant working on his land. This “multi-dimensionality” is, of course, common to peasant production more generically but it was difficult to reconcile with the MST’s vision of a good settler and good MST member. The following quotes are taken from different segments of his interview; they are not taken out of context so much as they are taken out of the larger interview: Cicero said he did not spend much time on his land because he “finished the house, looked to one side, looked to the other, didn’t see anything... and we have to battle constantly to give our family something to eat. Even this winter now, I have not been on my land, I have already lost a lot of weeks of work now. If not, I would already have a lot of stuff planted here. To do this, I want to be working on my land. Because in there, with the little bit of manioc that we have, digging out a little pool for fish, and then when things get tight, we have fish in the pond, we throw some manioc on the stove and we keep on fighting. If I had been in here all the time, I would already have a lot of things planted.” . “There are days when I leave here with my legs only moving by force. I get back to the house late at night and all I can do is drink some coffee and fall into bed. I had a [temporary work contract] there in the sugarcane mill, Santa Maria. I spent four or five months there, only coming home at the end of the week. If I spend time here inside the settlement without having anything where would I end up? At the end of the week, I have to arrange some milk for my son, and a little bit of change to buy even just a kilo of couscous, beans, and flour, which is what we most need in the house, and so we have to fight on.”... “When the summer comes around and the cane-milling begins, then if I can do some work on my land, I will really stay there. I am going to buy some pesticides and kill the weeds so that when the rains come, the land will already be ready. It all depends on when I have to leave to go take care of my family (pra segurar o meu) you know? One has to leave to work the season of the milling and that way I can eat again this winter.”
Even as he rationalized his detachment from the land in the settlement, Cicero distanced himself further from the movement by unselfconsciously rejecting the movement’s main strategic tool: the land occupation. MST leaders throughout the country view the occupation as the fundamental formative moment and ongoing process through which landless workers become members (for themselves). A prominent MST leader from Santa Catarina (who moved up to the Northeast when the movement began mobilizing there) put it this way, emphasizing the movement’s focus on land and the occupation process: “we picked an issue that united everyone — the land. [Land] is a necessity. Land is the word that unifies. Land became the element of the struggle. You offer the workers the opportunity to have land — but through an occupation [that they participate in].”
But Cicero, like many of the former rural workers on Flora, had learned to appreciate the law (through the formalization of rights after the labor victories of the 1960s and 1970s), and he distrusted methods that seemed so clearly illegal. His reasoning, however, was, to paraphrase Abu-Lughod, “confused, complicated, emotional and uncertain”: “I am against land occupations. If the government has already evaluated the land and decided to put people on top of it, that’s ok. Because not everyone is equal, you know? One time these people [several MST leaders] went to Recife, and they left there ruining the car they were driving. I am against that. If the head of the movement came and put people on a property, this then I agree with. Now, to invade — this business where they don’t even know if they will be able to get that land — well, then I am against that. But if the business is already all set, they’re already entering into negotiations, and they throw people inside there, well then, that’s correct. Because many people have already said — even the state said the same thing — that INCRA was buying land very expensively, land that had been invaded. Over there was even a mill and the owner himself was the one who got people together, even gave them a house to invade, so that he would get more than the land was worth. If we have a little piece of land, a farm, and we arrive and find it invaded, we won’t feel very good. Now, if we already owe money, and we’re not producing anything, well then I agree with it.”
Even on Flora, where the land had been designated for expropriation in the 1970s, Cicero didn’t agree with the occupation and was unsure if the original MST squatters had full rights to their plots of land: “Because this whole business of invading here, invading there, the men who kick them out. And so we didn’t know anything about the movement or the occupation [before they expropriated Flora]. We found out when they were negotiating, you know? And we still don’t know whether they’re settled already, absolutely correctly and everything — as they say in the history books.”
By our next conversation, in 2003, these disagreements over what the settlers should plant, where they should work, and who had the right to land (which can be summarized as the relationship between land and labor) had contributed to a significant divide between the settlers and the MST.
*** Cicero, February 19, 2003
I interviewed Cicero again almost four years after our first interview. We met in the screened-in area at the front of his house in Agua Preta. It was the same house he had been living in 1999. The settlement still did not have electricity and Cicero would not move his whole family there until there was running water and light. Cicero was hot and out of breath from having run up the hill to meet me. It was late summer in the zona da mata, the very end of the harvest, and nothing much was happening. Cicero wasn’t planting because the fields were dry; he was waiting for the winter rains that usually began falling in May or June. This year he thought he might plant manioc again, even though he had lost almost all the manioc he had shown me four years earlier: “That time when you came around [my house on the settlement], didn’t you see a lot of manioc?” “Yes, I have a picture of it.” “Well, I lost all of that.” The rains had come and the manioc rotted before he could pull it all up. Cicero’s attempt to produce bananas did not go well either: “The bananas didn’t do well at all (nao deu nada), they’re over there, those little trees, they’re only this tall...” Cicero, like many others, now said they had only planted bananas in the first place because they were told they had to: “It was just a waste of time and work. It was wasting money like a fool, this business of investment in banana [and other tropical fruits]. None of it did well. We only planted that banana because Antonio [the agronomist and MST leader] told us to — and the president and the extension agents too. Because if you didn’t plant it, you wouldn’t get the rest of [your government subsidized loans]. A lot of people were turned off (desligou-se), as you saw. They turned away from the association and the movement after that.”
Cicero said the government-subsidized project for banana had gone awry because the settlers had not received sufficient technical advice from their agronomist-cum-MST leader and because “salvation has to be sugarcane.” “I planted lemon, orange, banana, I planted my land, you know? Well, what I really planted was just banana and maracuja, I didn’t plant the rest. Because Antonio is coming today, he’s coming tomorrow, he’s coming this or that day and so time went by and in the end, the material that was supposed to come never came. The banana came, and I got 200 trees, but they kept saying the rest will arrive in the next batch and so they kept dividing it up for each one a little bit, and saying that when the next batch comes, you will get the rest. Today I have two cows, one horse, the fence, the pond that I built, it was all part of the government project. But the rest of it all disappeared (foi tudo pro Belele).”... “But, if I could have, I would have invested everything in sugarcane. If I had planted at that time the R$7,500 that I took, I would have put at least R$5,000 in sugarcane, and maybe my land would at least have energy and I wouldn’t be owing the bank.. We all went along with the talk (conversa) of Antonio and the settlement president because if you don’t plant all of this that the bank asks for and the movement asks for then you won’t get the other bit of the money. I know that there are others who did not do [what Antonio said] and they got their money.”
With the recent increase in the price of sugarcane, Cicero was planning to plant his fields again in the crop. “Sugarcane sustains agriculture because in the summer we have a little bit of change, you know?”. “[If I could do it again,] I wouldn’t invest so much again in what they made me invest in. I know that I am never going to be able to pay this debt off.”. “If the state liberated this money and said, ok the money is in your hands, I want to see you all make progress in some things, I am certain that only people who don’t want something will have nothing because we would plant what the land will support (o que a terra dava). Salvation has to be sugarcane, we have to push more for sugarcane.” Cicero was planning to plant at least a hectare of sugarcane, which he estimated would produce 50 tons of cane. He had taken 18 tons to the Treze de Maio mill the previous harvest and said it was easy to find a place for the crop: “All of the distilleries are accepting cane, what they want most of all is sugarcane, the more that arrives for them, the better.”
When I asked him if the MST was helping on the settlement, despite the failure of the bananas project, he said,
Cicero: I don’t even know what to say about the movement. Because the only meeting we have participated in until now was this past week and so I don’t know what to say.
Wendy: The movement doesn’t come around here anymore? The militants of the movement don’t come around?
Cicero: They only showed up here when that money came out. And at the time when they built that office that they were going to put there, seems like INCRA condemned it.
Wendy: Yeah.
Cicero: So it was stopped and everything ended, and no one has seen anyone from the movement again.
I asked Cicero to explain what had happened with the office building that MST leaders had hoped to locate on the settlement. Local movement leaders had held a meeting with the settlers to ask if the MST could renovate the nearly abandoned stables that sat at Flora’s entrance. The movement wanted to house its regional headquarters there, on the settlement closest to the center of Agua Preta as — up until then — a source of support for the movement.
The settlers had voted yes, but subsequently there was confusion and disagreement and several of them went to the state capital, Recife, to get federal agrarian reform agents (from the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform, INCRA) to stop the move. I said to Cicero:
Wendy: The settlers didn’t want the movement to build that house?
Cicero: They did want it, but there were many who went to INCRA. [The former president] himself went, several of them went, they said that it was going to turn into a rowdy bar (baderna).
But Cicero did not agree with this interpretation of the MST’s intent, although he said he did not bring his disagreement up with others:
Cicero: The more that INCRA, the state, the movement, no matter who, wants to invest in the settlement, well, that’s an advantage for us, but they [the other settlers] think that it is going to turn into a rowdy bar where the whole world will come and want to boss us around. And so it’s their problem; they only want to go downhill, they don’t want to see things get better.
Wendy: They think that the people who go to the office will want to boss people around?
Cicero: More or less...at least that’s what [the former settlement president] said. I live there inside the settlement, I fight to see all of that looking good, but then they said that there had been an act that was signed incorrectly without anyone knowing about it.
Cicero: .Because the will of the majority was that they shouldn’t build [the office].
Wendy: It should not have been done or it should have been?
Cicero: No, it should not have.
Wendy: This was what the majority of people wanted?
Cicero: Yes. That building was going to be the settlement’s postcard. It was going to be more attractive every time, more organized, it was an advantage for us! And so they think that it’s better to go down than to come up. For INCRA, the movement could build whatever building they wanted; at least the whole business was well-organized, giving us one more attractive thing. But many people think that it’s going to turn into a baderna, they are going to make a mess, with the whole world there coming in and out. And so what are we going to do? Stay quiet and just watch.
I then asked Cicero whether the settlement was still affiliated with the MST. He began his response with a comment about collective disengagement, but when pressed returned to his discussion of private property rights that had colored his evaluation of the MST in 1999.
Wendy: So the people here don’t like MST any more?
Cicero: I don’t see anyone here talk about the movement.
Wendy: Because in the beginning the settlement was part of the movement, right?
Cicero: Yes. Everything we have today we owe to the movement. I too owe everything to it. I just don’t agree with this business of invading land. Who wants to have what is theirs and arrive to find it has been invaded? I have this house here and say I leave and when I get back, it’s been invaded? What am I going to do? I don’t agree with this. Now, the way the law is today, where no one invades anything, because if there is an invasion it is expropriated only two years later, I think this is correct.
Wendy: What if they carry out an occupation on a large farm or mill that is already indebted and everything?
Cicero: Yes, and so the movement goes and negotiates and the owner of the property — after they negotiate, I agree with putting people on the property. To this day I have already fought a lot, but I would never fall into an occupation, no. I got this land because I worked in the mill, but for me to invade what belongs to other people, I never had the desire to do that. I would be afraid.
Wendy: Really?
Cicero: Yes. Can you imagine, a guy is at home in his house full of children like I am, and then a group of people come, whether it’s with guns or not. If you run you will see your family be beaten down. You have to react and if you react you end up dying. I have never lied. That time when they went to that other mill, they were camped out four different times. There on my land there is a little piece of land where they camped out. Over there (he said, pointing) there’s another place.”
Even though Cicero did not see anyone talking about the movement and didn’t try to talk to any of the leaders still in the region, he was discouraged by the disorganization on the settlement, and wished there was more cooperation. He described a settlement in the neighboring state where “you can see that things work differently, I don’t know if you have already been to Alagoas but there is a settlement close to a sugarcane factory there. It’s a very beautiful thing, it’s just like a city, there’s a bakery, there’s everything.” Cicero said they had achieved all of this because they had a cooperative and worked together. On Flora, Cicero said, there was too much mistrust to allow people to work together: “I have already told many of them that the guy who likes things doesn’t trust anyone. When a guy trusts another person it is because he doesn’t like to take what belongs to other people. But people who don’t trust anyone are people who already know what went on.”
Cicero’s idealized vision of “organization” reflected a belief in the value of politics that was relatively new. Although sugarcane workers in Pernambuco had been highly politicized in the past, particularly through the rural trade unions and the so-called Peasant Leagues, it was the MST that Cicero referenced when he talked about the need for political change on the settlement.
His opinion of the rural trade union was bleak. When I asked him if the union in town helped at all on the settlement, he said indignantly, “God help us!... I paid the union so much when I was working in the countryside and I never benefited from it. There’s an id card (carteira) in [my] house that has more than 30 years of work on it, paying the union the whole time.” One of the union’s primary functions after the 1964 coup was to fight for the provision of basic services for legally documented sugarcane workers. These were workers’ rights (direitos) guaranteed in the Rural Workers’ Statute passed just in 1963, just before the coup. In many ways, simply fighting for these basic, legal rights was a major victory for rural trade unions working in the hostile environment of the military dictatorship. But the focus on rights ultimately allowed the union to be seen as a service organization: workers paid their dues in order to receive benefits like medical aid, retirement pensions, and emergency transportation off of the mills or settlements. In Agua Preta, the union had a car that it still used to bring people from the mills or settlements into the nearby town of Palmares or to the capital city of Recife for urgent medical assistance. This was a typical service provided by the union — as Cicero said, somewhat dismissively, “If the union has a car, it will take people from most of the mills around hei’e...they go from one point to another and another — that is what they do around here.” But Cicero himself refused to depend on the union even just for this. He preferred to take care of his injuries himself rather than depend on an organization that siphoned your money away while being little better than an inefficient taxi company. He had lost trust in the union when it failed to provide him his family benefits in a timely fashion, “When it is time to take part in that program for the kids [a program called the Helping Hand, which provided a small stipend for each young child enrolled in school] we have to pay four months in advance to do it, and we keep on paying..”
Even as Cicero dismissed the union, he also rejected the rather distant promise of national politics. When I interviewed him in 2003, the man known everywhere as “Lula” had recently won and assumed the office of the president. For many Brazilians, Lula was a beacon of hope: he was a champion of the poor, having been a poor northeasterner himself, and he won the election on a platform of social justice. People everywhere, particularly in the Northeast, believed that Lula would save them from poverty, the ills of inequality, growing urban violence, and even concentration of land ownership. But for Cicero, Lula’s election was intangible, it would not provide the political support he needed to improve his everyday existence, and so he dismissed it. What follows is a brief transcription of our conversation about national politics.
Wendy: And do you think that things will be better now, with the new president and everything?
Cicero: How should I know! For me it’s all the same thing. For me, the only one who can do anything in this world is my God, it’s really just him, and no one on this planet is Him. What do you think?
Wendy: I think that maybe now there is a little space for things to get better.
Cicero: You think? We’ll try, right?
It turned out that Cicero had not voted for Lula, he voted for his primary opposition, José Serra. Serra had been the Minister of Health under the former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Cicero argued that Cardoso was “the best president we have had to this day.” Cardoso’s legacy, for Cicero, lay in his installment of the Helping Hand program, which Cicero argued had increased the size of the weekly market by two times its former size. I asked Cicero if he thought that Lula might be able to help him in other ways, but without the idea of a specific project that would make his life better in immediate, visible ways, Cicero was fatalistic. I said, pushing him, “if you could ask for something from the government now, what would it be? Some sort of help, some kind of change in politics?” To which he responded, “You know, I don’t even know. You know that now it isn’t even possible to think [about that]. I was going to ask just for peace in this world of my God, which there isn’t.”
Rather than invest his hopes for political change in the trade union or the state, Cicero wanted to organize the other settlers to protest using the MST’s model of mobilization, just as they had that evening in front of the city council building. Cicero blamed the mayor for not delivering the electricity that he had promised back in 1999. He called on his memories of the demonstration from 1999 to argue that “if we did this again, I am certain that the mayor would already have given us our electricity. And when we do get together — well, there was that time when we wanted the councilman Armando Souto to sign for us, about three years ago. That was the reason our credit projects were approved. Armando didn’t want to sign [our papers], and I know that we got together Elias, the other Elias who was the president, everyone got together with the mayor’s men, because Armando Souto was against us. Do you remember?”
He tried to convince some of the other people on the settlement to organize another demonstration like that one, “and so I said to them: ‘Now is the time for you to turn over the mayor’s car.’ And they said ‘no, because...’ And I said: ‘look, you guys don’t mobilize for anything; the mayor said the electricity here in Flora was a priority of his, even if there wasn’t enough money to finish it all, he would take it out of his own purse and finish it.’ I said this to them, because it was time for them to turn over the mayor’s car to make this happen, just like they did with Armando’s car.” Cicero remembered this demonstration with triumph, “because then the money came out, Souto signed the papers! But the mayor’s being a fool, and everything’s left the way you see it..”
I said, “It’s a lot of bureaucracy, isn’t it?” And he replied, still amiably, “Yes, and the only one who gets screwed [is forced to dance] is the little guy.” Cicero said that the mayor did help with some things, but through the traditional patronage channels, which meant that it didn’t always trickle down. His wife, who had joined us on the porch, explained: “He helps the presidents [of the settlement] because he’ll give a job to their children and then the presidents are trapped without being able to ask for anything because the mayor will take them to task — ‘but you have a child, your wife, they’re all working in the mayor’s office.’.”
In the end, though, even with the disorganization on the settlement and the difficulties with the movement, Cicero still thought that he was better off than he had been before he was awarded a place on the settlement. When I asked him directly if he was better off, his answer began with a discussion of material position and ended with a seemingly unrelated story about personal honor: “My life is quite a bit better now. Before [I got land] I had to wake up at dawn out of my head working in the middle of nowhere [no meio do mundo, a common expression having no perfect translation but meaning ‘somewhere out in the world’] on top of a sugarcane truck, and I would get home at ten or eleven at night. Today I leave the house at 7:30 in the morning and on Sunday I played soccer with some friends at night, then I watched a movie, and went to bed at 1:00 in the morning — when I looked at the clock in the morning, I had already overslept! And if I were working for others? Now I can get to work at 7:00, at 8:00, or 9:00 and [my boss at the auto shop] doesn’t say anything. One time, about three years ago, I worked in a mill around here. I worked in a job preparing the land. I would leave here around 5:30 in the morning — you’re supposed to be there at 5:00 a.m. to work. One time I went to the entrance of the hospital and I came back ashamed because the guys there said: ‘Well, boy, at an hour like this!’ Because that was what I have been most afraid of in my life: complaining about something.”
*** Conclusion
So, what then, is Cicero’s place — or the place for political ethnography — in critical studies of development and social mobilization? The close reading of the way in which the “banal geographies of everyday life” weave their way in and out of social mobilization advances our theoretical understandings in at least four directions:
1. Cicero’s strong assertions of statements that contradicted one another — even well after the fact — illustrate a “clear-headed confusion” (Abu-Lughod’s “counter-discourse”) that rarely comes through in studies of social movements. Instead of trying to make sense out of everything that happened and treating contradiction or uncertainty as “noise,” common sense should become a key epistemological tool for understanding political consciousness. Contradictions are not always contradictory: they are windows onto the messy relationship between agency and structure. Or rather, they reflect the ways in which people reconcile their personal circumstances with a view of how the world ought to work. These tensions are evident in the way that Cicero defended private property (referencing the pain he would feel if people invaded his own house) even as he attributed his property rights to the MST members who squatted on the plantation and pushed through the expropriation. He held onto the notion that the law should be respected, even as he legitimated the MST’s tactics of invading unproductive land by referring to a general situation of injustice.
These contradictions reflect both Cicero’s own sense of confusion and deeper contradictions in Brazilian notions of property and the political subject. Within the Brazilian legal system, one can find simultaneous support for the rights of squatters (based in an individual’s right to their labor and the fruits of their labor), the rights of property owners (based in an individual’s right to own commodities once purchased), and the collective right of society to property as a social good, property that satisfies some sort of vaguely specified “social function.” In this way, Cicero’s confused stance vis-à-vis property reflects an attempt to reconcile historical notions of property rights embedded in the plantation system with his own multifaceted understanding of who deserved land and why. By naming Cicero’s confusion as such and situating it up-front in this way, I argue that we get a better appreciation for the relationship between structural factors, such as political context, material conditions, and cultural “endowments,” and the actual path that any given social movement takes. Cicero’s qualified support for — and equally qualified rejection of — the MST help to explain why the movement had such strong membership numbers in the sugarcane region but struggled either to generate active displays of support or to maintain ongoing participation.
1. Analyzing Cicero’s interview emphasizes the importance of individual-group relations and the social construction of knowledge — both of which have been recognized as important for the study of social mobilization. Peer pressure, group expectations, intra-group leaders, and the will of the majority are all difficult to see without compelling ethnographies (Watts 2001, p. 286). Cicero joined the MST in part because everyone else did, and he left the same way. But underneath these decisions lay a whole continuum of opinions of the MST and of collective action. Some of the people who left the MST did so with relief because they had never been comfortable as members while others left without really thinking about it — they were busy and the movement never forced anyone to vote up or down.
Still other rural workers were not sure at all that they wanted to leave the movement, but when others did, they went along. These opinions could shape the future trajectory of the movement: people who left the MST reluctantly could rejoin the movement or start a new social movement or engage in new forms and moments of collective action, all of which would be difficult to understand if we accepted actions and decisions at face value.
1. Cicero’s interview also sheds light on the relationship between material goods and dignity. Many people have argued against the dichotomized treatment of material conditions and identity in social movement studies, and this case illustrated both their mutual constitution and subjectivity. Cicero was grateful for access to land because he was no longer held captive (cativeiro) to demands on his labor through his relationship to the land (see Martins 1998). He could plant sugarcane or not, he could sell the cane where he wished or he could choose to not work on his land at all. This is what the MST activists did not understand: they believed that access to land would generate a certain, well-defined political subjectivity. In much the same way as neo-liberal projects of land titling, made famous by the Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto (1989), are established under the assumption that access to title will generate hard-working, independent citizens who steward their property and make greater personal investments in law and order, the MST’s projects of land occupation and settlement operate under the assumption that access to land will generate community-oriented, politically motivated small-holders who produce with traditional agro-ecological methods and make greater personal investments in civil disobedience and radical politics. In fact, access to land in Agua Preta did symbolize material reward and freedom, but freedom meant freedom from control (even the MST’s control) rather than freedom from the state or the market. Cicero was not significantly better off in 1999 or in 2003 than he was before gaining access to land. He still worked temporary contracts in neighboring mills and put odd jobs together to make it through the winter. He harvested some manioc and caught fish that he was able to eat or sell. But more importantly, his land gave him a sense of material wealth that allowed him to hold his head up high and at least imagine that one day he would have time to plant it full of money-producing crops.
1. Finally, Cicero’s interviews illustrate the dynamic nature of social mobilization. Depending on when and where we stand, we get a very different picture of the MST’s position in the sugarcane region. When I first conducted research in Agua Preta in 1998–1999, I assumed that the MST had introduced long-term change into the region. By 2003, it seemed as if the old saying was true: the more things change, the more they stay the same (Eisenberg 1974). Brief snapshots of political activity are never sufficient because people add to their repertoire (or their toolkits, see Swidler 1986) of collective action and deploy them under particular circumstances. In the case of Cicero, involvement in the MST influenced his belief in the value of contentious behavior. He held onto the sense that politics were not fixed, that they could be changed through collective action. He anticipated the need for such action (the need for electricity and the fear that the mayor would no longer honor his promises to the settlement without some sort of organized pressure) and he encouraged his fellow settlers to mobilize and “get ahead.” The fact that he has not deployed it either outside of his movement activities or within does not mean that he will not sometime soon — just as the MST may regain its position as political representative of Flora in the future.
Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Javier Auyero, Charlie Kurzman, and Jeffrey Rubin for their advice and collegiality as well as the members of the Aspen Collective, particularly Scott Prudham, for their comments on issues relevant to the paper.
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** Chapter 2. Losing Face in Philippine Labor Confrontations: How Shame May Inhibit Worker Activism
Rosanne Rutten
*** Introduction
They are afraid to blunder. They rather not face the planter or other authorities than risk being shamed.
— Union activist, Hacienda Ramona, in the Philippine province of Negros Occidental, about workers on the sugarcane plantation where he lives and works.
Shame is an emotion and a behavioral disposition. Developed within social relations of subordination and control, a sensitivity to being shamed is learned and internalized, then becomes an emotion that shapes capabilities to act, as it favors certain forms of behavior and precludes others. “Converting passivity into action,” says Tarrow, requires an emotional energy, an emotional force, which may be fuelled by anger, pride, loyalty, and other “vitalizing” emotions. Shame is, in contrast, decidedly “devitalizing” (Tarrow 1998, pp. 111–112). Shweder offers the following comprehensive definition of shame:
[S]hame is the deeply felt and highly motivating experience of the fear of being judged defective. It is the anxious experience of either the real or anticipated loss of status, affection or self-regard that results from knowing that one is vulnerable to the disapproving gaze or negative judgment of others. It is a terror that touches the mind, the body, and the soul precisely because one is aware that one might be seen to have come up short in relationship to some shared and uncontested ideal that defines what it means to be a good, worthy, admirable, attractive, or competent person, given one’s status or position in society. (Shweder 2003, p. 115).
Face-to-face encounters are the main settings in which such feelings are produced — public encounters, in particular. What is at stake in any social interaction is the image of the self (the “face”) that is presented and judged; a negative judgment by other parties in the interaction may lead to a loss of face and feelings of shame and inferiority (Goffman 1955). “Stage fright,” says Geertz, is a more appropriate term than “shame” to capture the personal anxieties of individuals about their “on stage” behavior. In line with Goffman’s work, he describes such “stage fright” for Balinese society as a “diffuse, usually mild, though in certain situations virtually paralyzing, nervousness before the prospect (and the fact) of social interaction, a chronic, mostly low-grade worry that one will not be able to bring it off with the required finesse” (Geertz 1973, p. 402). Finesse in one cultural setting, other standards of behavior in another: the relevant issue here is the pervasive “fear of faux pas,” a fear that “keeps social intercourse on its deliberately narrowed rails” (ibid.).
As the “master emotion in everyday life” (Scheff and Retzinger 2000), shame motivates people to avoid encounters that might lead to embarrassment or humiliation. In practice, this means compliance with the status quo, with the behavioral standards imposed by dominant groups in society. “[T]o blush at the exposure of one’s own personal failure or impropriety is to accept and to honor the very virtues, high standards, and ideals that were the cause of one’s loss of face” (Shweder 2003, p. 1115). As Goffman put it: a person “cooperates to save his face, finding that there is much to be gained from venturing nothing” (Goffman 1967, p. 43, quoted in Aguilar 1982, p. 159; emphasis added).
The inclination to “venture nothing” may be strongest among people in the most subordinate positions. Their interactions with people of wealth, power, and status, involve a high risk of humiliation and ridicule, and tend to activate a sense of inferiority. “The dissembling of the weak in the face of power is hardly an occasion for surprise,” says Scott; it is “ubiquitous” (Scott 1990, p. 1). Besides blunt repression and economic dependency, the emotional dynamic of shame is also at work.
In this chapter I discuss how shame may inhibit workers from staging the most basic form of collective action — face-to-face encounters with employers and management — and how leftwing activists try to overcome this hurdle. Workers whose labor tie is cast in the mold of patron-clientage and personal dependency are particularly sensitive to the workings of shame. The habitus of clientelism and deference, matched with an acute vulnerability to humiliation by relevant others, can turn claim-making into a workers’ nightmare. The experience of Philippine workers serves as a main illustration.
Recent studies have illuminated the importance of emotions in motivating collective action, framing injustice, forging solidarities, strengthening, and redefining collective identities.[17] Less attention has been paid, so far, to the salience of emotions in personal, face-to-face confrontations with authorities — confrontations that are, after all, a central part of collective action. Proponents of the emotional turn in social movement studies have noted the importance of emotions as “a disposition to act in a certain way,” adding that “such styles are a crucial yet relatively unexplored aspect of social action, especially political action” (Goodwin et al. 2001, p. 14). This chapter aims to shed light on one aspect of this theme.
During my fieldwork among plantation laborers in the Philippine province of Negros Occidental, I experienced the dynamics of face-to-face encounters up close. As I traced the activist history of these women and men, I learned that their struggle to overcome the power of shame was a vital component. In the sugarcane plantation community where I lived for extended periods of time between 1978 and 2000 (“Hacienda Milagros”),[18] I witnessed the emotional turmoil among workers and management during the laborers’ first efforts at collective claim-making in the late 1970s, and the gradual change in the emotional and behavioral disposition of workers as they became seasoned activists in the 1980s and 1990s. Sharing in the daily concerns of the laborers and, whenever possible, in their informal talks, meetings, family reunions, and drinking sessions at local stores, in their encounters with management and other authorities, and in their interactions with unionists and guerrilla activists, I tried to understand these changes from their perspective, at the level of everyday life. Though the workers of Hda. Milagros are not always the centerpiece in the following text, their experiences have inspired its central questions.
*** Deference Rituals
Face-to-face encounters between patrons and dependents are highly circumscribed. Dependents are bound to a behavioral code, enforced by their patron, that prescribes personal deference. The interactions resemble “deference rituals” (Goffman 1956, p. 478) in which both parties play out their relation of dominance and subordination, following a mutually attuned script.
The notion of “claim-making” by dependents is squarely anathema to patrons and may be foreign to the dependents themselves. A redress of grievances is framed by dependents as personal requests, not claims. The requests concern individual favors, not the enforcement of collective rights. These requests, which are made in personal face-to-face interactions with the individual patron or his representative, are couched in the (body)language of deference. This social code is generated and reproduced within a system of control that hinges on personal dependency and loyalty: individuals who monopolize access to scarce resources (land, paid work, and capital) “offer” such access as an individual favor, punish disloyalty and breaches of deference by withholding such access, legitimize their control through an ideology of paternalism and patron largesse, and reward loyalty with individual privileges.[19]
John Aguilar (1982) has offered an enlightening analysis of shame and deference in the encounters between Indians and Ladinos within the highly stratified society of Chiapas, Mexico. Writing of the time before the Chiapas uprising in the 1990s and regionwide ethnic mobilization, Aguilar notes that poor Indian peasants subordinate themselves to the wealthier, educated, and more powerful Ladinos on whom they depend, by complying with Ladino deference requirements (Aguilar 1982, p. 156, 158). These include such everyday symbolic acts as walking slightly behind Ladinos, sitting with the cargo while Ladinos sit in front when riding a truck, using a soft, docile voice when addressing Ladinos, and avoiding sustained eye contact. Any transgression of these subtle rules risks confrontations:
When Indians do make sustained eye contact with Ladinos or when they disagree with them, these are frequently accompanied by gestures which are, as it were, in compensation for these interactional violations. For example, sustained eye contact is often accompanied by an increase in the ‘sweetness’ of tone of voice and/or a lowering of vocal volume; disagreement is usually accompanied by a lowering of the eyes (as if feeling guilt for some transgression) — when disagreement is accompanied by sustained eye contact, it is likely to be read as an unpardonable rebellion (Aguilar 1982, p. 158).
For both parties concerned, the face-to-face interactions are highly charged, symbolically and emotionally. Ladinos consider it morally imperative that Indians “acknowledge their [Ladinos’] superiority and right to command” (ibid., p. 169). Hence, their sensitivity to any gesture that could be interpreted as an act of defiance. For Indians, in turn, each encounter may activate a “feeling of inferiority... in terms of class and life style differences,” and may offer Ladinos the opportunity to ridicule and humiliate them (ibid.)
In these performances, Aguilar argues, Indians are informed not only by strategic considerations, but also by a “psychological predisposition” which makes them acutely sensitive to humiliation by Ladinos. “Shame constitutes a motivational basis for compliance in interethnic deference rituals which complements the interactional power provided Ladinos by their economic leverage over Indians” (ibid., p. 164). Most vulnerable to humiliation by Ladinos are those Indians who have internalized “Ladino cultural criteria for self-evaluation” and hence, the ideology of Ladino superiority over Indians (ibid., p. 157, 165). Where Indians are in close contact with Ladinos, through relations of patronage in particular, the latter have become an important reference group: the sense of self-esteem of Indians when they face Ladinos has come to depend on how they compare themselves to Ladino standards, and how Ladinos perceive and treat them.
This predisposition of dependents, developed within a particular system of control, promotes self-restraint and avoidance in face-to-face interactions with superiors. In more general terms, Ann Swidler (1986, p. 283) speaks of “culturally organized capacities for action.” Local understandings may be such “that alternative ways of organizing action seem unimaginable, or at least implausible” (ibid., p. 284).
*** Dynamics of Shame in Face-to-Face Encounters
Four types of shame are at play in the face-to-face encounters of workers/dependents with employers and other authorities. Implicitly mentioned above, these now deserve closer scrutiny: (1) a negative self-esteem vis-à-vis relevant others; (2) the experience of being personally shamed, humiliated, or the fear of it; (3) the embarrassment of not reciprocating patron “largesse;” (4) the embarrassment of breaching the established rules of interaction when confronting employers in an assertive manner. The first three dimensions are cogently analyzed by Michael Pinches in his ethnographic study of a working-class community in Manila (“Tatalon”); this will form the basis of the brief discussion below.
1. A negative self-esteem vis-à-vis relevant others, or a feeling of public disapproval, is fostered by the structures and symbols of subordination in which the poor are enmeshed in daily life:
For the people with whom I worked, the experience of poverty, hardship and subordination is not just the experience of having to go without in a material sense; more fundamentally, it is the experience of not being valued as human beings, of having to endure humiliation, disapproval and rejection, of constantly having one’s dignity challenged. These feelings of shame are... inflicted from above by virtue of one’s life’s circumstances; they are embedded in the structure of class society (Pinches 1991, p. 177).
In everyday life, the poor are continuously reminded of their inferior status compared to the more well-off: in their appearance, clothing, speech, and posture, in the location of their homes and workplaces, and in their “command of etiquette and bureaucratic procedure,” the “labels of poverty, propertylessness, and uncertain employment are inescapable” (ibid., p. 178). In Tatalon, “the sensitivity to these labels carries with it much pain and self-doubt, so that when people find themselves in the company of others more privileged than themselves, or are faced with this prospect, they commonly say ‘we feel ashamed’ ” (Pinches 1991, pp. 178–179). The “People Power” uprising in Manila in 1986 formed a rare exception: as poor and rich massed together on Edsa Avenue in the middle-class and elite-led protest against President Marcos, all warm bodies were valued equally, and the uprising enabled the participants from Tatalon, however briefly, “to command recognition, to stand in the presence of the rich without having to contend with the power of shame” (ibid., pp. 185–186).
This feeling of shame, activated in the presence of privileged others but emanating from a diffuse source, tends to foster avoidance, withdrawal, or an ambition for upward social mobility — in short, accommodation to the existing social order in various forms. It is a pragmatic accommodation to a large extent, since an alternative course of action is not feasible for many of the poor concerned (ibid., p. 179).
2. Shaming is the act of inflicting shame on others through ridicule or condescension (ibid., p. 167). The source is not diffuse but specific. The working-class poor of Tatalon are on the receiving end of this action in numerous encounters with the more privileged — employers, local officials, teachers, and priests — in which the poor generally feel regarded and treated with “contempt, ridicule, or patronizing sympathy.” They are ignored in public, spoken down to, verbally insulted, or they overhear how others speak about them as “rubbish,” “squatters,” and “vagrants.” Such encounters, in which the system of social inequality is acted out, arouse “intense feelings of class anger in Tatalon,” an anger shaped into a collective emotion as individuals share their stories of insult within the community (ibid., pp. 181–182). The anger feeds into a hidden transcript of protest (Scott 1990), a “counterpoint” value system that turns the tables on the rich and powerful (Wertheim 1964). However, the anger is rarely expressed in open confrontations, which would risk considerable sanctions.
Walk-outs are common reactions of Philippine workers when they are shamed on the work floor: the act makes a statement, but it avoids facing the employer or manager in defiance and protest. Speaking of construction workers in the Philippine province of Nueva Ecija, Kerkvliet mentions workers “leaving in anger and disgust because the boss spoke harshly to or swore at the worker,” scolded workers in front of fellow workers, publicly questioned their skills, and treated them “like dogs” (Kerkvliet 1990, p. 160). Forced to put up with bad labor conditions to avoid dismissal, they reach the limit of their compliance “when an employer makes a person look like a fool, curses him, or hurts his self-esteem” (ibid., p. 163). When face-to-face confrontations do take place, they may take the form of spontaneous, angry outbursts by individuals, a type that Scott called a “first public declaration of the hidden transcript,” “the reversal of a public humiliation” (Scott 1990, p. 203).
3. Embarrassment for not reciprocating patron benevolence is an emotion that is consciously played upon by elites. Pinches speaks of a “politics of shame,” in which shame is often “invoked as a principal sanction in reciprocal relations,” including relations of economic or political patronage. People generally feel “embarrassed” when they do not “fulfill a debt of gratitude” toward patrons or politicians who have shown their “benevolence” in diverse ways (ibid., pp. 174–175, 177). One may add that this feeling may thwart dependents’ complaints vis-à-vis their patrons, and may impede their requests for an additional “favor” when they feel they have no right to it.
4. Finally, the embarrassment of breaching the established rules of interaction may function as a powerful deterrent. In their book Encounters with Unjust Authority Gamson et al. (1982) describe this embarrassment as follows:
To challenge authority, one must make a scene, which many people are reluctant to do. The smooth flow of interaction will be disrupted and an awkward and, perhaps unpleasant, interpersonal exchange will result. Since the norms of polite interaction prohibit discrediting the claims of others, potential challengers run the risk of making asses of themselves. Apart from any consideration of sanctions, they may appear boorish and rude (Gamson et al. 1982, p. 111).
Inspired by Goffman, the authors argue that “in all face-to-face interactions factors operate to restrain challenge” (ibid., p. 110). They clarify:
Every social situation is built upon a working consensus among the participants. One of its chief premises is that once a definition of the situation has been projected and agreed upon by participants, there shall be no challenge to it. Disruption of the working consensus has the character of moral transgression. Open conflict about the definition of the situation is incompatible with polite exchange (ibid., p. 111).
When, in our case, workers breach the established code of patron-client interaction, they challenge the “working consensus” of patron-clientage and the tenuous hierarchy which it upholds. In such confrontations, all parties to the encounter may lose face in the eyes of their beholders: the employer-patrons, whose claim to deserve the unconditional loyalty of their workers is openly discredited by their own laborers; and the workers themselves, whose bosses tend to vilify the new role and identity which the workers put forth in the encounter. Employer-patrons accept their workers as clients, not as challengers. As they refuse to acknowledge the challengers as legitimate claimants, they tend to undermine the workers’ “face” (Goffman 1955), the assertive “image of the self” that the workers try to project in the encounter.
The first three forms of shame discussed above strike at the root of the dignity and self-esteem of the working poor, one reason why shame is so salient emotionally. The claim to dignity, says Aguilar of the Indians in Chiapas, is “one of the few expressions of pride available to these people so depreciated within the social hierarchy of the town and region” (Aguilar 1982, p. 161). The “public repudiation of the dignity claim” (ibid.) is, therefore, all the more painful to people in extremely subordinate positions. In contrast to shame, “dignity means being treated as a human being, with courtesy and without ridicule” (Kerkvliet 1990, p. 250). It also means “having a standard of living that is becoming to a human being according to current standards,” and which invites, therefore, “the respect of others who otherwise would be derogatory” (ibid.).
All four dimensions of shame discussed in this section may function as barriers to worker activism — in particular, as barriers to face-to-face encounters with employers and other authorities in which collective claims are forcefully made. A sense of inferiority among workers in the presence of the (relatively) rich and powerful may undercut the self-confidence necessary to present claims to employers. The fear of being ridiculed by their employers, humiliated in the eyes of their fellow workers, and denied the dignity of legitimate claimants may stifle the claim-making initiatives of individual workers, as does the risk of losing face by “inappropriate conduct.” Finally, embarrassment for failing to show the expected gratitude for patron benevolence may place a moral brake on face-to-face protest. In brief, shame may help reproduce, as Scott termed it, the public “performance of deference and consent,” required “of those subject to elaborate and systematic forms of social subordination” (Scott 1990, pp. 2–3).
How, then, could dependent, clientelist workers ever shift from deference to confrontation? The next two sections discuss how this process took place among Philippine plantation workers.
*** Shame and the Habitus of Personal Dependents: The Case of Philippine Plantation Workers
In the Philippine sugarcane plantation region of Negros Occidental, progressive Catholic clergy and labor unions introduced, in the late 1960s-1970s, a repertoire of collective action that involved a dramatic breach of the interaction rules of patron-clientage. This process was, in a sense, more “revolutionary” than the later involvement of plantation workers with the nationwide communist guerrilla movement Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA). It eased the way for a massive expansion of leftwing mobilization and underground organization by the CPP-NPA in the region in the late 1970s-1980s, supported by allied (above-ground) labor unions and other mass movements. By the mid-1980s, thousands of plantation workers participated in protests, strikes, and rallies, and in numerous small-scale confrontations with management within their own plantations.[20] In the process, these women and men developed a “radical habitus,” an “inclination to fight and the know-how to do so” (Crossley 2003, p. 61), which superceded the habitus of dependence and deference.
The first breaching of the habitus of clientage occurred in the early stages of worker activism in the region, when worker claims were modest, and when unions and Catholic clergy who supported the workers were not (yet) linked to the revolutionary movement. Despite the modest demands, these confrontations provoked the most intense emotional reactions from planters and workers, precisely because these were the first acts of collective defiance in the face of individual planters. Before I discuss this process, I offer a brief sketch of the role of shame in worker-planter relations in the region.
The province of Negros Occidental, on Negros Island in the central Philippines, presently comprises several thousand sugarcane plantations (haciendas) that range in size from several hundred hectares to less than fifty, worked by an estimated 200,000 laborers, many of whom live with their families on hacienda land and survive on meager wages. The patronage complex was developed in this region in the nineteenth century in the context of a frontier society where planters sought to attract workers (many from the neighboring island of Panay) to their newly established haciendas. It persisted in the context of a weak state and continued private ownership of the haciendas, with many planters, or one of their relatives, personally managing the hacienda enterprise, even after they moved house from the hacienda to nearby towns or the provincial capital. Planters have long been able to use the police, judiciary, clergy, and the system of electoral politics to maintain hegemonic control, combining patronage with coercion (McCoy 1991, p. 142). Until the 1970s-1980s, workers were under tight planter control and vulnerable to planter repression. They lacked a tradition of organized protest and were divided among themselves to gain personal favors from their employers (Larkin 1993).
Unionists and progressive clergy noted, in the 1960s-1970s, a “feudal culture” in the haciendas: workers were submissive and passive toward their planter and, above all, unable to personally confront their planter or overseer with their demands. “The silence on the plantations is eerie, pervasive, like a lonely desert,” noted Niall O’Brien (1993, p. 74), an Irish Columban priest who became instrumental in organizing progressive “Basic Christian Communities” among workers and peasants in the south of the province. The laborers, for the most part, “hold their tongues. It has been an uphill battle for any genuine labor union to organize the laborers,” even for the most basic forms of bargaining with local management (ibid.). “Loyalty and an unswerving obedience to the hacendero,” were demanded of workers in order to qualify for subsistence loans and credit from the hacienda store, observed local sociologist Nanette Dungo. Any open expression of worker grievances could be “interpreted as disobedience by the hacendero” (Dungo 1993, p. 27).
Patronage and coercion produced shame and fear among hacienda laborers in their interactions with planters and management. The “culture of dependence” devastated, according to O’Brien, “the mental antibodies which help people to stand up and believe in themselves,” and it destroyed the “independence, self-reliance, and self-confidence of the people” (O’Brien 1993, p. 129). Moreover, embarrassment for failing to reciprocate planter benevolence was strategically played upon by management. One reason why “unionism failed to penetrate the haciendas” until the 1970s was, according to Dungo, that “workers themselves admitted to the recognition of a debt of gratitude to the hacendero for all the support given to them,” and these feelings “were further reinforced by constant reminders by the encargado [overseer] of workers’ obligations to the hacendero in exchange for their employment in the hacienda” (Dungo 1993, p. 165). Finally, the sensitivity to personal insult and the harshness of planter sanctions required an immense self-restraint among workers in their encounters with management, in particular among men, who are culturally expected to defend their honor through violence. Standard reactions of workers to personal insults by a planter or overseer (or to acts interpreted as such) included: swallowing the insult according to the script of deference, leaving the hacienda in nonconfrontational protest, or physically attacking the person in question. Speaking of workers who suffered from an abusive overseer in a hacienda where he lived in the 1960s, O’Brien remarked: “They were prepared to talk about him behind his back, maybe even to knife him if things got too bad. But they were not prepared to confront him, though they would have been happy if I had done it for them” (O’Brien 1993, p. 75, emphasis added).
This emotional complex was supported by an intense sensitivity to shame in Philippine society. Individuals of all classes seek to avoid being “rejected or improperly criticized by others,” and try to maintain “smooth interpersonal relations” in which they “avoid outward signs of conflict” (Lynch 1973, pp. 8–9).[21] This is all the more true for subordinates who seek subsistence security through personal ties of dependency (ibid.). In the hacienda society of Negros, planters have certainly profited from this behavioral code. Workers have stated their “requests” as unobtrusively as possible, used the idiom of clientelism as a euphemism to avoid any impression of conflict, accommodated to the owner as they explored the limits of the planter’s willingness to give in, and used the overseer as a go-between. When poor people approached local authorities to redress wrongs perpetrated by influential persons (landgrabbing by a planter, for example), such intermediaries tended toward “smoothening the relationship” in the interest of the powerful. “The job to be done was to mend the relationship, not to undo the injustice. Invariably the ‘little’ man was clapped on the back, cajoled, reassured, and led to shake hands with his oppressor, although no reversal of the injustice had taken place” (O’Brien 1993, p. 139, emphasis in the original).
Lack of formal education and a lack of knowledge of city ways, middle-class habits, and the modus operandi of government offices and other institutions — in short, a lack of cultural capital to stand their ground in interactions with outsiders — has further fed into the workers’ sensitivity to shame. A leftwing union activist and plantation laborer described to me how this works out in the hacienda where he lives:
At festive meals, at a marriage or fiesta, for instance, the workers are too ashamed to sit at the table, but stand close together with their backs to the crowd, scarcely eating a thing [for fear of breaching etiquette and becoming the object of ridicule, RR]. When they need to visit an office and someone pushes a form under their nose, they are startled, ‘what do I need to do with this?!’ They all depend on us three here [the three union activists in the hacienda] in dealing with the authorities. When one of the workers needs to go to hospital in the city, one of us always has to accompany him: to talk to the nurse and doctor, arrange admittance, bring the receipts for medicine to the hacienda office, arrange the paperwork for Medicare, and so on.
Under these conditions — social, economic, cultural — the deference of workers vis-à-vis authorities had become a habit, the “natural” thing to do when approaching a superior. Moreover, in a society where an emotional and behavioral predisposition toward loyal personal service is necessary for sheer survival, acquiring this predisposition is part of the socialization of workers’ children. Notions of propriety are at work here, too: workers come to perceive deferential behavior toward superiors as “proper conduct.”
I do not imply that workers were molded into obedient dependents unable of critical thought — far from it. As Scott and Kerkvliet (1977) have cogently shown, the system of patron-client reciprocity contains, in itself, the seeds of criticism, as it sets a standard for patron behavior which patrons often breach in practice. The concept of the “bad patron” offered ample room for criticism. However, this criticism either remained a hidden transcript, or emerged in public in brief, violent outbursts. The behavioral disposition of workers/dependents, promoted by structural constraints, hindered a more sustained, controlled, and collective form of claim-making in face-to-face encounters with planters.
*** From Deference to Confrontation
By turning deference rituals into claim-making encounters, worker activists openly challenged the patronage system — the complex of ideology, behavior, and (expected) emotions that shape and legitimize relations of subordination and control. If we perceive workers’ humble, personal requests for “favors” as part of their action repertoire under patronage, then the change toward collective, assertive claim-making vis-à-vis their patrons formed a dramatic repertoire shift. Repertoires of contention, says Tilly (1995, pp. 26–27), are “the established ways in which pairs of actors make and receive claims bearing on each other’s interests,” and as such they are “learned cultural creations.” An action repertoire concerns “not only what people do when they are engaged in conflict with others; it is what they know how to do and what others expect them to do” (Tarrow 1998, p. 30; emphasis in the original). As they began to stage collective confrontations, workers in the plantations of Negros had to beat the twin emotions of shame and fear.
Early risers play a pivotal role in breaching the established rules of interaction. They bear the burden of breaking local conventions, suffer the embarrassment of “inappropriate” action, and may endure outrage from the side of authorities. “But once the ice is broken,” note Gamson et al. (1982, p. 111), “the risk of being embarrassed by inappropriate action has been greatly reduced.”
Support from third parties may be essential to pull this transition off, at least in those cases where the working poor are locked in established ties of dependency and subordination. Revolutionary China offers an extreme example. During Mao’s previctory land reform campaign, revolutionary cadres carefully stage-managed “struggle sessions” in villages to persuade long-subordinated peasants to publicly air their grievances against landlords and officials. Literally setting the stage for a new interaction script, they appointed village activists as “chief accuser” and “second accuser,” among others, and “coached the activists on how to perform their assigned jobs” (Chen 1986 in Perry 2002, p. 114). When peasants remained reluctant, “a cadre’s slap” on the jaw of an official might signal not only a radical shift in the balance of power, but also a shift in the action repertoire deemed appropriate and legitimate, as promoted by a new, alternative power group in the village (Perry 2002, p. 114).
In Negros Occidental, the new repertoire was introduced by labor unions and progressive Catholic clergy at a time (late 1960s-1970s) when planter power was still near hegemonic on the haciendas, and planters dictated the script of worker-planter interactions. Under these conditions, an early form of collective claim-making consisted of workers simply inserting this new type of action into the established script of deference. This could produce intensely awkward situations for both parties involved as the claims, however politely made, breached the rules of appropriate client behavior and could be read by planters as a gross impropriety. Moreover, the novelty of claim-making could render the target of the claims literally speechless, as the following case illustrates. The case concerns resident hacienda workers who sought to obtain a wage raise from their town-based planter. Local union leaders had requested Columban priest Niall O’Brien, who lived near the hacienda, to mediate on behalf of the workers. O’Brien recounts:
We planned the visit to Dona Clarit carefully, because a sixth sense told me that a large group of people arriving would be taken as an assault and would never be let in... Islaw [a worker-unionist from the hacienda] came into the house with me. The workers remained in the truck. I introduced Islaw to Dona Clarit when she eventually appeared. She was nervous.
After preliminary greetings, she asked: “Who is this?”
“This is Islaw. He’s been working for you for the last thirteen years. He’d like to talk to you.”
Islaw with great deference began to tell Dona Clarit of the conditions on the farm.
When he finished she remained impassive and mumbled something about not knowing all the details of running the farms.
“Islaw, is that your best shirt?” I said, pointing to his threadbare polo shirt.
“Yes, it’s my best. I bought it about seven years ago.”
“Tia Clarit, I know you don’t realize it, but the people on your farm cannot even buy clothes.”
She started to weep as when one is being harassed. And it was clear that the discussion was at an end. We took our leave politely. I was glad now that the other workers had remained outside (O’Brien 1987, p. 56).
Shortly after, the planter dropped the resident workers from the payroll and hired migrant workers to take their place (ibid.).
Labor unions offered a way out of this cul-de-sac by acting as intermediaries. They filed cases in the provincial labor court that precluded a personal, face-to-face confrontation between workers and their planter. The opportunity of a more formalized negotiation in the court room opened up as President Marcos, after proclaiming martial law in 1972, imposed new labor laws, widely aired over the radio, to gain the support of the poor in his effort to control established elites. Unions, often led by attorneys, reacted by calling on workers (over the radio, or through progressive clergy) to sign up with their union and get their legal due. A government ban on strikes, moreover, limited alternative options. While planters and their lawyers obstructed these labor cases by formal means (arranging for counter-affidavits, not showing up for court sessions), planters fought a different battle in their own haciendas.
Planters struck back by forcing their own style of personal confrontations on the workers, a type of “shame-laden” encounter that sought to pressure workers back into the clientelist mold. Planters whose workers had joined a union and had filed a labor case in court, proceeded, in many cases, to their haciendas where they staged a turbulent performance in front of their workers. I heard of planters who arrived at their haciendas drunk, who shouted at their workers, some turning violent and threatening to attack workers physically, or damaging property in workers’ homes. They conveyed the image of a patron enraged, deeply hurt, and betrayed by his own workers. In societies where power and status are based, in large part, on a loyal personal following, the reputation of being able to command such loyalty is certainly a quality that the rich and influential try to protect against disparagement. Humiliated by the audacity of their workers to question their status as patrons, they appealed to the workers’ own sense of shame by referring to the workers as ungrateful, disloyal, deceiving, or naive and misled by unionists. In doing so, they refused to acknowledge their workers as legitimate claimants, as persons whose claims deserved to be heard.
Consider the following two cases. The first concerns a planter who threatened, cajoled, and shamed her workers back into the clientelist fold:
September 1975, municipality of Kabankalan: The furious owner of Hacienda A. (a 360-hectare property) arrived at the hacienda for a showdown with her workers, two days after twenty workers of the hacienda had filed a case against her at the Department of Labor in the provincial capital. With the help of an attorney-led union (the National Union of Sugar Industries) which had offered its services over the radio, the workers contested the planter’s non-compliance with the minimum wage law. The planter, accompanied by her manager and three security guards, had traveled twenty kilometers from the nearby town where she lived.
She summoned all workers to the hacienda “big house.” Showing her anger openly, she told the workers how “deeply disappointed” she was. She presented them with two options: immediate withdrawal from the union (marked by signing up for a newly-formed company union), or a lock-out from hacienda work. She then summoned, one by one, each worker who had signed the union complaint into a separate room for a brief talk. There, flanked by her manager and security guards, she sat at a desk with a pile of banknotes, and called the vice president of the newly formed local union chapter to come in first. She “reminded” him that she had granted him the privilege of using a plot of hacienda land for subsistence cultivation, and eventually he accepted 100 pesos (about fifteen times the legal minimum daily wage at the time). After his “surrender,” many followed.
Two days later, the provincial union president visited the hacienda in anger. At a meeting in which the remaining activist workers accused the others of betrayal, and the latter argued they were pressured, the union president said he felt like quitting this case: hadn’t he warned the workers not to negotiate with the planter without his presence?
The planter returned several times to the hacienda to pressure the remaining members to leave the union. Most eventually yielded as they suffered from the lock-out. Though the court case continued with the last remaining members, it stagnated through intimidations and delaying tactics by the planter, even though the planter eventually did agree to pay the legal minimum wage and cost of living allowance.
Workers later recounted this union episode as a humiliating surrender, with shame but also with self-mockery and some satisfaction that they had challenged the planter this one time. The militant workers who persevered felt proud that they had, at least, stood by their principles (Wiersma 1982, pp. 29–33, my summary).
The second case shows how personal insults and the threat of planter violence might incite workers to fall back on another familiar act in the repertoire of dependents: counter-violence by individual workers who felt shamed. Unintentionally, the new action repertoire could promote such individual outbursts. Since workers were collectively present at the encounters, they formed an audience for the planter’s shaming practices which, in turn, might pressure the insulted worker to avenge the personal affront rather than swallow the humiliation in public. Moreover, the new actions introduced by the unions (e.g., the filing of a case in court) signaled to the workers that the script of deference was no longer the sole guide to conduct in the confrontations that followed:
April 1978, municipality of Murcia: A worker killed his planter during a collective confrontation in the hacienda, after the planter had personally threatened and insulted him. This planter, described in union records as “a very cruel man,” reacted to a court case filed against him by his workers, with the help of a union, to protest their “illegal ejection” from hacienda plots they had long tenanted.
The planter summoned his workers for a meeting in the hacienda. He carried a pistol, and many workers had cane-knives at their side. According to union records the planter, “in a loud and angry voice, shouted at the worker-tenants: ‘What do you really want? Do you really want to grab my land? You, Rodolfo, you are really a deceiver. What do you want now?’ ” After he moved as if to kick Rodolfo (the worker-tenant who had initiated the formal complaint), the showdown between Rodolfo and the planter quickly escalated, the planter drew his pistol, and Rodolfo killed the planter by stabbing him repeatedly. Rodolfo, and several other workers who were accused as accomplices, were jailed and charged with homicide (Case history, National Federation of Sugar Workers, Murcia/Bacolod, April 1978, summarized by the author).
These cases embody a unionist’s worst fears: as planters reacted according to the script of patronage and coercion, many workers were unable to stand their ground — in terms of emotions, discourse, and actions. They reverted to the repertoire of personal dependents, swallowing the humiliation of being pushed back into the role of a loyal subordinate or, as happened in some cases, they retaliated with uncontrolled violence to personal shaming.
The above suggests a lack of fit between action, discourse, and feeling in this early stage in the repertoire shift. Unions and progressive Catholic clergy introduced into the haciendas a repertoire of action that could only be sustained by a matching discourse (of class and labor rights) and a matching set of emotions (righteous indignation, and pride and self-confidence of workers as workers when facing authorities). It also called for specific behavior: a steady and forceful mode of speech, sustained eye contact, a self-assured posture, and the ability to control potentially disruptive emotions like anger.
Such a “fit” would become all the more necessary in the next phase of the repertoire shift. Confronted by planter repression of workers who had filed labor cases in court, the union National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) and progressive clergy began to promote, in the 1970s, a different form of collective action among hacienda workers: informal, face-to-face confrontations with individual planters or management to put forward worker demands. This required a culture change in the haciendas.
*** Emotion Work: Changing Sentiments and Behavioral Dispositions
“Emotion work” is called for, says Arlie Hochschild, when there is a lack of fit between a situation (including social interactions), the way this situation is ideologically framed, and the feelings expected of, and experienced by, people in this situation — in short, a lack of “fusion of situation, frame, and feeling” (Hochschild 1979, p. 563). She defines emotion work as “the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling,” which may involve evoking desired feelings and suppressing undesired feelings (ibid., p. 552). Any ideological stance, she notes, contains implicit “feeling rules,” which are guidelines for how one ought to feel in specific situations. The feeling rules of a leftwing ideology may stipulate, for example, that “one can be legitimately angry at the boss or company” (ibid., p. 566). When a person “changes an ideological stand, he or she drops old rules and assumes new ones for reacting to situations, cognitively and emotively” (ibid., p. 567).
Researchers have explored how social movements “reshape emotion cultures” and “emotional repertoires,” in order to free individuals from “devitalizing” feelings associated with their subordinate or marginal position (cf. Taylor 2000; Goodwin et al. 2001, p. 14, 22; Reger 2004). Many movements, says Jasper, “are motivated precisely to fight stigmatized identities” (Jasper 1998, p. 415). Attention is paid to the “emotional socialization process” within social movements, which “entails learning appropriate ‘feeling rules’ that guide social interaction within the movement” (Aminzade and McAdam 2001, p. 40).
Such emotion work may be essential, too, in guiding face-to-face interaction with external parties. Turning shame into pride is a key factor in this process. In contrast to shame — which involves a negative (self)evaluation and fosters avoidance of public space — pride involves a positive (self)evaluation and promotes public performance. “Prideful behavior occupies public space,” Britt and Heise argue (2000, p. 254), and “clear and powerful public discourse, a steady gaze, and even public demonstrations may be taken as indicators of pride.”
Hochschild discerns several techniques of emotion work that are relevant to our case: (1) cognitive: “the attempt to change images, ideas, or thoughts in the service of changing the feelings associated with them;” (2) bodily: “the attempt to change somatic or other physical symptoms of emotions (i.e., trying to breathe slower, trying not to shake);” (3) expressive: “trying to change expressive gestures in the service of changing inner feeling (e.g., trying to smile, or to cry)” (Hochschild 1979, p. 562). I discuss each below, broadly adjusted to our theme, as I briefly trace developments among hacienda workers in Negros Occidental since the 1970s. I focus, in particular, on the experiences of workers in Hacienda Milagros.
1. Changing the interpretation of the situation in order to change the feelings associated with it: A common process of reinterpretation (or reframing) aims to convince underdogs that their feelings of inadequacy in the face of dominant groups are socially produced, and are part of a system of oppression: they are not inferior but are defined as such. In the process, “individuals may come to feel angry not only because the system is unjust but because they have been made to feel ashamed” (Britt and Heise 2000, p. 257).
The “conscientization” seminars organized for hacienda workers in Negros Occidental in the 1970s, by progressive clergy and unionists, introduced a similar frame. They all started with the issue of dignity: the right to a dignified existence, “dignity in work,” “hacienderos” values and attitudes as not dignified,” and the “debased situation” of workers as “fruit of oppression by the planters” (NFSW typescript, Bacolod City, n.d.). The seminars produced anger as well, as activists meticulously computed on blackboard the production costs and value, wage share, and planter profits, convincing workers that planters were robbing them of the fruits of their labor. The frame of labor exploitation and oppression, moreover, legitimized claims for a better deal, and helped to overcome worker diffidence in making collective claims at all. Subsequent seminars by CPP-NPA organizers further elaborated this Marxist frame, and stressed the collective power and efficacy of militant workers.
The shift from shame to pride was reinforced by a shift in reference group. When workers felt socially inadequate in encounters with the planters and other rich and educated persons, they were measuring themselves against the standards of urban, middle- and higher-class culture, to which they aspired to some degree. Living just a half-hour bus-drive from the provincial capital Bacolod City, and incorporated in its urban culture to some extent (through the schools, market, and media), workers of Hda. Milagros were sensitive to how members of that category perceived and valued them. In countering this cultural dependency, the leftwing union and, even more so, the revolutionary CPP-NPA, put forward their own cadres as a new reference group for the workers, and their own leftwing and revolutionary culture as the new standard for self-evaluation. Cadres labeled the old reference group burgis and its culture as “rotten,” called its representatives thieves and landgrabbers, denounced the “feudal” mentality of workers who look up to their masters, and degraded formal education with the argument that only revolutionary teachings offer the truth about society. The cadres were presented as moral and social exemplars, as new role models to be emulated. This shift in reference group was promoted by new opinion leaders and status-makers in the hacienda: the CPP-NPA cadres and activists among the workers who had adopted the new standard and, in close interaction with their hacienda-mates, valued those who tried to live up to it.
The worker body, as a source of shame in public self-presentations, was subject to reinterpretation as well. A dark sun-burned skin, rough hands, splayed feet from wearing flip-flops, skin rashes from the sharp cane leaves, a face that aged and wrinkled quickly under the merciless sun — these were traits that were far removed from the widely accepted bourgeois ideal of the plump, fair-skinned body of those who spent leisurely lives in air-conditioned offices and comfortable homes. Laborers talked of their work in the canefields as “sucking the blood out of their bodies,” as emaciating them, and they judged themselves “ugly” in comparison to the richer people in town.[22] Against the physical ideal of the rich and middle classes, the worker activists in the hacienda promoted the ideal of the proud worker body, portrayed in numerous drawings in union pamphlets and underground newsletters, in large painted props during worker demonstrations in the provincial capital, and in sketches by the union’s theatre groups, resembling Soviet and Maoist socialistrealist art. They represented a worker body that exuded pride and self-confidence, and that would hold its ground in public confrontations.
In contrast to the pride-inhibiting identity of worker-client, the established identity of worker mother did offer more solid emotional basis for assertive encounters. A mother’s drive to fight for her children’s well-being (propelled by mother love) is respected by all classes in Philippine society, as is women’s responsibility to make ends meet. Claims put forward as mothers’ concerns have the aura of legitimacy,[23] and appear less threatening to powerholders than the claims of “workers” or “men.” In Hda. Milagros, women’s identity as mothers offered a potential source of strength in the face of power. Activists promoted the organization of “mothers’ groups” in the hacienda, and the women began to stage small-scale collective encounters with the planter to demand higher wages and more subsistence credit “because our children go hungry.” These were among the first collective confrontations in the hacienda in the late 1970s. The appeals to motherhood may have added to the women’s ability to pull these performances off, and the willingness of the planter to answer their demands.
2. Training: changing behavior, controlling emotions: Though reinterpretations of reality helped change the perception of the status quo and the feelings associated with it, a very different thing was putting these ideas and feelings into practice during public encounters with the planter or one of his representatives. Workers remained, initially, extremely sensitive to any hint of being snubbed or not taken seriously. The anger they felt when being shamed, might now slip out in the encounter itself. No longer guided by the script of deference and expected, instead, to be assertive, attempts to make controlled demands might derail into uncontrolled accusations and an aggressive voice. “I was emotional at first,” recounted a female worker in Hda. Milagros, “I threw out words when I made demands, words that hurt.” These could be painful experiences to the workers involved, as the following case shows:
Tia Nena became an activist in the women’s organization in the hacienda. But she had difficulty controlling her emotions in face-to-face confrontations. When she put across the demands of women workers to the female bookkeeper of the hacienda on payday, in full view of her fellow-workers, she got entangled in the verbal disputes that followed. She felt nervous, weak, afraid, and angry. Once, when she lodged a complaint with the bookkeeper, she added impulsively, with an aggressive voice, that the bookkeeper was a thief and had pocketed payroll money. When the bookkeeper had her revenge by ignoring Tia Nena’s demands the next time around, Tia Nena felt powerless and a failure in her mission. She vented her rage at home, exclaiming she couldn’t cope with these types of confrontations. Tia Fe, herself a worker activist, later commented in private that Tia Nena lacked skills in presenting her demands: she blurted them out, her tone was aggressive, and the phrasing not persuasive.
“Thickening the face” — that is how union activists, and later CPP-NPA cadres, called the process of training workers to overcome their sensitivity to shame. It “empowers” the poor, they explained to me; it helps them to “overcome their inferiority complex” in the presence of the powerful. They sought to foster sentiments and habits that would promote claim-making in public encounters. This involved practical training in controlling emotions: how to “analyze first before you react,” how to act with diplomacia, speak in a controlled manner, choose words with care, not be angry. Fear of shaming, and fear as such, were countered by fostering self-confidence and feelings of strength and adequacy, as noted earlier. Worker activists were persuaded to perceive the workers who were present at the encounter as a supportive cast that gave them strength, and not as potential witnesses and collaborators of a shaming experience. A female worker explained, “when I know I am in the right, and the people behind me support me, then I am not afraid.”
A sign of this increased self-confidence in public encounters was the ability of workers to stragolay. The term stragolay is probably a local adaptation of the English word “to struggle.” In the Maoist sense of the term, it means to forcefully put across one’s point in a contentious gathering. It involves a determined, sustained, and self-assured vocal performance. Worker activists in Hda. Milagros mentioned that they engaged in stragolay among themselves, or with fellow workers during CPP-NPA seminars, but also in the numerous small-scale collective actions versus the planter which they staged from the late 1970s onwards.
3. Doing it is feeling it: “Shame and pride are associated with distinctive behaviors,” Britt and Heise (2000, pp. 252–253) argue, and “performing those behaviors can induce the emotions.” In other words, “hiding creates shame, and public displays create pride” (ibid., p. 254). Rallies and demonstrations in public places may promote collective pride, in particular when they form a successful display of the solidarity, commitment, and numbers of the participants, as well as the worthiness of their collective identity (cf. Tilly 2004, p. 4). The first rallies of plantation workers and peasants in Bacolod City during the martial law regime of President Marcos, in the 1970s, supported by progressive clergy and unionists, proved an exhilarating experience for workers of Hda. Milagros. As they marched through the main streets of the provincial capital, shoulder to shoulder with workers from haciendas across the province, carrying simple cardboard placards demanding higher wages, partial land reform, and a respect for human rights, and as they congregated with hundreds of fellow workers on the main city plaza in front of the Catholic cathedral to listen to the speeches of activists and clergy, they experienced, perhaps for the first time, power in numbers and dignity (as workers) in the public arena of the powerful.
If hiding produces shame and public display pride, then, by the same token, deference promotes shame, and defiance may promote pride and personal self-worth. This may not be a simple, straightforward relationship, as the example of Tia Nena above suggests, but there is ample evidence for such a connection. The first acts of defiance against dominant persons, says Scott, produce a “sense of personal release, satisfaction, pride, and elation” and appear to “restore a sense of self-respect and personhood” (Scott 1990, pp. 208–210). “ ‘I was nothing before; I was a man now’,” said former slave Frederick Douglass (quoted by Scott), who defied his master for the first time by physically fighting him off (ibid., p. 208, emphasis in the original).
The act itself may induce the emotion. Often repeated, such novel acts, and the feelings attached to them, may become habitual to the actors themselves. A habitus of compliance and deference may thus be punctured and gradually replaced by a habitus of defiance, as individuals engage in a string of defiant acts. As Crossley notes, “ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving and acting that are repeated often enough will assume a habitual form,” and so, too, a “disposition toward critique and protest,” a “radical habitus,” is “generated through involvement in critique and protest” (Crossley 2003, p. 55, 61). Thus, the activism of movement participants “entails an ongoing attempt to change their habitual ways of being-in-the-world: that is, ‘habit-busting habits’.” (ibid., p. 56).
The desirability of the emotion (dignity, pride) may also form, in turn, an incentive to engage in defiant action. Among peasants in El Salvador who had long suffered humiliation and fear under landlord rule, Wood (2001, p. 279) found that “pride in agency and the reassertion of a dignity long suppressed” formed an important motive for engaging in collective action. As the guerrilla movement FMLN offered a basis for “the exercise of agency in the realization of their interests,” the gradual success of peasant actions (access to land and freedom from landlord control) further increased their confidence in their own capacities vis-à-vis the landed elite.
I found similar processes at work among laborers in Hda. Milagros. The women and men who had become seasoned activists by the early 1990s had achieved a degree of self-confidence in their interactions with people in authority (planter, mayor, bureaucrats in the offices of the Department of Labor), an ability to organize around strategic goals, and a habit of forceful speech in public, all of which expressed self-assurance and assertiveness in the public sphere. The numerous rallies, meetings, encounters with the planter and overseer, and efforts at local organization in which they had played leading roles, contributed to these acts and feelings becoming “habitual.” At the same time, these worker activists could easily revert to the clientelist mode when expedient — for example, when appeasing the planter or overseer, or when seeking a favor from local politicians. Less captive of the clientelist complex than before, these workers could now make strategic use of it.
Broader processes supported this change in habitus. Feelings of self-confidence and efficacy were boosted by a sequence of successful local confrontations in Hda. Milagros, related to the growing influence of the CPP-NPA in the region during the 1980s, which pressured the planter (like many other planters in the province) to make concessions to his workers. Moreover, the state has continued to chip away at the power of planters since Marcos’s martial law period: the government departments of labor and agrarian reform are gradually supporting the legal rights of workers in practice, and are slowly pushing planters into the role of employers, not patrons, and of property owners, not lords of the manor. Finally, a rising level of education has added to the workers’ stock of cultural capital, allowing them to navigate government bureaucracies and other arenas of power with more confidence.
Together, the changes discussed above have helped workers of Milagros to overcome their shame when facing the planter, an achievement which they expressed to me with some pride: “I am poor, but I feel no shame when I speak with management.”
*** Conclusion
The discussion above suggests several points. First, shame (coupled to fear) may form a powerful impediment to claim-making in face-to-face encounters. Claimants are most vulnerable to personal humiliation, denial of dignity, and rejection as legitimate claimants when facing their employers or other authority figures on whom they depend. Moreover, they may create (and feel) an acute embarrassment for breaching the established rules of “proper” interaction. The shame that may stifle worker activism is an emotion and a behavioral disposition formed in relations of domination, and supported by a dominant culture that labels the poor and working classes as inferior, creates a negative self-esteem of the poor vis-à-vis the rich and powerful, and permeates all cross-class interactions.
Second, when workers are poor dependents, then poverty, patronage and coercion may create among workers a habitus of clientelism and deference toward their patron in which the twin emotions of shame and fear form the emotional core. The clientelist habitus makes a sustained, controlled, and collective form of claim-making versus employers a difficult thing to achieve. When worker activists attempt to move from deference to planned confrontations, the role of shame is thrown in even sharper relief. Sensibilities of workers/dependents are at play: learned inhibitions, a dignity claim that is constantly under threat, and the fear of violent sanctions if workers would turn from loyal dependents into assertive claimants. These sensibilities produce exceptionally tense and awkward encounters with employers-patrons. In order to stand their ground in face-to-face confrontations, these workers need to overcome not only the power of fear, but also the power of shame.
Third, overcoming shame in face-to-face encounters involves a change in habitus, which may result from purposive actions and structural change. “Emotion work” (Hochschild 1979), ideological reframing, a change in reference groups, and the introduction of activist behavioral routines may help promote pride and self-confidence in the face of the powerful. Supporting these purposive actions, structural changes — including a shift in the balance of power in favor of workers, an acknowledgment of their rights by the state, and an increase in access to social and cultural capital (including formal education) — may reduce the subjugating dependence of workers and help achieve a sense of efficacy in the pursuit of their interests.
These explorations suggest some further lines of inquiry. Claim-making in face-to-face encounters may well be the most demanding type of collective action in emotional terms — much more demanding than, say, participation in a demonstration or holding speeches during a strike. How does the salience of shame defer for workers in different relations of domination and in different cultural contexts, and what does this tell us about conditions and patterns of worker activism? What exactly happens when early risers attempt to stage their first collective encounters with their superiors, in particular, what happens in the personal interactions between the parties involved? How do these workers try to overcome the influence of shame and “break the ice” of established rules of interaction (cf. Gamson et al. 1982, p. 111)? And how does this differ, for example, by gender, by cultural context, and by type of power relationship, employer reactions, and social-movement influence? Such research on the emotional dynamics of face-to-face encounters — in particular, claim-making on the work floor — may shed new light on the most basic of workers’ collective actions.
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** Chapter 3. Radical Outcasts Versus Three Kinds of Police: Constructing Limits in Japanese Anti-Emperor Protests
Patricia G. Steinhoff
How are the limits of dissent negotiated by protesters and police within protest demonstrations? How are messages about the protest conveyed to the general public through this interaction? Research on political protests and riots in the USA and Europe has called attention to the interaction between police behavior and participants’ responses to it (Kerner 1968; Marx 1970; Reiss 1971; Sykes and Brent 1980; McPhail et al. 1998; della Porta and Reiter 1998b; McPhail and McCarthy 2005). Differences in the organization and training of the police, in legal systems, and in cultural attitudes toward authority, conflict, and interpersonal space, may affect the style and outcomes of police-demonstrator encounters (della Porta and Reiter 1998a).
These patterns may change over time, both because of deliberate policy changes and through innovations in specific encounters that gradually become standardized. Hence police-demonstrator encounters at any particular time and place reveal both present arrangements and traces of past encounters. This study uses field observations of anti-emperor protests in Japan to examine these processes in one social, cultural, and temporal context. Taking a constructivist perspective, the study focuses on how the limits of permissible protest are constructed symbolically through interactions that take place during public demonstrations.
**** The Historical Context of Protest Demonstrations in Japan
Large street demonstrations are a postwar phenomenon in the Japanese repertoire of contention. Prior to the early twentieth century, popular contention in Japan paralleled Tilly’s (1995) description of the eighteenth century European repertoire: it was parochial in its local focus, particular in its local variability, and bifurcated in its claim-making (Vlastos 1986; White 1995). The architects of the strong nation-state that developed after 1868 established a national administrative police system on the French model, with broad powers that deeply penetrated daily life, including a higher police section responsible for preventive political control. Attempts to form socialist and communist parties were strongly repressed, and fear of the left led to the creation of the Special Higher Police (Tokko) to control social movements (Mitchell 1976; Westney 1987; Tipton 1990; Steinhoff 1991b).
Much, but not all, of this changed drastically during the Allied Occupation following Japan’s defeat in World War II. A new constitution written largely by US Occupation officials provided strong constitutional civil liberties protection for political organizations, labor movements, religious organizations, and social movements (Beer 1984; Moore and Robinson 2002). Under this protective umbrella, popular contention quickly took on Tilly’s (1995) modern characteristics of being national in focus, modular in form, and autonomous in its capacity to initiate direct claims at the national level.
The newly legal Japan Communist Party (JCP) and Japan Socialist Party (JSP) helped to organize and consolidate a broad array of private and public worker unions and a national student movement. They mobilized their constituents to make both economic and political claims, and used the courts to reaffirm constitutional protections of civil liberties when they were violated by police and other state agencies. A specifically Japanese form of ritualized strike developed in the early 1950s that did not threaten economic production (Ben Ari 1990), so the strike ceased to be a critical site of public contention.
The Communist and Socialist parties continued to mobilize large numbers of their constituents for street demonstrations to make political claims on the state through the 1960s and 1970. However, in 1958 a significant leadership segment of the well-organized national student movement broke with the JCP to become the nucleus of a more radical and independent New Left, which soon elaborated the street demonstration with more confrontational tactics during the 1960 anti-security treaty protests (Packard 1966; Steinhoff 1989a,b, 1991a). Massive street demonstrations culminating in violent clashes between New Left protesters and police were common during the late 1960s in Japan as they were in many other countries. The tide of escalating protest began to turn in 1969, following massive arrests of demonstrators and their prolonged incarceration, but violence continued to escalate in the 1970s (Steinhoff 1999a,b; Zwerman et al. 2000; Zwerman and Steinhoff 2005).
The Occupation had disbanded the Japanese military, eliminated the most severely repressive prewar laws affecting political and social movements, and had decentralized the police and heavily curtailed their powers. After the Occupation ended, the Japanese government gradually reestablished some of its earlier tools of social and political control. A 1952 anti-subversive activities law created an investigative bureau with some powers of surveillance and control over social movements deemed to threaten the state. The 1954 Police Law reestablished national control over the security functions of the police and established the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department as a largely independent organization with a strong security mandate. In response to the massive national street demonstrations in 1960 and an even broader cycle of protest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and the National Police Agency built up two major police resources: a specially equipped and trained riot police force that exercises direct control during street demonstrations and a large elite plainclothes security police force whose main activity is the surveillance, investigation, and arrest of political radicals. These forces doubled in size in 1969 at the peak of the protest cycle (Katzenstein 1998).
Political rallies and street demonstrations are regulated by permit under local public security ordinances, but as constitutionally protected forms of political expression they cannot be prohibited or terminated except under very extreme circumstances. Prohibiting a demonstration in advance requires a very lengthy formal process targeting the sponsoring organization as a subversive organization on the basis of its past conduct. The complex procedure was used only a few times at the height of the street violence of 1968–1969 and by legal standards established at that time would not be applicable to the sorts of demonstrations that take place nowadays. However, local authorities have considerable power to set the location and route of the demonstration in negotiations with the sponsoring organization’s official representative.
The state of protest policing in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s can be characterized as escalated force in terms of the five characteristics outlined by McPhail et al. (1998). While police recognized the civil rights of protesters to some extent, they regarded demonstrators as a security threat to be controlled. Police had relatively low tolerance for community disruption, and demonstrators routinely exceeded those limits. There was minimal communication between police and demonstrators, beyond the issuance of demonstration permits. Arrests were common and were executed with conspicuous force; injuries at large demonstrations were typically in the hundreds (Steinhoff 1999a). The broad limits of public confrontation countered by escalated force that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s form the baseline for this study.
**** Anti-Emperor Protest as a Site for Constructing the Limits of Dissent
Since the 1970s there has been little violent mass protest in Japan, except for the chronic disputes surrounding Tokyo International Airport near Narita (Apter and Sawa 1984). There have been periods of heightened security and increases in the size of security forces against the possibility of terrorist attacks, notably in 1986 for the Tokyo Summit and in preparation for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when some teams trained in Japan. The ranks of the radical New Left have dwindled, while the budgets of the security forces have escalated steadily, thus offering the potential for readjusting the limits of dissent in the state’s favor through changes in the dynamics of police-demonstrator interactions during protest demonstrations (Katzenstein and Tsujinaka 1991).
Although it poses no serious threat to state security, the most sensitive political issue in postwar Japan concerns the role of the emperor, whose position was retained in the postwar constitution but reduced to being simply a living symbol of national unity in a constitutional democracy. The special legal protection of lèse majesty that surrounded the emperor prior to 1945 was abolished, but a strong social taboo against criticizing the emperor remained, which was reinforced by mass media self-censorship. This made it politically and socially difficult to mount a public campaign critical either of the retention of the emperor institution, or of wartime acts that had been carried out in the emperor’s name. Further complicating matters, the same emperor (Hirohito, known posthumously as Showa) reigned for an unusually long time, from 1926 until his death in 1989 at the age of 87.
In contemporary Japan most people are uninterested in the emperor institution, or support it without particular enthusiasm. At both ends of the political spectrum, however, relatively small segments of Japanese society hold strong and polarized views on the issue. The nationalist right strongly supports the emperor, and intervenes periodically to enforce the social taboo against disrespect. In general, contemporary rightist retaliation ignores the established left wing, but targets political figures and mainstream economic institutions that do not show sufficient respect toward the emperor. There have been several incidents of serious rightist harassment of major publishing companies that published literary works deemed disrespectful toward the emperor (Kiriyama 1987). There have also been a number of physical attacks, the most sensational of which was an assassination attempt on the mayor of Nagasaki after he said publicly that he thought the emperor bore some responsibility for the war (Field 1991).
The state permits many of these private interventions as expressions of freedom of speech, even when they involve considerable economic and physical coercion (Szymkowiak and Steinhoff 1995). On the other side, a loosely connected anti-emperor movement emerged during the 1980s, holding three major annual protest demonstrations that coincided with national events in the emperor’s ceremonial calendar.
When the Showa emperor finally expired in early January 1989, the government carefully worked out a controversial 2-year calendar of public and private observances to mourn the emperor’s passing and mark the accession of his son Akihito to the throne, thus orchestrating a transfer of charisma in the Weberian sense. The anti-emperor movement developed a counter-calendar of protest rallies and demonstrations in response to these events. Security was heightened during the fall 1990 accession ceremonies to protect foreign dignitaries and avoid any embarrassing incidents. Underground elements of some of the most radical New Left groups involved in the anti-emperor movement were concurrently carrying out a low-level terrorist campaign of attacks on symbolic targets, further heightening security.
Special security measures in Tokyo included painting a large number on the roof of every building in central Tokyo, which could be picked up by surveillance cameras in a high-tech blimp floating over the city. A few weeks before the accession ceremonies the police held a press conference to announce that they had successfully uncovered and foiled a plot to disrupt telecommunications during the ceremonies, based on the detection of suspicious persons on two rooftops several kilometers from the site of the forthcoming ceremonies. Subway cars and apartment buildings were also blanketed with posters encouraging citizens to be on the lookout for terrorists and to report to the police any signs of suspicious activity. The list of suspicious signs of terrorism, based largely on a famous terrorist bombing case from the 1970s, included people carrying lengths of iron pipe, apartment dwellers active during nighttime hours, and strange chemical or cooking odors, particularly at odd hours.
All of these factors combined to make anti-emperor protest, despite its insignificance as a political movement, the flash point at which the limits of dissent in contemporary Japan would most likely be tested. Using field data from the anti-emperor protests of 1990–1991, this study first describes the social form of organized street demonstrations in contemporary Japan, and then analyzes how the limits of acceptable dissent were produced and displayed to the public through that form.
**** Demonstrations as a Social Form
Japanese demonstrations display the same catalog of microbehaviors within gatherings and demonstrations outlined by McPhail and his associates for the USA (McPhail and Wohlstein 1983; McPhail 1991). They also reflect some characteristically Japanese behavior and symbols, as well as Japanese innovations to the demonstration as a social form. The demonstrations are characterized by a high degree of formal order and planning, and by the participation of individuals primarily as disciplined members of organized groups marked by visible symbols of collective identity. Protesters and agents of the state share a common understanding of the street demonstration, but the form has changed considerably through repeated interactions over the past four decades, and the current pattern bears traces of this history.
Every demonstration must have an official sponsor to negotiate a permit, but there are usually a number of participating organizations, each responsible for its own logistics and publicity. Partly because of the severe police treatment of the most extreme New Left groups and partly because of longstanding enmities among rival New Left factions that were formerly united, certain organizations will not demonstrate together, despite their common opposition to the emperor. Therefore, the anti-emperor movement generally mounted two or three separate protest rallies and street demonstrations at different locations in the same city on the same day. While this reduced the mass in each demonstration, it had the advantage of dividing the security forces. The New Left groups, which have been demonstrating separately at the same events since the 1960s, are well aware of this advantage and do coordinate sufficiently to maximize its effect. During the height of the anti-emperor protests against emperor Akihito’s coronation in Tokyo, a major protest in the ongoing Narita Airport dispute was staged in the Narita area, about 90 min northeast of Tokyo, specifically in order to draw off part of the security forces that were being mobilized nationwide for the coronation in Tokyo.
A demonstration begins with a rally, generally at a public park near a train or subway station since virtually all participants arrive by public transportation. After the rally there is a long march through city streets to another public park near a different station, from which the demonstrators can return home. The first sign that one is nearing the rally site is the presence of large gray police vehicles parked along the street and small squads of leather-gloved riot police in flared, medieval-style helmets, carrying full body aluminum shields and nightsticks, waiting in position near street corners and along the side streets.
The riot police set up simple checkpoints some distance from the rally site, at which potential demonstrators are stopped for a search of any bags or backpacks they are carrying. Often the checkpoint is preceded by a few demonstrators handing out leaflets, loudly denouncing the searches as illegal, and urging passersby not to submit to them. Most people submit to the search to avoid further hassles, but often it would be a simple matter to skirt the checkpoint.
Directly outside the rally site are clusters of plainclothes security police, who by law and convention are not permitted to enter the rally. The security police are instantly recognizable by their “uniforms” of casual slacks, unstylish sport shirts, zippered cotton sports jackets, and floppy cotton sun hats. Their main activity at demonstrations is the identification of individual participants, as part of their general responsibility for maintaining watch over certain social and political movements. They carry small notebooks in which they record snatches of rally speeches, personal identifications, and physical descriptions of demonstrators they do not recognize on sight. The security police sometimes use small pocket telescopes to get a better look at individual demonstrators, and police photographers are also on duty taking pictures of demonstrators. The perimeter of the rally site is draped with long cloth banners bearing painted demonstration slogans, carefully positioned to block the view of the security police.
To defeat the efforts of the security police to identify them, experienced demonstrators from radical New Left groups wear dark-colored, hooded nylon rain jackets and either wrap their faces with towels or wear white gauze face masks. This practice dates from the late 1960s, when it was also a protection against the water cannons and teargas used to break up violent confrontations between demonstrators and riot police. New Left student groups wear color-coded plastic helmets painted with the name or slogan of their organization. The helmets are also a vestige of the 1960s, when they offered protection from the blows of nightsticks, bamboo poles, and riot police shields. Now they are primarily symbols of group identity that carry very powerful connotations to movement participants, the police, and the public.
After one has run the gauntlet of riot police and plainclothes security police outside a rally, there is sometimes a guard of demonstrators in full regalia at the rally entrance, intended more to guard against the unauthorized entry of members of rival factions than to prevent the entrance of security police, who know their place and do not try to get into the rally.
Inside, the rally atmosphere is festive and quite relaxed, despite the heavy political rhetoric booming out from the speaker’s podium over the public address system. While orderly contingents of demonstrators from the main organizations sit quietly on the ground in front of the podium listening to the speeches, the outer fringes of the rally resemble the back aisles of a baseball stadium, with people moving back and forth eating snacks, talking with friends, standing in line to use the bathroom, or hawking pamphlets and broadsides. Each organized group sits together and is readily identifiable, but there is casual conversation and friendly interchange between members of different groups who know each other.
The formal business of the rally is a long series of speeches by representatives from each of the participating organizations. Each group presents its own perspective on the issue, which means that the speech is often more about the group’s core concerns than about the immediate purpose of the rally. The rhetoric of protest demonstrations is heavy with difficult phrases expressing theoretical concepts drawn from the traditional Marxist vocabulary and amplified by 30 years of home-grown theorizing by rival sects of the Japanese New Left. The language is exceptionally harsh and violent, in stark contrast to the politeness of everyday Japanese speech, including the conversational speech of the demonstrators themselves. Banners, slogans, and speeches are filled with aggressive power words like “destroy,” “topple,” “fight,” “smash,” and “reject,” expressed in short, imperative verb forms devoid of polite endings.
As the rally draws to a close at the appointed time, the New Left groups don their helmets and everyone prepares for the street demonstration. The final rally speaker delivers a rousing oration, at the end of which the demonstrators stand while the speaker leads them in a series of chants of the demonstration’s official slogans to warm them up. While a few people unobtrusively take down the banners, an organizer announces the basic order of march and briefly outlines the march route. In an amazingly brief time by American standards, the groups of demonstrators form a disciplined queue and begin moving out into the street. A multigroup rally of 2,000–3,000 people can execute this maneuver in less than 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, outside the rally the security forces have been preparing for the street demonstration. Regular uniformed police stand ready to control traffic for the demonstration, both on foot and in marked police patrol cars. A riot police platform truck moves up into position at the head of the line of march. From a small railed balcony on the roof of the truck’s cab, a policeman standing beside a large multidirectional public address system verbally directs the street demonstration. His position as representative of state authority is underscored by his elevated position towering above the street-level actors, which also allows him to see potential problems a block or two ahead. Directly behind him is the demonstrators’ lead sound car, followed by the first contingents of marchers in the left lane of the street, bearing flags and banners on tall bamboo or collapsible metal poles.
On the street side the demonstrators are flanked by a line of riot police, while the plainclothes security police walk alongside the marchers on the sidewalk, interspersed with the press and ordinary pedestrians. Volunteer lawyers accompany every well-organized demonstration as invited observers. Their job is to make sure that the police do not violate constitutionally protected rights of the demonstrators, and to minister to anyone who gets arrested. Although the demonstrations are very orderly, it is common for one or two people from the most radical groups to be arrested during the march for violating the city public security regulations. The arrests are a public show of force, but the offenders are rarely prosecuted for these misdemeanors, in part because the presence of the lawyers ensures that the charges would be contested, and the municipal authorities have decided it is not worth the trouble.
If the rally was a relaxed buzz of conversation beneath the rhetorical cadences of a single overamplified speaker, the street demonstration is a glorious postmodern cacophony of layered noise. Through his multidirectional public address system, the riot policeman on his high perch at the head of the demonstration alternately apologizes politely to motorists for inconveniencing them, and officiously lectures the demonstrators about the public security regulations they are in danger of violating. This sort of verbal guidance is a common feature of Japanese public life; train conductors and elevator attendants constantly remind passengers not to forget their belongings when they leave, and disembodied loudspeakers on train platforms admonish commuters to stand behind the white line and not push their way onto crowded trains. A passenger who pushes his way into the train car as the doors are closing may make the train, but will often get a public scolding from the conductor over the public address system. The fact that demonstrators are accustomed to such officious behavior does not seem to render it ineffective.
The only difference here is the sharp difference in tone and verbal style that separates the officer’s apologetic comments directed to ordinary citizens using the public streets from his stern warning to the demonstrators. The constant code-switching conveys to everyone within earshot that as servants of the public, the police are energetically protecting them from the dangers posed by the demonstrators.
The speaker (usually a woman) in the demonstrators’ lead sound car immediately behind the platform truck also has a noisy dual role, politely addressing the general public in cars and on the sidewalk to explain the purpose of the demonstration, and at the same time leading the stylized march chants for the first group of demonstrators. The thrust of her alternating communication, however, is to link the public and the demonstrators, rather than to divide them.
Each block of marchers maintains its own rhythmic response chants with the same basic alternating two-beat rhythm pattern, led either by a sound car or by a chant leader carrying a battery-powered megaphone. The chants are created from the official slogans for the demonstration, but follow a standard pattern. For example, leader: “Ten-no” (emperor), response: “Han-tai” (opposed), leader: “Soku-i” (accession), response: “Tao-se” (overthrow). As at a parade with many bands, the sound of one group’s chant often overlaps with that of the groups ahead and behind.
As the demonstration moves through the streets, it is broken by the police into smaller segments that are easier to control. The division is created by forcing a group of marchers to stop while the uniformed police allow traffic to flow across the line of march and the forward part of the demonstration keeps moving ahead. In doing so, the police respect the unity of each organizational unit. In a large demonstration of several thousand marchers, the segments are controlled by separate platform trucks and often separate sound cars manned by demonstrators as well. A considerable distance may divide the segments of the demonstration, making it appear to passersby to be much smaller than it really is.
The demonstration winds its way across the city flanked by riot police and plainclothes security police, while uniformed police in each district manage the traffic flow. Behind all the marchers, the demonstration has a long, gray tail of special purpose police vehicles, which may include another tall platform truck to observe the rear of the demonstration, big water cannon trucks, toilet trucks for police use, and the buses in which the riot police will be transported back to their quarters after the demonstration ends. Unmarked but instantly recognizable as riot police equipment, they convey a sense of military preparedness should the demonstration get out of hand.
The street demonstration concludes with a rally at another public park near a public transportation station. Although most demonstrators arrive and leave by train or subway, nearly every demonstrating group has a small van or two to transport demonstration equipment such as helmets and banners to the rally sites. During the street demonstration, these vehicles also transport the marchers’ personal bags and backpacks to the site of the final rally. The format of this rally varies with the scale of the demonstration, the size of the park, and the time of arrival. Sometimes there is a big general rally to complete the demonstration, but more often there are smaller closing rallies conducted separately by each of the participating groups. In a long march that has been broken into several segments and ends up at a small park, the first groups may have completed their rallies and left the area before the latter part of the demonstration arrives.
With this general understanding of the demonstration as a social form, the following sections will examine specific features of the actors in a demonstration, the nature of their interactions, and the meanings conveyed to the larger society by these events, in order to see how the limits of dissent are produced and displayed. There are two main strategies at work, each brought about by a rather complex set of interactions. The first strategy isolates dissent from the mainstream of the society and discredits it, while the second divides the protesters internally, drawing them away from the most extreme expressions and gradually narrowing the limits of permissible dissent.
**** The Isolation of Demonstrations and Protesters
The expression of political dissent through protest demonstrations is managed as a remote, preferably invisible, activity of people who are stigmatized and marginalized within Japanese society — and from which the general public needs to be protected. This is accomplished partly as a matter of deliberate strategy, but interacts with the actual social composition of the protesters. Their status results from historical applications of similar strategies, plus other cultural legacies of social discrimination in a relatively homogeneous society.
*** Radical Outcasts
Within the general context of Japanese society, an anti-emperor protest is a gathering of outcasts. It is by definition a socially inappropriate activity in which most ordinary people would not dream of participating. During the year I spent studying anti-emperor protest in Japan, I quickly learned not to describe my purpose outside of movement circles, because of the shocked negative response it produced. Although the people who do participate have a genuine commitment to the issue, they tend to be people who have already been marginalized by Japanese society in one way or another and thus have nothing to lose by acting out their commitment.
Like most protest movements in postwar Japan, the anti-emperor movement is a coalition composed of single issue groups formed around a specific problem, plus more generally constituted left-wing organizations that take a position on many issues based on their core ideological orientation. On this particular issue the major old left parties (the JCP and the former JSP) are notably silent, having long since made their peace with the postwar constitution and the emperor’s role in it. As participants in the political process, however, representatives of these two major opposition parties did register strong objections to particular features of the accession ceremonies on constitutional grounds related to the separation of church and state. The parties also supported lawsuits to pursue these objections through the courts. As weak but legitimate political insiders, they used methods other than protest demonstrations to press their claims.
On the other hand, the few New Left organizations still surviving from the 1960s take strong anti-emperor positions aimed either at the link between the emperor and the perpetuation of conservative political power in postwar Japan, or at Japan’s failure to come to terms with its wartime treatment of other Asian peoples. A much broader range of participants in the anti-emperor movement are not currently affiliated with specific New Left groups, but are veterans of the New Left student protests and citizens’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They are joined by many left intellectuals from an earlier generation, for whom the emperor remains the central symbol of what was wrong with the old Japan and persists in the new.
Also joining the New Left in the anti-emperor movement are organizations representing virtually all of Japan’s minority groups, including the powerful Buraku Liberation League (BLL) that represents a formerly outcast segment of Japanese called Burakumin; Okinawans, who are Japanese citizens but have an independent culture and history; plus groups representing Koreans and Chinese who reside in Japan. The Koreans, Chinese, and Okinawans all have specific grievances relating to the emperor’s role in Japan’s actions during World War II and earlier, while the Burakumin feel that the old emperor-centered ideology of Japanese “blood” has helped to perpetuate their outcast status in Japanese society. All of these groups are engaged in contemporary social conflicts relating to their marginal status in Japanese society. They have been organized by the left for a long time, and can be found jointly protesting over issues other than the emperor and their own status issues.
Other marginal groups without a strong and specific connection to the emperor issue are also readily mobilized to participate in anti-emperor demonstrations through their general ties in the left. Virtually every anti-emperor demonstration I observed had a sizable wheelchair contingent from the disabled rights movement, composed of severely physically handicapped young adults, each with a very caring able-bodied attendant who pushed the wheelchair, chatted companionably, and assisted with feeding and other needs.
Day laborers, the most economically marginal group in Japan, were also regular participants in anti-emperor demonstrations, as Christian, Buddhist, and New Left groups have been organizing unions and support services in Japan’s day laborer slums for many decades. At one anti-emperor demonstration in Kyoto, an ancient red bus arrived at the rally site to general cheers of “They’re here! They’re here!” The bus creaked to a stop in the parking area and a Buddhist priest in traditional begging attire with straw hat and sandals emerged from inside, followed by a ragtag collection of about 30-day laborers in rough work clothes. They were greeted with genuine warmth and friendly intimacy by middle-aged veterans of the New Left student movement, an affirmation of human dignity they rarely receive in Japanese society.
A unique feature of the anti-emperor movement is the prominent presence of members of Japanese Protestant Christian groups, many of which were suppressed during the war because their religious beliefs were thought to conflict with the required degree of loyalty to the emperor. Unlike the other participants who are relatively seasoned political dissidents, many of these Japanese Christians are ordinary nonpolitical citizens who have joined the anti-emperor movement through church-sponsored study groups. Since Christians comprise only one percent of the Japanese population, however, they also have a strong sense of difference from mainstream Japanese society.
Thus, there is a visible diversity to anti-emperor demonstrations that sharply contradicts the standard image of homogeneous Japan that is widely held by the Japanese themselves. At few other public gatherings in Japan could one find college students, Koreans, Christians, professors, union members, lawyers, day laborers, and five hundred Burakumin participating together in a single event. Like the special protected settings Goffman describes in Stigma (1963), the anti-emperor movement is a social haven where persons who are marginalized or stigmatized in Japanese society can meet as social equals without fear of discrimination. Yet conversely, the highly visible presence of stigmatized and marginalized groups in the anti-emperor movement tends to reinforce the social stigma of the movement itself, and of anyone who chooses to participate in its demonstrations.
*** Protecting the Public from Contamination by Outcasts
The outcast status of the demonstrators is visibly reinforced by the style of policing used. The message is conveyed by the scale of security applied to relatively small and peaceful demonstrations, but even more vividly by the massed physical deployment of riot police in full regalia, accompanied by a retinue of strangely shaped, unmarked gray security vehicles. Although the density of the riot police and plainclothes security police lines that flank a street demonstration vary depending upon the specific group and its style of march, there is inevitably a strong, physical police presence surrounding the demonstrators and separating them from the general public. As in the verbal code-switching by the riot policeman high on his platform at the head of the demonstration, the message seems to be that a dangerous toxic substance is moving through the streets, and the police are guarding it closely to keep it from spilling out into the general population.
An alternative explanation is that the police are protecting the anti-emperor protesters from the hostility of the public or from possible violent retaliation by the nationalist right, but there is little evidence to support this interpretation. In extended observation of a number of demonstrations passing through heavily populated urban areas, I did not witness a single hostile gesture toward the demonstrations from the observing public. About half the people simply ignored the demonstration and went about their business, while the other half paused to watch it as street entertainment. As a helmeted New Left group poured into the street at the start of one demonstration, they were cheered on by name like a football team by some middle-aged men in blue suits who had stopped to watch the action.
On two occasions, I observed anti-emperor demonstrations being harassed by an ultranationalist group’s sound truck. These huge military green or black trucks with very high-powered public address systems regularly cruise the streets of Tokyo blasting out military music and political rhetoric. In one instance, the demonstration was making a right turn at the intersection of two major streets. The intersection was blocked by a heavy line of riot police vehicles and riot policemen, who were using considerable force to press demonstrators into a narrow, orderly corridor as they went around the corner, including smacking their aluminum shields against the plastic helmets of the New Left groups. The right-wing group’s sound truck was stuck in a line of traffic about half a block away from the marchers. At a decibel level loud enough to drown out the demonstrators’ chants and the clang of metal shields against helmets, a man inside the truck was taunting the demonstrators in the colorful, rude style of Japanese used familiarly by working-class drunks picking a fight. Four men in military green got out of another car and ran up to the heavy line of riot police and riot police vehicles blocking the intersection. One squad of riot police turned to face them, and they retreated after a few minutes.
In the second incident, the truck was cruising past the demonstration in light traffic on the opposite side of a divided boulevard, while a man inside taunted the demonstrators in the same style as the earlier incident, but not quite as loudly. The police kept an eye on the truck and one squad of riot police was sent off to chase after it briefly. Thus, although the riot police did divert some token attention to ensure that there was no direct confrontation between pro- and anti-emperor demonstrators, it was primarily the public that was being protected from the demonstrators, and not the reverse.
*** Spatial and Conceptual Dislocation of Protest
The police also were protecting the participants in the emperor’s official ceremony from contamination by protesters. In fact, every anti-emperor demonstration that I observed was strategically relegated to a location so distant from the target ceremony as to be completely invisible. At a June 1991, protest I attended near Kyoto, the demonstration was conducted two kilometers away from the site of the imperial tree-planting ceremony to which it referred. For the accession ceremonies, the distances were even greater, with the protests located across the city from the actual ceremonies. Hence no one attending the imperial ceremonies, or covering them for the local or world press, had any inkling of a conflict that might mar the carefully orchestrated event. For Japanese demonstrations, this degree of spatial separation is unique to anti-emperor protest, and reflects the strong social taboo against showing disrespect toward the emperor. During the same time period, demonstrations against sending Japanese troops overseas to participate in the first Gulf War were routinely permitted to march around the national Diet (parliament) building.
The spatial separation of demonstrators from the event they are protesting has been used in recent years by police in other countries for events such as WTO protest that have a high potential for violence. In those cases the protests are well-publicized by the mass media; the physical separation of all or part of the demonstration reduces direct interaction between demonstrators and dignitaries participating in the target event, but it certainly does not render the protest invisible, as it does for anti-emperor protest.
Following longstanding agreements in the mainstream Japanese media to handle coverage of the emperor in a respectful manner, there was also minimal coverage of anti-emperor protest in the Japanese press and television. The foreign press did include some protest coverage, but it was hard-pressed to make the link between events that had been spatially segregated to the point of losing their conceptual connection. This spatial and media invisibility reinforced the social taboo against disrespect toward the emperor, and rendered anti-emperor protest completely irrelevant to the national and international audience for imperial ceremonies.
Correspondingly, the people who did happen to watch an anti-emperor protest demonstration passing through their neighborhood would not have readily connected it with the ceremony it was designed to protest. Instead, they witnessed an apparently irrelevant demonstration by some obviously marginal characters under heavy police guard, whose motives were unclear and thus suspect. Knowing that they would not be permitted anywhere near the event they were protesting, demonstration organizers tried instead to get their protest marches routed through busy shopping districts rather than the empty caverns of closed office buildings, on the theory that they could bring their message to more ordinary people. But they could no more control the messages emanating from their tightly wrapped demonstration than they could control its location. The cumulative effect of these factors renders invisible both the issues of social protest and the marginalized people who raise them, thus further reinforcing Japanese myths of homogeneity and social harmony.
**** Narrowing the Limits of Permissible Protest
The range of acceptable protest is not only established by laws and regulations and the extent to which they are enforced by the police and courts; it is also constructed and reconstructed more subtly through the interactions of police, demonstrators, audience, and mass media over successive protest events. The literature on protest policing distinguishes two general styles of policing, known as escalated force (in which police aggressively try to control demonstrations by engaging in confrontations that can easily escalate into violence) and negotiated management (in which police and protesters negotiate in advance what the demonstrators will be allowed to do, including the degree of disruption and how it will be handled) (McPhail et al. 1998). Although police departments in many industrialized democracies seem to have moved from escalated force to negotiated management since the 1960s, some scholars see a more nuanced and fluctuating pattern depending upon circumstances (della Porta 1995; Waddington 1998).
Observations of Japanese anti-emperor protests further complicate this dichotomy. They reveal police-demonstrator interactions that do not fall neatly into one category or the other, including significant variations within a single demonstration. While Japanese demonstration organizers do negotiate in advance with the police for a permit that covers the rally sites and the route of the street demonstration, they do not negotiate such matters as how many people will be arrested, what styles of march will be permitted, or any other aspects of police behavior. Consequently, the most revealing interactions between police and demonstrators take place not backstage and in advance, but during the demonstration itself. It is through these interactions that the limits of permissible protest are constructed, and through the cumulation of these micro-level interactions that the limits of permissible protest change over time.
To understand this process, we must look more closely at how police interact with demonstrators and then consider the impact of these interactions over time. The general process is as follows: a highly intrusive style of policing combines with the state’s strategy of differential and selective treatment of protest groups to make certain aspects of participation in demonstrations very unpleasant. The state’s strategy interacts with the actual diversity within the movement to discourage resistance to state authority and produce internal divisions among protesting groups, based on avoidance. This in turn weakens the position of groups operating at the limit of permissible dissent, and gradually narrows the limit itself.
*** Policing by Surveillance and Bodily Control
The styles of policing used to control protest demonstrations are logical extensions of characteristic Japanese methods of informal social control, observable virtually anywhere one looks in Japanese society. They include direct body control and body management to constrain the social space and independence of the individual, combined with various forms of group pressure to encourage compliance with the wishes of the social unit.
Of the three kinds of police who participate in the management of demonstrations, regular uniformed police are the least significant. Their role is simply to direct traffic as the demonstration moves through their regular territory; hence they have little contact with the demonstrators. The limits of dissent are created by the interaction of demonstrators with the plainclothes security police and the mobile riot police. Both of these are elite forces designed to protect the security and stability of the state.
Although their roles are quite different, both of these police forces employ a characteristically Japanese style of control that is highly personalized, and both physically and socially intrusive. There is evidence of modern technological policing in the formidable equipment of the riot police, from their ominous-looking vehicles to the modern samurai aura of their flared helmets and tall body shields, and in the pocket telescopes of the security police. Ultimately, though, the technology seems less significant than the actual behavior of the police as they interact with demonstrators.
Descended from the dreaded prewar special higher police, the contemporary public security police constitute an elite force whose function is the surveillance and control of social movements that threaten the security of the state (Tipton 1990; Katzenstein and Tsujinaka 1991). They carry out this function through heavy use of direct, personal surveillance of individuals. The security police are not equally interested in everyone who participates in anti-emperor demonstrations; their attention is directed to those involved with specific groups that seem to constitute a particular threat or have especially aroused their ire. Hence the number of security police present at a demonstration of perhaps 3,000 persons could range from less than 2 dozen to well over a 100, depending on what groups were involved.
Despite their plainclothes or “invisible” status, the security police make their surveillance almost ostentatiously visible to demonstrators. If they are invisible to anyone, it is the general public. One spunky anti-emperor group of young people made it a point during street demonstrations to point out the plainclothes security police to the people on the sidewalk, much to the consternation of the officers.
The security police sometimes go beyond surveillance to intervene in highly physical ways. For example, it is plainclothes security police rather than uniformed police who make arrests at demonstrations. The standard style of arrest is for at least half a dozen plainclothes security police to suddenly swarm around a targeted individual and physically overwhelm him with bodily force, so that he cannot move. Only after this physical confrontation do they formally identify themselves as police officers and place the suspect officially under arrest. Seasoned activists know that they must keep their hands at their sides in such encounters and resist the natural human inclination to raise their arms in front of their chest in a defensive posture, which would result in an immediate misdemeanor arrest for “obstructing an officer in the performance of his duties.”
Plainclothes security police have a strong sense of boundary about the sidewalk beside the demonstration, where they walk. On one occasion, a cameraman associated with a protest group was moving along the sidewalk edge of the demonstration taking pictures. Two plainclothes security police bodily lifted him up and threw him into the line of demonstrators, angrily telling him he belonged in the demonstration and should stay there. On another occasion, from my usual perch on the sidewalk I turned my video camera toward the plainclothes security police instead of the demonstrators. A security policeman angrily told me to film the demonstration and not the police.
The few incidents of volatile behavior by police that I observed at demonstrations involved plainclothes security police, but I also saw a supervisor reprimand a security policeman whose anger had exploded at a demonstrator, ordering him away from the demonstration until he cooled off. On another occasion when demonstrators were taking a break in a public park, a young demonstrator in full regalia sat down on a park bench next to a sleeping drunk. The drunk woke up and immediately began shouting and gesturing belligerently at the surprised youth. In an instant, a plainclothes policeman who is well-known for affecting a gangster swagger and style of speech stepped in, identified himself as a police officer, and calmed the drunk down. This was the only occasion, other than in the later stages of an arrest, that I have ever seen a plainclothes security policeman identify himself as a police officer — or act to protect a demonstrator from someone else.
In contrast to the somewhat unpredictable aggression of the elite security police, the riot police appear extremely well-disciplined and even impassive as they move around in tight drill formation under silent hand signal or verbal command. They are physically intrusive in a somewhat different way, as a massed physical force pressing against demonstrators or blocking and channeling their movement. Yet in both cases the effect is one of direct, bodily constraint brought about by the superior physical power of the police applied at close range.
This sense of intrusive bodily control and surveillance is reinforced by a variety of gestures of elitism and authority on the part of the police toward demonstrators. The most direct example is the riot policeman who stands high above the demonstrators and lectures at them officiously through his loud public address system. Plainclothes security police also tend to find the high ground on the perimeter of a rally so that they can see better, but this adds to the general impression that they are above the demonstrators and bearing down upon them.
These styles of policing are general, but they fall differentially on individuals for a variety of reasons, including the style of march they use while demonstrating, the hostility of the police toward their organization, and the particular demonstration in which they participate.
*** Styles of March
Reflecting the diversity of groups that participate in anti-emperor protest demonstrations, there are three different march styles in common use. Each style is associated with certain organizations, but different styles may be used simultaneously by different groups within the same street demonstration, resulting in quite different types of policing.
The first, called “French-style” demonstrating by the Japanese, is the loose, casual walking style used in American street demonstrations. The marchers are roughly ordered about eight persons across, but there is little attempt to maintain neat rows. Friends walk together in clusters, with considerable space between the rows and between demonstrators walking in the same row. Demonstrators walking “French-style” are usually dressed quite individually in street clothes, and do not cover their faces. They are generally ordinary citizens who have nothing to hide, participating in the demonstration as individuals through their affiliation with a relatively informal group that has taken a stand on the issue.
The second style of marching is most often used by strong organizations such as labor unions or minority group organizations whose members participate fairly regularly in political demonstrations. These groups march in closer order, with neat rows a fixed number of persons across and less space between the rows. Their chants and consequently their march pace tend to be a bit livelier. Such groups are usually in partial uniform, all wearing bright marching vests of the same color, with clear vinyl pockets to hold the same preprinted demonstration slogans. Sometimes they have matching printed cloth headbands, or even matching jackets or hats. They may also carry flags or banners identifying their organization and bearing demonstration slogans.
The third style is the famous snake dance, known in Japanese as a “zigzag” or “uzumaki” (swirling) demonstration. Foreigners who first observed it in the 1960 anti-security treaty demonstrations thought it was a traditional form related to the way groups of young men carry swaying religious festival carts through the streets, but in fact it was a newly invented political instrument of the New Left. The demonstrators link arms in rows of eight across, with the front row stabilized by a horizontal pole held by the marchers at hip height. The rows form a tight block that may extend for a considerable distance. Running in lockstep to a fast chant, the rows of demonstrators open like a fan first to one side and then to the other, forming a long, zigzagging ribbon that fills the entire street with exhilarating movement and sound.
A loose zigzag line fills the street and can knock a line of police off balance by bumping against them. If the same march style is used with the lines of marchers tightly packed together and running straight ahead, it forms a human battering ram capable of crashing through a massed line of riot police two or three men deep. In either case, the line of zigzag demonstrators cannot stop its own forward motion, and requires a counterforce pushing against the front row’s stabilizing pole in order to slow itself down. Snake dancing is physically demanding and requires strong group coordination. Only young demonstrators in good physical condition, with prior training, can maintain it for any length of time. Members of New Left organizations that use snake dancing train with deep knee-bends to strengthen their leg muscles.
The snake dance style of demonstrating was widely used by New Left student groups in the 1960s, but as demonstrations became more aggressive confrontations and the students discovered the power of the massed zigzag line, the police learned to contain its energy by forcing the demonstrators into a straight, narrow corridor sandwiched by thick, solid lines of riot police on each side. By the late 1960s, the zigzag style of march was prohibited by city ordinances governing street demonstrations, and the standard style of New Left demonstration was the forced “sandwich,” requiring nearly as many riot police as demonstrators.
Radical New Left groups still try to do zigzag demonstrating, and this in itself became the contested limit at the anti-emperor demonstrations I observed. When a group tries to zigzag at the beginning of a street demonstration, it is quickly forced into a sandwich by massed units of riot police converging on both sides of the marchers at the first intersection. Thereafter a solid phalanx of riot police several men deep forces the demonstrators into a straight line against the curb, while massed plainclothes security police on the sidewalk stand ready to force back anyone who ventures onto the sidewalk.
Forced into a solid block by the police, the helmeted demonstrators push forward with all their might. At the head of the line a full squad of riot police, facing backward, pushes against the front row of demonstrators to slow them down. This front row is a mini-war zone, with demonstrators and police nose to nose, battling with their fists for hand space on the stabilizing pole. Demonstrators’ helmets get knocked off and their noses bloodied in these confrontations. The police can spell each other with replacements, but the demonstrators inside the block are stuck there for the duration of the march, in real danger of being trampled to death if they should stumble.
The zigzag or snake dance style of demonstrating has been perpetuated despite two decades of being outlawed because in fact the police permit it at the very end of the march, when the demonstration leaves the main thoroughfare and heads for the park where the final rally is to be held. Tired from the long march and contained in a side street, the demonstrators are allowed a final moment of wild snake dancing.
*** Variations in Police Response
Within a single street demonstration, the degree of police pressure varies markedly for different groups of demonstrators. This is largely a function of the variations in style of march used by different groups, but that is clearly not the only consideration. The underlying variable is the police attitude toward the particular group, and the degree to which the police wish to assert their authority over the group by close physical control.
In the same Tokyo demonstration at which two large sections of a radical New Left student group (Chukaku) were engaged in the direct bodily confrontations of a sandwich demonstration, there was a large contingent from the BLL that had come up from Osaka to participate. There were absolutely no plainclothes security police, and only a handful of widely spaced riot policemen controlling the BLL section of the street demonstration, even though they were using the relatively structured march style characteristic of strong formal organizations that demonstrate regularly.
Over the past 25 years, the BLL has been enormously successful in winning concessions from political authorities by a tactic of formal denunciation in which officials suspected of harboring discriminatory attitudes or of acting unfairly toward Burakumin are made to face an angry mass meeting at which they are psychologically intimidated for hours until they capitulate. Government officials are now extremely wary of engaging in any behavior that might precipitate a traumatic denunciation session (Upham 1987).
The group that received by far the harshest treatment from the police was the Central Core Faction (Chukaku-ha), a radical New Left group that has maintained its strength and traditions since the 1960s and continues to attract a steady stream of student recruits despite the vast changes in the general political climate for protest groups. There are a number of obvious reasons for the severe treatment of Chukaku, including its history of both internal and external violence, the contemporary involvement of its more or less independent underground wing in an anti-emperor terrorist campaign, and its persistent use of the zigzag march style as a deliberate confrontational device.
Yet another anti-emperor group, Autumn Storm (Aki no Arashi), received surprisingly similar police attention, despite its very different scale and approach. Autumn Storm was a tiny, barely organized group of musicians, students, and drifters that initially specialized in clever street performances to get its anti-emperor message to the public. The group’s unpredictability and irreverence, plus the symbolic venues it chose for its activities, led to an escalating campaign of both right wing and police harassment of Autumn Storm until the group finally sued the state over its treatment.
When the police got wind of the impending lawsuit there was a brief period of conciliatory behavior and in late October 1990, Autumn Storm was granted permission for a rare evening street demonstration following an indoor rally at a neighborhood public hall. During the rally, while the police were waiting outside the building, a contingent of right-wing nationalists showed up and were openly laughing and joking with the police on the street corner, to the great consternation of the Autumn Storm lookouts. In the street demonstration that followed, about 40 people from Autumn Storm, many in outrageous costumes and wearing Halloween masks, marched in a loose “French-style” demonstration. They were surrounded by a tight wall of over 60 riot police on the street side and nearly as many plainclothes police on the sidewalk, with platform trucks and a variety of other police vehicles at the head and foot of the parade, including a huge water cannon truck.
Unlike any other demonstrating group I observed, the highly independent members of Autumn Storm kept up a sassy running commentary with the policeman perched on the platform truck and anyone else who cared to join in. The policeman addressed them with condescending familiarity as “kimi” while they made smart remarks back, some so funny that the police could not help but laugh. All the while, other marching members of Autumn Storm were calling the attention of passersby to the excessive number of plainclothes police on the sidewalk.
Tiny, disorganized Autumn Storm clearly did not pose the same sort of security threat to the society as heavyweight Chukaku, but it was similar in its capacity to frustrate and resist police authority, and its unnerving ability to strike unpredictably. Autumn Storm also offended both the police and the nationalist right by its playful disrespect toward the emperor — behavior that is not illegal in postwar Japan, but which the police treated as if it were. Yet if this were the prime criterion the police should have been equally severe with the BLL, which began its street demonstration with a chant that threatened to subject the emperor to a public denunciation session.
Because Chukaku is a much larger organization than Autumn Storm, controlling it through direct bodily force consumes a tremendous amount of police man power. Whenever possible, the police used available configurations of urban space to achieve physical containment. Anti-emperor street demonstrations were sometimes routed through narrow streets and into cul-de-sacs so that the physical space itself contained the demonstrators, requiring less man power on the part of the police. The imperial tree planting ceremony demonstration near Kyoto was routed through the narrow shopping streets of a tourist town so that the streets themselves kept the demonstrators in line, and riot police were really only needed at intersections to keep the line of march from going astray. Neither the police nor the shopkeepers perceived any danger that the demonstrators would run amok inside the shopping street and loot or damage the stores. Such behavior would never have occurred to the demonstrators, either.
On this occasion, Chukaku had scheduled a separate demonstration at which the police pressure was expected to be very severe. The Chukaku group was met at the train station by a large force of riot police who blocked the way on both sides, channeling the protesters directly into a very narrow street with the high walls of private homes and closed offices lining both sides. The other end of the street was completely blocked by another solid phalanx of riot police, sealing the group into the street. They stood in place for about half an hour, chanting vigorously, but were never actually permitted to move forward. They were then smoothly channeled back to the train station and out of town, having never been permitted to conduct a real street demonstration at all.
An even more sophisticated use of the available physical environment occurred in Tokyo on the day of the new emperor’s coronation ceremony. The back page of the Chukaku newspaper announcing a major Chukaku-sponsored demonstration contained a half-page map showing the street demonstration leading from its actual starting point straight to the coronation ceremony to disrupt it (Zenshin 1990). Not surprisingly, the demonstration was routed in an entirely different direction and ended up in a small park on a side street near a train and subway station. There was a final rally at the park lasting about half an hour, and then some of the smaller participating groups began to leave.
To everyone’s surprise, both ends of the side street and all of the other neighborhood alleyways had been quietly blocked by riot police vehicles and solid rows of riot police three men deep, standing with their body shields edge to edge. A crowd formed in front of the main line of implacable riot police, who refused to answer questions. Some of the demonstrators began to argue that they were ordinary citizens whose rights were being violated, but the riot police refused to budge or speak. One of the volunteer lawyers came out and after a brief discussion with a police official the situation became clear: we would all be detained inside the sealed perimeter until the imperial parade on the other side of the city ended and the emperor and empress were safely back inside the palace grounds. Small groups of demonstrators settled down and began listening to the radio coverage of the imperial parade — the object of their protest — so they would know when it ended!
Although Chukaku was the sponsor and main contingent in the demonstration, there were absolutely no helmeted Chukaku members in the crowds that formed in front of the police barricades. Their lookouts had discovered the situation while their final rally was still going on, and the members had been instructed to sit down quietly and wait until the road was unsealed. After an hour and a half the imperial parade ended, the riot police received instructions to withdraw, and 3,000 demonstrators were free to leave. Technically, we had been illegally detained by the police, but it was also a textbook example of “soft” policing (della Porta and Reiter 1998a).
**** Compliance with the Limits on Dissent
This last example is all the more remarkable for the passive compliance exhibited by the most militant radical group in the face of strong state power, when only an hour before the same group had been fiercely resisting a riot police sandwich. In many other instances as well, anti-emperor protesters quietly accepted the limits and special conditions imposed by the police. Acutely aware of their limited power, they wasted little energy trying to resist the inevitable. Instead, they either tried to anticipate and avoid potential hassles, or simply put up with them.
Ordinary citizens who join protest activity through their interest in a single issue are generally shocked at the strong police pressure on mild, peaceful protest. They do not like being searched, photographed, shouted at, and singled out for identification by the police. Church-sponsored anti-emperor groups were very sympathetic toward Autumn Storm for the harassment it experienced, but they were reluctant to incur the same degree of police pressure themselves. Even middle-aged veterans of the violent New Left protests of the 1960s did not relish the thought of being under police surveillance again, or inviting even stronger forms of police pressure.
At a planning meeting the evening before the imperial tree planting ceremony protest near Kyoto, the organizers described the next day’s plans with frequent references to “the other demonstration,” being planned by Chukaku. The emphasis was on various strategies for avoiding hassles created by the interaction between the police and Chukaku. The demonstrators were instructed to leave their overnight lodgings (in a BLL hall in Kyoto) at an exceptionally early hour in the morning, in order to get to the distant suburban rally site by train before the police security went into effect at 9 a.m. Both the timing and the street demonstration route were adjusted somewhat to ensure that there would be no unwanted interference between the two separate demonstrations, and no unnecessary exposure to the risk of arrest.
Thus the exercise of overwhelming police pressure against one segment of the movement is a powerful deterrent to aggressive resistance by others. In addition to its old political enemies who organize separate demonstrations explicitly because of their animosity toward Chukaku, many other milder groups will not participate in the same demonstration as Chukaku because of the strong police attention it draws. Even if they are clearly not Chukaku members, they will be subjected to the same surveillance and close physical police control at key points in the rally and demonstration. Yet when other radical New Left groups form their own separate demonstrations, they simply replicate the pattern of the Chukaku-sponsored protests. The most extreme group in that demonstration also becomes the focus of strong police pressure, especially if they try to use the classic zigzag style of march and end up in a police sandwich. The only way to avoid becoming entangled in physically intrusive and high-surveillance police practices is to organize and participate in a completely separate, mild “French-style” demonstration that quite patently does not pose a threat to social order and stays well inside the prevailing limits of protest. As other groups pull away from the most militant groups that are testing or holding the limits of dissent, they too become weakened and unable to hold the line.
Over time, the limits of permissible dissent narrow as a result of this repeated dynamic, and police pressure can be applied at a new point to further discourage even milder forms of protest. In 1998, for example, I observed a rather modest demonstration protesting changes in the administrative policies at Tokyo House of Detention, including how many articles of clothing, papers, and books prisoners held in unconvicted detention could keep in their jail cells. The prisoners most affected by the new policy are those involved in lengthy trials stemming from their radical political acts, some of which had anti-emperor connections. The demonstrators were primarily members of their trial support groups (Steinhoff 1999a) and thus were associated indirectly with the most radical New Left groups, but were not themselves members.
At the rally preceding the street demonstration, the organizers announced the route and reported that they were not certain whether they would be allowed to present their petition. Hence although they did have a permit for the demonstration, they clearly had not negotiated the arrangements in any detail. The demonstration had about 50 participants from various groups, with a lead sound car at the head, several chant leaders for the different little groups, and a car at the rear to transport people’s belongings to the end of the demonstration. Although many of the groups had demonstration vests, they walked French-style on a rainy Saturday toward the Tokyo House of Detention, where they hoped to present the petition.
There were no riot police or riot vehicles in evidence, but the 50 marchers were surrounded by 35 plainclothes security police busily scribbling down everything in their notebooks and 65 uniformed police officers, a ratio of two police officers per demonstrator. In this demonstration, the uniformed police did not simply control traffic, but were deployed much as riot police are at larger demonstrations, to control and contain the demonstrators. About two blocks from the prison that was their intended destination, the demonstrators were herded by the police into the grounds of the Tokyo Municipal Sewage Treatment Plant and then into a park along a river embankment across a divided highway from the prison. All exits to the park were blocked by yellow ropes tied across the park paths and guarded by clusters of uniformed police. A small delegation was permitted to leave the confined demonstrators and proceed under police escort to the prison entrance gate, which was barricaded by police and metal barricades on the outside and by a thick phalanx of prison guards on the inside. After some time a prison official came out and they handed over their documents, whereupon both the petition delegation and the rest of the demonstrators were herded under police guard toward the nearest train station.
There was little public audience to observe the police protecting the public from contamination by this bedraggled demonstration. The real audience was clearly the demonstrators themselves, who were treated to a dramatic show of social control. Even a simple, perfectly legal street march to present a petition to authorities now subjected the protestors to heavy surveillance, intrusive bodily control, and over an hour of police confinement.
**** Implications for the Study of Protest Policing
This study has identified two processes through which the interaction of police and demonstrators brings about a gradual narrowing of the limits on dissent through protest demonstrations. The first process stigmatizes demonstration participants and sharply separates them from the mainstream of Japanese public life, discouraging public attention to or participation in their causes. The second process divides protest movements internally through harsh treatment of targeted groups that spills over to those around them. As other demonstrators try to avoid such treatment, they draw away from the groups that operate at the prevailing limit of tolerated dissent, decreasing support for them and gradually constricting the limit itself.
The limits of dissent being contested through anti-emperor protest demonstrations in the early 1990s in Japan were substantially narrower than those that prevailed in the late 1960s, even though some of the same groups were still trying to hold the line. Anti-emperor demonstrations of the early 1990s featured no wild clashes between baton-wielding police and demonstrators using wooden poles and throwing Molotov cocktails. Yet the water cannon trucks that follow the demonstration, and the crash helmets, rain jackets, and face masks that the current generation of New Left activists still wear remain as symbolic vestiges of that period. The zigzag demonstration has been reduced to the sandwich, but riot police and demonstrators still engage physically at the front line of the sandwich. Even though the right to protest is constitutionally guaranteed in Japan, in the absence of clear limits set by the courts and maintained by standard police practice, every protest event becomes a site for renegotiation of the limits on dissent in which the immediate outcome is largely a function of the relative strength of the two sides. The prevailing limits in the early 1990s were the result of the same processes applied over decades, and my subsequent observations in Japan suggest that the shrinkage continues.
Although detailed fieldwork at a micro-level has generated these findings for a particular, historically bound set of demonstrations in one country, the general processes identified may be found in other times and places, buried in the social and cultural context of each case. The findings suggest that protest policing may be far more complicated and nuanced in practice than the dichotomy between escalated force and negotiated management implies. On the one hand, the well-disciplined Japanese police do use soft-policing methods similar to the negotiated management style used in the USA and in European democracies, as opposed to the escalated force of the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the tools of escalated force remain highly visible and available for immediate deployment, as symbolized by the battle gear of the riot police, the water cannon trucks that follow the demonstration, and the rain jackets, face masks, and helmets that some demonstrators wear as protection against them.
While it is certainly true that the organizers of demonstrations in Japan do negotiate with the police regarding the basic conditions of their parade permits, this is not the most salient aspect of the interaction between police and demonstrators. Far more significant are the intrusive style of direct bodily control that police use to contain and control demonstrators physically, and the many physical and symbolic ways that police isolate demonstrators from the general public to convey strong messages about the dangerous pariah status of the demonstrators. These features seem much closer to the mentality of the escalated force mode of policing, even if the result is not a high number of arrests and injuries from violent clashes between police and demonstrators.
A related observation is the great variability observed within a single demonstration. Earl et al. (2003) have developed a multivariate classification of five types of protest policing, which they have used to analyze a newspaper data set of protests in New York State. While this is about as nuanced as one can get with newspaper data on protest events, the unit of analysis is necessarily the single protest event taken as a whole. Closer observation of single events naturally reveals much more internal variability. Applying the colorful terms developed by Earl et al. to a single anti-emperor protest in Japan, we find that the BLL’s portion of the protest was handled as “Nothing to See Here,” some of the labor union units received “Legal Eagle” treatment, while the Chukaku contingents in the same demonstration experienced something between “Dirty Harry” and “Calling All Cars.” These Japanese findings, along with studies of large and complex events such as WTO protests, suggest that it is also essential to look closely at the internal dynamics of demonstrator-police interactions within single protest events. Such analyses can be useful not only to problematize apparently discrete categorizations, but also to improve our understanding of how such microprocesses lead over time to much larger changes in the prevailing limits of permissible protest activity.
Koopmans has proposed that public discourse plays an increasingly important role in the response of the police to demonstrators, and that police respond to protest as it appears in the media (Koopmans 2005). However, there was virtually no coverage of anti-emperor protest in the Japanese mainstream newspapers or in the saturation television coverage of the emperor’s coronation ceremonies, except for some reporting on police actions to prevent terrorist attacks. Since the same mass media and publishing distributors exercise strong self-censorship against criticism of the emperor, gatekeepers excluded the broader issue from the mainstream public sphere, although it received extensive coverage in alternative media that are also excluded from the mainstream and comprise an alternative public sphere (Steinhoff 2003). Both the issue and the protest movement were invisible.
My argument is that the handling of the demonstrations themselves constituted the most visible contribution to public sphere discourse. The message was that such protest and those who engage in it are dangerous contaminants from which the police must energetically protect the public. A corollary point is that anti-emperor protest in Japan cannot be studied using the standard method of newspaper protest event analysis because it does not appear there, although demonstrations certainly did take place in 1990–1991 and substantial police resources were devoted to them.
This dynamic corresponds to Feree’s notion of soft repression (Feree 2005), even though in this case it was exercised by the police as agents of the state as well as by gatekeepers of the mainstream public sphere. The findings exemplify all three of the levels of soft repression identified by Feree, to different degrees. At the micro-level, tiny contingents of right-wing counter-demonstrators attempted to ridicule the vastly larger contingents of anti-emperor demonstrators. At the other extreme, the absence of the movement and its issues from public discourse was clearly a form of silencing, based on an informal taboo maintained throughout the postwar period as a powerful relic of the pre-1945 lèse majesty law.
The behavior of the police in managing anti-emperor demonstrations falls in between these two extremes, as meso-level stigmatizing. The participants in anti-emperor protest were disproportionately composed of groups that are already stigmatized as social minorities in Japanese society. Hence anti-emperor protest carries the stigmas of its participants as well as of its discourse. The police treatment of the demonstrators built upon and reinforced both forms of stigma, thereby creating a further layer of state-sponsored stigma that aimed to discourage protest and narrow the limits of acceptable dissent through soft repression.
**** Note on Methods
I have been studying certain Japanese New Left radical groups since the 1970s, and thus had wide contacts in New Left circles before I began studying the anti-emperor movement in the late 1980s. I am grateful for a small travel grant from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies for preliminary research in 1989, and for a Fulbright fellowship in 1990–1991 that made this research possible. I have continued to follow the anti-emperor movement since then.
I learned the time and place of demonstrations from friends and the publications of anti-emperor groups. I selected the demonstrations involving the most extreme groups and the greatest potential for conflict as my main focus of observation, but often because of differing time schedules I was able to observe parts of other demonstrations on the same day.
I appeared at the rallies wearing appropriate casual clothing and carrying a camera or video camera, and was sometimes mistaken for a foreign journalist. To make it clear that I was an observer and not a participant in the political movement itself (which would have violated my visa status), during street demonstrations I walked on the sidewalk beside the demonstrators. At some demonstrations I knew people from my earlier research, but often I knew no one initially. However, as a Japanese-speaking foreign woman I was a sufficient curiosity that demonstration participants frequently initiated conversation with me, and responded readily to my overtures. In order to maintain good relations with the demonstrators I did not speak to the security police, but we recognized each other on sight. Aside from the one occasion on which an angry security policeman scolded me for taking pictures of the security police instead of the demonstrators, I was not bothered.
Since the demonstrations moved slowly through the streets and segments stopped periodically for traffic to pass, I was able to move back and forth and observe activity in all parts of each demonstration while still focusing my attention on the most extreme groups that had the greatest police presence and the most contentious interaction between police and demonstrators. My aim was not to conduct the level of systematic observation that McPhail has done, but to grasp the overall context and observe the most contentious direct encounters between police and demonstrators, as the specific sites at which limits were being tested and reconstructed within each demonstration.
Over time I became more widely known within the anti-emperor movement because I was also attending trials and other movement events, studying certain groups more intensively, and collecting published materials from movement organizations. In June 1991, I was invited to attend a major demonstration near Kyoto and to stay overnight with a large contingent of demonstrators from Tokyo, which gave me an opportunity to observe the backstage preparations and informal activities associated with participation in national demonstrations. Coincidentally, my bullet train from Tokyo left 2 min after the train carrying the Emperor and Empress to the same demonstration, from the opposite side of the same platform, so I had a ringside seat for their departure.
**** References
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** Chapter 4. Honor and Morality in Contemporary Rural India
Pamela Price
*** Introduction
There have been major shifts in relations of power and authority in rural society in many areas of India since independence in 1947. Millions of people among the approximately 70% of the population who live in villages have challenged the dominance of high caste and/or major landholding village lords. These challenges have contributed to what Yogendra Yadav has termed the two “democratic upsurges,” as expressed in the results of elections to state and national assemblies (Yadav 2000). In the first democratic upsurge in the 1960s, voter turnout increased and new political parties emerged to undermine the nation-wide dominance of the Congress Party. Increasingly persons from lower status castes entered electoral politics. The second democratic upsurge occurred in the 1990s with the dramatic expansion in political participation of those low in caste ranking and in economic class. New political parties in parts of India emerged campaigning with direct reference to the status and well-being of Scheduled Castes (SC)[24] and/or Backward Castes (BC, also called OBC).[25]
It is difficult, with the current state of knowledge, to gauge the democratic “deepening” (Corbridge and Harriss 2000, p. 202) in the transitions which have taken place. While changes in voting patterns and the emergence of new political parties have attracted considerable scholarly attention,[26] there has been little ethnographic examination of upsurges in localities.[27] There is little scholarly discussion of the meanings which former and new authorities, as well as ordinary citizens, assign to social and political changes in their communities. Few researchers have explored the nature and extent of departures from former ideologies of dominance. I approach some of these challenges in the study here.
Over a period of six months in 2003–2004 I made periodic visits to a village in a south Indian state with the intent of learning about local ideas and values of authority. My interest in contemporary political culture in rural society followed an engagement in studies of indigenous institutions of rule during the colonial period (Price 1996a) and of discourses about authority and status at district and state levels following independence (Price 1996b, 1999, 2005). In a village community I planned to track the fate of political ideas and values which I had investigated for earlier times and in transactions of greater scale. In particular I wanted to explore the existence in local cosmologies of possibilities for persons to acquire status and authority independent of their caste position. My earlier research suggested that ideas and values of honor and respect were salient in expressions of superiority in political relations. They were not necessarily statements about caste status. Political cosmologies contained notions attributing positive meaning to personal achievement. I pursue this issue here, within the wider one of the meanings which villagers attach to political and social relationships in a context in which conventional relationships of clientage and domination have undergone considerable disintegration.
In semi-structured conversations in the village of Balapalle,[28] respondents told of great and small changes which had taken place in relations of power and authority in their locality during the past 10–15 years. Low caste status informants spoke of experiencing independence in their lives. In their rendition individual moral and behavioral qualities gave possibilities for the acquisition of power and influence in the village. Strikingly, informants expressed norms for the achievement of power and influence in the conventional idiom of honor and respect. Informants’ notions of authority appeared to build on old ideas of (economic and political) protection which they adapted to new uncertainties in their environment. Yet, their comments about authority were infused with conceptions of individual moral behavior which have innovational qualities. The study below is a confirmation of the assertion of Richard Wilson: “Because reasoning about social issues inevitably involves the invocation of moral criteria, it is moral reasoning that especially influences the norms of political culture” (Wilson 2000, p. 261).
Earlier studies document that personal qualities and skills, apart from birth, could count in the attainment of political influence in Indian rural society in the decades immediately following independence (see, for example, Bailey 1966, p. 201; Dube 1967, pp. 161–167; Hiebert 1971, pp. 62–68; Wiser and Wiser 1971, p. 206) People of influence and trust in the informal management of community affairs did not come only from the highest ranking castes and/or from the dominant, landholder castes. The work of Bruce Tapper (1987), Marvin Davis (1983), and Srinivas (1976), among others, suggests that ideas of personal, as well as group, honor pervaded village political cosmologies. Influence could be earned, not just inherited. The occasional achievement of influence of lower status individuals did not imply, of course, the undermining of local structures of dominance. Powerful economic and political developments, especially since the 1970s, have had that result. Research on rural society documents that the structural changes which have occurred, unevenly, in many parts of India have been the result of a series of political, economic, and social factors. Corbridge and Harriss, among others, refer to “access to education and reserved jobs and changes in local land, labor and credit markets” (Corbridge and Harriss 2000, p. 215). Competitive processes in electoral politics and state and national legislation regarding reserved seats on local and state bodies for SCS and BCs have had structural impacts (Robinson 1988; Corbridge and Harriss 2000). Anirudh Krishna points to the political effects in rural communities of up to fourteen fold increases in state expenditures during the past fifteen years (Krishna 2002, pp. 32, 43–45).
Informants in Balapalle spoke of such economic and political forces with references to changes in their lives since the 1970s. Their comments are confirmed by published and oral observations of researchers who were part of a long-term project of quantitative studies of agrarian change carried out in the area. To protect the anonymity of the village I do not cite these studies here.
*** The Setting
Balapalle village is found in a district of slender and erratic rainfall in western Andhra Pradesh and contains about 700 households divided into a main village settlement and a hamlet. The two settlements are located 10 km. from a small market town which lies on a major road. A former quantitative researcher in the research project mentioned above accompanied me on my first visit to Balapalle and introduced me both to former village lords and the new elected leadership. His good rapport with villagers and the positive reputation of the project of which he had been a part contributed to the openness with which I was met when I later returned on my own with an interpreter. I did not stay in the village on my periodic visits, but rented rooms in the nearby town for several days at a time and visited the village in the morning and late afternoon, so that I could catch farmers before they went to their fields. The names of some of my informants I took from an earlier list of farmers who had been randomly selected and interviewed in the agrarian change project. Others were people I met as I walked around the village with my interpreter.
The earlier research describes Balapalle in the 1970s as having a highly stratified social structure, with a number of Forward Caste (FC)[29] families dominating landholding and (possibly) colluding to fix low wages for labor. The preeminence of some of these families was facilitated by their control of the hereditary village offices. A Brahmin held the office of Patwari (keeping records of landholding) and Reddys, the major landholding caste of the village at this time, held the offices of Mali Patel (revenue collection) and Police Patel (law and order). Scheduled Caste (SC) kawalis (men who also served as watchmen and strong arms) assisted the village officers in their work.[30] Village lords included these officers, some additional major landholding Reddy families, and two FC Velama caste money-lenders. Included as well was a wealthy BC Gowda caste head. The Gowda caste work was to tap palmyra trees for a liquid substance which the tappers fermented to make a slightly intoxicating drink, toddy. This was low status work which did not produce good earnings, but the caste head had acquired control of licensing and the distribution of the drink outside the village.
The BC, SC, and FC men and women I talked with agreed that the families who had ruled the village in the 1970s and 1980s had lost much of their authority and influence.[31] The villagers have a term for people of importance and influence, pedda manushulu (literally translated as big people). The singular form is pedda manishi. As long as ownership of land was concentrated in a relatively small number of kin-linked groups and as long as major sources of credit were similarly restricted to a small number of men, these people constituted most of the pedda manushulu in the village. Over and over again BCs, SCs, and some FCs told me that now every family has a pedda manishi, the head of the family. Some claimed that there were no longer any leaders in the village: everybody was a leader. Most of the 22 castes in the village no longer had one or more caste heads, also called pedda manushulu. The exceptions were the major SC castes: the Malas and (even lower status) Madigas. Village caste heads had held responsibility for managing disputes and giving authoritative guidance. Some informants told me that now people wanted to make their own decisions and they did not want to be told what to do by somebody outside their family. “Who are you [to tell me what to do]?” one SC (Madiga) farmer asked rhetorically as we talked (Fig. 4.1).
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-1.jpg][Fig. 4.1 A home in an SC neighborhood in the village. Picture taken by Pamela Price]]
Some informants said that the BCs and SCs had become the dominant groups in the village. SCs constituted between 25% and 30% and the BC Gowdas constituted about 20% of the population. By 2003, with the assistance of the state, these numbers translated into formal political power in the electoral system of village governance. Former village lords controlled the office of village government president until 1991, securing that one of their own was elected. Both old and new men of influence backed the SC men who won seats reserved for SC candidates in the elections of 1991 and 1996. The 2001 election for the current president of the panchayat was reserved by the state government for BC women. The political importance of the Gowda caste in Balapalle is seen in that three out of four contestants were Gowdas. The husband of the woman who won was the leader of village members of the political party, Telugu Desam. Telugu Desam, which had been in control of the state government for the previous 9 years, had broken the dominance of the Congress Party in the state in 1983 partly with appeals to poor and low status groups.
*** Ideological Integration in the 1970s and 1980s
The comments of informants suggested that the power of former village lords in the 1970s and 1980s had been buttressed by values and ideas similar to those justifying political subordination in other regions of India. What contributed to the stability of sharply hierarchical village societies were cosmologies in which there was focus on the necessity of interdependence — interdependence in asymmetrical relations — for the well-being of persons, families and the village community as a whole. Mutual, but unequal, shows of respect in economic, social and political interactions supported the political integration of villages. It was conventional to assume that respectful subordination to superiors (defined by certain criteria) was necessary in order for persons and their families to survive.[32]
In ethnography and fiction we find that in kin groups and ritual practices, people in rural society were socialized from a young age into recognizing superiors and respectfully subordinating themselves to them (Price 2005). (This is not to deny that tensions existed and quarrels occurred.) One honored, in particular, one’s parents, deities, and village lords. Ideally one gave respect and received respect, though not on terms of equality.
From the reports of Balapalle informants, villagers shared notions of honor and respect which buttressed the rule of the pedda manushulu village lords. The concept which best summarizes an attitude commonly held is that of bhayam-bhakti. Bhayam means fear and bhakti is loving devotion. Bhakti is devotion which worshippers properly have in their hearts when they approach icons of the gods, when they honor the gods either at their family altar or in temples and shrines. A goldsmith and his wife, both in their late fifties or early sixties, and an older friend and kinsman of theirs, the former pedda manishi of their caste, had this to say about the attitude, bhayam-bhakti, which they used to have toward the village pedda manushulu:
We go to a temple and do bhakti. We used to look up to the pedda manushulu like gods.
[We were] honoring by showing fear. We used to look up to them with bhakti. They used to look after us. Take the tiger and the hill. The hill protects the tiger and the tiger protects the hill. Nobody will go to cut wood from the hill when the tiger is there. There is reciprocity. Bhayam-bhakti is related to gauravam [respect]. We looked up to them with respect and they would have some love and affection toward us.
The element of fear had a physical basis, which I will discuss below, but it had another basis which had to do with the dependency which all of the castes in the village to greater and lesser degrees had on the pedda manushulu village lords. As the goldsmith caste informants explained: “The pedda manushulu used to give people [agricultural laborers] seeds and food grains and all, so people were dependent on them and were afraid.”
We understand the issue of fear mixed with devotion when we refer to the nature of most village gods and goddesses in south India. Gods and goddess, like village rulers, had the power to protect. Ordinary villagers were dependent on deities and on men more powerful than they to protect them, when protection means that one person makes it possible for another person to survive and to support those who are, in turn, dependent on him or her. As a former village lord, the Mali Patel, told me: “[You get respect] because you are protecting somebody.” Like village goddesses, however, the village rulers could withdraw protection, as well as give it. They could withdraw credit, could refuse employment, and could withhold vital information. From village ethnographies we know that, when the goddess feels that she is not honored and loved sufficiently, she punishes by withholding what is hers to give. So, too, could former village lords.
As we shall see below, informants were divided on the issue of the significance of bhayam-bhakti today. Women tended more than men to feel the emotion and low caste women seemed to feel it the strongest. A SC (Madiga) woman who was married to one of the caste heads explained: “You can be scared of people whom you like. In the house wives are scared of their husbands. You are scared of someone you are contracted to work for. Bhayam-bhakti is being afraid of someone whom you like and respect.”
Under the rule of village lords, informants reported that physical movements indicated fear and respect. If a pedda manishi was sitting outside a building, people would be afraid to walk in front of him and would turn away so as to avoid him. SCs generally walked, shoeless, with their heads bent in the presence of higher caste folk.
The village lords ruled with the threat of force and the disobedient could be beaten. An SC (Mala) former caste head related his experience. He said that, earlier, when SC people like himself were much poorer than they are today — when they were landless and living on 4 rupees a day for wages — they would steal crops from neighboring fields:
[From my notes] The police patel would send the kawali [the SC assistant] to fetch him and to take him to a place on the edge of the village where there was a room and the police patel would beat him nicely... When the kawali came he would plead not to be taken. He might have taken something from a field to eat. The person who had the field would complain.
For small affairs there would be only a beating. For big offences, the patel would turn people over to the police. The patel would beat them and make them promise not to steal again.
This former caste head was not, overall, trying to paint a picture of brutal oppression. Just before telling of his experiences with the police patel, when I asked him about the nature of the regime of the village lords, he had answered: “Honoring others was more. [There was] lots of love and affection shown earlier.”
One of the surviving members of the regime of village lords argued in a similar fashion about the content of emotion in his relations with his subordinates, the people who worked his fields: “There was a feeling of oneness and belonging, gauravam [respect]. Nowadays the SCs feel [that it is low] to work for others and also in taking help from others.” The informant, a Reddy farmer with about 25 acres of productive farm land, went on to say that earlier he experienced mutual respect between him and his field laborers.
In sections below I discuss notions of respect, fear and protection that emerged in my conversations with informants. Elements of these notions altered in Balapalle as a significant number of BCs and SCs took advantage of opportunities offered by the introduction of new crops and agricultural technologies, changes in the market for land, and new institutions, inside and outside of the village, to seek independence (swatantram), experiencing the desire to be free of domination in general, not just from former village lords.
The study here, along with others which focus on status in terms of honor (Price 1989; Price 1996a,b), indicates that there has been greater scope for human agency culturally in Indian society than was suggested by earlier preoccupations with status organized around notions of purity and pollution (Dumont 1970).
*** Informal Indications of the Decline of Former Village Lords
An indication of shifts in authoritative relations was the trend informants reported against addressing all Reddys and Velamas by their caste titles, titles which indicated dominance. Previously one would address a Reddy either just by “Patel” or one might say “Tirupati Reddy Patel,” instead of just “Tirupati Reddy.” A Reddy woman would be addressed as “Patel amma [lady].” Velamas were entitled Dhora and Brahmins were addressed as Panthulu. Informants reported that younger men in particular were less inclined to address superior caste people by their caste titles. Women, however, as I indicated above, were reported to tend to regard Reddys, Brahmins and Velamas with some fear and to behave with shows of respect toward them in public, addressing them by their titles
Informants said that the younger generation in general give less respect to older generations on the basis of age and experience. They hold more respect for formal learning and wealth. When asked about changes in the nature of cooperation in the village in the last 20 years, older people (40 years and up) tended to say that people in the village have become more “selfish.” Informants’ comments pointed to villagers’ becoming more focused on the welfare of their families — especially that of their children in terms of education — and less interested in the needs of distant kinsmen and non-kin neighbors. Education was highly prized. Knowledge, I was told, could lead to freedom and wealth, freedom of movement, to greater choices in life.
There was wide acceptance among informants that education had played an important role in the achievement of greater independence among village BCs and SCs. The BC president of the village government (illiterate, herself) reported that “Twenty years ago the village leaders gave commands. No one commands anymore. Because of education. [Now] other villagers can do the work of the patels, while before there was less knowledge. Children are seeing films on television and are learning new ways of doing.” The word for knowledge/intelligence, telivi, came often into the discourse: informants said that villagers had more telivi these days (Fig. 4.2).
What were some of the other perceptions of reasons for political change? When I asked one Gowda medium landholder about the decline of the village lords and caste pedda manushulu, his quick response was that new sources of credit caused the changes. He added that the emergence of new political parties was a factor, in that party activists helped villagers to get loans. Too, he said, wealthy men in the village had become less interested in lending money, even though not doing so resulted in their loss of control over lower status and poor people. Informants said that lending money had become less attractive because it was harder to recover loans.
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-2.jpg][Fig. 4.2 Instead of the usual deities, holy men and movie stars pictured on a wall in their house; the village president and her husband show mainly images of famous Indian politicians. Picture taken by Pamela Price]]
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-3.jpg][Fig. 4.3 Abandoned house in the village. Picture taken by Pamela Price]]
Another factor which often came up in conversations was that families of major village landowners had sold their land and moved away or simply ceased agricultural production, giving lower status and poor people the opportunity to become landowners or to expand their holdings (Fig. 4.3). With the introduction of new crops such as cotton and castor beans the new landholders experienced increases in their incomes. Shifting relations of power and authority had contributed to high/ dominant caste flight, it was said, because landholders had lost control over field laborers. Bonded labor diminished significantly during the 1990s and field laborers became aggressive about claiming higher wages or simply left the fields and looked for other sources of income. A man who was once the greatest landowner had sold off almost all of his holdings, he said, because his children did not want to live in the village and do agriculture. He added that large scale landholding had also become less interesting because of the presence in the district of Naxalites, political radicals whose activities included extortion and assassination.
I asked a Reddy farmer how greater access to land had changed ideas about respect in the village and he answered with reference, first, to himself:
[He says] that, if he takes a loan for one lakh[33] rupees, the money lender cannot tell him what to do when he wants to. That is because [he] can sell off some land: “I can pay the sum back”...There is a lot of change because people are leading their own lives by having their own land and work.
I heard repeatedly the expressions, “having one’s own land and work” and “eating one’s own food.” An illiterate SC large landholder asserted, “Buying one’s own land and doing one’s own work gives respect.”
*** Continuing Focus on Respect
Even if there was an articulated desire to make one’s own decisions in Balapalle and to be independent, showing and receiving respect continued to play an important role in informants’ statements of what it meant to be a person of power and influence. The following response came from an illiterate SC medium landholder in his 70s, when I asked him how the village had changed:
There is less fear about patels. We do not call Reddys by the title of patel. Now SCs can go to the home of a Reddy.. [About FC Velamas] There is no fear toward them, just gauravam [respect]. [But why show Velamas gauravam?] Because they are educated and have knowledge — they have had this for generations passed. But now youngsters are not giving respect to Velamas. Good character gets respect. A bad person may get respect in a bad way. [What is good character? How does a person show good character?] The way the person behaves with him, talking nicely, with kindness, advising him, giving good advice and doing good work [helping others]. If you want money, a person with kindness will give. [He] says that [villagers] will give politeness to someone who helps them. Behaving well is having a helping nature and giving good help.
An illiterate SC large landholder commented that, “A person who is not acting with respect will be shown agauravam [disrespect].” I asked a former village lord, a Reddy large landholder, if knowledge and intelligence played a role today in a person’s acquiring respect: “Educated people will get respect, if they conduct themselves with politeness [maryada]. [How does one get a good reputation?] If you mix well with others and help others. A person who has 10th standard can get respect, if he behaves right, but an M.A. will not get respect if he thinks only of himself.”
Education, good conduct and generosity encouraged responses of respect. So also did money. The most straightforward statement of the relationship between money and respect came from the SC large landholder quoted above. When I asked him about the existence of bhayam-bhakti today, he said, “It is there.” And he continued,
Money is very important here. If we do not give gauravam [respect] to a man like [the president of the village Credit Cooperative Society] or [a money-lender], they will ignore us. [I ask about the connection between bhayam-bhakti and gauravam and he says that they are the same.] Those who have money, if we give them bhayam-bhakti and gauravam, they will think, he is a good man and means well and they will give us money. If I had money, I would not have to show gauravam.
Informants had a word for the social quality associated with having superior amounts of money, anthasthu (status). A former village lord, a Reddy large landholder, talked about behavior and money status in the same discussion:
According to your way of behaving you will get respect and honor. Respect has to be earned. Money will always give anthasthu. [I ask if moving to the city means that families are searching for anthasthu, as opposed to respect.] He says that, if they earn one lakh, they would like to buy a plot in the city for their children to use. It is not for him a question of anthasthu vs village respect, so much as a family’s diversifying and spreading its possibilities. A job is highly prized; one is getting a steady income with a job.
There are several words for respect, some of which have appeared above (gauravam, maryada). Other words are ijjat, paruvu, and viluva. Sometimes the meanings of these words overlap and sometimes they are specific. It is the word viluva which most obviously registers changes in village society. It can mean respect, but it also means worth or importance. The sense of worth is both financial and social. Viluva is replaced by the English word “value” in some people’s usage. Most of these people say that they started using the English word, value, for respect and worth about ten or fifteen years ago.
The issue of “value” came up at one point in the context of my question to a BC Gowda farmer, “What constitutes leadership in the village?” He answered:
Whoever has money is treated as a leader; they are also getting “value.” [What is meant by “getting value”?] The villagers are giving value means that the leaders are giving any amount if the villagers are facing problems. If a person is a good person, they are giving him value. Who has the money, they are giving him value. The villagers believe them and have faith in them. [What does that mean?] It means that they have hope that the person will let them borrow money. But, those who have money are only giving to those who have a good financial position, a good house, with a fan .. One is giving value when one makes a namaste [hands folded in greeting] to someone . it is the same as gauravam.
Another use of viluva came from a former village lord, who was expressing an elite point of view toward farming:
Before land gave gauravam, now there is not so much gauravam and ijjat, so I think of the land as a house which you can rent out rooms. You can rent out some of the land, if you like — lease it out in a 50–50 share basis — if you can’t farm it yourself [because of the lack of field laborers these days|...|Why is there no gauravam in land?] Because there is no viluva, no worth, there is no water [because of drought], no labor. People who work as field laborers and are landless want land and they come and ask landowners sell it to them. Many people sell land and have bought plots in the city. If we sell 50 acres here, we can buy a 200 yard plot in the city.
The college-educated son of a medium SC landholder used viluva in the following way:
[If people have land and less fear, do they have more self-respect?] Son says that he gives credit to his father, who had been jeetam [a bonded laborer]. Father thought that his son should not have to do the same, so he worked hard and got some land. So the son has never experienced that bondage. His viluva is more. He is standing on his own feet and is not depending on anybody.
Here viluva refers to respect, worth and importance. Another meaning related to economic status came from a young washer caste medium landholder (who had taken serious financial losses because of drought and plant disease):
[What has happened in the village since the old-time pedda manushulu no longer control access to credit?] The pedda manushulu do not want to give money on loan, because they cannot count on its being paid back, so nobody is afraid of them anymore. Everybody has money now, whether it is small or big. There is no viluva for the pedda manushulu. There is no more Chinna-Pedda. [Informants referred to two brothers, former village lords, as “Chinna-Pedda.” Chinna, meaning small, was the younger.] Everybody has swatantram [independence] now. Why should they be scared of others? It is because of rajakeeyam [government and politics] that people are not fearing others. No one cares for the pedda manushulu now, why should I? Since about ten years back there is no viluva for them, nobody cares for the pedda manushulu.
The word for respect which seemed to be most commonly used among my informants was gauravam. Curiously, however, there was infrequent use of the term, atma gauravam (atma, self), the word which state politicians use to discuss the selfrespect of the Telugu people. In a discussion of the symbolism employed by the Telugu Desam Party as it emerged in the early 1980s, Ratna Naidu reported that common slogans that the party used included “jaati gouravam (honor of the Telugu race) [and] atma gouravam (self-respect)” (Naidu 1984, p. 132). During the period of field research politicians in Andhra Pradesh regardless of party referred to atma gauravam as part of their electoral appeal. The head of the new party arguing for an independent Telangana state called his election campaign “Telangana atma gourva yatra [procession]” (The Hindu, 5 February 2004) and called the air-conditioned van that he planned to travel in as he toured the area, the “Telangan Atma Gourava Ratham [vehicle]” (Deccan Chronicle, 5 February 2004).
It was only relatively sophisticated people among informants who knew the term atma gauravam, and they said that they learned it from sources outside village discourse, from reading or other forms of media. The lack of familiarity of atma gauravam among most of my illiterate informants indicated how very local for them was meaningful political discourse. Self-respect, as well as honor, was more commonly indicated by the Urdu word, ijjat, a reflection of earlier Islamic rule in the region.
When asked about the meaning of ijjat, informants usually spoke with reference to being able to get a loan and the repayment of loans. This view from a Reddy large landholder reflected his sense of propriety:
There are good people who give ijjat and maryada to others. There are others who don’t care for others and go their own way, such people have no ijjat. If we move with good people who have ijjat, we also get ijjat. If we roam with drunkards, vagabonds, we will not have any ijjat... Suppose I am traveling in a bus and I lose my money. There are people from my village in the bus. If I have ijjat they will buy me a ticket thinking that I will surely return it. They won’t do it for a person without ijjat.
There was a slightly different concern with reputation from a SC medium landholder whose family members worked as agricultural laborers: “Ijjat is when we don’t mess with anybody. If we get into a fight and he scolds us, then our ijjat will go. We live with maryada [respectful behavior]. If someone says something to me, I will keep quiet and end the matter there. There is maryada in finishing it right there.” For this respondent the matter of loans was more pressing than needing the fare for a bus:
When we are unable to return money on time, our ijjat is to go personally and explain nicely and apologize for not being able to return the money on time. Money gets you ijjat. When you don’t have money, maryada can get you ijjat. If we have ijjat we feel santhosham [contentment, happiness]. Without ijjat it is like being naked, and losing everything.
Still another point of view, that of maintaining high, inherited prestige, came from an adult son of a prominent FC Velama family of landholders and moneylenders. When asked about the meaning of ijjat, he began by saying that “we” hesitate to ask for loans because “our paruvu [honor status] will go. So we fear and don’t go.” He went on to explain, “In our family I have to live with ijjat as my father and his father before him and not lose ijjat. If we are performing a marriage, we have to spend and give according to our standards. We get trupti [contentment, satisfaction] because of our paruvu and get maryada from the whole village.”
Ijjat was the word most closely associated with shame and embarrassment among informants. A medium landholder SC reported:
Ijjat is coming from birth. If you perform bad things, you do not have ijjat. If someone knows you did something bad, you do not want to show your face. You have strong feelings, you hurt. Shame is not being able to pay money lenders when you are supposed to — you lose ijjat.
Informants characteristically associated shame with being scolded and with not being able to pay back loans when the money lender demanded his money. In newspaper stories about farmer suicides in Andhra Pradesh the winter of 2003–2004 a cause sometimes given was the intolerable shame a man felt by being repeatedly approached by a money-lender seeking repayment. Issues of credit-worthiness, financial reliability, and ijjat overlapped among my informants. Viluva could also be used in this context. A Gowda farmer explained that, “If he returns borrowed money in time, he has viluva.”
Related to, but different from shame, is a notion of low status, of feeling small. As reported above, young men in the village who had gone to the tenth standard in school refused to work as field laborers, if they could help it, because it made them “feel low,” naamoshi. Feeling low or small is related to feelings of shame, according to the responses of two Reddy kinsmen:
Naamoshi is when you do something bad and can’t show your face. You may commit suicide, when you do something bad, because you feel naamoshi. An ijjadar [someone concerned with his honor] will wonder about what others are thinking about him. [They bring up the word chinnathanam (feeling small).] If you are a good person, you would do anything for someone you cared for. Otherwise you will feel chinnathanam [doing the same work]... Pedda manushulu cannot do small works [low status jobs]. Only middle rank people can.
A pedda manishi will feel chinnathanam when a work will reduce their dignity or ijjat.
The two Reddy farmers told me that, if they work in their own fields, that was all right with them. However, that if they have to work in somebody else’s field of the same caste or a lower caste, they feel chinnathanam. In this case, they said, chinnathanam would be the same as shame [siggu|.
*** Whom do you Respect?
I experienced a contradiction between informants’ emphasis on respect for civility, kindness, learning and generosity, on the one hand, and on the other, statements about the respect given to those with money or access to other resources. A Brahmin, a former large landholder in the village, told me, “When a person has good character, the respect that you have for him is not out of fear or compulsion, but is whole-hearted respect. But when we respect people with money or power, it is out of fear or compulsion.” The Brahmin was articulating a major shift in notions of authority in the village. Particularly male informants owning land, including small landholders, suggested in their comments that bhayam (fear) tended no longer to be attached to bhakti (devotion) in political relations. The emotions were very often separated in behaving with respect towards a person.
The SC (Mala) former caste head and his college-educated son elaborated on these thoughts:
There are [these| two types [of respect|. The first is much better, where you act out of freewill. In the second you act out of fear of another’s position and power. More specifically, if we do not treat them with respect, they will keep this in mind and, when we need to go to them for getting our work done, they will not do it. Even if he [the son| does not belong to or support a political party [which a more powerful man belongs to|, he will have to show respect, because he may not get the benefit or get his work done.
But why, I asked, give respect without fear or compulsion? They answered that, “One respects good qualities and good character.” The son said that he “would respect anybody who helps others and does not harm anybody... He respects one who protects people from difficulties, perhaps by loaning money or helping them cope with their difficulties.”
Ambivalence between giving money pride of place in talking about getting respect is seen in an interview with the literate wife of a Reddy farmer:
[I ask about changing practices of honor and respect in Balapalle]: She says that she is getting honor and that there is nobody who does not show her respect. She shows respect to farmers. She laughs and says that whoever has money gets respect: most money gets most respect. Good character also gives respect. [What is good character?] Kindly people who talk without getting angry or laughing at you if you ask them something.
Talk about giving respect to people with money and influence quickly turned to the issue of today’s pedda manushulu in the village. Even if some villagers liked to say that every house had a pedda manishi, one found in conversation that there were some pedda manushulu in the village who were more important than others. Some low-status villagers would simply refer to “the pedda manushulu,” with the understanding that these were the people with much money and/or superior influence (Fig. 4.4). They usually did not want to specify who these people were, except to mention the holders of formal titles, such as the president of the village government and the head of the Primary Agricultural Credit Co-operative Society (PACS), or major money-lenders. They tended to mention a title, not a person. There was still fear in the village, if not of being beaten, of not being able to borrow money for major loans or not getting access to information or to government officials and politicians when the need arose.
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-4.jpg][Fig. 4.4 In the living room of a young Reddy farmer who has done well financially selling cotton seeds. Picture taken by Pamela Price]]
Being relatively wealthy or well-connected could result in villagers’ greeting one with a polite “namaste” or “namaskaram” and folded hands and welcoming one into their home and offering a chair. Another issue, however, was whether or not villagers would “listen” to a person when s/he talked. Who was likely to get influence in Balapalle?
A goldsmith caste man was negative on the topic of anybody in the village listening to anybody else, of letting a person influence how villagers thought or what decisions they made:
Before, the [goldsmith caste people] used to listen to... Panthulu [the Brahmin village officer, keeper of land records]. Now nobody listens. Now they listen to the “patwari” [the local name for the Village Secretary, a government servant] and the sar panch [panchayat president]. They used to listen to [a former village lord who was village president], now there is only his wife and son. Everybody is a pedda manishi now, everybody is intelligent and everybody is a leader.
According to the goldsmith, if people would not listen to a person, “his respect would go down.” suggesting the significance of personal qualities — judgment or knowledge, for example — apart from access to resources in the constitutions of influence.
Respect, generosity, and money were often interlinked. The Mala former caste head explained: “If you give ten rupees, there is a lot of gauravam. If [the informant] needs 100 rupees and someone loans him the money, he will have a lot of gauravam for him. If the creditor needs the money back, he will work hard to give the money back. And then he will be able to borrow money again.”
There was a link, however, between informants saying that there is less honor and respect in the village and complaints about selfishness. A Gouda medium landholder observed, “Gauravam is not like it was before. Now if somebody is doing well, is intelligent, we think, he is just doing it for himself, he won’t do anything for me, so why should I listen to him. So such a person has less respect: Who are you to tell me?”
He complained that loans among neighbors and other villagers were harder to come by:
Nowadays helping is reduced because people do not return ten rupees help that we give to them. Those days the pedda manushulu would help everybody. Now they help only 10%. Now they help only those who go to them and show respect and viluva and they [those who get a loan] return back the money they have been given. Everybody is on his own. Now days relatives don’t help much because if you give a loan and don’t return on time, then there will be disputes. Now relatives just come and eat and go away. [Does one still worship as a god somebody who has helped one?] It is still there. We will talk well of him if others are there and are criticizing him. We will say that he will give us ten rupees.
The husband of the village president, the leader of Telugu Desam Party members, made a statement which tied together the notion of dependence and respect:
There is still bhayam-bhakti in the village. When you listen to one another [a form of showing respect], that is bhayam-bhakti. Bhayam-bhakti is like when somebody is coming and you stand. Bhayam-bhakti is gauravam. Bhayam-bhakti is not totally gone, but reduced from before because there is no dependence on others. You can go to the panchayat office and get solutions without a mediator.
I asked this village politician who the pedda manushulu are now and he gave a succinct reply: “Those who have padhavi [formal titles] and the money people, plus there are those who are good to people and have a good reputation.”
*** Ideological Bases for Village Rule Today
The hereditary officers had been, in many ways, distanced from conflicts among ordinary villagers, because their positions of dominance were secured by custom and law. Perhaps for this reason, they were perceived by some of my informants as having been fairer then the current pedda manushulu. A Gowda farmer said, “They used to be impartial. Anything they said people would do. Now SCs are getting educated and go to government offices and get papers on their own.” For many of today’s pedda manushulu, even minor issues become politicized. Those who are in elective positions fear being turned out of office in the next election. There is more at stake today in managing a conflict then there was previously: “Nowadays [pedda manushulu] see their own benefit. They just see their own interest, from where they can get ten rupees more.”
The government decides whether the election to village office will be an open election or restricted according to gender and/or caste. “Any person who has respect and whom people think is a good person can contest,” said an SC former caste head. Informants’ comments pointed, as well, to the importance of access to cash and loyal followers in electoral politics in the village. The candidate may be in a position to sell off some land, may borrow money and/or may get funds from people in his political party, inside and outside of the village. Candidates pay for drinks for voters and they may give money to an associate to distribute to encourage people to vote for them. According to a Gowda farmer, at election time, if a candidate did not give money for drink or ten rupees for a bribe, people complained that “he is not doing anything.” A Mala farmer said, when I asked where the drinking took place: “The candidate gives money to a pedda manishi and he will keep the drink in his house and invite people to come and drink and the pedda manishi will tell them about the candidate. Sometimes both the parties will give and the voters will take from both, but they will vote for the person for whom they have gauravam.”
An SC informant pointed out that villagers will have seen the candidate since s/he was young and they will have an “impression” of the person. His comments pointed to goodness, friendliness and helpfulness being important in creating the impression which will give a person a basis for running for office. For informants generally, helpfulness seemed to be the most important quality. I was told that, even if a person loses an election, he may keep his candidacy alive by being available to help people in getting a grant or a loan for their house. A Reddy farmer explained how a person not in power makes a reputation which could serve as a base for future contests:
[The person] can help in approaching politicians. Say that you have to go town to approach a politician. He will come with you and stay with you, even if you have to stay over night, and he will see that the work is completed. Even if he “eats” a little money, we are happy that he has got the work done... [S]ay that you have to get a loan from a bank and need a letter of recommendation from an MP [Member of Parliament] or an MLA [Member of the state Legislative Assembly]. This person will take the time to go to Hyderabad [the capital of Andhra Pradesh] and introduce you to the politician and help you get the letter.
Informants’ comments about village governance under the fluid new regime suggested the following scenario: Once a person is elected to office, respect which is granted on the premises of “good work” or helpfulness is not easy to maintain. An SC (Mala) smallholder remarked, “If the village president does good work, he gets the stamp of a good person. When respect is due to good character, it will be called viluva padhivi . only with good work will gauravam be there. A pedda manishi has both gauravam and power, [though] sometimes respect goes away.”
Villagers expect the village president to continue to be helpful and, in part because there is the wide assumption of the “eating” of public funds by elected officials, they expect that the person has greater access to resources than he had earlier. As the Mala smallholder assumed, “Pedda manushulu are the village president, the ward members of the panchayat, the members of the board of the Cooperative Bank. They get votes and they become pedda manishi and whatever is the profit, they share it among themselves.” The new president will have many claims on his energy and material resources. Each candidate in the election for village president will have 20–30 followers. (In the case of the president during the period of research, her husband was considered the political force in the village government and had factional followers.) After the election, the winner will still need to maintain followers in his active service and will thus have to compensate them for the time they spend assisting him. He has to pay back people from whom he has loaned money. Since resources are scarce, he has to make priorities among those who want his assistance. He will have a good idea of who (actively) supported his own candidacy. The winner will also have some notion of who did not support him, especially those who were in the camp of his rivals. His supporters have a high priority on a list of those deserving assistance. A Gowda farmer complained, “The village presidents only help those whom were with them in the campaign. As far as others are concerned, [the president] says, ‘You did not vote for me. Why should I help you, if you were supporting the other candidate?’” There can be guilt by association with the supporters of a rival candidate, which may include living in a part of town which is associated with the rival and his support base. Such was the complaint of a poor BC farmer, that he could not get assistance, even though he was in dire straits, because he lived in the wrong part of the town.
The village president not only has to keep track of government schemes and show to be “doing something for the village” as a whole by, for example, getting a new concrete road built, he has also to engage in personal acts of charity and generosity, offering people food, and making loans/gifts of money to those in need. At the same time, as I mentioned, many villagers assume that public funds are being “eaten” and that the president is colluding with government officials, taking money which should go to poor and deserving villagers.
For a village president of modest personal resources, it is difficult, if not impossible, to meet all of the expectations for personal assistance. He has difficulty in fulfilling a major constituent of respect. The resulting failures, for village presidents as well as other elected officials, outside the village and higher up in the party hierarchies and governing institutions, may contribute to the famous “anti-incumbency factor,” the disillusionment which voters in India commonly feel toward the men and women they elect to office. Comments from a Reddy informant suggested that constituents express their feelings about incumbent politicians in terms of their moral character: “[A particular MLA] did try to help people when they went to him, but people are [now] saying thus, ‘[his rival] is a good man’. And they say ‘[the MLA] is not a good man. [When his rival was in office], that time only it was better’.”
For informants in Balapalle politics was about moral behavior, about choosing or not choosing to help others (even if one “eats” a bit along the way). The discourse did not include discussions of competence or skill in carrying out responsibilities of governance. Moral condemnation fell on the person who disappointed; though one had a chance for a comeback when one’s rival also did not succeed in meeting expectations. As a BC tailor commented:
Your value increases when you have a padhavi [elected position in the village], but there are chances of it coming down also. No, you cannot get padhavi with money, you may have to use some money, but your self-viluva [value/respect] has to be there. Money does play a role. Manchitanam [goodness] is more important. Money is only a tool to be used.
*** Forms of Democratization
As I explained at the beginning of this piece, my initial interest in carrying out research in Balapalle was to explore the existence and meanings of noncaste status. My historical research on south India political culture indicated that noncaste status was a status which one achieved in processes of competition for political dominance and superiority. Ideas and values of honor and respect described this status and informed its authority. When I asked in Balapalle about present meanings and practices of honor and respect, informants generally associated these with moral qualities. They associated honor and respect less with domination than with individual characteristics of concern for others which could entail selflessness. Personal generosity played an important role. At the same time, some villagers said that there was more “selfishness” in relationships these days and some said there was less “love” among villagers. For the people I talked with, the constituents of both honor and morality had changed in several ways.
Comments about “selfishness” seem reflective of more fluid interpersonal relationships set in motion by more intense market forces. However, the greater prominence of market forces had not resulted in dissolution of preoccupation with morality. While some informants expressed respect for wealth, respect was appropriately tied to the way in which resources were used in social relationships. One way of understanding this preoccupation is to keep in mind that, even though the BC, SC, and some FC persons I talked with felt that there had been improvements in their lives and in the village in general in the last 20 years, they perceived their welfare as precarious. Even medium and large landholders articulated, for example, the need for easy access to small, as well as large, loans. The political economy of the village informed their moral sense.
From the beginning of historical sources in south India, including the poems of ancient Tamil, generosity has been a constituent of honor. (As Marshall Sahlins [1972] explained, control over redistribution is a major constituent of chiefly, ruling status generally in precapitalist societies.) However, in the new political economy of Balapalle, there have been changes in notions of reciprocity. Transactions have to a certain extent lost meaning as statements about dominance and subordination. Loaning money, giving your time and sharing information have acquired characteristics of transactions between equals. In the context of electoral politics and the increasing disintegration of clientelism in village economy, aiming for the honor of long-term, dominating lordship becomes less likely as an alternative for politically ambitious persons. In Balapalle, for the people I talked with, the greater fluidity in political and economic relations implied that the generous person acts out of a moral regard which does not require subordination in return. These changes in perceptions of moral action play themselves out in village politics.
Earlier I referred to research which documents the achievement of influence in village affairs by persons who did not come from high and/or dominant, landholding caste families in the decades immediate following Indian independence. In Balapalle, included among the village lords in the 1970s was the BC Gowda caste head. He was a money lender, having a good income from his control of extra-village distribution of the fermented drink, toddy, made by village Gowdas. A Gowda informant, a Congress Party activist, told me of his breaking the power of this village lord when he was a young man by persuading illiterate and inexperienced toddytappers to allow him to take over the distribution of toddy, giving them a higher return for their production and a modest income for himself. He related that he had been part of a nonparty, multi-caste group of village youth in the 1970s who formed an association with the aim of working for justice and development in Balapalle. The FC president of the village Credit Co-operative Society at the time of my interviewing and the BC Telugu Desam husband of the village president had also been members of the association. The young men joined political parties when village lords forced the group to disband after several years of operation. A new type of leadership had emerged which found its legitimacy, not foremost in inherited, landholding status, but in assisting villagers in solving problems, in doing what informants called “good work.” These men fit the pattern of newly emergent political entrepreneurs who gain influence and the possibility for political careers independent of inherited status, as discussed in Krishna’s study of village leadership in the states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (2002). With the advantage of literacy and quite often not much else, such men make a living as they engage in activities of service to those handicapped by lack of education and practical knowledge of persons and institutions outside village communities. In so doing they attract a grateful following and, despite their modest resources, become useful, as well, to those outside the village — such as administers of state development schemes and politicians — who need reliable ties to vulnerable groups in rural society. The spreading of the social base of recruitment to village leadership constitutes a process of democratization.
A further, ideological, democratization occurred in Balapalle as SC and BC respondents claimed for themselves and others in the sphere of everyday affairs the honor of being a pedda manishi, of being rulers of their own lives. This was particularly the case for male informants. The scale of the distribution of ruling honor had flattened. This type of honor was less connected with domination of others. We can view the frequent references to swatantram, independence, in this light. One became a pedda manishi, not as a village lord, but in one’s own eyes and those of others by “having one’s own land and work” and “eating one’s own food.”
Balapalle had not experienced in 2003–2004 polarization around the concept of self-respect. “Self-respect” had not become politicized as a call for mobilization among SCs and BCs. This development in political culture has occurred notably in north India, where the self-respect of SCs and their desire for respect from others is a major motivation in support for the SC-based Bahujan Samaj Party (Inkinen 2003). Since values and symbols of honor pervade north Indian society (see, e.g., Mandelbaum 1988), as well as the south, clearly articulated desires for self-respect in political rhetoric indicate the continued, if changing, salience of ideas and values of honor and respect in the general context of contemporary “democratic upsurges.” Notions of authority related to honor and respect evolve and, in the process, continue to play significant roles in political idioms. There is a continuing preoccupation in rural society with protection as a platform for leadership and influence, but it is a protection which demonstrates, for those who feel protected, independent, individual morality.
Acknowledgments The Norwegian Research Council funded the research upon which this chapter is based. Many thanks go the Village Level Studies group at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, for cheerful assistance and good discussions. I am grateful, as well, to David Gilmartin, Arild Engelsen Ruud, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. Responsibility for the contents is mine.
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** Chapter 5. Routing Conflict: Organized Violence and Clientelism in Rio de Janeiro
Enrique Desmond Arias
Some portions of this text draw on data discussed in Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill), 2006.
Studying politics in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shantytowns) is an extremely challenging enterprise in light of the immense violence facing these communities. During my first research trip to Rio in 1996 few wanted to help me, an inexperienced and young researcher, gain access to any favela. After nearly a month of efforts I visited the favela of Rocinha under the auspices of an internship program run by the Pontifica Universidade Católica (PUC), an elite private college. On one of my early visits I attended an end-of-the-semester party at PUC’s center in the community where I met Roberto, a young politician campaigning for city council. When I lamented my difficulties gaining access to favelas he told me that “you just have to know the right people” and invited me along to visit several that evening. I accepted and in minutes we had left on a journey that would take us to three favelas.
We ended the night in Rio’s working class Zona Norte (North Side) at a favela called A Ladeira where a party was just beginning. Standing in the plaza I could smell grilling meats from the many booths selling beers, sodas, and food. A DJ warmed up the crowd playing charme, a melodic and usually romantic variant of Rio’s more staccato, violent, and sexual funk (a type of hip-hop). As a dancing contest began someone released a small hot air balloon into the clear starry sky.
I was unsure of exactly why we had come to this party except that Roberto had to meet with someone about gaining access to the community. Before going to the party we had visited another social gathering in a nearby housing project populated with residents the military had displaced from the Praia do Pinto favela in the 1970s (Perlman 1976, pp. 258–260). There we met a middle aged woman who took us to A Ladiera.
After a long wait at the party Túlio, a young stylishly dressed man, came down to meet with us and he and Roberto went off to have a private conversation. I was left with the politician’s short bull-necked driver and a very large powerfully built man who had arrived with Túlio. While they talked, the three of us silently drank beer, listened to the music, and ate tough grilled meats.
Eventually Roberto and Tulio returned, everyone shook hands, and we said goodbye. As Roberto, his chauffer, and I drove away, Roberto, reveling in the illicitness of his contact, said that Tulio was the dono (literally owner, head trafficker) of the favela and that he had asked Roberto to help improve the main quadra (public square) in the community in exchange for exclusive access during the election period. Roberto said he refused the deal because he did not work with traffickers though I wondered why we had gone to the meeting at all if he had planned from the outset not to make a deal. Several months later Roberto lost his bid for the city council.
**** Drug Trafficking and Clientelism in Rio de Janeiro
Clientelism is alive and well in Rio de Janeiro. This story, however, highlights the changing nature of this practice in light of the growing power of drug traffickers in the city’s poor communities. Brokers, patrons, and clients still work together to distribute favors and organize votes but today drug traffickers have stepped into the picture, creating a new level of exchange in this process. To get into favelas politicians must first make an arrangement with traffickers who then, usually through interlocutors, present the politicians to the community. While politicians always had to gain access to favelas through intermediaries, this new situation is clearly more intimidating and potentially compromising. The result, as I will show in this chapter, is that politicians tend to distribute favors to traffickers and traffickers then redistribute those favors to residents, resulting in a two-tiered clientelism in which traffickers are free to negotiate patronage with a number of politicians but in which ordinary favela residents obtain political patronage through a single trafficker who dominates the favela they live in partially through force. This decreases the ability of favela residents, who during much of the late twentieth century could choose which local leaders would represent them to politicians, to effectively negotiate for patronage during elections. It also reduces residents’ already precarious identification with politicians and political parties while at the same time increasing, through political patronage, ties between residents and traffickers.
In the past two decades, organized criminal groups have had a growing impact on the political life of poor communities and, more broadly, on Rio de Janeiro as a whole (Leeds 1996, pp. 70–73; Gay 2005, pp. 54–58). These drug gangs can become involved in extended conflicts with one another that kill many and bring chaos to the communities where they operate. Clientelism provided the primary way that Rio’s impoverished linked themselves into political organizations, redressed basic grievances, and provided a minimal infrastructure to the favelas where many of the poor live. We know a great deal about the history of clientelism in Rio and the ways that drug trafficking has affected the political life of favelas by providing services to residents, resolving conflicts, and imposing controls on the operation of Associates de Moradores (Residents’ Association, AMs) (Goldstein 2003, pp. 174–225; Gay 2005, pp. 54–58). Nevertheless, we know relatively little about the specific effects that drug trafficking has had on the practice of clientelism in contemporary Rio.
In this chapter, based on work conducted in Rio and Kingston, I will argue that the growing prevalence of crime in Rio’s favelas has caused a bifurcation and transformation of clientelist practices. What has emerged today is a combination of fixed-patron clientelism, reminiscent of what Scott Mainwaring has described as “traditional rural” clientelism, and neo-clientelist practices based on more flexible patron-broker-client ties. Both of these systems exist simultaneously and help deliver some limited services to favela residents. At the same time, however, they do little to provide a meaningful link between favela residents and the political system. In what I refer to in this chapter as two-tiered clientelism drug traffickers act as relatively fixed patrons to favela residents by distributing limited goods and services in exchange for favela residents’ silence and protection. At the same time, traffickers obtain some, though by no means all, of these goods through flexible patronage relations with politicians. Through brokers, traffickers augment their resources for patronage in favelas by negotiating among a number of outside political patrons during each election cycle. The result is the distribution of electoral clientelism to favela residents through traffickers who, as a result of their more flexible relationship with outside patrons, can skim off a portion of patronage resources before passing them back along to their captive clients in the favela. Examining clientelist transactions during the 1998 elections in the favelas of Tubarao, Santa Ana, and Vigario Geral, this chapter shows how political and criminal clientelism operate simultaneously and cooperatively in Rio today to decrease direct links between the poor and the state and to improve the political position of drug traffickers both inside and outside favelas.
**** History and Operation of Clientelism in the Americas
Scholars of Latin America have relied heavily on clientelism to explain numerous cross-class political interactions. While for a long time most scholars saw this practice in a negative light (Hagopian 1992, pp. 251, 271–279; Stokes 1995, pp. 131–132; Sives 2002, pp. 66–79) in recent years a few scholars conducting intensely focused field research have shown its enduring importance as one of the few modes available to the poor to make demands of the state and effectively provide for themselves and their communities in highly unequal political systems (Gay 1998, pp. 7–24; Auyero 2000, pp. 41–44; for an example see Scott and Kerkvliet 1977, p. 440).
Most political science approaches suggest that clientelism is a set of unequal, reciprocal, noninstitutionalized, face-to-face exchange relations (Stokes 1995, p. 55; Sives 2002, pp. 80–82; also see Chalmers 1977, pp. 412–415; Scott and Kerkvliet 1977 offers a nuanced analysis of this, pp. 442–443). This definition encompasses three narrower sets of practices. The first, patrimonialism, refers to the treatment of state power as private, almost familial, resources in which clients work in the personal interest of their patrons. The second, what Scott Mainwaring has called “traditional clientelism,” is a practice in which powerful fixed patrons, often operating with the force of arms, dominate a particular region and negotiate the votes of their captive clientele in exchange for outside support, a small portion of which is passed back to clients. In Brazil the classic example of this were rural coroneis, powerful landowners, who dominated clientele networks made up of poor workers in order to make demands of the state. In return for delivering their votes, and hence shoring up their political position with higher-level patrons, the coroneis would provide some personal assistance to those who worked for them. In these relationships clients were beholden to patrons in relatively static, spatially linked relationships (Leal 1977; Graham 1990). Finally, neo-clientelism refers to the postwar urban phenomena in which independent brokers representing groups of clients move flexibly among politicians negotiating deals to provide services to residents in exchange for votes (Mainwaring 1995, pp. 175–181). In these relations, which Robert Gay has so well documented in the Rio de Janeiro of the 1980s and 1990s, groups of clients are not indefinitely stuck with a broker, there is no necessary reproduction of pseudo-familial relations, and brokers are free to negotiate independent agreements with politicians in different electoral cycles (Gay 1994, pp. 54–55).
**** A Short History of Clientelism in Rio de Janeiro
Over the last 70 years, as the urban population and the political franchise have generally expanded, clientelist practices in Rio have approximated those observed in other parts of Latin America. During Brazil’s Second Republic (1945–1964) clientelism played a major role in linking poor communities to the state (for a description of politics in this period see Mainwaring 1995, p. 359). This was an era of growing concern about the role of favelas in cities and the emergence of numerous policies designed to incorporate favelas more effectively into the urban landscape thereby reducing some of the problems which many political and social leaders believed they caused (Leeds and Leeds 1978, pp. 198–229). While the Catholic Church, in conjunction with the state, worked to provide services to favela residents and resituate them in other forms of housing to prevent the spread of communism and provide them a better life, many actual improvements in services came from local organizing or contacts with politicians. At the behest of Catholic organizations and the government, favela residents formed Associates de Moradores which helped mediate contacts with politicians and stop removal efforts (Burgos 1998, pp. 28–31). Over time the leaders of these groups became the primary locus of clientelist contacts and their presidents the main brokers of relations between politicians and residents.
From the early 1960s until the mid-1970s the government of Rio and later the Brazilian military regime adopted an active policy of favela removal. In response, AMs organized, often through statewide interest groups, to prevent violent government eviction efforts. While the dictatorship crushed mobilizations during its most brutal period in the 1970s this changed in the late-1970s and early-1980s as the political system began a gradual opening and favela residents organized collectively to demand concrete improvements in services (Perlman 1976, pp. 206–209, 258262; Gay 1994, pp. 19–21; Burgos 1998, p. 38).
Nevertheless, even during the dictatorship’s worst years, state-level and some federal-level elections occurred and clientelism played an important role in linking politicians to poor communities. Under Governor Antonio de Padua Chagas Freitas, the leader of a powerful political machine that dominated Rio politics from 1970 until 1982, many state resources were distributed through brokers to favela residents in exchange for electoral support. While Chagas Freitas was formally a member of the opposition Movimento Democratico Brasiliero (Brazlian Democratic Movement), ideology played a weak second to seat machine politics in his efforts to obtain votes (Gay 1994, pp. 21–26; see also Diniz 1982). During this period and later into the twentieth century favela brokers, usually elected AM leaders, sought out and negotiated among several politicians for the best arrangement for the communities they represented. Brokers worked hard to get good deals because the communities they represented could replace them through the normal electoral cycle.
In 1982 Leonel Brizola, an eminent exile during the dictatorship, was elected governor of Rio with extensive support from favelas. Brizola’s efforts to gain support from the poor were not explicitly clientelistic in that services were provided not by individual politicians directly to favelas but rather through state agencies under the direction of the governor. Politicians from Brizola’s party, however, ensured that the state agencies they controlled distributed these services as favors to communities which had provided them and their allies with votes (Gay 1994, pp. 26–34). The result was that a political machine centralized in the state apparatus managed exchanges of favors and votes. Brizola’s populism became a grander, more centralized form of clientelism (Gay 1990, pp. 452–454). During this period the state government regularized electricity in most established favelas and made other significant improvements. These shifts had the effect of weakening AM power since, with many collective demands met and without the income from the provision of home electricity, AMs and their leadership became less relevant to the day-to-day lives of residents (Alvito 2001, p. 161).
Around 1985, narcotics trafficking exploded in Rio as a result of the expansion of the Andean drug trade. As the home of the second largest port in Brazil and an important tourist hub, Rio was an easy choice to become a major drug transshipment center. Often built on very steep hillsides, Rio’s favelas provided ideal places to hide drugs and arms. Traffickers started to employ many residents in their operations, provided needed assistance to the poor, and fortified their leadership role within favelas (Dowdney 2003, pp. 60–62). The consolidation of drug gangs has increased crime and violence in the city, provoking aggressive military and police responses which have resulted in the violation of favela residents’ rights (Leeds 1996, pp. 63–66; Dowdney 2003, p. 32).
The growing strength of drug traffickers did not simply stem from the ways they met the needs of residents or the weakness of AMs. It also resulted from state corruption, a social policy dominated by personalist politics, organizational strategies learned by common criminals while incarcerated with political prisoners during the dictatorship, and the particular economic and political geography of Rio in an era of globalizing markets. Increasingly drug traffickers realized that to remain safe in favelas they had to control elements of local political life. Consequently, in the late 1980s, with approximately 600 favelas in the city of Rio, police recorded the murder of 240 community leaders (Barcellos 2003, p. 234). As a result fewer and fewer favela residents had any interest in running for leadership positions and, increasingly, trafficker-supported AM presidents stayed indefinitely in local leadership positions whether ratified by uncontested elections or not.
Since the mid-1980s drug trafficking organizations have played increasingly important roles in favelas providing limited assistance to residents and involving themselves in the political realm. In 1996 Elizabeth Leeds wrote, “...in learning to play the electoral game, the drug groups run the risk of distorting the democratic process with the help of vote-hungry politicians and of helping recreate an even more pernicious form of patronage politics (Leeds 1996, p. 76).” While we know that traffickers are involved in politics it is less clear from the existing evidence exactly how they are involved and how they have transformed local clientelist practices. To understand favela politics we need to delve more deeply into roles that traffickers play in the political life of favelas.
**** Understanding Contemporary Clientelism in Criminal Environments: Political Practice, Crime, and Conflict Resolution in Kingston, Jamaica
The most explicit analysis of clientelism and drug trafficking comes from the Jamaican context. From the 1960s to the 1980s a violent form of political clientelism operated in the Kingston-Spanish Town area in which politicians distributed resources to poor communities via brokers who also acted as enforcers in keeping opposition supporters out of the neighborhood. To this end, politicians gave weapons to some partisans. This led to cyclical electoral violence that in 1980 took over 800 lives in this small island nation (Gunst 1998, p. 111; Stolzoff 2000, p. 99).
With this explosion of violence, politicians began backing away from armed local supporters who, in a period in which the global cocaine trade expanded dramatically became involved in drug trafficking (Small 1995, pp. 140–142). This occurred at the same time as state resources available for clientelist spending declined under the weight of demands for structural adjustment (Sives 2002, pp. 80–82). Increasingly these criminals, many of whom were former political gunmen, began to independently provide resources earned through smuggling to the communities that they came from and played increasingly large roles in providing local security. The rivalries of these new criminal gangs often paralleled preexisting lines of political conflict.
Amanda Sives has argued that this has led to a type of double or parallel clientelism in which drug traffickers play a primary role delivering services to poor areas and maintaining order. She notes that while “there is still some pork left in the barrel” there has been a weakening of clientelist ties with politicians as residents of poor neighborhoods have increasingly looked to drug dealers for basic assistance and security (Sives 2002, p. 84). During elections, however, residents of these communities continue to receive some support from political patrons. At times, Sives argues, this has resulted in outright conflicts between politicians and traffickers (Sives 2002, pp. 80–84). Her claims about a parallel clientelism resonate with the experience of Rio, where drug traffickers and politicians also simultaneously provide resources to poor residents. This analysis provides the basis for building a framework for understanding the operation of Carioca clientelism today. Many of these observations are born out in one short observation of criminal clientelism in Eastern Kingston.
With approximately 600,000 residents, Kingston is the main urban center in Jamaica, an island nation with a population of 2.5 million. The main access between the wealthier parts of the city (Uptown and the New Kingston area) and the airport which sits on the Palisadoes Causway, a thin isthmus that connect the city to the town of Port Royal, passes through an area know as Mountain View Road. This zone of the city brings together a group of neighborhoods that over the past several years have been involved in a series of turf conflicts which effectively separated the better-off neighborhoods from the airport. This created substantial stress in the city and interfered with basic commerce. In response, civic leaders and the Jamaican government began efforts to negotiate a peace among these rival gangs. The result was the creation of the Peace Management Initiative that engaged leaders of gangs in the region’s neighborhoods with government and civic officials. In April 2006 I spent 2 days traveling around Kingston with one of the local leaders and activists involved in the initiative. His interactions with community residents and others reflect the critical role violent interlocutors play in managing local services and providing a link to the government.
Through contacts at the University of the West Indies I met Sam, a community activist who described himself as the “number two man” in one of the southern neighborhoods of Mountain View. We began our conversation at a local community center that he helped run but quickly I found myself driving around the neighborhood as he met with community residents who often asked him for work and for his assistance in securing prescription drugs or good medical care. We drove one young girl to a doctor he knew in a different part of Kingston for a medical exam after which Sam paid the doctor J$4000 (approximately US$80).
During our conversations Sam talked at length about the role of “local leaders” in administering order. He noted “[If there is a] [p]roblem I will deal with it.... Drastic measures need to be taken sometimes. Have to beat man who make problems, who robs. We flog man, man don’t want spanking, sometimes we broke foot and arm. It jungle justice.. If someone rapes a child we break di foot and hand and for him to leave. Certain crimes [are so bad] have to tell him to leave. Comes from Africa. Man gets run out of village when rape someone. [It’s] [d]onmanship, man who runs place.” He went on to note in this conversation that “There are two types of don. You have one who is a leader. He sends people to school, helps the community. Another one who kills, who starts doing it for money and glory.. If you try to kill [him], if you kill one you take away [the one you can talk to]. Then you have to talk to a hundred. [I tell them they should work] with dons, to transform, to ... bring change. We recommend talking to Dons. Talk to one gun and not 100 guns. This is a different strategy the help communities.” He noted during this conversation the positive relations that he had with police and their mutual efforts to maintain order and to work with the Jamaican government to deliver services to the community.
His conversation was with imbued with references to the Peace Management Initiative in which civic leaders and government officials sought to engage local violent actors in efforts to control violence. The objective, as he notes in the above statement, was to negotiate with one community leader who had the power to bring violence under control in and to stop fighting with the leaders of other communities. In exchange the groups operating in the community would receive resources from the state to provide assistance to community residents. As Sam put it “People won’t get rid of Downtown [the poorer area of Kingston], they [gangs] will get money from extortion. I made [a] speech in front of [the] minister for a community project scheme to go to community [and work with the dons]. [The government has to have the] intelligence to understand who runs things and embark on mission, must use guns [to protect the project], work constantly to protect, need to confide, need the trust of the community, need to spend millions of dollar to programs. [These people can help gain that trust.]. Work with one to set up the business, give money to work organizations, to employ people, change life for the best.” For Sam, someone involved with violent activities in his community, reform will only come when the state can effectively engage with local criminal leaders as had occurred through his efforts. In this vision violent local actors become a critical component of local governing strategies. Without effective engagement with these groups it would be impossible to control violence. Left unsaid here is a new vision of state engagement in which formal bureaucratic ties are built between the state and local violent actors. These new ties supplement longstanding clientelist connections between the parties and the community (Sam is a fervent supporter of one of the two major parties) and local violent leaders remain as critical interlocutors in delivering the services to the community. Though outside contacts may become bureaucratized, local relations remain personalist and clientelistic.
These conversations reflect the changing nature of clientelism in Kingston today. On one level they confirm Sives’ observations of parallel clientelism in which violent actors and politicians simultaneously deliver resources to residents of poor areas. At the same time these conversations reflect that these two forms of clientelism may not always be discrete and that violent actors may play a role in the distribution of state clientelist resources to poor communities. Perhaps most importantly, it is clear that violent actors find themselves negotiating with several potential patrons including politicians, state bureaucracies, and in this case civic leaders to bring resources to the community which they then redistribute to residents. This suggests that violent groups engage in their own clientelist activities outside the community and then local residents, who cannot choose which gang to negotiate with since only one gang dominates each neighborhood, then have to maintain positive relations with those violent actors to obtain resources. This dual relationship is very similar to what occurs in Rio.
**** Clientelism in Rio Today
As in Kingston, it is widely known that traffickers in Rio de Janeiro provide services to favela residents in exchange for their protection from police and other traffickers. Evidence from the three favelas I studied suggested that traffickers regularly threw parties for residents in each of the communities. They also helped to build and improve residents’ homes, worked to improve water service, resolved disputes, stopped petty theft, maintained basic order, provided street lighting, and helped residents gain access to health care and burial services. In general this assistance was limited, sporadic, and very much based on personal relationships. In the abstract, residents would describe traffickers’ services in a way that left the impression that they really thought they could get assistance from the traffickers when they needed it but, in practice, traffickers’ decisions to help residents seemed much more capricious and depended on personal relationships and circumstances. To make matters more complicated residents had only a limited amount of choice in these matters since it is very difficult to remove traffickers and, even then, they would only be replaced by other traffickers who would probably follow similar principles in distributing services. Despite these limitations, traffickers are one regular possible source of assistance for many favela residents in an environment in which state services to the poor are erratic and extremely limited. Traffickers in Rio, as in Kingston, are a continuous presence in poor communities and offer the regular, if limited and capricious, possibility of patronage. All of this improves the stature of traffickers who many favela residents, nonetheless, still view with a high degree of fear and circumspection. The ongoing presence of criminal patrons within the favela affects the activities of political patrons during electoral cycles.
In Cores de Acari, Marcos Alvito builds on the experiences of one group of favelas to offer insights into contemporary clientelism in Rio. Paralleling some of Sives observations of Kingston, Alvito argues that Rio’s primary brokers, AM presidents, see traffickers and politicians as similar types of patrons. He notes, for example, that when a police occupation reduced drug sales in Acari and drained traffickers of resources to provide certain services, an AM president quickly secured support from a sympathetic politician to maintain some of the programs the traffickers had paid for. The growing power of criminals and the formalization through them, Alivto argues, of more capitalist and individualized (as opposed to symbolic and communal) exchange relations within favelas has led to a transformation of political clientelist relations from collective efforts to gain resources transacted through ritualized events to more individualized and overtly instrumental exchanges of jobs for votes. AM leaders, he goes on, are transformed from being brokers who act in the interest of the community into entrepreneurial free agents who serve traffickers and look after their own interests by delivering services from wealthy patrons to residents (Alvito 2001, pp. 162–164). Traffickers and their allies step into this gap and distribute resources to favela residents. This process reaches its logical end point when traffickers take direct control of the few universal goods (such as a soccer field) that politicians occasionally build in a favela. Here Alvito offers important insights into how clientelism has evolved by showing the overlapping roles of traffickers and politicians in favelas and the seeming primacy of traffickers.
Rio today lives with a two-tiered form of clientelism in which traffickers and politicians perform similar but different roles. They are comparable in that both provide patronage in exchange for support but diverge in terms of the type of support they seek. Five factors characterize this system. The first is that, as in Jamaica, traffickers are a constant presence in favelas who work to provide some degree of regular security and assistance to residents while politicians appear in the favela only around elections. Second, as Alvito notes, civic leaders mediate contacts between politicians, residents, and criminals. These leaders often have long-term associations with criminals and, as a result, bargain more in the interests of the criminals than the community as a whole. Third, the relationship between politicians and favela residents tends to be much less personal than the relationship between residents and traffickers. Indeed, major political investment today, such as with the well known Favela-Bairro program, seems to go into making improvements which collectively benefit whole communities rather than provisions which go to specific residents. While politicians hand out some jobs to garner support during election campaigns, those resources go through AM leaders who almost always have close ties to traffickers and, hence, hand out those jobs to residents on the basis of their relationship to traffickers rather than their commitment to the politician. Fourth, traffickers and their AM allies who mediate connections between the community and politicians, control which politicians gain access to the community, determine what gets built with political resources, and decide how to use those resources. This leads to criminals gaining disproportionately from political investment and actually controlling which residents benefit from the services that politicians bring to the community. Thus, political spending accrues more power and authority to the traffickers than it does to the politicians. Finally, traffickers, differently from brokers of an earlier area, provide an independent channel of assistance to residents that is much more personal and face-to-face than contacts residents have with politicians.
At the heart of these arrangements are elements of neo-clientelism, based on more flexible patron client ties, and a fixed-patron clientelism in which, because of the preponderance of force available to patrons, clients have little or no choice about who they will appeal to for resources. Traffickers and their brokers engage in neo-clientelist practices as they skillfully negotiate with different politicians during campaigns to get the best possible deal for themselves. Traffickers, however, then turn around and distribute those resources to residents on the basis of specific personal relationships within the favelas. Traffickers, often referred to in favelas as donos, serve as fixed patrons within favelas and can effectively charge a monopoly rent in terms of their patron-client exchanges. Residents must work with those traffickers whether they like them or not to gain access to resources. This fixed relationship decreases the bargaining ability of residents and forces them to maintain strong relationships with traffickers and their allies even if traffickers fail to act generously.
This is different from how clientelism operated in Rio in the 1970s and 1980s when, despite the efforts of some civic groups in Rio to eliminate clientelism, freely elected AM leaders, who were moderately accountable to residents, negotiated among politicians for the best payoffs during elections. If the AMs leaders did not perform, residents could replace them before the next election in an attempt to get more out of political patrons. AM leaders, however, were not always removed after a poor showing in an election since they would receive some credit for their negotiating efforts even if benefits were not immediately obtained. Now, with the force of arms behind them, traffickers have much more flexibility in terms of what types of resources they distribute to residents.
The result of this particular practice of clientelism is that politicians gain votes but little else from poor communities. Traffickers gain access to resources which they then distribute to residents who are moderately grateful for the services but who see traffickers, more than politicians, as the source of those services. Traffickers and their allies skillfully negotiate bringing the resources in and then decide who gains access to those resources. In this sense, traffickers themselves become the clients in the relationship with the politicians. They then redistribute goods to the residents who, in turn, are their clients. AM leaders still act as brokers in each of these relationships but get little out of it. Since traffickers are criminals they have only a limited and fragile degree of respect within communities and they have difficulty directly interacting with state officials. What contacts politicians have with traffickers actually may hurt politicians’ image with residents who see them as even more corrupt and dishonest than before even though they will vote for them as a result of the traffickers’ support. When residents give politicians their support they believe they are getting something because of the skillful exploitation of political corruption by the traffickers and AM leaders rather than as a result of a legitimate political process. While this is similar to how residents viewed politician-broker relations prior to the rise of drug trafficker power in Rio (Gay 1998), the particular involvement of criminals in the process and the specific way that criminals relate to residents only further increases favela residents’ alienation from the political system and further limits the few contacts favela residents would have had with politicians. To make matters worse, since AM leaders are really brokering a relationship between politicians and traffickers rather than between politicians and residents they may have more difficulty making appeals of politicians outside of electoral cycles than they did previously. Further, in an effort to avoid overt and potentially dangerous contact with criminals and their civic allies, politicians spend very little, if any, time in the communities which they provide assistance to and local leaders do very little to turn residents out to speeches or other events where they might build ties with other supporters of the politician. This contrasts markedly with the practices of clientelism that Javier Auyero has documented in Argentina (Auyero 2000, pp. 5–11). The result is a political exchange that delivers votes but which limits the prestige of the patron politicians and prevents the deepening of political ties within these communities. At the same time traffickers increase their stature by delivering resources to favela residents.
These practices do not offer a rosy picture of democracy in Rio. Some time ago Guillermo O’Donnell wrote that Latin America could be seen as a map of blue, green, and brown areas. Blue reflected places where there was a regular rule of law and a real protection of basic rights. Brown areas reflected places where authoritarian practices persisted in the midst of a wider democratic polity. Green areas fell somewhere in between (O’Donnell 1993, pp. 1361–1364). While O’Donnell offered this cartographic metaphor he has since lamented the limited understanding we have of these areas (O’Donnell 1998, pp. 314–315).
In a sense, favelas are brown areas par excellence (Goldstein, 2003). The evidence presented here suggests, however, that these brown areas are far more integral to the Brazilian political system than O’Donnell’s cartographic metaphor would imply. What the shift in the structure of clientelism suggests is that criminal violence has itself become embedded in the political process. This means that, as things stand now, more intense policing, police reform, or NGO efforts are unlikely to materially decrease violence in the city because traffickers have strong connections into the state and civil society. At a deeper level the growing tolerance of violence in poor areas among the upper classes and the ongoing relationships many politicians maintain with drug traffickers means that crime has become embedded within the political system and is unlikely to be controlled without some sort of major political change. The result, then, is the existence of a political system in Rio which needs a degree of violence to function. Politicians depend on relationships with criminals to provide them with secure access to poor communities and, as a result, do little to remove them once in office. All of this is exacerbated by extensive police corruption and impunity. This violence materially curtails the rights of a large percentage of the city’s citizenry thus raising the question of how deeply consolidated “democracy” is in Brazil or if “democracy” is even the appropriate concept to use to understand a political system that systematically tolerates the abuse of residents by state and non-state actors. The system seems set up to provide increasing benefits to criminals and their political allies. Residents of favelas only benefit tangentially. A comparative analysis of three favelas will help flesh out this model of state criminal relations.
**** The Practice of Clientelism in Three Rio de Janeiro Favelas
To understand political exchanges in a highly criminal environment, this section will use ethnographic analysis to examine clientelist practices in three favelas during the 1998 national elections. Tubarao, a community of about 10,000, is located on a steep hill overlooking Rio’s picturesque and wealthy Zona Sul (South Zone) and has long been a site of heavy political investment. Santa Ana, a favela of around 4,000, is located near downtown Rio. Both of these communities were the sites of very powerful, well connected, and violent criminal gangs during this electoral period. The final favela, Vigario Geral, a community of around 10,000 located on the far northern edge of the city, was the site of a massacre of 21 residents by police in 1993. After that a large local social mobilization took place that succeeded in reducing violence. During the 1998 elections traffickers were very weak and had little control over the electoral process in the community.
I obtained the data for this chapter between 1997 and 1999 as part of a broader project on human rights and violence in favelas. During this period, I spent between 3 and 6 months in each community conducting ethnographic research involving participant observation and more formal interviewing. During the 1998 elections I spent most of my time in Tubarao but traveled regularly to the other two communities where I had earlier conducted ethnographic research.
My initial contact in all three favelas was through the local AMs. While community leaders received me warmly it usually took 2 months of participant observation before residents began to open up. During this time I generally sat in the AM, got to know the local leaders, and conducted historical interviews with older residents. Over time residents grew accustomed to my presence and began to speak more openly with me. Some of my best information, however, came after a period of intense field research in a particular community had ended and I would return to visit with contacts. During these trips I was often regaled with details about much of what had occurred during my absence.
With the rapid rise in crime and violence throughout the region ethnographic methods are becoming an essential tool for understanding politics in Latin America today. People experiencing regular violence, subject to police impunity, and criminal gangs are usually not tremendously forthcoming about their feelings and experiences. They are exposed to substantial risks which middle-class educated North Americans are not subject to in their day-to-day lives or even on their brief visits to developing countries. As a result it often takes a long period of close research to gain even a rudimentary understanding of the politics of many populations in the region. Ethnography is an essential tool in the political analysis of the conditions that exist in Latin America today.
The high levels of danger involved in this work and resident apprehension led me to choose not to tape record interviews. During visits to communities I would do my best to compose an outline of notes which I would write up in detail later that day. As a result the quotes which appear in this piece are not exact quotes from informants but, rather, detailed reconstructions based on sparse notes usually taken during or immediately after a conversation. Finally, with the exception of Vigario Geral all the names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. This was done to protect the privacy and safety of those who provided me with information. I used the actual name of Vigario as a result of the extensive literature that already existed on the community when I started work there.
*** Tubarao
The primary political broker in Tubarao was the 36 year old AM president Bernardo. A tall, heavy-set, Afro-Brazilian newly converted to Evangelical Christianity, Bernardo had come to power in the mid-1980s after a notoriously unstable trafficker forced many residents out of the community. Bernardo, then AM vice president, was among the exiles but he reacted by making a deal with the Comando Vermelho, at the time an up-and-coming prison-based gang which grew into one of Rio’s major drug factions, in which he agreed to pave the way for them capturing the community if he could return and take up the AM presidency.[34] His gambit succeeded and from that time forward, until his death in an automobile accident in 2002, he ran the AM. This long incumbency resulted from Bernardo’s significant political skills and his unparalleled abilities to manage relations both inside the favela and between the favela and the outside. Despite numerous violent changes in trafficker leadership he remained in the AM presidency. Jorge, a former president of Ceuzinho, a nearby favela, said, “[Bernardo] is tied to one group of traffickers and he knows that their life is short so he is planning to leave the community when this one leaves. He used to run the community for Fernando but then Alberto [the current head trafficker] had him killed and [then] he worked with Alberto... He is his compadre [the godfather of the trafficker’s child].”[35] Jorge went on, “Bernardo has a lot of jogo [short for jogo de cintura or political skill] and changes between one [trafficker] and the other.”[36] In 1992 a prominent journalist even publicly accused Bernando of running for political office to do the traffickers’ bidding in the state government. Like one of the brokers examined in Gay’s work, other AM leaders seek him out for his connections to the political world and advice on how to negotiate agreements with politicians (Gay 1994, p. 59). I attended one meeting in which he offered detailed advice to leaders from a neighboring favela about how to force politicians and bureaucrats to deal with persistent water problems there and on another occasion the president of an AM in the distant Zona Oeste (West Zone) traveled hours by bus just to meet with him about how he might negotiate with politicians in the upcoming elections.[37] His success in bringing resources into the favela led to some talk among residents of a neighboring favela that he should also take over their AM. One resident said, “Bernardo is going to be the president of [Ceuzinho] because no one here has confidence. The associagao does nothing here. Alexandre [the current president] wants to leave. Bernardo is the only one who can take over who has everyone’s confidence.[38]
During the 1998 elections Bernardo managed to make agreements with two candidates for state assembly. For the first candidate, a woman from one of Rio’s most powerful political families, Bernardo agreed to hire around 50 residents to distribute flyers for her on the weekends on the wealthy and often crowded beaches near the community. While she stored numerous signs in the AM headquarters for residents to use when they worked for her, the agreement she made with Bernardo did not give her access to the favela. Bernardo negotiated a separate deal with a second well-connected politician notorious for working with traffickers. In exchange for monopoly access to the community during the election Bernardo demanded money to improve a set of decaying stairs and to rebuild an outdoor quadra (dance floor, square), resources to hire a small number of residents to distribute pamphlets and put up signs for the politician in the favela, and three “clean” (not directly traceable) cellular phones for use by him, Alberto (who was in prison at the time), and Alberto’s girlfriend.[39] While I am not sure if the politician delivered the telephones the campaign manager readily accepted the demands. Bernardo then hired a group of five women to work for the politician in the community. This group included the expectant mother of the jailed head trafficker who once discussed possible baby names with me, the wife of another jailed trafficker, as well as three other women associated with the AM leadership.
The story of the 1998 elections in Tubarao, however, does not stop there. In the days immediately before the election the traffickers made an agreement with a second set of politicians and they ordered Bernardo to remove the signs for the politician who had paid for the quadra and put up a new set of signs for the other politicians. Bernardo angrily ordered the five residents who worked for the first candidate to take down the old signs and put up the new ones. As he was frantically trying to get the signs changed he said that he wanted to get himself out of “these problems” and that he takes “a subsidy from them [the traffickers] so when they decide to support a candidate I have to also. This was our [the favelas’] chance to be respected again. We had a candidate from the same party as the mayor and had he been elected people would have paid attention... Now we were forced to support a candidate who they [the traffickers] had closed [the agreement with] without consulting me.”[40] It was never clear what the last group of politicians had agreed to give the traffickers.
This last-minute change created difficulties. Residents were now confused about who to vote for and, capitalizing on the division between the AM and the traffickers, one of the local Neo-Pentecostal churches backed a third candidate. As a result, the favela’s votes were split among at least three separate contenders, none of whom won the election. Despite the shift in candidates both the quadra and the stairway were finished by mid-October, just after the first round of voting.[41] The pressure to finish the quadra came from the traffickers who used the space frequently to hold parties and dances for residents and who wanted to host a large party for the International Day of the Child. The celebration, which drew a huge attendance among the community’s children, was administered by the AM and presided over by traffickers from a “luxury” box over the quadra.[42]
The outcome of this event reflects the skillfulness of the traffickers in manipulating clientelist politics. They used Bernardo’s credibility and skills to bring in resources to improve the quadra where they hosted parties for residents. Thus, Bernardo brought resources into the community which they employed to directly deliver services to residents. By cutting the deal with the second set of politicians, however, the traffickers gained some other direct reward from politicians while at the same time undermining the possibility that the community and the AM would develop a powerful political patron who could compete with them.
All of this also reflects highly on Bernardo’s skills as a broker. By asking for the cell phones Bernardo communicated to the politician’s manager that he had connections with the traffickers without ever directly saying that he represented the traffickers. He was, thus, selling the traffickers’ protection to the politician’s campaign without ever formally engaging the traffickers. At the same time, Bernardo brought improvements to the community, found short-term employment for many residents, and helped the traffickers in their efforts to deliver services.
*** Santa Ana
During the 1998 elections the primary political broker in Santa Ana was Josias, the father of Doca, the manager of the drug trade in the favela and a relatively powerful trafficker in Rio. Josias was a small, wiry, and tough man with always perfectly brillanteened hair and a ready, usually very crude, joke. He had lost a leg when, as a sanitation worker, it was mangled in the back of a garbage truck. As a result he hobbled around the community on crutches as he tried to manage the sometimes tense relationships in this very violent favela that for much of the time I worked there experienced nightly gunfights.
Unlike Bernardo, Josias was not a natural political broker. In addition to his injuries which limited his mobility, his relationship with his son and the inadvertent murder of his wife by the police the year before the election made him very apprehensive about interacting with outsiders. While he was quite gregarious with other residents, he was relatively quiet and very formal when dealing with outsiders he did not know well. As with other favelas, however, politicians sought out links with Santa Ana to gain access to votes. Joselino, a voluble evangelical hardware store owner, said “Politicians can only get access to a community if they make deals with traffickers. The work between the traffickers and the politicians is limited to the election.”[43]
The primary contacts which Josias made with the outside came through Doca’s attorney who otherwise spent most of his time trying to bribe police to release Doca’s employees. The lawyer put Doca and Josias in touch with two political candidates who, after negotiations, agreed to provide the materials to build a large covered quadra with the understanding that the traffickers would provide the manpower to build it and would guarantee them monopoly access to the community. Joselino noted “...they [politicians] are all liars. Nelson [a politician] agreed to pay for the materials for the quadra if the traffickers paid for the mao de obra [labor]. Rodrigo [another politician] came in with him and knew what was going on.”[44] After the candidates and the AM leadership concluded the agreement a large banner went up over the middle of the small favela’s main street saying that Josias and the trafficker’s lawyer supported the two politicians, building supplies arrived, and men in Doca’s employ began carrying supplies up to the construction site. Within a year after the elections, local laborers finished building a huge dance floor capable of holding hundreds of people. Josias and Doca found enough resources to build a small bar on the dance floor from which Josias could sell refreshments during parties. With its high roof traffickers and other community groups could use the quadra for festivities and sports such as volleyball and indoor soccer. These efforts, according to one resident, brought about 2,400 votes to each candidate, one of whom, with substantial support from other parts of the city, won election to the federal legislature.[45]
Despite its apparently public nature, the traffickers controlled access to the quadra and used it primarily to host baile funks (hip-hop balls). One young Evangelical Christian noted that “.they [the traffickers] have bailes all the time now and they are very loud. You can hear the beats up here. The houses around the quadra have all been devalued. [no one] who lives there could sell one of those houses now. Traffickers patrol around the dance with large weapons. You can’t get the dances changed because they run them. Eventually the dance will end because the police don’t like them.”[46] Doca’s girlfriend held the keys and controlled access to the space. One resident used the quadra to offer soccer classes but stopped as a result of his discomfort with constantly having to ask her and, hence, the traffickers for permission to teach the class. He claimed that he did not want to provide that type of example to children. As the 2002 elections approached the federal deputy who had originally provided money to build the quadra came back to campaign again and this time provided money to offer sports classes in the quadra to community children. The return of the candidate, who was reelected to the federal legislature with one of the highest vote totals in the state, confirmed that candidate’s perceptions about the success of his relationship with Santa Ana.
These contacts, however, undermined residents’ support for politicians. No one seemed very excited about their activities in the community or particularly attached to either of the two candidates or their ideas. Indeed, residents seemed not to really trust the politicians at all as they became identified as outsiders whose support the traffickers had skillfully bought in exchange for their votes. Joselino, concerned about the complicity between politicians and drug traffickers, noted sarcastically “the guy who was elected will work with the Medillm cartel.”[47]
Santa Ana provides interesting evidence about how clientelism has adapted to drug trafficking. The AM acts as a broker between the drug traffickers and the politicians rather than between the residents and politicians. The goods the politicians give to the community mirror the way politicians had previously provided communal assistance in improving water services or building health clinics but instead of turning those services over to an AM or some other elected body, politicians directly delivered those resources to the traffickers who in turn used them to put together events to bolster their position in the community and tighten their relationship to residents. As a result, residents really did not receive anything from the politicians. Rather, the traffickers received a quadra which they then used to distribute services to residents. Further, traffickers paid for all the work to build the quadra. Direct personal assistance to residents came solely from the traffickers. As a result, residents felt no interest in the politician or loyalty to him. They voted for a politician and, in turn, received benefits from traffickers who used that transaction to shore up their position in the favela.
*** Vigario Geral
During the 1998 elections Vigario Geral had no active political broker. The community had come through a turbulent period with the massacre of 21 residents by police in 1993, extensive police efforts to kill traffickers involved in the murder of several police officers, and a social movement that organized to bring peace to this very violent community. This movement eventually led to the creation of the Casa da Paz, an important NGO that operated in the community until 1998, and also involved the Fundacao Afro-Reggaes and Doctors without Borders. By 1998 police under special orders from the governor had occupied Vigario and violence had dropped dramatically. The natural person for the job of broker was Seu Almeida, the president of the AM. Miguel, a community plumber formerly in the employ of the traffickers, noted that Almeida’s political connections had led to the traffickers strongly supporting his candidacy for AM president in the years before their hold on the favela had weakened. “Seu Almeida had always believed himself to have the skills to be a good president. He had connections in politics and politicians knew him. The trafficker liked that.”[48] In other words, traffickers chose Almeida to lead the AM in order to exploit his connections with politicians. The subsequent social movement and political intervention, however, weakened traffickers. While Almeida succeeded in holding on to his office, the complicated situation with the traffickers and Almeida’s extensive efforts to bring services in through contacts with NGOs and other state agencies caused him to sit out this electoral cycle.
Vigario’s unlikely broker was Rubia, the owner of a small restaurant that catered mainly to the NGO and government workers who had descended on the community as a result of the massacre. Rubia, a friendly outgoing woman, had moved to the community when she left an abusive husband who lived in the neighborhood that bordered the favela. At the time she was trying to run her nascent business and raise a young daughter. Her restaurant, however, became a popular hub among politically engaged residents who often would sit with her drinking beer late into the night. Many of these activists complained that Almeida had not done enough to help the community and, partially as a result of anger stemming from how he came to power, plotted to replace him with his vice president, a man who had joined the AM after trafficker power had waned. In this environment, Rubia took the lead in making contact with a powerful state legislator to help improve a soccer quadra and makeshift movie theatre that traffickers had built years before and that had fallen into disrepair.[49]
The patron, the longest serving state assemblyman in Rio de Janeiro, was from a conservative party that backed Cesar Maia, Rio’s former and future hard-line mayor, as its gubernatorial candidate. He provided Rubia with money to hire five workers to put up signs and distribute flyers which bore his name, face, and, in smaller print, Cesar Maia’s name as his choice for governor. Shortly after the signs went up, the traffickers told Rubia to take them down because they supported the election of Maia’s main rival Anthony Garotinho of the left-leaning PDT. When Rubia refused a more powerful trafficker arrived from another favela to deal with her intransigence. The traffickers then kidnapped her boyfriend Edivaldo and held him at gun point as they insisted Rubia take down the signs. Still she refused. Eventually the traffickers and Rubia compromised. They agreed to let her leave the signs up if she would remove Maia’s name. I noticed that signs for conservative candidates in other favelas I visited had been similarly altered.[50] All of this left Rubia and Edivaldo very distraught and soon afterwards they broke up. Rubia moved out of the favela less then a year later and reconciled with her husband.
Vigario contrasts with the other two communities examined in this chapter. Here Rubia established a clientelist network where she brokered a deal with an outside patron who would provide both personal and communal assistance directly through her to residents. The traffickers, however, could not abide this arrangement and threatened the use of force against Edivaldo creating a very tense situation for Rubia. Their efforts contributed to breaking up a nascent political network in the community thereby maintaining conditions in which traffickers could retake power several years later. This story also makes clear that the drug traffickers in this part of Rio had a definite preference for the election of Garotinho who they may have believed would not be as tough on crime as Maia. It is interesting to note that when Garotinho visited Tubarao during this campaign a low-level trafficker asked Bernardo to lobby the candidate to eliminate the police presence in that community clearly believing that this request might not fall on deaf ears. Bernardo disagreed and rebuked the adolescent.
Almeida’s role in all of this is very interesting. He chose to stay out of the political game that year. He may have thought that his participation would lead to similar difficulties between him and the weakened traffickers that Rubia had encountered. Another reason is that he was actively engaged in a different sort of politics working through NGOs and government agencies to make improvements in the community and bring jobs and other services to residents. During the 2 years in which I conducted this research he brought in a major program to improve water service that employed tens of residents and also brought in a computer training class to help residents gain qualifications for white collar jobs. Almeida had an advantage over other favela leaders in these efforts as a result of the immense attention that had focused on Vigario in the wake of the massacre. The significant NGO presence connected him into a number of different funding sources (see Arias 2004, pp. 15–16). Almeida’s choice not to enter the competitive clientelist fray of the elections was a savvy one which avoided conflict with the traffickers and freed up his time to bring in other types of resources.
**** Clientelist Practices in Rio Today
Much of the existing scholarship on clientelism focuses on how clientelism creates vertical identifications between the poor and political elites thereby strengthening state legitimacy, reducing horizontal bonds based on class, and limiting opportunities for radical political change. Many see clientelism as a fundamental component in building the hegemony of the dominant classes and reinforcing state power against possible insurrections by the poor (Scott and Kerkvliet 1977, p. 440; Hagopian 1992, pp. 251, 271–279; Stokes 1995, pp. 131–132; Sives 2002, pp. 66–79). Auyero has shown with considerable nuance how clientelism goes beyond just problem-solving into the realm of identifying voters positively with the patron (Auyero 2000, p. 123). In these circumstances, clientelist exchanges through networks help to solve problems by facilitating the exchange of favors and, in the process, build cross-class political identities that contribute to state legitimacy.
The endemic presence of powerful violent criminals has displaced this process in Rio de Janeiro. The evidence from the cases examined here shows that clientelism in Rio today works on two separate levels. In the first instance it is a relationship between politicians and favelas in which favors are granted through a broker, usually an AM leader, to the community as a whole in the form of improvements to public goods. Often, however, control of that public good passes from the broker into the hands of criminals rather than residents. Traffickers then, again often through the AM president, redistribute these and other goods to residents. Politicians spend relatively little time in favelas and develop few, if any, personal relationships with residents. Rather, it is traffickers, through AM leaders, who build personal relations with residents by delivering services directly to them. Jobs are either given to residents through the traffickers or their allies in the AMs. All of this creates conditions in which residents feel little commitment directly to politicians or political parties. Instead they provide votes to politicians the traffickers and their allies support in exchange for assistance from traffickers who they then support in their efforts to avoid arrest or murder by police and other traffickers (this system has something in common with how Archer (1995) has described broker clientelism in Colombia). These data also suggest that politicians and traffickers today still provide substantial communal goods to favelas. As a result some of Alvito’s observations about the end of the distribution of communal goods through clientelism may not be generalizable to all favelas in Rio.
At the heart of the complications that traffickers bring to the clientelist process is the complexity of their social status. While they do have some prestige among certain sectors of favela residents and may even be seen as having higher prestige among these sectors than most politicians, traffickers are criminals who have extremely low status in society as a whole and even among many residents of favelas who resent the fact that they do not hold regular jobs and that they bring so much violence to their communities. This is at odds with typical clientelist practice in which relations operate exclusively between higher and lower status actors (even if low-status clients sometimes have a dim view of their exploitative high-status patrons). In the case of favelas, traffickers, as criminals, act as an intermediate patron that have lower social status in society as a whole than many of the favela residents who are their clients. This official public status differential causes politicians to avoid openly appearing with criminals and to minimize their contact with the residents of the communities where traffickers operate. The result is that favelas are increasingly pushed to the edges of the political process and little effort is made to bring them into contact with others who voted for a politician.
This contemporary practice of clientelism has not done much to build support for the existing Brazilian political system. As Bête, a resident and NGO activist in Santa Ana said, “Democracy has done little for the residents of the favela other than provide them with the right to talk. Prior [to that, during the military regime,] individuals were not allowed to talk but the politics have not changed. The poor do not have what they need and politicians tend to provide things to the poor via clientelism. The poor have little more ability to interact with politicians than was available to them under the dictatorship”.[51] (On changing conditions for the poor in Brazil see Perlman 2004). The ongoing violence propagated by traffickers and police limits the ability of residents to organize within favelas, co-opts favelas’ civic leaders into criminal networks, and causes life in many favelas to be as bad or worse for residents that it was under the military dictatorship.
**** Conclusion
This chapter has shown that the practice of clientelism is alive and well in Rio but that it has adapted to the emergence of powerful locally based narcotics traffickers. Drug dealers have become inserted into the process through which votes are exchanged for favors. This results in a two-tiered clientelist system in which drug traffickers make exchanges with politicians and then turn around and deliver services to residents of favelas themselves. While criminals can engage in the flexible negotiations with multiple politicians that characterize neo-clientelist arrangements, favela residents cannot choose which trafficker they will ask for assistance since each favela is dominated by one gang. As a result residents negotiating power during electoral periods is weakened by the fusion of a fixed-patron clientelism in which clients have virtually no choice about who their patron will be and of the more flexible neo-clientelism that characterized Rio politics after the Second World War. This results in vote exchanges and the election of politicians skilled at making arrangements with criminals. It does little to build state legitimacy among the poor and leads to a situation in which many elected officials tolerate criminal activity.
These insights provide a perspective on the micro-politics of voting in Brazil that shed considerable light on the institutional and relational mechanisms that lead to voting decisions. This information can only be obtained through a close examination of local-level politics. Given the growing interest in political behavior and, more broadly, the application of neo-institutional frameworks to the Brazilian case this chapter points to the critical need for more ethnographic examinations of political practice in urban and rural Brazil. Such an effort would not only tell us about how traffickers participate in elections in Rio but would also provide insights into such issues as machine politics in the Brazilian Northeast, the continuing practice of coronelismo in parts of rural Brazil, and how the growing power of evangelical churches affects political practice in major cities.
The evidence discussed in this chapter makes a strong case for the role of ethnography in studying politics in the America’s today. Ongoing civil conflict in many countries in the region is based on complex semi-clandestine ties between state and non-state actors. These particular types of links are not observable through more straightforward qualitative interviewing methods or through the statistical analyses that dominate political science today. Rather, understanding these complex and semisecret relations requires an engagement with the field that can only be accomplished through ethnography (see Auyero 2000). At another level the vivid stories recounted through ethnography provide us with an opportunity to add critical detail and dynamics to the stories that social scientists tell. Without ethnography’s deep connection to the field it is impossible to get at the depth of these issues and to develop an understanding of the politics in the region. In a part of the world where violence is growing, only ethnography can provide us with the insights to understand the reasons for violence, the role of political actors in that violence, and how that violence can be addressed.
One of Pierre Bordieu’s important injunctions to social theory is to work to think outside the categories offered by the state (Bourdieu 1998). Governments have little interest in helping us understand their own complicity in violence activities. With its focus on the everyday and especially on excluded populations, ethnography is an extremely effective tool for going beyond what the state wants us to see. Understanding the changing politics of the region depends on the growing use of ethnography to understand the profound implication of governments and civil society in the violence that affects the region.
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** Chapter 6. Vicious Virtuous Circles: Barriers to Institution-Building after War
Tammy Smith
As the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ignited in 1992, 40 Bosniak[52] men living in the Serb-dominated town of Bijeljina were fired from their jobs at a state-owned enterprise because of their ethnicity. The decision for the discriminatory firings had been taken by local municipal officials and implemented by public employees of the state-owned enterprise (Human Rights Watch 2000). As the war raged on, Bijeljina’s remaining ethnic minorities endured other discriminatory practices such as forced labor, arbitrary arrests, and conscription into the Yugoslav Army. At the notorious State Exchange Commission, ethnic minorities who were evicted from their residences were compelled to pay fees up to US$1,250 for the paperwork required for their evictions and as much as US$1,600 in transportation costs related to their forced expulsion from the region (Barber 1994). Together with physical violence such as murder, arson, and rape, the above describes the administrative process of ethnic cleansing that drove upwards of 2.4 million people from their homes in Bosnia. It is a process in which institutions of local, regional, and state government were intimately involved in harassment and violence against citizens. One of the greatest challenges for states emerging from conflict is to provide an environment which repairs the torn social fabric and fosters notions of generalized trust. In light of these goals, many theorists and practitioners have turned to the concept of social capital to answer questions as to how states such as Bosnia transition from war to peace and from state-controlled economies to liberal democratic systems.
In their respective critiques of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work (1993), Margaret Levi and Sidney Tarrow call for a concept of social capital that better appreciates the role of institutions in supporting the emergence of generalized trust and civic engagement in democratic states (Levi 1996; Tarrow 1996). For Levi and Tarrow, institutions are seen both as potential third-party enforcers, guarantying compliance with rules, and a mediating environment through which individuals can tap into or expand their connections with others in ways that yield benefits for whole communities. The absence of effective institutions, notes Levi, creates an environment where overcoming collective action problems is more difficult and gives rise to wars of “all against all” that have characterized places like the former-Yugoslavia and Lebanon in recent decades. While institutions certainly have important roles to play in functioning democracies, Levi’s observation raises an interesting problem: how do citizens in places like the successor states of former-Yugoslavia regain confidence in governing institutions after the fighting?
Because institutions themselves have histories, the answer to this question is complicated. Although Levi describes war as a situation marked by the absence of effective institutions, as we have seen above, state institutions not only exist during war but often contribute to worsening social conditions that fuel war. The problem, then, is not that wartime is marked by the absence of institutions, but that frequently institutions directly or indirectly participate in the violence. Though media reports during wars often focus on dramatic acts such as the bombing or burning of homes, the more subtle acts of administrative discrimination and the distrust they foster also have enduring legacies: citizens learn to distrust institutions.
In Bosnia, where development programs since 1995 have sought to improve local institutions and support postwar democratization efforts, citizens’ confidence in institutions remains tepid. A recent United Nations survey found that less than 25% of Bosnian citizens believe that governing institutions are impartial, transparent, and nondiscriminatory (UNDP 2003). A similar lack of confidence in institutions can be found wherever internecine conflict has occurred on a wide scale.[53] Given the participation of institutions in war, this should not be surprising. In the Bosnian context as elsewhere, however, institutions must begin to function again if the state is to transition from war to peace and from state socialism to some form of liberal democracy — and they need citizens’ confidence and participation to do it.[54] How is such confidence engendered on the ground?
Both theorists and practitioners have employed the concept of social capital to explain and remedy the difficulties presented by low levels of trust and confidence often found during state transitions. Largely following Putnam (1993, 1995), these approaches call for organized citizens to engage each other and the state while obeying norms of reciprocity in order to build trust and improve institutions (Colletta and Cullen 2000; Richards et al., 2004). While the claim sounds reasonable, and Putnam and others have provided cases where this process appears to have worked, evidence from Bosnia presents a more complex picture with respect to social capital and the increase of trust and confidence. An individual’s singular or multiple ways of defining his or her relationship with others has bearing on whether interaction between the two will support institutional confidence or reaffirm interpersonal trust. Previous approaches to social capital by and large have viewed trust as a stable personal attribute of actors. Consequently, they have not been able to account for differences in trusting behavior among the same actors across different social settings. An investigation into how interaction affects confidence and trust requires methods that are sensitive to the meanings actors themselves invoke in practice. In this chapter I employ a two-pronged ethnographic approach to better capture the social dynamics that contribute to or inhibit institutional confidence: participant observation to identify differences in trusting behavior across social settings and in-depth interviews to explore the bases for these differing outcomes.
This chapter considers the problem of fostering confidence in institutions in a postwar context by drawing on the Bosnian experience. Specifically, I account for divergent outcomes arising from a program that established local planning committees for improved transparency and greater citizen participation in decision-making in Bosnia from 1998 to 2001. The program was based on notions of social capital that anticipate greater confidence and improved institutions through individuals’ engagement of others in the public sphere. Three years of programming, however, yielded divergent outcomes across participant groups: local officials grasped the principles of transparency and accountability and developed confidence in their own municipal institutions and in the nascent structures of mutual assistance they formed through the program. Citizens’ confidence in institutions, on the other hand, remained frustratingly low.
A closer examination of citizen interactions revealed that citizens’ lack of confidence in institutions persisted even when they had friends or family members working in local government. While citizens possessed interpersonal trust in individuals close to them who worked in local institutions, their trust did not translate into increased confidence in institutions. Furthermore, citizens’ trust was situational. Citizens acted on their interpersonal trust only when they were free to identify their bond with their local official as a personal one. When their friend’s official role was enforced, however, as in a public meeting or on the local planning committees, even interpersonal trust was withdrawn and citizens disengaged from both the institutions of local government and their friends who work there. Consequently, I show that the simple appearance of citizen’s links to officials in institutions is insufficient for building confidence in institutions. In short, social relations are not always transposable.
With its emphasis on the various ties many community members have with each other, this chapter follows critiques of social capital that call for a better understanding of the complexity of social relations. Such critiques have focused on the “dark side” of social capital in generating clientalistic relations and furthering preexisting inequalities (Portes 1987; Coleman 1988; Levi 1996, 1998; Portes and Landolt 2002; Swain 2003). This chapter goes one step further by observing that within the same group of actors, any one actor may be either an insider or an outsider, depending on the social context in which action takes place. An individual may have insider status while discussing local development needs with friends in a café, but outsider status when leading a public meeting as mayor at which the same group of friends is in attendance. The identity of the relation is marked by the situation in which a given exchange takes place. Which identity is invoked, in turn, has implications for what kind of trust — if any — is extended.
Postwar Bosnia is an important context for understanding how social relations can induce trust. The violence that profoundly changed the lives of its citizens produced an environment in which citizens actively distrust institutions. The literature on trust and institution building rarely considers such contexts, even though they are increasingly prevalent. By focusing on a case where state institutions are implicated in the prior history of exclusion and violence, this chapter provides an opportunity to consider a realistic view of the difficulties states encounter during radical transitions. The focus of this chapter, then, is on the challenges to postwar institution-building presented by the legacy of wartime institutional distrust — a problem relevant for Bosnia, Lebanon, and, of course, the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
*** Prior Literature: Connections Among Social Capital, Trust and Confidence
In its most general form, social capital emphasizes the resources embedded in relations among actors and social structure that can be utilized to increase the likelihood that a certain action will be successful (Lin 2001). Social capital has been used to help explain success or failure at, among other things, economic advancement, employment, educational attainment and transitions from socialism to capitalism, and authoritarian to democratizing societies. Within theories of democratization and civil society, social capital is seen as a means of building democratic processes that supports the development of generalized trust, which in turn strengthens democratic participation and improves institutions (Putnam 1993, 1995; Brehm and Rahn 1997; Paxton 1999, 2002; Knack 2002).
Across each of the social capital settings, trust is an important component of social capital. The type of trust that contributes to social capital, however, differs among the various settings. Actors situated in social groups organized around relations of commerce or friendship benefit from and contribute to interpersonal trust among group members. This trust, subsequently, helps strengthen the group and contributes further to its success (Bourdieu 1986; Portes 1987; Coleman 1988; Waldinger 1995; Bowles and Gintis 2002). With respect to democratization, however, the kind of in-group personal trust that promotes success in an economic sphere may reinforce social inequalities or the clientalistic ties of patronage systems, and undermine democratization efforts. Instead, it seems that institutional confidence and generalized trust work best for supporting the kind of social goods that benefit larger communities (Putnam 1993, 1995; Norris 2000; Gibson 2001; Torney-Purta et al., 2004).
Current work on social capital within democratization studies tells us that dynamic associational lives yield engagement with and confidence in government (Putnam 1993, 1995; Brehm and Rahn 1997; Paxton 1999, 2002; Knack 2002). This observation links individuals’ participation in local level associations with perceptions of their confidence in local, regional, or national level government. Researchers see trust between specific actors transforming into trust for generalized others. As actors cooperate within networks of civic engagement and obey norms of reciprocity in the public sphere, they deepen their trust of others, an outcome that promotes further cooperation and improves democratic institutions. In these models, trust of individuals induces trust in institutions.
In cases where citizens cannot find a basis for trusting each other, state institutions are said to be effective third-party enforcers that reduce actors’ personal risks and provide information and guarantees about potential exchange partners (Hardin 1991, 1998; Tarrow 1996; Levi 1996, 1998). Actors come to believe in the trustworthiness of institutions by trusting the individuals who work there. Making a strong case for institutions, Levi notes, “If the state is one of the institutions — and in many cases it is the most important one — for promoting generalized trust, it can play this role only if the recipients of its services consider the state itself to be trustworthy. Subjects and citizens must trust the competence of the state to perform its trust-producing duty” (Levi 1998, p. 86). But what happens when citizens do not trust the state to perform its “trust-producing duty?” How do institutions that have demonstrated untrustworthiness regain the public’s confidence?
As Hardin (1991) observes, Levi’s solution to trust individuals who work in institutions is problematic, since these individuals may have been the same bureaucrats acting discriminatorily or inefficiently under previous regimes. A less obvious but equally important difficulty with Levi’s approach is that even in cases where bureaucrats or officials are trusted members of citizens’ social groups the personal trust of social intimates may not translate into system confidence — and in some cases may work to inhibit the development of confidence in institutions. Conversely, lack of confidence in institutions may cause actors to withdraw their trust of individuals working in those institutions.
Previous work on social capital does not capture this point because it does not consider the range of social identities actors may invoke in any given exchange. Actors can be social movement activists, elected officials, or bowling league members, but in the literature on social capital they are never all three at the same time. Whether a citizen approaches his mayor because of his confidence in local governing institutions or because the mayor is his aunt, however, will bear heavily on whether the kind of institutional confidence that promotes “virtuous circles” will develop. The citizen may trust, but the basis upon which he builds his trust will determine whether it will transform into system confidence or simply reaffirm the personal trust between the two actors. Failure to explicitly recognize that actors have choices about how they identify themselves in different situations weakens current theories of social capital by leaving them unable to account for differences in trusting behavior among the same individuals across a variety of social settings.
Following Mollering (2001), Luhmann (1979, 1988), and Seligman (1997), this study stresses that confidence and trust are products of very different sets of relations. Confidence relates to positive expectations about contingent events that attach to general systems, not to specific individuals (Luhmann 1988). The changeable, uncertain nature of the fields of economics, politics, fashion, and scientific knowledge, for example, move people into states of confidence rather than trust since modern life requires us to act despite uncertainty. One goes to a hospital in an emergency while on vacation, for example, because of one’s confidence in the medical system, not because of one’s knowledge of any particular doctor.
Trust, on the other hand, is a belief in the goodwill of another, given the opaqueness of the other’s intentions and calculations. Most importantly, trust operates when actors have a choice about whether to engage in a relation and when the outcome of that engagement is not certain (Luhmann 1979). Seligman observes, “...we do not have to ‘trust’ in other’s agency until that agency becomes a realizable potential. When most aspects of alter’s behavior can be convincingly explained (and planned for), confidence in systematically defined normative patterns is sufficient” (Seligman 1997, p. 63). The trouble for states in transition — whether from state socialism to liberal democracy or from war to peace — is that citizens cannot rely on the structural limitations to action provided by institutions in which they had invested their confidence. The system in which they had confidence has been disrupted, corrupted, or dissolved. Openness or fluidity in a system creates role choices previously negated by the institution. In this situation, actors are left only with the option of trusting or not trusting in another actor’s intentions.
Seligman sees trust emerging only through the agency that has developed through the proliferation of roles in modern, highly differentiated societies. Precisely because individuals have a plethora of roles that bear distinct identities and moral commitments, interaction occasionally presents role conflicts: working parents worry that they do not have enough time for their children and bureaucrats are expected to act impersonally toward close friends and family when performing their official duties. Such role conflicts prompt actors to make choices about their commitments and allow uncertainty to creep into social relations. The presence of risk provides an opportunity for actors to negotiate their way through uncertainty and develop trustful relations. Trust, then, relies upon the presence of risk and is inherently context specific.
Furthering this notion of context-specific trust, Mollering (2001) extends Simmel’s work to see trust forming over a three-step process in which the truster engages in interpretation of the complex conditions in which he or she must act, suspending those elements that are unknown in order to achieve an expectation that an outcome will be positive. Mollering’s approach appreciates the vast number of interpretations actors may give to their environments and — counter to deterministic approaches — does not accept a direct relationship between interpretation and expectation, since actors themselves have their own notions about what kinds of uncertainty they can and cannot suspend.
In contrast to this context-specific approach, many studies of social capital see trust as a constant cognitive or behavioral characteristic of individuals. Mayer et al. (1995) go as far as to identify “ability,” “benevolence,” and “integrity” as the three common characteristics of trusted individuals upon which partners can rely, regardless of context. Brehm and Rahn (1997) see trustworthiness as a behavioral quality that attaches to individuals who “follow the rules.” It is not clear, however, how Brehm and Rahn’s actors adjudicate between one set of rules attached to a specific set of relations, like kinship ties (e.g., the rule “always help your kin”), and other conflicting rules, such as those that accompany civic ties (e.g., the rule “bureaucrats may not act preferentially toward one specific group”). Putnam (1993, 1995), on the other hand, distinguishes between the type of “thick trust” found in close-knit groups and the more general social trust that is needed in modern, impersonal systems. This distinction, however, falls short of appreciating that actors are embedded in a multiplicity of networked relations, regardless of whether they exist as members of small, tight societies or large, impersonal ones. Action, for Putnam, has only one meaning: individuals engaged in civic associations enact a set of practices that encourage the build up of generalized trust. But actors have a range of motivations for engaging each other in civic associations, some of which produce system confidence while others reinforce personal trust. As Mollering (2001) cautions, determining which type prevails in any given exchange requires investigation into the meanings and identities the actors themselves invoke. It is in the murkiness of role negotiation that we find the potential for relations of trust. In glossing over this negotiation, we lose the ability to examine whether citizens act on their confidence in institutions or whether it is trust that enables their cooperation in risky and uncertain environments. This is an important distinction for those interested in state-building and democratization, since it bears heavily on whether an action reaffirms interpersonal trust that remains between actors or helps support more generalized trust through institutional confidence.
As will be shown below, trust in individuals who work in institutions may have an inverse effect on the development of institutional confidence. Bosnians seeking to rebuild their lives after the war have consistently relied on trustful relations with family members and friends working in local governments. As these citizens approach local officials through their close social ties, they increase the interpersonal trust operating between them. Heightened interpersonal trust, however, has not translated into increased institutional confidence, since the basis on which the action is defined is the personal relationship between the two actors.
*** “Good Governance” in Postwar Bosnia
From the spring of 1992 to late autumn 1995, Bosnians endured a war that killed approximately 200,000 citizens and displaced more than 50% of Bosnia’s 4.4 million inhabitants. Bosnia’s war ignited in the institutional collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the years leading up to the war, Yugoslav institutions and policies that had sought to eliminate class and ethnic divisions came under fire following an early attempt by Croatian elites to push for greater regional autonomy in the late 1960s. Constitutional changes in the 1970s and 1980s, which devolved decision-making powers from the political center to Yugoslavia’s constituent republics, increasingly made ethnic distinctions more salient and eroded support for integrative institutions such as the federal parliament, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and worker self-management policies of earlier decades (Banac 1992; Hayden 1992; Sekulic et al., 1994). By 1989, political elites in the northwestern republics of Croatia and Slovenia began devising plans for independence from Yugoslavia in response to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s use of state institutions to advance the position of ethnic Serbs (Hayden 1992). Bosnia, with its population divided into nearly equal thirds of ethnic Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks quickly fractured as the war and ethnic claims-making that began in 1991 in Croatia spread south.
Institutional collapse and the outbreak of war did not occur over night. Instead, it progressed in phases that were accompanied by the development of new institutions that took over from previous state organizations and operated at the behest of political and military elites engaged in the war. As noted in the introduction, throughout the war Bosnians on all sides of the conflict learned to distrust institutions that were used to promote ethnic cleansing.
For most Bosnians the first point of contact with postwar institutions occurred at the local level, where citizens obtained new state identity cards, sought the return of confiscated property, registered as eligible voters, and secured assistance for the reconstruction of war-damaged homes. As such, local governments are especially important sites for the success or failure of governing institutions emerging from peace agreements, yet they are the most overlooked aspect of governance among both researchers and development practitioners.[55] By late 1998, only two development projects addressed local governance training in postwar Bosnia.[56] The first was implemented by the office of the United Nations Operations (UN-OPS) and targeted only 4 of Bosnia’s 142 municipalities. The second was implemented by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and is detailed below. The UN-OPS project was closed in 2000, which at that time left OSCE as the only source of technical training available to Bosnian local governments.
In the polarized postwar environment, Bosnians have been called upon to participate in seven nation-wide elections from September 1996 to October 2006, including municipal elections in 1997, 2000, and 2006. Although each of the seven elections has been certified by international observers, Bosnian local leaders have faced constraints to their authority from international actors. Most notably, the Office of the High Representative (OHR), an office established by the General Framework Agreement for Peace to oversee implementation of the Agreement, has, over time, been invested with the power to remove elected and appointed Bosnian officials, as well as the power to draft and impose laws — powers international actors have reserved for themselves in other postwar environments such as Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. From 1997 to 2004, the High Representative used these powers to remove nearly 200 Bosnian politicians from their posts (Trofimov 2004) without any form of due process (Knaus and Martin 2003). In addition, in the decade since the signing of the Peace Agreement, the UN Mission to Bosnia has routinely sacked police officials suspected of blocking the peace process or engaging in corruption, while the OSCE’s Election Appeals Sub-Commission, a temporary body that operated in the immediate postwar years to rule on elections-related complaints, applied a heavy-handed approach in striking hundreds of candidates from voting lists when parties were suspected of acting unfairly toward political opponents. With every election, voter participation has declined from an estimated 71% in 1998, to 54% in 2002,[57] a trend that elections observers have attributed to citizens’ disaffection with a political process that cancels voters’ expressed preferences and places more responsibility in the hands of international technocrats than in locally elected officials (Knaus and Martin 2003).
In addition to exercising powers often reserved for sovereign states, international organizations have enthusiastically pursued anticorruption campaigns that target municipal, cantonal, entity-level,[58]and federal officials. International actors have implemented a two-pronged approach that includes, on the one hand, awarenessraising aimed at citizens’ perceptions of corruption and, on the other hand, the removal of local officials deemed corrupt. Precious little evidence has been provided by international actors to back up their claims of rampant corruption. A report produced by the US General Accounting Office entitled “Crime and Corruption Threaten Successful Implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement,” is emblematic of this problem. Lacking hard evidence of illicit activity, the GAO resorted to the conditional tense in its assertion that corruption undermines the peace. “Privatization efforts have encountered problems, and corruption may undermine the process...for example, officials may solicit bribes from those interested in obtaining certain assets or sell the assets to themselves for prices far below market value” (GAO 2000, p. 6, emphasis not in the original). Given the lack of specificity in these kinds of allegations, David Chandler (2006) has observed that international anticorruption efforts have been subsumed under the general rubric of “good governance,” a link that has been successful at only one thing: promoting the notion among Bosnian citizens that the political process is not to be trusted.
International actors, preoccupied with corrupt claims-making by ethnic elites, have missed the viciousness of ostensibly virtuous circles for average citizens who are deeply skeptical about their new state institutions. Speaking to Bosnian parliamentarians on his first day on the job in 2002, High Representative Paddy Ashdown observed, “Bosnian justice works too often for the powerful and the politically connected, not for ordinary people. It may be that the grip of nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina is slowly — too slowly — weakening. But the grip of criminality and corruption is strengthening. And this poses a threat to every single one of us” (The Independent 2002, p. 14). As we shall see below, however, most Bosnian citizens have emerged from their wartime experience with strong evidence to support a lack of confidence in governing institutions. Subsequent international community efforts that underscore a perceived endemic problem of corruption have validated citizens’ distrust of the broader political process, compelling them to rely even more on their strong ties to known elected officials.
*** Data
The initial empirical data for this study stems from my participation from September 1998 to September 1999 in a local governance development program funded and implemented by the OSCE. These data were augmented with two rounds of in-depth interviews conducted in Bosnia, including 72 interviews conducted with participants from 11 municipalities from May to August 2000, and 65 interviews in 13 municipalities conducted in November 2001. In each of the municipalities, interviews were conducted with the mayor or his representative, technical experts from administrative offices, representatives from local nongovernmental organizations and citizens.[59]
The OSCE program is a multiyear training program, in which more than 50 of Bosnia’s 142 municipalities have been participating since 1998. Municipalities were chosen to participate based on their relative openness to reform and tolerance toward ethnic minorities, as well as their stated commitment to program goals. As such, participating municipalities represent perhaps the best-case scenario for fostering citizen confidence in present-day Bosnian institutions.
By implementing infrastructure projects identified by local officials and citizens through their participation in newly established community planning committees, the OSCE program has sought to support municipal transparency, accountability and cooperation between authorities and citizens in decision-making. In the project planning stage, the OSCE assumed that citizens would welcome the planning committees as an innovative tool for local governance. Citizens regularly complained of their lack of a role in local decision-making and their inability to hold local officials accountable. The OSCE anticipated that elected officials seeking to protect presumed clientalistic ties through the maintenance of nontransparent decisionmaking schemes would pose the greatest barriers to the planning committees and overall good governance. During 3 years of program implementation, however, the unexpected occurred: elected officials developed an atmosphere that promoted participatory decision-making and rewarded officials with increased prestige when they developed innovative strategies for improving transparency and accountability. Citizens, on the other hand, remained distrustful of the committees and created the greatest obstacle to transparent and participatory decision-making. Instead, citizens reserved trust for actors in their close social networks when they were able to identify those actors as relatives, neighbors, or long-time friends.
The following section traces the participation of municipal officials and citizens over 3 years of program implementation. It examines differences in trusting behavior between municipal officials and citizens. It follows changes in the two groups’ perceptions of trust and confidence in program counterparts and institutional structures over time, as these actors reaffirmed the trust of social intimates or developed new relationships across municipal boundaries.
*** OSCE Workshops and Dual Outcomes for the Development of Confidence
The OSCE program formally began in December 1998, with a 3-day workshop designed to outline new regulations for the adoption and implementation of municipal budgets. Right away, small problems emerged. During the first workshop, participants voluntarily arranged themselves at tables composed exclusively of other members of their municipal teams. While they sat with their friends and coworkers, participants were unreceptive and hostile to the methods of municipal accounting introduced during training sessions. The interpersonal trust engendered by small town life — where kin often are schoolmates who become partners in business or sit together on local government boards — worked against the workshop structure. Each table became a separate unit unto itself, hindering interaction among the municipalities and between the municipalities and the OSCE.
In contrast, at the start of the second workshop in February 1999, participants were required to sit with others based on their official roles: mayors with mayors, town planners with town planners, etc. The change was immediate and dramatic. By reconfiguring the order of relations around the tables, the most disruptive of the participants — who relied on strong norms of group solidarity — were marginalized. The result was an environment where most participants became open to receiving new information and willing to share experiences. Frustratingly, however, citizens’ participation remained tepid and OSCE staff noticed that from the first to the second workshops, across municipalities, the presence of individuals who represented citizens’ interests was inconsistent.
Against this backdrop, where a fragile trust seemed to be developing at least among municipal officials, the OSCE program faced its most difficult exogenous challenge. NATO air strikes against Serbia and Kosovo in March 1999 instigated violent demonstrations by Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs against foreign agencies and governments. Rioters in the regional capital Banja Luka destroyed or damaged British, American, and German consulates and UN offices, and injured numerous ethnic Serbs accused of cooperating with the international community (ICG 1999, SFOR Joint Press Conference, March 26, 1999 and March 30, 1999). Participating municipalities led by ethnic Serbs were under tremendous pressure from higher levels of regional government to withdraw from the program. Participants from all over Bosnia looked to Cajnice, located less than 10 miles from the Serbian border and perhaps the most ethnically hard-line municipality in the program, to see if the program would survive. Days after the air strikes began, the OSCE received a letter from Cajnice’s participants urging the organization to move forward with the third workshop and to facilitate dialogue between Cajnice and neighboring municipalities. The tentative steps toward confidence-building in the OSCE program taken during the February workshop appeared to hold.
Later that spring, municipal workers who had met each other for the first time through the workshops began contacting each other without the assistance of OSCE to engage in problem-solving. As predicted by social capital theorists, cooperation bred increased trust, which further encouraged cooperation. Mayors expanded their contacts with each other from assistance on technical difficulties to the sensitive topics of refugee return and integration. Mayors in Gorazde and Cajnice, for example, laid the foundation for the return of displaced persons in their respective municipalities based on mutual cooperation that began through the municipal program. During separate meetings with the two mayors in August 1999, both men independently expressed appreciation for the opportunity to engage the other municipality in a neutral environment. The mayor of Cajnice added that even more than the assistance his municipality received for budgeting and infrastructure development, confidence-building among municipalities was the most important programmatic outcome.
Similarly, the participation of the north-central Bosnian towns of Usora and Tesanj helped those municipalities overcome years of hostility. Both towns comprised the prewar municipality of Tesanj, which saw fighting between ethnic Croats and Bossniaks during the war. From war’s end in 1995 until the summer of 1998, Usora resisted reestablishing a functioning municipality with Tessanj. Even after gaining administrative independence from Tessanj in summer 1998, the two municipalities continued to bicker over unresolved territorial and administrative issues. Entering the program as a unified “team,” Usora and Tessanj began developing common infrastructure plans by April 1999 and resolved a 3-year fight over a patch of land that formed the boundary between the two municipalities. In meetings in September 1999, municipal councilors in both Usora and Tesanj credited the program for having provided a structure through which they could engage in dialogue and eventual problem solving.
Despite these advances, by September 1999, program staff recognized that lack of citizen participation was problematic. Municipal officials could improve transparency in decision-making but other measures of “good governance,” such as accountability and group identification of needs, required partnership with citizens. The OSCE sought formal commitments from citizens by tapping preexisting “local communities” (mjesne zajednice), which had a history under Yugoslavia of informally organizing citizens for small-scale public works projects (Seroka 1989). Typically, citizens identified infrastructure projects through consensus and collected funds through door-to-door donations. In this way, citizens of local communities, who share dense networks of social ties, provided themselves with much-needed roads, as well as extensions to the water, sewage, and telephone systems. Since the war, Bosnia’s informally organized local communities have acted as crucibles in which networks of trust are forged that promote a willingness to donate scarce resources. By allying with these networks of trust, the OSCE program sought to ensure citizen participation through channels already familiar to citizens, while offering citizens a chance to expand their improvement efforts through greater access to funding.
As late as 2 years after the incorporation of local community leaders into the community planning committees, however, citizen participation continued to lag. Citizens chosen to represent local communities within the community planning committees complained that their neighbors refused to participate in group meetings or support planning committee decisions. The complexity of citizen reticence to engage new institutions at the local level is revealed when one considers that individuals who appear untrustworthy when acting in their official capacities are subsequently trusted to participate in informal local community action.
From 1998 to 2001, citizens and municipal officials demonstrated increasingly diverse outcomes in the development of confidence in the new institutions of local governance. Municipal leaders have since gone on to establish an association for lobbying higher levels of government on behalf of local interests and have initiated a quarterly newsletter devoted to information sharing and mutual problem-solving. Citizens, on the other hand, still reserve their trust for social intimates. The next section will more closely examine how individuals’ different roles affect the interplay between interpersonal trust and institutional confidence among citizens engaged in the program.
*** Analysis of Citizen Engagement of Local Authorities
On the surface, local community organizations appear to be excellent examples of social capital at work at the local level: citizens build trust in each other by voluntarily cooperating in the public sphere to improve local services. Upon looking deeper into the social dynamics of local community organizations, however, a paradox not captured by social capital theories presents itself: individuals who appear not to be trusted when acting in their official capacities are subsequently trusted to participate in local community action, as in the case of the town of Buzim.
Buzim is located in Bosnia’s northwestern-most territory. It is a town that should be beset by distrust. Fighting during the war in Buzim was contained within one ethnic group, a situation that is said to have given rise to deeper-seated animosities among the former combatants.[60] Political divisions split families, as brothers and cousins fought on either side of the political divide in horrific village-to-village combat. It is among the poorest municipalities in the country and corruption scandals in the late-1990s both in the municipality and in the canton have eroded what little confidence citizens may have had in their pubic officials. Moreover, following the end of the war in 1995, cantonal authorities revoked the statute identifying local communities as administrative units, thereby removing legal protections for these organizations.
To an outsider it seems that Buzim’s citizens have ample reason to trust neither their neighbors nor their public officials. Despite this complex environment, citizens organized in Buzim’s local communities exist as the only viable actors through which municipal improvements are made. Since they are not legally recognized entities, local communities are prevented from establishing bank accounts for the donations they amass and instead keep the collections in the homes of selected group members. To some this may sound like an invitation to corruption, but to the citizens of Buzim this system, which relies on a dense network of relationships among families and friends, provides an atmosphere of greater accountability. Their actions are consistent with research in other Central and East European states transitioning from state socialism (Stark 1996; Rose-Ackerman 2001), which demonstrate that actors seeking to cooperate during uncertain transitions rely on preexisting forms of organization and tested relationships. An aspect of interaction not captured in these studies, however, is that local officials who appear untrustworthy in their official capacities are trusted to participate in the collection and implementation efforts as private citizens. As one of Buzim’s municipal councilors said during one interview, “The people know me. I live next door and if something is missing or if there is a question, they know where to find me.” Though this sounds like a reasonable explanation for why citizens trust their neighbor, these individuals do not extend their trust to the same neighbor when that individual assumes his official role. In these two contexts, individuals’ willingness to trust the same actor is different across roles.
As Tilly (2004) observes, democratic states cannot operate effectively without incorporating trust networks like the Bosnian local communities into public politics. Evidence from Bosnia, though, demonstrates how difficult accomplishing such a task is in practice. Individuals like Buzim’s municipal councilor are trusted only when the tie that binds them to their constituents is a familiar and personal one. This process is found not only in towns where accusations of corruption have certainly eroded citizen confidence, as in Buzim, it is also found in towns where officials are not perceived as corrupt. In Jablanica, where citizens can follow municipal assembly meetings on television or radio and where they have participated in municipal surveys to rank needed infrastructure, the mayor still receives petitions for funding of discrete projects when he visits the various local communities that comprise his municipality. Feeling the strain between citizens’ reliance upon him instead of established channels of decision-making, the mayor noted, “I am not trying to take over the role of the Community Planning Committee, but I need to be able to tell the citizens if, when and how a project can be addressed during my mandate.” And in Gorazde, where the mayor is widely viewed to be honest, citizens still are reticent to engage him and his administration in a public environment. During an interview in 2000, the mayor lamented that citizens express their local needs mostly in one-on-one meetings during his “open door” day instead of public town meetings or through the community planning committees. He rightly worries that citizens rely too much on him as a person and not enough on the office of the mayor. Although the mayors of Jablanice and Gorazde are rare examples of elected officials who are concerned about their personal ties to constituents, their unease illustrates how one action may have a variety of meanings for different actors. Citizens perceive assistance from their friend the mayor as a source of interpersonal trust. Individuals who receive help believe that they benefit from preferential treatment. They believe this, in part, because they receive assistance in closed-door, one-on-one meetings, an environment that offers them flexibility in identifying their mutual bond. For the mayor, on the other hand, providing citizens with access to state services is an obligation he provides to everyone. Is this evidence of clientalism or merely an example of a mayor providing services to citizens who he happens to know? In the case of Jablanica and Gorazde both conclusions appear to be true, since the single action has different significance for the various participants.
Examples from Jablanica and Gorazde highlight the need for analysts to probe deeply into the social identities actors themselves invoke in practice when acting in the public sphere. Concluding that an exchange between the mayor from Jablanica or Gorazde and a constituent is evidence of a patronage system obscures the variety of meanings attached to this one action across different actors. Similarly, concluding that this type of sharing assists in the kind of social capital that strengthens institutions also would be misleading. Without an investigation into the various roles different actors tap into, analysts cannot anticipate whether the provision of municipal services reaffirms interpersonal trust or increases institutional confidence. As the mayors of Jablanica and Gorazde well appreciate, however, these distinctions matter for long-term citizen confidence.
Theorists such as Hardin have suggested that allying citizen and local leaders’ interests can contribute to increased citizen confidence. Since the OSCE program and local community organizations are complimentary and could mutually strengthen local improvement efforts, one could anticipate that these shared interests should promote citizen confidence. Follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001 in 20 municipalities, however, showed that even the lure of expanded services at a lower investment cost could not coax local community members to engage the new local institutions. When citizens in the central Bosnian town Konjic were queried about why they did not engage the planning committees to bolster local community efforts, they responded that they simply did not believe that such a structure could work, even though they claimed to individually trust local leaders who would sit with them on the committee.
Even in municipalities where the material benefits of cooperation within the planning committees were already demonstrated, citizens still remained aloof. In the ethnically divided town of Novi Travnik, for example, municipal leaders secured funding for a district heating system through participation in the OSCE program. The municipality was promised additional funding for a water purification project if it could improve citizen cooperation. Despite the municipality’s success with the heating project, local community leaders in Novi Travnik refused to participate and the water treatment plant was shelved. One local leader explained that he opted not to participate because he worried that the interests of his area would not be heard in the project-planning phase. Rather than participating on the committee to ensure transparency and citizen participation, this local leader and the citizens he represented chose disengagement. During our interview, however, the same local leader accepted a phone call from the mayor in which they agreed that a certain local road would be paved using a combination of funds from the municipality and the local community, and voluntary labor from citizens. Although citizens would receive less in terms of services for their time and money, the local leader trusted the mayor, who was the father of an old school friend, to make these relatively nontransparent commitments. His lack of confidence in the more public environment of the formal community planning committees, however, prevented him and his local community from taking advantage of expanded services. The refusal of citizens in Novi Travnik and Konjic to participate in their respective community planning committees supports Mollering’s (2001) observation that the leaps of faith required of actors to overcome uncertainty is not deducible by analysts through transaction cost economics or rational choice analysis. Much to the frustration of the OSCE program, these citizens had their own ideas about what kinds of uncertainty they could and could not overcome, despite the program staff’s assumptions about the clear benefits and low risks associated with cooperation.
The trust that Bosnian officials in this program tap into is deeply interpersonal. When mayors are able to act as private citizens or meet in one-on-one encounters with citizens, trust operates between the actors. When the impersonal role of elected official or bureaucrat is stressed, however, citizens refuse to engage, despite their previous demonstration of trust in the individual who holds the public mandate. The basis upon which these actors establish trust is not through their understood roles of official and citizen. Rather, trust is restricted to the preexisting roles of friend, family member, or former schoolmate. These differences in trusting behavior suggest that trust may best be understood not as a property of individuals but as a property of relations between specific roles under certain conditions. This observation follows other calls to see the trust needed to produce certain forms of social capital as inherently context-specific (Lewis and Weigert 1985; Coleman 1988; Hardin 1991; Burt 1996, 1997a, b; Podolny and Baron 1997; Swain 2003). I go one step further to recognize that different contexts may positively or negatively affect the same individuals’ ability to take advantage of trusting relations.
Evidence from this governance program suggests that citizens’ lack of confidence in the institutions with which they would have to interact kept them outside of official municipal work and disengaged from the community planning committee structure. Unlike Levi’s assumption that citizens have confidence in institutions because they trust the people who work there, Bosnian municipal experiences show that distrust in institutions can persist even when the individuals working there are themselves trusted under different circumstances. Existing approaches to social capital cannot account for this problem because they do not recognize that actors often have multiple ways of identifying their relationship. As the above observations show, however, it is a crucial oversight that leaves existing theories unable to clarify why trust is granted or withheld from the same individuals in different contexts.
The nontransparent provision of assistance by public officials to citizens manifests additional problems for citizens’ confidence in institutions. As noted, citizens’ readiness to approach Bosnian officials for individual assistance, requests for what should be public entitlements or state-guaranteed rights, often take the form of personal appeals based on close social ties. These relations erode public confidence in the overall institutions, as they link performance of public duties with performance of personal favors in the minds of citizens. In these transactions, the strong ties of close social relations are reaffirmed between the official and the petitioning citizen. It is the formal office that suffers in this environment, as successful performance of the favor is attributed to the individual, while lack of performance is blamed on the ineffectiveness or corruption of the institution. In sum, not only is confidence in Bosnian institutions not derived from trust placed in workers within those institutions, confidence in institutions is undermined by those very ties. While 5 or 6 years may not be enough time to begin seeing large-scale changes in citizen confidence, early evidence from the OSCE program suggests that in environments already riddled with distrust of institutions, interpersonal trust among citizens and officials does not easily translate into system confidence.
*** Conclusion
In his book, Seligman (1997) concludes that in ordinary situations, trust is a rare phenomenon, given that individuals usually rely on system confidence and familiarity to predict the actions of others. Only in the interstitial points at the outer limits of system confidence do we find opportunities for trust. Postwar conditions — or other periods of radical transition that disrupt the functioning of institutions — by definition are periods of system breakdown. In these periods, instead of reliance on system confidence, actors rely on trust developed through interpersonal exchanges in the public sphere. As participants in this good governance program in Bosnia have shown, however, reliance upon interpersonal trust undermines the development of institutional confidence.
The cycle of relying on trusted social intimates is a dynamic that has been captured in previous research on the transition from state socialism in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. A number of scholars have identified that strong, closed networks of trust emerged under state socialism to overcome deficiencies in services provided by the state (Mishler and Rose 1997; Rose, Michler and Haerpfer 1997; Gibson 2001; Dowley and Silver 2002). Others have observed that previous forms of organization and prior relationships assist actors in negotiating their way through uncertain times and transitions (Stark 1996; Guseva and Rona-Tas 2001). Against this view of thick trust as a benign resource, Susan Rose-Ackerman (2001) has cautioned that the kind of trust networks that emerged as coping mechanisms under socialism may work at cross purposes with “trust in rules” or confidence needed to make the transition to participatory democracy. Bosnian citizens who refuse to grant confidence to their local public institutions not only affirm Rose-Ackerman’s conclusions, but underscore the important point that the respective categories of people we trust and those we distrust can be composed of the same individuals in different social settings.
Since 2001, Bosnian citizens have begun expressing a little more optimism about their local governments on attitudinal surveys. A March 2006 poll of citizens in municipalities that have received training and technical assistance through a USAID-funded program indicated that 85% were satisfied with their access to municipal services, an increase of 16% over the year before. This improvement was contrasted with respondents in municipalities which did not receive support, where satisfaction decreased by 5% over the same period (Report on Attitudinal Survey, Governance Accountability Project, March 2006). A contributing factor in citizen satisfaction could be the implementation of initiatives that remove the possibility of tapping close personal ties for needed municipal goods. Modernization within municipal service agencies, including the establishment of impersonal, mechanized municipal citizens’ service centers and the computerization of birth and death records, property deeds, and health records, has reduced the amount of time citizens must wait for needed documents. The municipality of Zenica, for example, processed 9,000 documents in the month of July 2005 — an increase of 3,000 over its usual output — after receiving modern equipment and customer service training (Frontlines 2005). Successful iterative problem-solving of this kind through enforced engagement with the institutions of governance, over time, may yet manage to do what 10 years of anticorruption programs and training of individual local leaders has not: break Bosnians’ vicious cycle of reliance upon virtuous circles and interpersonal trust, and open up space for the development of confidence in new institutions.
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** Chapter 7. Are National Politics Local? Social Movement Responses to the 2004 US Presidential Election
Kathleen M. Blee and Ashley Currier
Social movements and elections pose alternative options for political action (Garner and Zald 1987; Tilly 1988b). Social movements operate outside the formal institutions of politics; elections operate within. As competing models for effecting social change, social movements and electoral campaigns might be expected to differ considerably in their operations, personnel, strategies, and tactics, but that is not always the case. In movement-rich, modern democratic societies, a “fuzzy and permeable boundary” often separates electoral campaigns and social movements (McFarland 1998; D. Meyer 2000, 2003, 2004; also Banaszak 2003; Earl and Schussman 2004; Goldstone 2004, p. 336; Koopmans 2004). Much research has focused on how social movements cross this boundary and affect elections or bring their members into institutional politics (Knoke 1990; Andrews 1997; Burstein 1998; Green et al., 1998; Burstein and Linton 2002; Meyer 2003). By examining social movement groups in Pittsburgh before and after the 2004 presidential election, we explore influence in the opposite direction: how elections affect social movements.
The influence of elections on social movements is one aspect of the relationship between states and collective action. States and other forms of institutional politics affect social movements (Banaszak et al., 2003) by facilitating the development of protest forms (Tilly 1997; Tarrow 1998) and shaping — or delimiting — the opportunities and benefits of group action (McCarthy et al., 1991; Walker 1991; Meyer and Imig 1993; Tarrow 1998; Beckwith 2001; Hoffman 2003; Meyer 2003). Some studies conclude that states influence social movements primarily by providing political opportunities — assuming, as David Meyer (2003, p. 279) argues, that “social movements are opportunistic, even if activists are not conscious of their opportunism” — although other studies find threats to be more influential than opportunities (McCammon and Campbell 2002). In either case, the link between state provision of opportunity (or threat) and social movement response is complex, shaped by external factors like political context; internal factors such as movement ideologies, values, identity, resources, and culture (della Porta 1995; Beckwith 2001; Mueller and McCarthy 2003; Rucht 2003); and interactions between social movements and the state (Tarrow 1996; Meyer 2003; Rucht 2003).
Only a handful of studies focus explicitly on the effect of elections on social movements, mostly with aggregated data on a fairly restricted range of social movement activities, particularly public protests. These studies come to different conclusions about the election-social movement dynamic. David Meyer (1993, p. 40) finds that protests against nuclear weapons decline in election years and concludes that “[m]ovement politics appears to flourish when the possibilities of electoral influence are more distant.” Others suggest that elections create new opportunities for social movements (Gamson and Meyer 1996; Imig 1998; Boudreau 2002; Van Dyke 2003) or stimulate new movements (Meyer and Minkoff 2004). Whether these different findings are due to varying levels and types of media attention (Oliver and Maney 2000; Koopmans and Olzak 2004), differences among movements (Kriesi 1995; D. Meyer 2004), national- versus local-level organizations (Edwards and Foley 2003), or other factors is unclear since none of the studies examines contrasting social movement organizations over time in sufficient detail to understand precisely how (or if) they react to electoral campaigns.
One line of research that is useful for understanding the influence of elections on social movements are studies that distinguish which aspects of social movements are most likely to be responsive to state opportunities or threats. Carol McClurg Mueller and John McCarthy’s (2003) analysis of feminist movements concludes that a movement’s culture is less susceptible to threats or opportunities than are mobilizing structures, alliances, tactics, and strategies. Megan Meyer’s (2004) comparative analysis of peace groups in Israel, Northern Ireland, and South Africa extends this analysis of movement culture and finds that group identities are not only difficult to change, but also act to put certain tactical choices off-limits by, for example, making groups hesitant to engage in contentious actions for fear of stimulating internal conflict (also Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). It is clear that states, state actions, and institutional politics — like election campaigns — can have profound effects on social movements, although the precise circumstances under which this is likely to occur, and the exact aspects of social movements most amenable to influence by state action, are not resolved.
Not only do elections generally affect social movements, but certain elections also represent “exceptional events” for analysts that can “bring into the open structures whose importance is much more difficult, if not impossible, to see in other periods” (Peltonen 2001, p. 350). Major electoral campaigns such as the deeply divisive 2004 US presidential contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry may prompt social movements, even on a local level, to consider new strategies or tactics in response to a changing political landscape. Such exceptional elections thus provide an analytic opportunity to observe how social movements deliberate and select strategies and tactics in the face of a common external event.
We use the highly contentious and media-saturated 2004 election as an exceptional event to examine the varying responses of ideologically similar social movement groups in one political field (Ray 1999; also Borland 2005), a medium-size US city, thereby holding constant both the external context and internal factors of ideology and structural position. Since we are particularly interested in understanding how groups develop meanings and strategies of action, we select these for study at very early stages of their development (Blee and Currier 2005) before they have developed coherent practices, strategic and tactical repertoires, and identities (McCarthy and Zald 1977). These groups thus have similar, generally low, levels of formal structure and procedures as well. We label these “social movement groups” (SMGs), to distinguish them from more established social movement organizations (SMOs) in which practices and strategies are likely to be sedimented. Through ethnographic observation, in-depth interviewing, and analysis of SMG documents, we explore the relationship between the election and local political action by observing and comparing how Pittsburgh SMGs viewed a common issue — the election campaign — and the strategies and tactics they developed in response.
**** Conceptual Approach
Our approach draws on concepts from three disciplines: culture and strategic action from social movement studies; path-dependency from social geography and political science; and task timing from management studies.
How SMGs respond to elections — if they do — cannot be predicted simply from their stated goals or agendas. Rather, acts of political contestation are embedded in subtle aspects of social movement culture. In the course of current and past struggles, SMGs develop currencies of shared meaning that make elections significant (or not) to movement activists (Polletta 1999, 2004; Suh 2001; Auyero 2004). Moreover, SMGs may either act on these meanings or fail to act, reflecting the indeterminate choices that shape strategic action by activists and groups. The practice of politics (strategic choices) and the signification of these practices (culture/meaning-making) constitute what James Jasper (2004, p. 4) terms the “microfoundations of political action” (also Koopmans 2005).
Understanding meaningful action requires an analytic strategy different from standard models of cause-and-effect relationships among variables since similarly constituted and situated social movement groups can diverge significantly in how (or whether) they are affected by or respond to electoral cycles. Indeed, it is these divergences — more specifically, the choices that create such divergences and the sequences of action that lead from these — that reveal the actual practice of politics in SMGs. Thus, we use the concept of path-dependency, tracing both the strategic choices of SMGs as they formulate goals and shared meaning and the “residues of action at a given time [that] constrain subsequent action” (also Pred 1981; Tilly 1988a, p. 710; Aminzade 1992; Pedriana 2005). In path-dependent sequences of action, paths are self-reinforcing in the sense that, once taken, paths of action are progressively more likely to continue while, in the words of Paul Pierson (2000a, pp. 74–75) “over time, ‘the road not chosen’ becomes an increasingly distant, increasingly unreachable alternative.” The logic of path-dependency is useful for understanding the cascading nature of some social movement processes and the turning points that transform trajectories and shape new action paths (also Abbott 1997; Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2000a,b). Daniel Cress’ (1997) examination of movements of the homeless, for example, uses a path-dependency framework to show how the decision to become a nonprofit organization narrows the range of tactics these SMOs can employ. The focus on action and constraints created by prior actions in path-dependency also provides a framework for examining changes in how social movement groups perceive their alternatives and choices over time. As the geographer Allan Pred (1985, p. 8) notes, paraphrasing Marx, “[p]eople do not produce history and places under conditions of their own choosing, but in the context of already existing, directly encountered social and spatial structures.”
The dynamics of SMGs’ meaning-making and strategic choices accrue as distinctive paths of action, but work by management scholars suggests that there may be commonalities in the timing of these paths. Workplace task teams, for example, typically exhibit a similar cycle of internal dynamics even when pursuing very different sequences of decisions. Teams move from an initial and quickly established platform of expectations (a “framework of givens”) about how to proceed, to a transitional period of anxiety, and then reorient with a new set of agreements about the direction their work should take (also McGrath and Kelly 1986; Gersick 1988). Despite significant differences between work teams and SMGs, each face impositions that can disrupt routines and initiate a search for new strategies of action. Iterative cycles within groups may open new possibilities for strategic action.
Building on these concepts, we explore how SMGs assess the meanings of electoral politics, the strategic choices they make during a highly visible presidential election, and the sequencing and timing of paths of action that follow from these choices. Our goals are twofold: both to understand the response of SMGs to the election campaign and to use the 2004 election, an event which confronted groups with acute strategic dilemmas, as an analytic opportunity to probe the microdynamics of action in social movement groups more generally.
**** Methodological Approach
The larger study from which we draw these data (Blee and Currier 2005) analyzes new and emerging SMGs in Pittsburgh in order to understand how such groups develop assumptions about who they are and how they will operate. Here we analyze 15 SMGs that are affiliated with the Center for Progressive Values (CPV), an umbrella center for leftist and progressive (peace and social justice) groups in Pittsburgh, plus the CPV itself, for a total of 16 groups. (All names are pseudonyms). We include the CPV, even though it qualifies as a SMO, because it shepherds emerging SMGs and offers them resources, such as meeting space and 501(c)3 nonprofit status. These SMGs and the CPV comprise part of a “social movement family,” a local version of what Donatella della Porta and Dieter Rucht (1995, p. 233) define as groups that “share a common worldview, have organizational overlaps, and occasionally ally for joint campaigns.” SMGs in our sample worked on the following issues, with some issues drawing the interest of multiple SMGs in coalition (Jones et al., 2001) or separately (the number of SMGs working on an issue appears in parentheses): gun control (1), animal rights (1), global AIDS (1), anticapitalism (3), police violence (1), same-sex marriage (1), environment (1), war in Iraq (3), Middle East (1), and civil rights (2), plus the CPV. Although most SMGs focus on a particular issue or set of issues consistently, some considered or added new concerns, often remote from their original focus (Blee and Currier 2005), such as a group organized to oppose the war in Iraq that broadened its focus to include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and US military action in Haiti and an animal-rights group that became involved in antiwar protest.
Members exerted considerable control over all SMGs in this study. Michael Foley and Bob Edwards (2002) discuss a range of activity levels of members (as opposed to staff) in voluntary associations, from those who simply receive mailings from a group, to those who support the group financially, to those who volunteer and attend meetings. By this schema, all the SMGs had active members. With one exception (a short-term grant to one organizer), no group except the CPV had paid staff; members were critical to governance and policymaking, including shaping strategies, tactics, leadership, and the financial situation of the group. Although all groups considered volunteering for group activities and attending meetings to be requirements for being considered a member, some groups distinguished, informally, between the expectations they placed on different kinds of members, such as those who attended all SMG events versus those who only attended special SMG events like protests.
All SMGs operated through public meetings to which members were invited and expected to attend. Most of the groups had, or attempted to have, meetings at regular intervals, although some suspended meetings occasionally because of interpersonal conflict, the accomplishment of their primary goal, or holidays. Attendance at meetings ranged from a handful of people to several dozen. The antipolice violence, anticapitalism, animal rights, civil rights, gun control, antiwar, and pro-same-sex marriage SMGs averaged smaller attendance at their meetings than did the pro-environment SMG. Although the groups had distinct identities, there was membership overlap among several of them, due in part to the CPV’s role as an umbrella organization for some groups.
Over the period of this study, several SMGs began to formalize their structures of leadership by holding elections or creating special positions for members, such as treasurer, although most continued to operate informally, generally by regarding founding members as their de facto leaders. A couple of groups changed their leadership structure during this observation period by, for example, initiating rotating meeting facilitators. On Edwards’s (1994) measure of internal structure, nearly every group would be characterized as having a minimal formal organization: except through their association with CPV, almost no group had a governing board, federal tax status, a formalized annual budget, paid staff, or legal incorporation.
To examine the effect of the 2004 election on these SMGs, we analyze continuous data on each group for a 20-month period that extends across the electoral cycle, from September 2003 to April 2005. The 2004 election was particularly salient in Pittsburgh, and local politics were especially likely to be disrupted, because Pennsylvania was widely viewed as a contested, but must-win state by both major political parties, resulting in many candidate visits and much election advertising in the city. Moreover, the fact that Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of the Democratic candidate, lives in a Pittsburgh suburb and heads an influential local philanthropic foundation brought candidates and significant media attention to the city.
Our data on SMGs are extensive, longitudinal, and comparative and include observations not only of public events, but also of less public arenas such as meetings, social events, and e-mail correspondence. Data are extensive in that we collected information on an increasing variety of social actions as new categories emerged in preliminary analysis, longitudinal to uncover dynamic processes underlying group decisions and actions, and comparative across groups to allow comparison across cases. We collected data in three ways.
First, we used ethnographic observational methods to collect microlevel data on the internal dynamics of 16 SMGs over 20 months. Either one of us or trained students attended all meetings and events and took notes, following a detailed, semi-structured observational template that we continually refined to include new issues and address emerging hypotheses. We also collected documents from these groups and monitored e-mail discussions among members.
Second, we conducted 24 in-depth interviews with activists and former activists from these groups, including 8 interviews that also asked about the election’s impact on their group and the progressive community of Pittsburgh. To explore how these issues might be discussed differently in a group context, we held focus groups in the spring of 2005 with the CPV board and an African American antiwar group. We tape recorded and transcribed all interviews and focus groups in full.
Third, to provide a wider context about the political field in which these SMGs operated, we collected information on all politically progressive (e.g., peace and justice) SMG- or SMO-sponsored public events, including publicly announced meetings, during this time period. To our data on the 16 SMGs, we added information (date, location, type of event, issue raised, and sponsoring group) for all events listed on the CPV online and print event calendars sponsored by any SMO or SMG in Pittsburgh; all events involving progressive SMOs or SMGs that we located in local general- and special-audience newspapers during this time period; and all events culled from the Pittsburgh Independent Media Center Web site, a repository of video, audio, and photographic footage on local progressive political actions, for these 20 months. This resulted in a total of 1,234 events, sponsored by 112 groups. The events consisted of 569 meetings, 216 protests, 145 vigils, 133 public forums, 65 film screenings, 49 miscellaneous events, 27 fundraisers, 22 social events, and 8 press conferences. In addition to the issue-focuses of the groups we observed intensively, these included events on public transit, health care, voting rights, community welfare, anarchism, prisoner rights, queer protest, media reform, veterans’ rights, public school reform, labor solidarity, and antiracism.
Using N6 data management software, we coded and analyzed all ethnographic, interview, and document data for thematic content, including both overt references to the presidential election and silences in discussion when groups might have referenced the election (e.g., if it was referenced in a similar situation by another group), but did not. Our analyses are longitudinal and comparative: we examine SMGs over time and across groups.
These data allow us to examine the precise dynamics of strategic action in SMGs for several reasons. Observational methods record the trajectory of group life as it unfolds, capturing the fits and starts — the messiness — of social interaction that is often lost in accounts that rely on a group’s documents or the memories of its participants. Our observations include public meetings and vigils as well as semipublic and private activities like press conferences, steering committee meetings, and social events. These latter constitute what Hanspeter Kriesi (1995, p. 196) calls the “invisible side of social movements,” as opposed to the more common scholarly focus on public protest events sufficiently large or dramatic to be recorded in newspaper data (McAdam et al., 2005). Using an ethnographic approach, we also are able to consider the significance of inaction and lack of discussion as well as action and discussion (Lichbach 1998; Jasper 2004), an analytic approach not possible in social movement studies that use events rather than groups as the unit of analysis. Finally, we study SMGs just beginning to organize and those that fail before making an impact, providing a more complete picture of a social movement family and political field than is possible with the more traditional focus on groups that are sustained, influential, and sufficiently visible to be noticed and attractive as subjects of research (Blee and Currier 2005; Koopmans 2005).
In the following sections, we first examine characteristics of SMG events across all groups in our study before, during, and after the election and compare strategies of action across SMGs. We then present two contrasting case studies of how SMGs responded to the election. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this approach for understanding collective political action.
**** SMG Events
The most common progressive SMG event between September 2003 and April 2005 was a meeting, comprising nearly one-half of all events (Table 7.1). This likely understates the predominance of meetings since some groups did not advertise their meetings on online calendars, and meetings were less likely than other events to appear in media coverage. Protests, such as rallies, marches, sit-ins, and picketing, were the second most common SMG event, occurring about 40% as often as meetings. Vigils and public forums took place less often than protests; other types of events were comparatively few in number, but diverse in character, including film screenings, social events, press conferences, and fundraisers. All SMGs had meetings, but groups tended to specialize in what other events they held. Protest events were disproportionately staged by animal rights, anticapitalist, and antiwar SMGs; press conferences by the antipolice brutality group; and public forums by the civil liberties SMGs. The effect of the election on the frequency of events was similar for almost every type of event, as indicated in changes in monthly averages for each event type, noted in parentheses. The highest number of events per month (87) was during the election period, with a drop afterward to 68, a level only slightly more than the 54 events per month average in the pre-election period.
Table 7.1 SMG event type by time period{1}
| Time period | Total |
| Preelection | Election | Postelection |
| Type of Meeting | 337 (28.08) | 65 (32.5) | 167 (27.83) | 569 (28.45) [46%] |
| event | | | | |
| Protest | 95 (7.92) | 31 (15.5) | 90 (15) | 216 (10.8) [17%] |
| Vigil | 60 (5) | 25 (12.5) | 60 (10) | 145 (7.25) [12%] |
| Public forum | 83 (6.92) | 20 (10) | 30 (5) | 133 (6.65) [11%] |
| Film | 23 (1.92) | 13 (6.5) | 29 (4.83) | 65 (3.25) [5%] |
| Miscellaneous | 23 (1.92) | 11 (5.5) | 15 (2.5) | 49 (2.45) [4%] |
| event | | | | |
| Fundraiser | 17 (1.42) | 2 (1) | 8 (1.33) | 27 (1.35) [2%] |
| Social event | 10 (0.82) | 4 (2) | 8 (1.33) | 22 (1.1) [2%] |
| Press | 4 (0.33) | 3 (1.5) | 1 (0.17) | 8 (0.4) [1%] |
| conference | | | | |
| Total | 652 (54.33) | 174 (87) | 408 (68) | 1,234 (61.7) [100%] |
{1} The pre-election period is September 1, 2003-August 31, 2004. The election period is September 1-November 2, 2004. The postelection period is November 3, 2004-April 30, 2005. Because the time periods contain different number of weeks, monthly averages for each event type appear in parentheses to provide a standard for comparison. The percentage in squared brackets indicates the percentage of all events over time. All events that took place in Pittsburgh are included in these data
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-5.jpg][Figure. 7.1 reports the number of meetings and protests — the most common public events — over 20 months. Protests show a temporal increase over this period, with the highest number in the months before the election, but significant peaks also during intense periods of antiwar mobilization in April and June 2004 and winter of 2005. A seasonal pattern in protests is also evident: the frequency drops sharply during Christmas and summer when many SMGs operate less intensively and increases in late winter and early spring. The overall trend toward more protests might be an effect of the election, but more likely reflects seasonal fluctuations and protests that occurred on the anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.]]
A comparison of trends in protests and meetings indicates both a rough synchrony over time and interesting differences. Meetings become more frequent before major protests, reflecting the preparation needed to stage such events. Much of the peak in meeting frequency in November 2003, for example, reflects SMGs planning for protests over civil liberties, animal rights, and police violence. Similarly, the increase in March 2004 is due to planning for protests against the Iraq war and the National Rifle Association’s national convention that was held in Pittsburgh. Unlike the relatively steady pattern of protest frequency, however, the number of meetings shows great variability over time, suggesting that SMGs work tirelessly before major events, and then take time off. Significantly, these data cast doubt on the assumption that social movement groups are defunct, in hibernation, or in abeyance when evidence of a group’s protest activity is missing (Bagguley 2002; Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). In fact, as these data show, SMGs often work intensively in meetings during periods in which they are not staging protests.
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-5.jpg][Fig. 7.1 Frequency of meetings and protests in Pittsburgh by election period]]
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-6.jpg][Fig. 7.2 Frequency and location of protests in Pittsburgh by election period]]
It is important to examine not only when, but also where, SMGs stage protests. Where SMGs locate their protests sheds light on their intended audience. It also suggests how the general population experiences social movement activity. We examine the three locations in which protest activity was the most frequent during the time of this study: downtown (site of federal, state, and local government offices); in majority African American neighborhoods; and in the area of the city’s two largest universities (Fig. 7.2). Looking only at protests staged in these three areas of Pittsburgh (216 of a total of 254 protests), 49% took place downtown; 32% in African American neighborhoods; 19% near the universities. Contrary to what might be expected, protest activity was not primarily concentrated downtown, except for the short time before the election in which the number of protests in front of government, especially federal, buildings soared. Earlier in the election cycle and after voting day, relatively few protests took place downtown, even those sponsored by groups oriented toward influencing government policies on same-sex marriage, civil liberties, and the war in Iraq. Although generally fewer in number than protests downtown, those in African American neighborhoods showed little effect from the election. Rather, there was a general and significant increase over time in protest activity in African American neighborhoods, due in part to the efforts of an African American antiwar SMG. The university area, traditionally regarded as an incubator of protest (Van Dyke 2003; McAdam et al., 2005), had the least amount of protest activity.
The above aggregated data on meetings, protests, and other SMG events hint at a connection between the electoral cycle and social movement activity. To understand how and why these might be associated, we look at the actual activities and deliberations of these groups — their decisions about what strategies and tactics to use, if any — for which we turn to the ethnographic data.
**** Strategies of Action
Not surprisingly, given the general disenchantment with electoral politics that is characteristic of left and progressive movements in the US today and the tendency of social movements to rely on familiar repertoires of action (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004; but see Edwards and Foley 2003), few SMGs were initially interested in the presidential contest. Even five groups focused directly on issues raised in the election — labor, environmentalism, sexual minority rights, military action in Iraq, and civil liberties — were not involved with the election at the beginning of our observational period. Only 1 of the 16 SMGs for which we have ethnographic data, a group working on national security policies that developed a questionnaire for candidates and a voter’s guide, engaged in election activity early in the period. Other SMGs had little or no discussion about the election in their meetings, literature, or internal e-mail until close to November 2004. Groups used President G.W. Bush as a symbol of the problem they had organized to rectify, but did not regard the election as a means of enacting their agendas, at least until late in the campaign.
The initial stance of 15 of the 16 groups was to ignore the election. In some groups, deciding how to ignore the election was not difficult — they simply used tactics of scale to make it irrelevant to the issues they regarded as problematic (Banaszak et al., 2003). A group fighting police brutality toward African Americans moved from an initial local focus on police violence to global issues of imperialism that underlay such brutality; both scales of political action bypassed national and presidential politics. Except for an October 2003 discussion of the political climate and presidential candidates as “dissatisfying,” they did not mention the election until a week before voting day. Similarly, a group opposing the federal and Bush-initiated Patriot Act decided to restrict itself to passing local resolutions in defense of civil liberties, avoiding involvement in presidential politics. Even a group favoring same-sex marriage framed itself solely in terms of state-level politics, despite the centrality of same-sex marriage issues in this presidential campaign.
For most groups, however, maintaining distance from the election required more direct strategies of insularity. Most commonly, groups insisted that progressive outcomes were possible only through grassroots movements, not party politics. Social movements, they argued, were effectual precisely because they were not entangled in party politics. Remaining uninvolved in the campaign, therefore, was a way of bolstering grassroots power. SMGs thus identified themselves — for example, as groups that were progressive, effective, radical, in touch with people — in part, by their distinction from electoral politics. A telling example of this divide was one group’s castigation of pro-Bush hecklers at a “healthcare, not warfare march” for turning healthcare into a partisan (electoral) issue when it rightfully should be a grassroots concern. Or, as one public transit activist declared, “politicians don’t build power, they seek power. It’s our job to build power.” The view that social movements were superior to electoral politics was evident too in tales that activists told each other about fraud in Bush’s 2000 victory, what one termed “the country’s messed-up election.” Initially, the story of the 2000 election was framed as evidence of the futility of electoral politics. But collective memories, as John Walton (2001) notes, are both selective and pragmatic. Later, when many SMG activists had become involved in the election, the story of the 2000 election recirculated, but now to underscore the need for activists to intervene in the current election, as poll watchers or campaign workers, to prevent more fraud.
Strategies of insularity did not prevent electoral politics from percolating into SMGs to various degrees as the election drew near. But SMGs differed in when they began to discuss strategies of involvement in the election. A few developed strategies of involvement months before the election, but most became involved in the campaign only in mid- to late fall of 2004. Unlike task teams whose strategies of action vary according to distance from their deadlines, SMGs were relatively unaffected by the approach of voting day, or even by changing predictions about who might be elected. Such external events had relatively little influence on when (or if) a SMG would become involved in the election.
Despite their initial strategies of insularity, most SMGs eventually developed strategies of involvement in the election. The process whereby this shift occurred had similarities across groups. Strategies of insularity broke down when specific events connected to the election intervened in a group’s business-as-usual; that is, when its “framework of givens” was disrupted. One group, although it often talked about Bush as an enemy, never discussed the election until a Democratic Party campaign worker presented them with the opportunity to bring their signs to a Kerry rally. Although the group had pledged to remain distant from the election, a few members seized this opportunity to open a discussion about how the election could be an arena for publicizing their cause. Once the topic was broached, the group began to consider a range of tactics that would allow them to use the electoral campaign to their advantage.
An intrusion with a more negative cast occurred in an African American antiwar group. This group, vociferously anti-Bush in their opposition to the Iraq war, also had little election talk until the weekend before the election when the group sponsored a teach-in that included urging African Americans to vote. After the nonpartisan teach-in, many Kerry volunteers descended uninvited on the site of the group’s weekly antiwar vigil to stage a pro-Kerry rally. One antiwar member recalled that the group “really thought they [Kerry volunteers] were trying to exploit our situation and be opportunists.” The need to determine whether the Kerry supporters would be helpful or disruptive (“I don’t want people to be confused that this is a pro-Kerry demonstration,” a member explained) led the antiwar group to a broader discussion of whether being seen as allied with Kerry would bring additional negative attention to the war or might drive away potential opponents of the war who did not support Kerry. The group decided to relocate temporarily to another highly trafficked site away from the pro-Kerry rally, although they returned to their normal protest site the following week. This decision resonated with one leader’s statement that “no matter how the election went, we knew we’d be here.” Another group, which “tried to stay as much away from electoral politics as possible,” was forced to discuss it when their general castigation of US politics received negative reactions from other SMGs who “didn’t want anything done questioning Kerry and the Democratic Party or any alternative to Bush.”
Strategies of insularity also gave way to strategies of involvement through the activism of individual SMG members in the election. Although it is clear from our data and other studies that many activists engage in both conventional politics and social movements (Meyer 2000), the fact of such co-participation by their members, by itself, did not move SMGs to become involved in the election. Even groups in which core activists were highly committed to electoral work operated with an agreement (explicit or unspoken) that there would be no talk of the election in meetings and events. Some SMGs, however, became involved in the election when the electoral work of their members became a credential in the larger social movement family. The credentialing process was most striking after massive protests at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in August 2004 in New York City. Activists in all SMGs often used prior social movement experiences to enhance their political credibility (e.g., “as I learned from my work in the X movement”), but the RNC protests became a particular touchstone of progressive credibility. The importance of the RNC protests came, in part, from how it connected local activists to each other — planning for demonstrations and, for some, riding together on a bus chartered by the CPV — and to a wider, national progressive movement. This sense of participating in an action of great importance was heightened by heavy-handed tactics that police and security forces used to limit the protestors’ access to media, politicians, and the public. Since police surveillance and repression were directed with little distinction at both provocative and nonconfrontational demonstrators, protestors from SMGs found themselves embroiled, and sharing common cause, with Democratic Party and pro-Kerry demonstrators. As stories of the RNC protests were told and retold in SMG meetings and on e-mail discussions long after the event, the open hostility of many SMGs to working with electoral activists gave way to a sense that they had a common enemy.
The progressive credential of having worked against Bush was short-lived, however, and evaporated immediately after the election. After November, progressive legitimacy required the opposite: expressions of regret over electoral involvement or claims that one had remained outside the electoral process. “I got sucked into this fear thing and voted [for] Kerry,” one activist admitted. Another acknowledged that the election did not bring new people to activism: “There were a lot of people organizing and registering to vote ... I haven’t seen those people at any of the nonelectoral events.” Others asserted that “we mistakenly equated getting people to vote with mobilizing them” or “party politics are worthless” and “[we shouldn’t] wait for politicians to make change.” A new historical memory was being made, reasserting the importance of social movements freed of elections and castigating those who had invested unfounded hope in the electoral process.
Changes in how groups operated and in members’ sense of the boundaries of legitimate activism — dynamics that are impossible to discern except through close ethnographic observation — prompted SMGs to develop strategies of involvement in the election. What kind of strategies and tactics they developed depended on a further process of collective meaning-making: the group’s sense of whether to view the election as an opportunity or a threat, an assessment that changed over time.
Groups that regarded the election as an opportunity tended to create an explicit strategy of action, although given the deep distrust that many activists had toward electoral politics, these tended to be uncertain and fleeting, similar to the “stumbling on opportunity” process described by Ruud Koopmans (2005). Several talked about the need to bring their message to candidates, but did so only indirectly with tactics like protesting candidates’ appearances or distributing flyers at campaign rallies since more direct involvement with candidates could create problems for the group. For example, while planning for a march and rally, one group decided not to allow any politician who did not endorse single-payer health care to speak. Would that mean, as one member pressed the group, that they would allow a candidate to speak if the candidate supported single-payer health care, but was not against the war? “Could you turn Kerry down if he wants to speak?” she asked; the facilitator replied without hesitation, “Absolutely.” A graphic protest against US torture of Iraqi prisoners, featuring a male wearing a black hooded robe and holding wires, was similarly contentious in an antiwar SMG when it was staged across the street from a Democratic Party rally.
Some groups did make efforts to take advantage of the heightened sensibilities of the public during the electoral season. One conducted an additional rally; another made sporadic efforts to recruit electoral workers; still another staged an election eve “corporate victory party” to symbolize that “no matter who wins, they [corporations] win,” asking attendees to dress as their favorite corporate evildoer or “republicat”; and an antipolice brutality group e-mailed a postelection assessment to its supporters, celebrating that “blacks [voters] faced down Bush” and several groups cooperated in a postelection protest. Although aggregated data on protests suggest that SMGs seized the opportunity of the election to stage a series of protests, closer examination of individual groups suggests more sporadic strings of actions. One SMG, for example, contemplated a big postelection rally or conference before concluding that these would be “too much work” and settled for a press conference “which needs only about 50 people with signs in the background.” From the outside, the election might seem a political opportunity for SMGs, but many activists adopted this notion only cautiously and partially (also Suh 2001).
The most durable action taken in response to the election came in the formation of Revolutionary Movement (RM) to take advantage of the “political opening” for local progressives in the wake of the election “disaster.” RM’s founder cited a dire need for progressive grassroots organizing since there was so little public uproar over issues like the Iraq war.
If you can’t see it with this guy [President Bush], how bad does it have to get? Hitler was democratically elected too, but at least he wasn’t reelected ... At least you didn’t have Jews voting for him after he set up Auschwitz. If this guy [Bush] can get elected after showing what he’s capable of, we have a problem. I can understand voting for him the first time. We didn’t know. We didn’t know how bad things were going to get. Kerry was an ineffectual candidate to say the least. But Bush had proven himself to be to the detriment of mankind. [Yet voters said,] “let’s put him back.” And I found that quite distressing.
At RM’s initial meeting, almost 3 months after the presidential election, its organizer defined the group’s mission by citing the failures of other groups. RM, he asserted, would reunify activists who had been divided by the election and move the progressive movement forward during what he regarded as the usual “political downtime” between elections. Despite RM’s efforts to build beyond electoral politics, the imprint of the election was pronounced. After 4 months, it was unable to fashion a set of goals or a vision, largely because what RM considered its commonality — the experience of working against Bush in the election — was also what they wanted to transcend. Efforts to design political agendas dissolved in stories of nostalgia or anger about the 2004 campaign. Additionally, RM’s tactics built directly on those used in the election, such as the notion that it is easiest to get people involved in politics by giving out “free stuff” (stickers and buttons). RM floundered by being unable to transcend the very political practices it formed to oppose.
More commonly, groups that regarded the election as an opportunity simply waited to reap its benefits. One group discussed at length how the election would bring new members, particularly from constituencies the organizers regarded as desirable but underrepresented, such as young people and women. Women and students, they reasoned, were likely to become angry at Bush as the electoral campaign progressed because they opposed his antiabortion and socially conservative stance and would be attracted to the street demonstrations that the group routinely organized. Such recruitment was presumed to require no additional effort or change of strategy by the group itself. It would simply emerge as a function of the political and emotional dynamics of the election. And this sentiment was not restricted to one group. Many activists and group expressed a variant of the idea that people would “get politicized” by the election and thus join the progressive movement; that is, that the election itself would mobilize social movements. Similarly, groups argued that the election would bring their issues to a wider audience, again without their active intervention (see Tilly 1988b). Candidates, these groups assumed, could reach audiences that were inherently beyond their grasp. SMGs could make use of candidate rallies and media coverage, but could not develop these on their own.
When SMGs regarded the election as a threat, their responses differed from when they saw it as an opportunity. As a threat, electoral politics were decried by SMGs as detracting from local political activities, splitting allies, undermining a collective sense of purpose, heightening police repression, luring away the attention of the media, and diverting members’ time and money from social movements to electoral efforts. Activists bemoaned that “for a few, [the election] was their whole world and it distracted, I think, from our progress” and decried how “people’s energies are being taken into the campaign.” Even events that accorded with the groups’ politics seemed tainted by their electoral involvement, as seen in the worry by one antiwar SMG that President Bush was “desperate” and would “pull out of Iraq just to win the election and increase his popular support.”
The perception that the election was a threat to grassroots efforts typically was followed by expressions of despair, strategies to shield the groups from damage, and emotional strategies meant to sustain the spirit of members. One group decided to reduce its activity during the election campaign, arguing that people were overextended and could not be recruited, there was too much happening to forge regional alliances, and people could not be approached with additional issues during the campaign. Other groups discussed their common demoralization about the election, either asserting “a feeling of just giving up” or committing themselves to persevering, an emotional strategy that varied according to a group’s political vision. Antiwar activists, for example, insisted that “though many of us may have been shocked by the election results, our organizing continues” and that “we need to look forward;” a feminist peace group described its need to “take time to heal;” and a direct action group adopted the refrain of AIDS activists that it would “turn grief into anger.”
**** Case Studies
To explore further how SMGs developed strategic paths of action in response to the election, we look closely at two groups: No More War (NMW), a group organized to oppose US military involvement in Iraq, and Environment First (EF), an environmental group.
*** No More War
NMW initially showed little interest in the election, except for expressing concern that Bush would appear to end the war simply to get reelected. By the summer of 2004, however, the increasing involvement of its core members in the campaigns of Democratic Party candidates and in protests at local appearances of Bush and other Republicans pushed the election into occasional discussions at NMW meetings and caused concern among some that efforts to “beat Bush” might swamp the antiwar effort. Although members were careful to couch expressions of support for particular candidates as personal pleas rather than attempts to spur group action, a concern surfaced in meetings that the election might prove internally divisive, splitting members who thought Kerry would be better than Bush from those who opposed Kerry for his support of the Iraq war.
Fearing that continued talk about the election would harm the group, NMW leaders invoked two principles — that meetings should be limited to discussions and planning for antiwar events, thus excluding election talk, and that NMW’s affiliation with the tax-exempt CPV precluded them from endorsing candidates, thus prohibiting commentary on candidates as desirable or not. Despite these rules, the candidate preferences of some members still intruded into meetings, eventually provoking an open discussion of NMW’s stance toward the election. The group concluded that it would remain nonpartisan, but that members need not be, separating collective and individual interests in this instance. But the threat of what the election might do to the antiwar effort lingered. At a meeting to plan a postelection rally, members aired worries about the election’s effect on the group, with NMW resolving that the event was needed to demonstrate that the antiwar movement “is still here.” Members committed themselves to “keep on meeting, no matter who wins [the election],” and affirmed that NMW was “antiwar, not just anti-Bush.”
As NMW pondered the threat the election posed, they also considered its possible advantages. What if the Democrats “got nervous” about the mobilizing power of social movements and decided they needed to support their call for “healthcare, not warfare”? What if Kerry wanted to speak at their rally? How could they stage an antiwar presence at the massive Pittsburgh Labor Day march to make “sure our message was seen by both spectators and Teresa Heinz Kerry [a march observer]”?
NMW’s ambivalence toward the election continued as voting day approached. In October, they speculated that the election might bring attention to the need for US troop withdrawal from Iraq. This discussion, however, ended on a more equivocal note. Contrary to its routinely optimistic attendance projections, NMW refused to predict a big turnout for its next antiwar march, concluding instead that “whoever shows up, shows up.” A week later, during a discussion of how they might use the candidates as “symbolic political targets,” NMW activists wondered why they had so few resources to mount opposition to the war and concurred with one member’s assessment that “all the money has gone toward supporting the election.” The following week brought an unusually revealing discussion in which members, many for the first time, revealed their candidate preferences in a discussion of whether planning a postelection antiwar “week of resistance,” to be held no matter who won, would offend Kerry supporters by highlighting his failure to condemn US troop presence in Iraq.
NMW’s series of strategic choices etched a path that shaped its postelection trajectory. Equivocation about whether the election was meaningless or threatening helped forge a postelection understanding of the election as pragmatically important, but ideologically insignificant. After November, NMW regarded the election as having been an obstacle to the group’s progress, but one that had been removed. Antiwar activism was both more important and more likely now because it was possible to get people of different political persuasions involved. At their first postelection event, NMW speakers built on this newfound optimism, heralding Bush as “the best organizer the left ever had” because his policies “made people angry” and required a unified plan for self-defense by progressive activists and members of politically underrepresented groups. NMW members talked about how conventional politics hamper progressive activism, but also create new political configurations that can work to the advantage of progressive forces. In the postelection period, divisions and debates about the ideological positions of candidates, the group’s responsibilities or opportunities to link with electoral issues, and the separability of individual from group interests were no longer relevant. A new platform of expectations, a fresh “framework of givens,” now governed group dynamics. Having survived a period of threat and turmoil, NMW could mobilize antiwar sentiment among a larger and more diverse population. Now revived, NMW staged a spring 2005 antiwar march that was the fourth largest in the US.
*** Environment First
Before, during, and after the election, EF minimized the election’s potential negative effects on the group. The issue of the election surfaced early since EF members typically engaged in lengthy informal talk among themselves before meetings and during sessions devoted to making banners or writing letters. In January 2004, one member asked that the election be on the agenda for a meeting, noting that it was clear that most members supported Democratic candidates which, he feared, might hinder recruitment among pro-environmental Republicans. After extended discussion, EF agreed that this was a realistic problem and that a separate meeting should be held to discuss it. This did not happen. Several months later, a number of members used meeting time to make pro-Kerry signs, a clear violation of the earlier agreement that the group would remain nonpartisan. The resulting conflict brought the issue into explicit discussion again, resulting in new rules: EF would allow pro-Kerry sign-making and prohibit anti-Bush signs, but EF leaders would have to approve all signs that members made during meetings. Again, the decision did not hold firm: within a week, leaders decided EF was obliged to take more explicit action to educate the public about the differing environmental records of the candidates.
The vacillating decisions about EF’s relationship to the election eventually provoked an explosion within the group, although it was expressed, significantly, through a series of e-mail exchanges rather than in meetings. After a core member posted a message soliciting support for Kerry as “the most important thing you can do for the environment this year,” other members reacted strongly that such openly political expressions would “cut the membership” since “not everyone shares [those] views.” A flurry of exchanges ensued. Some members demanded that they be removed from the e-mail list because of the intensity and personal direction that the conflict had taken, citing such e-mails as “all of you people who care about the environment and support Bush have some horrible issues. I don’t know if you had a tragic childhood or what but your brains are not functioning properly.” Although most members involved in the conflict were careful to express their opposition to Bush, some expressed sentiments like “the environment and political opinions float on very different wavelengths.” Another decried EF for allowing politics to intrude into the group’s work, stating that members should account for “what your political narrow-mindedness is doing to the welfare of our planet, causing people that care to be alienated from the cause.”
EF’s efforts to shield itself from the election ultimately backfired as conflict between members intruded into the group’s functioning. Before the election, a spirit of optimism and enthusiasm characterized EF’s events and meetings. After the election, a sense of despair and gloom permeated the group. Even the Bush administration’s proposal to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, once eagerly awaited by EF as an opportunity to demonstrate public opposition to Bush’s environmental policies, was now met with fear that Bush would “get permission just to do anything” and wanted to “break the back of the environmental lobby.” One EF leader summarized the group’s sentiments about its future and the future of environmentalism in April 2005 as “we have never been more scared.” The group’s efforts to contain the election left it demoralized and floundering.
**** Discussion and Conclusion
Social movement theory tends to regard elections either as black holes that absorb energy and attention away from noninstitutionalized political activity or as boosters that create opportunities for social movements by raising the overall level of political interest and activism. By exploring how SMGs themselves consider and develop strategies of action in the course of a major presidential election campaign, we uncovered a broader range of responses, from ambivalence, to efforts to stay uninvolved or use the election to their advantage, to group paralysis. In contrast to traditional variable-centered analysis, our goal was not to predict whether individual SMGs would react to the election, but rather to understand how they did, including what actions SMGs considered and what they did not (or no longer) regard as possible. Through an examination of new and emerging groups in a single political field with a common external issue — groups thus similar on factors known to shape social movement responses and tactical selection (McCarthy et al., 1991; Taylor and Van Dyke 2004) — we were able to focus closely on the internal dynamics that led to different patterns of action. We found that whether and how any particular group would respond was not predictable from likely causal factors, such as whether they were interested in issues raised in the election, whether they were focused on federal government policies, or, until the last few weeks, even the
proximity of voting day. All SMGs eventually reacted to the election in some way, but there were revealing differences in how and when they did so. In this final section, we consider the implication of these findings for our initial goals: extending scholarship on the relationship between social movements and electoral politics and, more broadly, using the election as an analytic opportunity to develop richer understandings of the microdynamics of action in social movement groups.
The pattern of actions by SMGs during the 2004 election were path-dependent and iterative, with self-reinforcing sequences of actions disrupted at turning points during which the dynamics of meaning-making (culture) and strategic action were most visible. Figure 7.3 is a heuristic schema of the paths of action that the SMGs followed during the election cycle. Paths represent sequences of action, not groups. Some groups followed a single path; the national security SMG could consistently be described as following path 1 (involvement), and an animal rights group remained in path 2 (insularity). More commonly, however, groups followed many paths in different sequences of action as they worked out possible strategies for how they would deal with the election. The strategic actions of NMW, for example, followed paths 2 (insularity), 3 (opportunity), and 4 (threat) at different and sometimes overlapping times. The same was true for EF and other SMGs. Moreover, sequences of actions in any path are not in fixed order. SMGs do not necessarily develop ideas about elections first, and then develop strategies to act on those ideas. Rather, strategic action and meaning-making are coincident and mutually reinforcing; this is the durability of action paths. Thus, the strategies of insularity that the direct action group developed reinforced its sense that the election was irrelevant while the strategies of involvement that the national security group used heightened its sense of the election’s relevance.
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-10.jpg][Fig. 7.3 Strategic action paths of SMGs]]
Although the self-reinforcing nature of action paths makes them durable over time, they are not static. Indeed, it is the turning points in path-dependent sequences paths that illuminate the contingent rather than determinant nature of action. Faced with the 2004 election, most SMGs began with a sense that the election was irrelevant to their identity and mission as grassroots organizers — a “framework of givens” — that led to actions to preserve their distinction from electoral politics. Not all such strategies came from familiar repertoires; some SMGs developed innovative tactics like changing scales to avoid entanglement with the election. Over time, however, strategies of insularity were disrupted by various combinations of external events and/or internal pressures from members. Existing patterns of action began to be unworkable, and thus a framework of givens became questionable, when members threatened to defect to electoral politics or election rifts appeared in the group. At these turning points, new sets of ideas surfaced, even those that were earlier off-limits as antithetical to the groups’ identity or mission. Fresh repertoires of strategy and tactics for taking advantage of the election to bolster grassroots action were now debated as groups established new, if often short-lived, trajectories of action. Yet, even here the deep-seated sense of electoral politics as antithetical to social change lingered, curtailing how they would view and act on the opportunity to benefit from the staging of the electoral campaign. SMGs carved paths of action that drew on past meanings and assumptions of action even as they shaped new ways of engaging in political activity.
The response of SMGs to the election was conditioned by the particular legacy of antagonism between progressive grassroots and electoral politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century US. Despite this common framework, however, SMGs reacted to the election in various ways. All eventually did take action related to the election, but they did not do so in an automatic or uniform fashion. SMGs responded only when their established patterns of action were disrupted and whether they regarded the election as an opportunity or threat shaped their reactions differently. This is consistent with the path-dependent arguments that similar starting conditions can produce a wide range of outcomes (Pierson 2000b), but to understand how the reactions of SMGs diverged it is necessary also to consider the differing constructions of meanings in these groups. By integrating ideas of culture and strategic action into a framework of path-dependent and iterative sequencing, it is thus possible to analyze grassroots political action in a complex and nuanced manner.
Path-dependency and iterative timing theories provide a means of understanding how sequence and timing shape the possibilities of social action since, as social theorists from Marx to the present have noted, there is not an infinite repertoire of action possibilities in social life. Indeed, many aspects of collective political life may operate along trajectories of action in which past choices and temporally remote events are profoundly enduring and deeply explanatory of present actions, in which sequences of action are self-reinforcing and difficult to change. To project beyond our current data, it is likely that as the Pittsburgh SMGs in this study develop into more established SMOs — if they do — they will exhibit a self-definition and sense of possibilities that are, in part, the legacy of actions they undertook to handle the 2004 presidential election. Combining path and iterative theories with closely grained ethnographic and qualitative data thus makes it possible to understand both how paths constrain action and how the choices of actors can shift action onto new and more open trajectories.
Finally, the unfolding of meaning-making and action in SMGs suggests the utility of paying attention to an aspect of social movement emergence that can be overlooked in the more common focus on resources, external political opportunities, and individual consciousness. Social movements are made not only by what is structurally possible and individually imaginable, but also by what the dynamics of SMGs authorize as expressible; that is, what is considered an option for action. Close attention to such microlevel dynamics of action as they unfold in SMGs thus may add to a fuller understanding of how social movements come to be or fail to do so.
Acknowledgments This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 0316436 and 0416500, awarded to the first author. The authors thank Kathleen Bulger-Gray, Spencer Foster, Deborah Gould, John Markoff, David S. Meyer, Hyung Sam Park, Assata Richards, and anonymous reviewers for Qualitative Sociology for helpful suggestions; and Christie Harrison, Kathi Elliott, Amy Grottenthaler, Danielle Kittridge, Emily Long, Cara Margherio, John Nigro, and Laura Petruzelli for assistance with data collection and analysis.
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** Chapter 8. Professional Performances on a Well-Constructed Stage: The Case of an Institutionalized Advocacy Organization
Mirella Landriscina
**** Introduction
As homelessness emerged as a major social problem in the 1980s, grassroots activists and anti-poverty advocates clamored for both structural change and immediate aid for those experiencing homelessness (Imig 1996; Wright 1997; Hopper 2003). Only the latter demand was met: federal and local governments boosted emergency aid systems, leading to the expansion and institutionalization of homeless shelter and service-providing organizations across the country (Wright et al., 1998). Today, many of these contracted nonprofit organizations continue to describe themselves as advocacy organizations that speak on behalf of homeless people and work to end homelessness. I use qualitative methods to investigate the nature of homeless advocacy by homeless service providers and to explore the following questions: What role can institutionalized social movement organizations play in the political arena? What effect does a nonprofit organization’s dependence on public sector funding have on its mandate to do strong advocacy?[61]
This chapter focuses on the work of Project H.O.M.E., a homeless service provider and community development organization in Philadelphia.[62] Project H.O.M.E. opened as a small, emergency shelter in 1988. Under the leadership of a locally known homeless advocate, S. Mary Scullion, it soon became involved in championing the rights of homeless people, as when it entered into a highly publicized, drawn out and contentious battle against the city over a case of NIMBYism. Today, Project H.O.M.E. is an expansive community development organization; for fiscal year 2005, it listed its total assets as US$29,424,200.[63] It works collaboratively with the city, is active in local policy networks, and relies heavily on public funding; for example, in 2005 it received US$3,873,897 in government grants. Additional support from elite foundations and major business and banking institutions has recently allowed Project H.O.M.E. to embark on large-scale projects including the construction of a community education and technology center and the development of low-income housing.
Project H.O.M.E.’s reputation as a strong advocate has grown even as the organization has expanded. In fact, Project H.O.M.E. first drew my attention in 1998 when it led a campaign to oppose a bill in City Council proposing new restrictions on public conduct in the downtown commercial area. Together with a group of allies that included service providers, radical anti-poverty groups and civil libertarians, Project H.O.M.E. argued that the Sidewalk Behavior Bill catered to the downtown business community and that it “criminalized” homelessness. Allies spoke bitterly of the “Disney-fication” of Center City Philadelphia. With their campaign, the providers and the advocates challenged a range of dominant institutional figures: the powerful City Council President, a majority of the members of City Council, the mayor, and leading business groups.
This campaign, along with preliminary data on Project H.O.M.E.’s organizational history, suggested to me that, as it has matured, Project H.O.M.E. has been able to maintain some independence from the dominant institutions which support it. The organization appeared to embody a challenge to traditional models for understanding institutionalized social movement organizations (Michels 1962; Piven and Cloward 1977; Rucht 1999), as well as those studies of nonprofit organizations that suggest that public sector funding has the potential to weaken third sector advocacy (Wolch 1990; Smith and Lipsky 1993).
Giugni and Passy’s (1998, p. 86) observations of social movements in Western Europe lead them to argue that some modern social movements do not follow the traditional path of institutionalization, whereby movements become incorporated “into institutional structures and procedures.” They argue that some movements maintain their identities even after establishing collaborative relationships with the state; rather then being subsumed by the state, they develop relationships of “conflictual cooperation” (a term they borrow from Adalbert Evers). Giugni and Passy (1998, pp. 81–82) draw on a theory that the changing nature of the state, its growing “reflexivity,” helps create a space for movements in modern society. The study offers a number of illuminating hypotheses regarding the nature of modern social movements, including the proposition that social movements’ access to knowledge about recognized social issues helps them maintain their agency (Giugni and Passy 1998, p. 89).
I joined Project H.O.M.E. as an ethnographer in May 2002 and conducted historical research into Philadelphia homeless politics for the purpose of exploring how Project H.O.M.E., as a contracted, professionalized and institutionalized organization, performs in the political arena. My goal was to examine whether and why Project H.O.M.E. can be viewed as an independent actor that is still capable of posing challenges to authorities as it works to advance the interests of homeless people.
In this paper I take an issue-focused approach to explore these questions. I describe how Project H.O.M.E. responded in 2002 to a push by downtown business groups for more stringent public conduct legislation to resolve their complaints of an unruly street population. This issue was not new: conflict has periodically emerged between advocacy organizations and local authorities over the street population since the late 1980s. These local tensions mirror those in cities across the country where plans to redevelop downtown commercial areas as “pleasure spaces” for the well-to-do (Wright 1997) often include policies that make urban centers inhospitable for the poor and homeless (Davis 1990; Zukin 1991; Wolch and Dear 1993; Stoner 1995; National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty 2002). These policies are consistent with theoretical models of urban politics that suggest that officials are attuned to downtown pro-growth interests (Logan and Molotch 1987).
My ethnographic data shows that Project H.O.M.E. aimed to act as a disruptive force in 2002 and helped to derail the plans of those groups and authorities whose goals were not congruent with their vision of good policy for homeless people. Applying insights from Goffman (1959) and Tilly (1999), I will show that much of Project H.O.M.E.’s advocacy work in the institutional political arena occurred at the symbolic level. Project H.O.M.E. focused on shaping atmospheres, setting tones and comfort levels, and choosing appropriate partners to help them send subtle but challenging messages to authorities and other important parties.
I also draw on historical data to highlight the resources and networks that Project H.O.M.E. has gained as it has become an institutionalized figure in the city, particularly those it has gained through government contracts and grants. Institutionalization has given Project H.O.M.E. the capacity to shape the context of its interactions with authorities in the institutional political arena. I show that Project H.O.M.E.’s capacity as an advocate has been strongly, if indirectly, supported by the local and federal government.
In addition, historical data helps me highlight the important role that a third party, the downtown business community, plays in defining Project H.O.M.E.’s advocacy identity. The business community has repeatedly generated conflict over homelessness. Consequently, they have also repeatedly created opportunities for Philadelphia service providers to publicly demonstrate their continuing loyalties to homeless people.
**** Methods
I draw on data collected for a larger historical case study of Philadelphia homeless politics and a comparative ethnography of two homeless service provider and advocacy organizations, Project H.O.M.E. and the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness. The larger study entailed analysis of local newspaper coverage of homelessness from 1981 to 2003, analysis of the organizations’ advocacy related files, and analysis of a number of primary and secondary data sources. Additionally, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 11 individuals working in other social service organizations in the city, four key informants in the city administration, and one member of the media. The ethnographic portion of the larger study was conducted from May 2002 to September 2003. Fieldnotes and interviews were coded using the grounded theory method of qualitative data analysis (Strauss and Corbin 1990) and with the aid of the qualitative data analysis software program N-VIVO.
My focus on Project H.O.M.E.’s work as a political insider meant that I investigated “ordinary” settings that are not often studied by political sociologists (Lichterman 2005, p. 1). I observed Project H.O.M.E. staff as they participated on taskforces, made phone calls to members of the community, and casually conversed with city officials. Meaningful advocacy occurs in these everyday interactions, suggesting that the patient eyes of the ethnographer are needed for a full understanding of the work of institutionalized movement actors.
**** On States and Social Movements: Conflictual Cooperation
As devolution and privatization have reshaped the third sector, nonprofit scholars have asked whether contracted nonprofit organizations can remain steadfast in their advocacy missions to represent their client groups (Salamon 1987; Smith 2001). Among those offering a critical perspective, Wolch (1990, p. 3) warns that the third sector may become little more than a “shadow state,” a system of organizations under state control but in the guise of the private sector. Smith and Lipsky (1993) suggest that the quality of a nonprofit’s advocacy work is degraded by its ties to the government and its dependence on public funding. They note that while many contracted nonprofits continue to be politically active, their advocacy work often appears to be narrowly focused on ensuring that their funding streams are protected (Smith and Lipsky 1993).
Social movement scholars have also investigated the effect of external resource dependency on social movement organizations. Brulle (2000, pp. 257–264) concludes that dependence on external funding requires the moderation of a movement organization’s political goals and strategies, and eventually leads to co-optation and ineffectiveness. Professional reform organizations are considered to be especially vulnerable to co-optation by the more powerful institutions and groups upon which they depend (Helfgot 1981).
On the other hand, Chaves et al. (2004, p. 295) provide evidence that government funding could promote certain types of political activity by nonprofit organizations. However, as they admit that they do “not know the content of the political activity” they measured, Chaves et al. (2004) cannot respond to Lipsky and Smith’s findings that contracted organizations are often politically active for “self-interested” reasons (Chaves et al., 2004, p. 312). Studies of the effect of government ties to nonprofits have also had other methodological weaknesses; for example, Handler (1996, p. 106) notes that they often rely on “self-reporting” by the organizations themselves.
Social movement theory has been heavily influenced by Michels’s (1962) conclusion that an “iron law of oligarchy” rules organizational development whereby organizations become less democratic, less representative of the interests of their members, and less oppositional as they mature. The dominant view is that social movements will become more moderate in their choice of tactics and goals as they institutionalize (Tarrow 1994, p. 171). Pruijt (2003, p. 134) writes: “Institutionalization means that a movement is channeled into a stable pattern based on formalized rules and laws... The institutionalization of a movement means that it loses its identity (Castells 1983, p. 328). [and] conventional methods take the place of disruption (Kriesi et al., 1995).” Rucht (1999) provides support for Michels’s theory. Noting, however, that “informal groups can be moderate in their tactics and formal groups can tend toward radical action,” Rucht (1999, p. 166) also concludes that there is “no such thing as an ‘iron law’ at work.” Piven and Cloward (1977) analyze poor people’s movements and support the dominant frame, concluding that poor people only make gains by acting as disruptive outsiders who eschew formal organization.
Della Porta and Diani (1999, p. 147) note that many scholars have challenged the Michels (1962) based model of organizational and movement evolution. Among them are Zald and Garner (1987, p. 138) who argue that scholars who view institutionalization as the “death” of a movement are likely to be “left-leaning scholars” who have been personally disappointed by certain movements and have assumed that there is a “necessary association ... between growing institutionalization and bureaucratization and conservatism.”
Katzenstein (1998, p. 164) argues that feminists working within existing institutions, for example the Catholic Church and the US military, have produced important changes and “have kept feminism alive” with their insistent claims-making. While the women studied are “far from lawless, rarely use civil disobedience, and never resort to violence,” Katzenstein (1998, p. 7) argues that the purpose of their demand-making within institutional walls is to be “disruptive.” Tarrow (1998a, p. 32) suggests that to study movement effects, more studies are needed that focus on “the slower, less dramatic processes of policy elaboration, negotiation, and implementation.”
In Philadelphia, the periodic conflict over the street population that emerges between homeless service providers and political authorities parallels Giugni and Passy’s (1998) observations of social movements in Western Europe. Giugni and Passy (1998) theorize that some social movements, even after establishing collaborative relationships with the state, maintain their identities and enter into relationships of “conflictual cooperation” with the state. To explain the circumstances that allow for these new relationships, Giugni and Passy (1998, p. 81) draw on the work of theorists who argue that the state “has lost its hegemony over the pilotage of society and is now engaged in a process of coregulation (Wilke 1991).” The state is posited as being “self-reflexive,” cognizant of its own limitations and willing to seek out those groups, like social movement organizations, interested in “coregulating” society to manage mutually recognized problems (Giugni and Passy 1998, pp. 81–82). The ability for movements to exchange their knowledge with the state allows them to maintain their agency, to use an “ambivalent strategy made of a combination of conflict and cooperation” as they interact with and make demands on the state (Giugni and Passy 1998, pp. 84–85). Their expert knowledge about certain societal issues enables these social movements to gain a “space for action” (Giugni and Passy 1998, p. 89).
**** Project H.O.M.E.
Recognizing the persistent efforts by Philadelphia homeless service providers to maintain inter-organizational links for the purpose of building political strength is the first step in understanding Project H.O.M.E.’s role in the local political arena. In the early to mid-1980s, another organization, the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness, served as a lead agency by organizing the Advocacy Committee for Emergency Services (ACES), a coalition of service providers.[64] Members of ACES combined legislative advocacy at the state level with persistent local level advocacy aimed at improving the burgeoning shelter and services system. Since the early 1990s, Project H.O.M.E. has led these efforts by routinely developing collective projects for local groups, which range from lobbying campaigns at the state capital to voter registration campaigns at city shelters.
In addition to these provider-initiated efforts, the public sector has played an important role in developing provider networks. Devolution has meant that the federal government has celebrated the potential for localities to provide well-planned and coordinated homeless service provision programs. Under the Clinton administration, for instance, Philadelphia was one of six cities nationwide to receive a federal grant of US$8 million to, among other things, support its “innovative planning and networking of homeless providers and institutions” (Rosenberg 1994). In the mid-1990s the federal government also encouraged localities to submit one coordinated funding application. Philadelphia adapted to the new procedures, which require a demonstration of a collaborative public-private planning process. The Clinton administration also promoted the “continuum of care” model for addressing homeless people’s needs. As the model envisions a homeless person traversing a series of programs to receive specific types of assistance, it too amounts to a push from the federal government for coordination and strong networks among providers.
Since 1988, the city of Philadelphia has also supported provider networks by funding the Outreach Coordination Center (OCC). This program aims to coordinate the work of outreach staff stationed at homeless service providing organizations throughout the city in order to ensure systematic and thorough coverage of the downtown streets. The program promotes inter-organizational networks as it requires daily communication among staff at participating organizations. In addition, the OCC holds regular meetings that attract not only the outreach staff from participating organizations, but also staff from organizations which do not regularly coordinate their work with the OCC.
Project H.O.M.E. holds the contract to run the OCC, which partially explains the leading position Project H.O.M.E. has in the city. This contract essentially provides Project H.O.M.E. with public dollars to maintain networks with fellow service providers. Running the center also requires routine communication with city officials and city shelter workers, giving Project H.O.M.E. regular access to and experience in relating to the city. This access means that Project H.O.M.E. staff are often among the first to receive information about the city’s plans for the system, which they then relay to fellow providers.
*** The Politics of Public Space
While in the early 1980s homeless activists and advocates had helped develop a positive discourse about homeless people in Philadelphia, by the late 1980s the conditions and the atmosphere in the city had changed. A severe budget crisis prompted calls to slash funding for homeless services (Loeb 1988; Philadelphia Inquirer 1988). Publicly speculating about the dysfunctional characteristics of homeless people also became newly legitimate. A harsher discourse emerged as voices in the media and business community argued that the presence of the street population was problematic for the downtown economy and thus for the city in general (Philadelphia Inquirer 1989a, 1989b, 1989c).
The political effect of this new tone was seen in 1989 when two City Councilmen proposed a bill prohibiting “aggressive begging” in public places. Then, in 1990, reports emerged that the mayor had promised downtown business groups to adopt a “get tough” policy against the street population (Daughen 1990). Soon after, the local media reported a violent confrontation between police and a mentally ill homeless man on the streets. This news, combined with reports of other cases of harassment, prompted local advocates to take action. Project H.O.M.E. and its allies organized a protest and a “vent sit-in,” and threatened the city with legal action. The city’s response was prompt: the mayor quickly backpedaled on his promises to the downtown business community (Daughen 1990).
Still, the issue did not disappear. In 1993, there was a little-noted attempt by a City Councilwoman to pass legislation against sitting on the streets. In 1996, two City Councilmen proposed a bill that would place new restrictions on a range of behaviors, from sitting on the streets to aggressive panhandling. This too stirred Project H.O.M.E. to action. They rallied supporters to loudly demonstrate their disapproval at a hearing for the legislation. The bill eventually died.
In 1997, tensions rose again when reports that homeless people were being harassed by the police began to stream into Project H.O.M.E. through their various contacts. Project H.O.M.E. began to systematically gather, record and organize the stories, eventually assembling them into a formidable report they used to challenge the city and demand changes. Then, in 1998, City Council President John Street presented a bill that proposed restrictions on a range of behaviors in the downtown area. The bill was strongly supported by leading members of the downtown business community. The advocates saw the bill’s potential to make the streets even more dangerous for the homeless, and thus organized to defeat the bill. With their established links to fellow providers working as a strong foundation, Project H.O.M.E. helped lead a campaign that attracted a range of supporters, including those representing the religious community, civil libertarians, and radical anti-poverty groups. Meanwhile, Project H.O.M.E. continued to collect data on harassment, which served to fire up the emotions of Project H.O.M.E. staff and their allies against the bill. The data also allowed the advocates to take legal action: both Project H.O.M.E., in 1998, and the ACLU, in 1999, sued the city for violating homeless individuals’ rights. Both cases resulted in compensation for the homeless individuals named in the lawsuits.
The challenges they leveled in 1998 and 1999 highlight how, by managing the city-funded OCC, Project H.O.M.E. is positioned to be an advocacy leader on matters related to the street population. Due to the centralized position within provider networks that the OCC affords them, Project H.O.M.E. has “eyes and ears” spread throughout the city. Various teams of outreach workers constantly observe and relay to Project H.O.M.E. information about the issues homeless people are facing on the streets and in the shelters. This feedback creates opportunities for Project H.O.M.E. to make claims on behalf of homeless people. The brief political history recounted above also highlights how frequently homeless advocacy networks and identities have been reignited over matters related to the street population. The repeated problematization of the street population creates opportunities for homeless service providers to assert their advocacy identities and take action on behalf of homeless people.
*** Making Gains and Relationships
Although the advocates were unable to prevent the passage of the Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance in 1998, through their mix of outsider and insider tactics, they won concessions from the city, including millions in new funds for homeless programs. They also gained the opportunity to reshape the bill by inserting a requirement that the police call outreach workers when they intend to enforce the Ordinance. Today, the Philadelphia Code mandates that officers offer oral and written warnings to individuals who appear to be violating the sections on public conduct, and attempt to discern whether the individuals require social service assistance. Then the officer must:
contact an Outreach Team, who shall come to the officer’s location, evaluate the person’s needs, and together with the officer take all reasonable steps toward directing the person to the appropriate service provider, including but not limited to offering transportation to such provider.
By reforming the bill in this way, the providers created a new relationship of dependency between the police and the outreach worker and placed limits on police action.
Project H.O.M.E. also used the passage of the bill as an opportunity to cement relationships with the bill’s influential supporters. Once the bill was passed, Project H.O.M.E. asserted that there should be a “monitoring” taskforce to oversee its nondiscriminatory implementation and to ensure that the funds promised by the city materialized. Project H.O.M.E. sought out individuals with “influence,” including those in the business community, to participate on the taskforce. The taskforce became a site for regularly bringing together a range of downtown residents’ and business groups, service providers, advocates and city officials.
The development of the taskforce reflects an established part of the Philadelphia providers’ collaborative “repertoire” (Tarrow 1998; Giugni and Passy 1998, p. 106). The providers have long capitalized on the business community’s concerns about the city’s image to build relationships with them. In 1990, for example, soon after the Mayor was forced to renege on his promises to the business community, Project H.O.M.E. approached members of the business community and encouraged them to view their desire to change the appearance of the downtown streets as similar to the advocates’ and providers’ hopes to end homelessness.[65] They also presented the argument that the services system is more effective than the criminal justice system for addressing the street population. The business leaders responded to these overtures, first agreeing to meet with Project H.O.M.E. and, soon after, agreeing to lobby state legislators for homeless and housing related funds. By opening up lines of communication, the providers opened the door for other opportunities to connect with the business community. Since the 1990s, for example, members of the business community have initiated projects, such as poster campaigns about panhandling, for which they often seek the advice of the providers.
**** An Issue Re-Emerges
My field research at Project H.O.M.E. began at an opportune moment in the spring of 2002. Within days of my arrival, a local newspaper, Philadelphia Daily News, splashed its front page with a photo of individuals panhandling in the downtown area, captioned by the words “Bum’s the Word.” One of the several related articles within the paper was headlined: “Pushy Panhandlers Proliferating: Aggressive Beggars Threaten Economic Vitality of Center City” (Hinkelman 2002). Soon after, on May 15, Radio Times, a local public radio program, also devoted an hour’s programming to the topic of panhandling in the downtown business district, with one commentator declaring that “panhandling has gotten worse ... there are more panhandlers and they are more aggressive.” The media reports were the visible signs of the downtown business community’s newest push for an official response to their complaints regarding the street population.
When downtown panhandling was last a political issue, the result was the City Council’s passage of the Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance. Given this fact, I expected Project H.O.M.E. staff to express concern about the media coverage. However, contrary to my expectations, as they perused the newspapers or listened to the radio, staff registered little alarm and appeared to be thoughtfully considering all of the arguments being made. In fact, one staff member was apparently so untroubled that he wrote a letter to the editor of a local paper and expressed appreciation that the paper was encouraging dialogue about the issue.
I was curious about the fact that, far from reacting defensively, Project H.O.M.E. staff at first appeared to be attaching no explicitly negative meaning to the emerging debate. In fact, in conversation with me, staff made distinctions between subgroups of the street population, suggesting that homeless people are not necessarily panhandlers and that panhandlers should be considered different from homeless people. The comments suggested to me at the time that staff were unable to fully identify with those on the streets. This assessment seemed valid when one staff member noted that panhandlers “are not our jurisdiction.we go out when we get a complaint and sometimes find out that they don’t want or need our services. So there’s not much we can do” (Fieldnotes, 15 May 2002). It seemed that staff were untroubled because they perceived the anti-panhandler sentiments as not necessarily directed at their own narrowly defined client group, homeless people. It appeared that staff member’s professionalism and their organizational identities were determining how they perceived their political environment.
Shortly after the emergence of the media reports, I learned that two City Councilmen, James Kenney and Frank DeCicco, had decided to propose legislation amending the Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance to make it more punitive. Project H.O.M.E. staff continued to project an air of being untroubled. Scholars have argued that a movement organization’s professionalization, bureaucratization and institutionalization are associated with the loss of its movement identity and with growing ineffectiveness (Piven and Cloward 1977; Meyer and Tarrow 1998; Pruijt 2003). My familiarity with these theories led me to consider the possibility that Project H.O.M.E. staff would not or could no longer generate the “fire” needed to mount a challenge to the renewed push for public conduct legislation.
*** Project H.O.M.E.: “Confidence and ‘Inaction’ ”
It soon became clear that investigating the networks in which Project H.O.M.E. was embedded would illuminate some of the factors explaining the staff members’ reactions. For instance, I later discovered that Project H.O.M.E. had first learned of the business community’s rising frustrations not through the media, but through informal networks which they maintained with downtown groups. In fact, a few months earlier, Project H.O.M.E. had assisted a business group in gathering information about panhandling and legislation. Moreover, a few weeks prior to my arrival at the organization, Project H.O.M.E. had participated in a forum organized by the downtown business groups to discuss and air their grievances about panhandlers. I also learned that Project H.O.M.E. had received early warning of the bill: Councilman Kenney had personally contacted leaders at Project H.O.M.E. to offer notice of his intention to present the bill.
Project H.O.M.E.’s networks were not only delivering advance information, they were also serving to reassure staff of their respected position in the community. By calling Project H.O.M.E.’s leaders directly, Councilman Kenney signaled his view that they deserved to be “in the know.” A conversation that occurred during a chance meeting between a Project H.O.M.E. staff person and an aide to Councilman Kenney further underscored these dynamics. During this exchange (which was described to me by the Project H.O.M.E. staff person), the aide offered several justifications for Kenney’s decision to co-sponsor the bill. First, he explained that Kenney had been energetically pursued by the business community and that he had felt compelled to act on their behalf. In addition, the aide intimated that Kenney was trying to make a political point against his rival, John Street (the former City Council President and current mayor); he wished to demonstrate how the Street-sponsored Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance had failed. Both comments painted Kenney as a man motivated by several factors, and none of them included antagonism towards the street population. By offering these justifications, the aide implicitly acknowledged Project H.O.M.E. staff as advocates who were likely to be offended by displays of hostility towards the street population. Furthermore, the aide made several efforts to signal, according to Project H.O.M.E. staff, his desire to remain their “friend” (Sofia, interview, 20 June 2002). The aide inquired about staff members’ feelings on the topics being discussed and asked to meet with them at a future date to discuss the issue at greater length. Project H.O.M.E. staff agreed to the request.
After the bill was presented in City Council, Project H.O.M.E. took no firm public stance against the bill, even though the bill included the following harsh provisions: violations of rules against behaviors such as sitting on the streets would be subject to a penalty of not more than 30 days of imprisonment and a fine of up to one hundred dollars; and violations of the rule against aggressive solicitation would be subject to a penalty of not more than 30 days of imprisonment and a fine of up to three hundred dollars.[66]
As an outsider, I might have assumed that Project H.O.M.E.’s multiple and intersecting relationships were having a co-optive effect on Project H.O.M.E. staff, slowing or extinguishing the drive to object to both the negative public discourse being generated about the street population and the bill itself. However, as an ethnographer, I learned of two additional comments made by the City Councilman’s aide in conversation with Project H.O.M.E. staff, comments which made contentious action against the bill seem unnecessary, at least for the present time. First, the aide offered his personal prediction that the Councilmen’s bill was unlikely to generate sufficient support, that “nobody is going to vote for it.” Second, the aide revealed that Kenney had purposely proposed the bill in the last session before the City Council’s summer recess because he expected that by the fall hearing “everyone will have forgotten about it” (Sofia, interview, 20 June 2002). In this way he implied that while the Councilman appeared to be acting on the business community’s behalf, his sponsoring of the bill was simply a gesture made for political purposes.
*** Favorable Sites for the Institutionalized Advocates
Soon after the bill was presented in City Council, I gained the ability to observe numerous interactions between Project H.O.M.E. staff, city authorities and members of the business community. The bill was taken up for discussion by the Mayor’s Task Force on Homeless Services. This was the new name given to the monitoring taskforce which Project H.O.M.E. had helped form in 1998. In 2002 it was continuing to serve as a site for providers and advocates to meet with city officials and members of the downtown community to discuss matters related to homeless people and the homeless services system. I gained access to meetings of the Task Force through Project H.O.M.E.
At the first meeting I attended there were early clues that the Task Force was a comfortable and favorable site for Project H.O.M.E. Councilman Kenney’s aide had been scheduled to explain why Kenney was co-sponsoring the bill to amend the Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance. The mood was relaxed as people settled into the spacious, air-conditioned meeting room which had been provided by the Chambers of Commerce, whose offices were located in a luxury hotel and office building in downtown Philadelphia. However, Councilman Kenney’s aide seemed uncomfortable when he rose to speak to the group and began by acknowledging that his presentation would not be viewed as “friendly” to many in the room. He explained that Kenney’s sponsorship of the bill was a response to the many communications Kenney had received from the business community regarding the large number of aggressive panhandlers in the downtown area. He concluded by emphasizing his eagerness to discuss the issue further with interested parties.
Since I was unfamiliar with the dynamics of the taskforce at the time, I was surprised when one of the first people to express a negative view of the proposed bill was a business group representative. This individual pointed out that the city’s Community Court, which had been developed for the purpose of dealing with downtown “quality of life” offenses, had just opened its doors. She argued that the bill was premature and that it was a step towards “a Draconian point of view.” A representative from a downtown residents’ association continued this line of argument. She agreed that it was a “Draconian” bill and that it was harmful because “it sets up a ‘we-they’ scenario.” She suggested that before pressing for new legislation, Kenney would do better to present evidence of a real problem; she said that if people were not really breaking the law, the Councilman was doing nothing more than “stirring the pot,” which would accomplish nothing. The comments challenged me to reflexively consider my assumptions about how the downtown groups would work to protect what I had perceived as their “interests.”
Since several Task Force members did express support for the bill and no consensus was reached, members resolved to form a subcommittee that would meet over the course of the summer to examine the problem of aggressive panhandling. I gained access to these meetings as well. Again, I was struck by the positive dynamics I observed, particularly the subcommittee members’ apparent openness to each others’ views. For instance, though Project H.O.M.E. staff members would express their fear that new legislation might create a dangerous environment on the streets for the mentally ill homeless, staff would also indicate their willingness to consider the matter further in light of other people’s concerns. Project H.O.M.E. staff also expressed faith in the others around the table, faith in their willingness to adjust their views on the issues Project H.O.M.E. felt were important. One staff member explained: “I think [the aide] really just wants to learn. He admitted to us that he doesn’t know much about this stuff and is willing to learn” (Sofia, interview, 27 June 2002).
I also observed downtown representatives, seemingly unconcerned with “breaking rank,” questioning the comments or positions of other downtown representatives. In fact, on one day, I mistook a residents’ group representative (who also managed two buildings downtown) for a homeless advocate because he had criticized a poster about panhandlers that had been developed by a business group. When I asked Project H.O.M.E. staff about the individual, they thought my mistake was understandable given the points he had made. I learned that he was a much appreciated participant at these and other meetings. One staff person explained, “Yes, that’s why I like him. I genuinely like him, really. He’s very practical.” Staff noted that the man’s attitude obliged Project H.O.M.E. staff to behave similarly:
Since he’s not the type to just say, ‘No, you’re all wrong. I don’t even want to hear what you have to say,’ I feel like I can’t say that either.” (Jeffrey, interview, 14 August 2002).
The incident and the staff member’s comments spoke to me of a shared commitment to dialogue at the negotiating table, leading me to consider the possibility that I was observing a type of “issue network.” Heclo’s (1978, pp. 100–102) vision of issue networks are groups of individuals who focus on the task of applying their knowledge to a complex policy issue rather than on protecting their interests.
However, I eventually concluded that it was not accurate to view the taskforce and subcommittee meetings as sites for disinterested discussions and objectively-approached efforts to problem-solve; rather, the taskforce and subcommittee meetings served as stages for Project H.O.M.E. to engage in goal-oriented advocacy. This advocacy work had performative and symbolic elements to it. For instance, during the course of the summer, I saw Project H.O.M.E. work diligently to create the atmosphere of open dialogue that had so impressed me. Project H.O.M.E. staff purposefully shaped the atmosphere in this way because it allowed them to deliver key messages to fellow members of the taskforce: about the worthy mentally ill who deserved careful treatment; about themselves as committed policy partners who deserved similar commitment from fellow members; about the professionalism, expertise and trustworthiness of the individuals in the homeless services system; and finally about the unified advocacy community in Philadelphia. Ultimately, with these messages, Project H.O.M.E. aimed to be disruptive. This became clear one day in mid-summer when lower level staff revealed that they had received directives from above that, “it’s your job to make sure the bill doesn’t go forward” (Jeffrey, interview, 25 July 2002).
*** Setting the Stage
Project H.O.M.E.’s past role in developing the Task Force, its management of the OCC, and its leading position in the provider community, not only assured the organization a place on the panhandling subcommittee, but also gave staff some say over who would join the subcommittee. This meant Project H.O.M.E. could influence the interactions between themselves and other subcommittee members in ways that suited them.
While many groups representing downtown interests volunteered to participate and so automatically joined the panhandling subcommittee, Project H.O.M.E. was in the position to invite allies in the provider community to balance the number of downtown groups. However, Project H.O.M.E. decided against doing so. Below, I will discuss in more detail how the composition of this sub-committee provided Project H.O.M.E. with a strategic network position. However, at the time, I was confused by their actions, as it seemed that Project HOME staff were stacking the committee against themselves. Thus, I asked staff about their reasoning. Staff responded by declaring that the business and residents association representatives were practical people and could be trusted to aim for objectivity. Staff also explained that they desired this uneven ratio for they felt they had more to gain from hearing other views on this issue than in arguing their case. In addition, a staff member explained, “It helps us when they know we’re trying” (Jeffrey, interview, 19 July 2002). The last comment revealed that staff aimed to use the structure of the subcommittee meetings to symbolically demonstrate to the business community that they were putting aside their role as partisan advocates and were committed to listening to others. In addition, they were doing this to instill a sense of obligation in fellow subcommittee members to do the same.
For similar reasons, Project H.O.M.E. staff sought the participation of a certain police inspector whom they felt “would bring a lot of social capital with him.” Staff felt that the “business people [would] feel like their problem is sort of being addressed because of his presence” (Jeffrey, interview, 12 July 2002). These efforts too were aimed at making the subcommittee members feel comfortable in the knowledge that the subcommittee was a site for open dialogue where serious attention would be paid to their views. Project H.O.M.E.’s effort to get a few members of the police force to participate is all the more meaningful when one considers the views that staff knew some of the officers held. One sergeant, for instance, objected to the current form of the Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance because he felt the requirement that the police call outreach workers stymied the police. (The sergeant was known among Project H.O.M.E. staff for his frequent comment of frustration, “We’re the only city in the world where the officer has to call a civilian to enforce the law!”) The overall benefits of police involvement on the committee, however, appeared to outweigh the negatives for Project H.O.M.E. staff. A staff person explained that the inspector’s presence was
Going to be good in terms of building unity around this and trying to persuade different people that we can work on an agenda that’s separate from criminalization but still... addresses the needs of the business community. (Jeffrey, interview, 12 July 2002).
Other individuals also helped Project H.O.M.E. deliver symbolic messages. Though not in favor of having too many “client-group” representatives at the table, Project H.O.M.E. did welcome the participation of an old friend and ally from the city agency, the Coordinating Office of Drug and Alcohol Programs (CODAAP). Staff particularly appreciated when this individual agreed to co-chair the subcommittee (along with a business group representative), for it meant that Project H.O.M.E. staff would not have to assume the role. Staff did not want prominent positions on the subcommittee for they believed this would imply that panhandling was a homeless-related problem, and staff wanted to “keep the issues of homelessness and the issues of panhandling very separate in [people’s] minds” (Sofia, interview, 20 June 2002). In one conversation, a Project H.O.M.E. staff member further explained that much depended on “how we decide to play it and we’ve decided that this is a panhandling issue and it’s not really a homelessness issue and so the CODAAP people . are going to deal with it a lot more than we are” (Sofia, interview, 20 June 2002). Despite the presentation of being only secondarily involved, Project H.O.M.E. staff did much with regard to organizing the meetings and managing the data that members generated over the summer.
The CODAAP representative was additionally helpful because he could “team” with Project H.O.M.E. staff (Goffman 1959). At one meeting the CODAAP representative brought data to the table that supported Project H.O.M.E.’s point that poorly conceived or overly simplistic legislative approaches would have a ruinous effect on Philadelphia’s reputation as a progressive city. “Team” dynamics were also apparent after some subcommittee members proposed a census of downtown panhandlers and expressed the view that it was important to discover the panhandling “hotspots.” Both Project H.O.M.E. and CODAAP responded positively to the idea and agreed to assist. The CODAAP representative enthused that the census would make their discussions “data-driven” and this data would provide a “baseline” of knowledge that would help future efforts to understand the issue. Despite these gestures, Project H.O.M.E. staff did not spend much time fashioning precise counting methods for their tours downtown and seemed little concerned with the quality of their resulting statistics.
The CODAAP representative presented himself as an individual who was friendly but also professional, practical, and interested in the facts. This self-presentation was helpful on one occasion when a business representative attempted to shift the discussion away from the strictures of defining what “aggressive” meant (and how it could be legislated against) and towards a discussion of how to address all types of panhandling, even non-aggressive forms. At this point, the CODAAP representative helped keep the conversation within certain boundaries by reminding the group of the substance of the original complaints — namely that “aggressive panhandling” was on the rise.
Ultimately it was the CODAAP representative’s professional persona that made his presence so valuable. It was important to present the services system as one composed of professionals with expertise as it buoyed the providers’ argument that the system was the most effective means of handling the street population. Moreover, presenting expertise was important for building the others’ trust in Project H.O.M.E., which added to their influence. Project H.O.M.E. staff were clearly invested in the display of expertise as a vehicle for persuading others; this was evident in a Project H.O.M.E. staff member’s comments that they needed to offer “rational” information, “that is not just based on, ‘Okay, we are advocates, so we don’t agree with it,’ ... that is based on, ‘These are the possible constitutional challenges you might face. This is why this would be illegal . other cities have tried that and it never worked’ ” (Jeffrey, interview, 12 July 2002). These ethnographic observations regarding the strategic self-presentation of professionalism complicate theoretical models regarding the dampening effects of professionalization. Future efforts to study professionalized social movement organizations should recognize the potential differences between the work performed by an organization because it is professionalized and the work it performs for appearance purposes.
*** Staging Performances
Consistently, when Project H.O.M.E. staff presented their views on the bill, they also emphasized their pragmatism, as is evident in these statements to the subcommittee:
We recognize your interests. We know we can’t advocate for the homeless and ignore the community. Our problem is with a blanket law that will go after someone who is sitting on the sidewalk, someone who might be mentally ill, who might resist arrest. (Fieldnotes, 14 August 2002).
However, examining the staff members’ words at the table does not wholly reveal the way that Project H.O.M.E. was shaping the political dynamics that summer. Staff were also staging their performances by directing the behaviors of others around them (Goffman 1959, p. 82).
On at least one occasion, Project H.O.M.E. staff arranged for a business group representative to present information that staff had in fact collected. Other members of the subcommittee were unaware that Project H.O.M.E. had provided the data. The staff member explained,
I sort of — I’ve been the driving force behind it but I don’t like when we were having a presentation — I never give the presentation on panhandling. I had Jane do it.[67] When we get together with people ... I never lay credit to having done any [of that]. So it’s like, I’m just there because I happen to be there. (Jeffrey, interview, 12 July 2002).
By working in this indirect manner, Project H.O.M.E. staff could ply the subcommittee members with ideas, continue to perform as non-partisan policy partners, and ensure that the business community remained receptive to their views. In addition, the Project H.O.M.E. staff member believed there were long-term benefits to this strategy. Namely, he believed that when other individuals supply data to colleagues or fellow meeting participants, the data will shape their discussions even when a Project H.O.M.E. staff member is not present.
Strategies such as these reflected the experience Project H.O.M.E. staff had in managing their environment and their position within the homeless service system. More specifically, they reflected the skills developed by an individual whose job involved conducting outreach to the downtown community. The development of this individual’s position had been part of the package of concessions the advocates won when the Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance passed in 1998. At that time, the advocates had sought for ways to make the public, especially the downtown community, aware that, in lieu of calling the police, they could contact outreach workers to attend to individuals on the street. Thus a position was designed that essentially entailed doing public relations, spreading information about the services available in the homeless shelter and services system. Though funded by the city, Project H.O.M.E. staffed this position. Thus, Project H.O.M.E. reaped the benefits of this individual’s skills development.
The ability to work “with and through other people” (Pfeffer 1992, p. 17) was one skill the individual had developed by working in community group settings. The staff member once explained, “I generally have other people do that [provide data to the group] so that it reduces the attention, because then — as opposed to the attention being on me — I can still work all the people across the board” (Jeffrey, interview, 12 July 2002). The staff member had learned that by cultivating an ally in a group, one could deliver information and influence other members of the group through that ally. This skill had also been developed through Project H.O.M.E.’s work on the Mayor’s Task Force on Homeless Services. Project H.O.M.E. staff frequently provided data or materials that were then used by city officials at the meetings. Project H.O.M.E. staff related that city administration officials often turned to them, asking, “Okay, what will I be saying?” This arrangement worked well for Project H.O.M.E., in the view of staff. One staff member explained, “I think it looks better if the city says these things to them rather than a nobody like me.” As shown above, these methods of presenting themselves and data were used in 2002 to influence the panhandling subcommittee discussions.
Project H.O.M.E. worked through other individuals on the subcommittee in other ways. Earlier, I described a residents’ group representative whom I had mistaken for an advocate. Though a Project H.O.M.E. staff person had declared that he “really liked” the man, I also learned that the staff person assiduously maintained communicative channels with this individual because “after talking so much with me, [he] can’t come into the meeting and say something [outrageous] like, ‘Oh, get rid of all of them!’ ” (Fieldnotes, 9 September 2002) Clearly, the individual was not treasured for the light he could bring to the topic at hand; rather, he was viewed as an individual to be subtly targeted for persuasion and managed to good effect.
*** Effective Network Management
Project H.O.M.E. remained confident the whole summer, even when it seemed that Kenney’s bill was gaining the support of other City Council members and Kenney’s aide himself seemed to be wavering with regard to how far the bill would be pushed. This confidence was on display during an interview I had with a staff member, a portion of which is provided below:
I: Do you feel worried?
R: No.
I: No? Even though it seems likely?
R: No.
I: Why not?
R: Because this isn’t going to work!
I: What? The amendment?
R: They’re not going to get this through!
I: Oh, they’re not?
R: Oh my, I can swear by my — I don’t know what! We will not — We can’t have that! You can’t have that! We can work together on having something that is constructive, that helps the city, that helps everyone. But, no way. No way. Oh jeez, are you kidding me? (Jeffrey, interview, 19 July 2002).
Project H.O.M.E. staff largely took the news of growing support for the bill within the City Council in stride, pointing out that, if necessary, allies in the city administration could help them challenge the bill. At another point, when it seemed that support for the bill was continuing to grow, lower-level staff were told by their superiors to think about how they would make the best out of the possible passage of the bill. They were told to ask themselves “if it happens, what else can we get?” just as they did when the Sidewalk Behavior Ordinance was passed. Yet, despite these preliminary in-house discussions, staff continued to express faith in the dialoguing process.
During this period, I attended a meeting between Project H.O.M.E. and other service provider organizations. Dynamics at that meeting highlight another force that helped Project H.O.M.E. that summer: its networks were advantageously arranged. Though the meeting was on matters unrelated to panhandling, Project H.O.M.E. staff provided the others with an update on the subcommittee discussions of the bill. However, they did not relay the fact that unclear political winds had prompted inhouse discussions regarding the possibility that the bill might pass; in fact, Project H.O.M.E. staff portrayed fellow subcommittee members in a positive way: as individuals who, “to their credit,” were ultimately interested in seeing that those on the streets found their way to rehabilitative services. The convenience of being able to provide an abbreviated update to their allies highlighted the benefits of not having these allies on the subcommittee. Namely, Project H.O.M.E. staff did not have to waste “time and energy” (Burt 1992, p. 20) offering justifications or seeking approval for the strategy they had chosen. At the same time, their allies’ absence allowed Project H.O.M.E. to be viewed as the provider community’s spokesperson at the subcommittee meetings, which gave Project H.O.M.E.’s words greater force. Essentially, Project H.O.M.E. was benefiting from a “structural hole,” which can be created when an individual is connected to other individuals who have no ties to each other (Burt 1992, p. 1). By not having balanced the subcommittee with many allies, Project H.O.M.E. was in the advantageous position of being able to represent the views of each side, the downtown community and provider-advocacy community, to the other.
These arrangements also meant Project H.O.M.E. could finely control the messages sent to City Council staff and to the downtown groups. That Project H.O.M.E. staff enjoyed their ability to do this became especially clear when that ability was suddenly threatened in September. At this time, one of the more “prohomeless” members of City Council decided to challenge Kenney and DeCicco by proposing her own bill. Although the Councilwoman was a longtime ally, some at Project H.O.M.E. were not pleased, feeling that the Councilwoman would “polarize us into two camps” (Fieldnotes, 17 September 2002). (According to Project H.O.M.E. staff, the CODAAP representative had similar fears). Thus when the Councilwoman expressed an interest in attending the upcoming Mayor’s Task Force meeting, though leaders at Project H.O.M.E. welcomed the prospect of the Councilwoman attending, lower-level staff hoped she would not attend, “Because the purpose of the taskforce was to bring people together and [her] politics are so clear” (Fieldnotes, 17 September 2002). Essentially, the concern was that the downtown groups would receive mixed messages from the “pro-homeless” crowd, which would compromise their strategy of emphasizing friendly dialogue. In the end, she was not present at the meeting.
It is important to note that friendly messages were not the only ones relayed that summer. On one occasion, Project H.O.M.E. staff reported that they had warned the others against pushing for legislation Project H.O.M.E. deemed unacceptable, stating,
If we see that it is going to have a negative impact on the folks we work for, we know what to do, we’ve done it successfully in the past and we’ll do it. We’ll protest the laws and we’ll try to get our allies to stop it from passing” (Jeffrey, interview, 19 July 2002).
Such comments also sent a clear message that a unified network of allies stood behind Project H.O.M.E.
*** Institutionalized Authority and its Reproduction
Offsetting the news that support for the bill was growing were numerous indications that events were developing in Project H.O.M.E.’s favor. A comment made at the final subcommittee meeting by the business group representative who co-chaired the subcommittee was one of those indications. He remarked wryly that “this should have been called the mentally ill committee,” referring to Project H.O.M.E.’s insistence throughout the summer that the taskforce members keep the well-being of the homeless mentally ill uppermost in their minds. He also later commented, “I’ve learned a lot about how complex it is...I don’t know whether we can do something about it.” The co-chair appeared to be conceding that the business groups were not qualified for policymaking on matters that might affect the homeless mentally ill. At a meeting of the larger Task Force, this individual also declared that “it was a given” that the business groups did not want to criminalize homelessness. Homeless advocates have long described public conduct legislation as attempts to criminalize homelessness; the co-chair’s comments thus reflect the way advocacy-derived frames were steering the summer-long discussions.
There were also repeated demonstrations that the subcommittee members recognized Project H.O.M.E. as an advocate and an authority on the matters at hand. Most revealing was that Councilman Kenney’s aide repeatedly edited the proposed bill in an attempt to allay Project H.O.M.E.’s fears. A new version was brought to each of the three subcommittee meetings. The significance of these revisions became especially clear at one meeting. When the aide offered to draft the bill once again to make it more acceptable to Project H.O.M.E, a representative of a resident’s association asked, “But isn’t it better for you to know what Project H.O.M.E. wants [before you rewrite the bill] so as not to waste time?” When the aide responded, “Yes,” Project H.O.M.E.’s position of influence was clear. I later learned that Project H.O.M.E. staff also interpreted the revisions as implicit acknowledgments of their authority. When I asked why the aide was repeatedly revising the bill, a staff member replied that it was because Project H.O.M.E. was viewed as a “force to be reckoned with” (Jeffrey, interview, 4 September 2002).
Finally, the last subcommittee meeting also revealed that the institutionalization of the homeless service system was another force influencing subcommittee members. At this meeting Kenney’s aide presented another version of the bill. It called for increased penalties for aggressive panhandling, but kept in place the requirement in the law that mandated that the police call outreach workers. When presenting the new draft, the aide admitted that it was Councilman Kenney’s belief that the law was not enforceable “because of the Outreach requirement.” Nevertheless, he explained, the Councilman was “not against the Outreach requirement.”
The aide was essentially acknowledging that the bill was unlikely to change the conditions on the streets, yet only one person objected to the newest version of the bill. The police sergeant insisted that there was little merit in discussing any changes to the Ordinance other than his recommendation to remove the outreach requirement. He argued again that it was the outreach requirement which made officers reluctant to enforce the Ordinance. The police sergeant’s recommendation fell on deaf ears that day.
It became apparent that most of the subcommittee members were unwilling to challenge the authoritative role that the providers had claimed on the streets through their outreach work. Furthermore, the aide’s presentation highlighted the fact that Kenney and DeCicco had never, in any version of the bill that summer, attempted to remove the outreach provision. When ideas develop a taken-for-granted aspect, they wield power over those who accept them (Pfeffer 1992, pp. 134–135). This incident suggested that the institutionalized status of the providers was a constraint on those individuals and groups seeking to develop ways to minimize the presence of the street population. In the end, Kenney and DeCicco’s bill lost momentum and died.
**** Conclusion
In this paper, I describe in detail how Project H.O.M.E., an institutionalized homeless service provider and community development organization, demonstrates a continuing willingness to engage in advocacy that counters local authorities and influential groups. I support existing scholarship challenging theories that predict that an organization’s expansion and institutionalization lead to the loss of its movement identity or make it unable to act as a disruptive force in the political arena (Della Porta and Diani 1999; Rucht 1999).
I use historical data to show that Project H.O.M.E.’s institutionalization and ties to the public sector have allowed staff to develop resources and skills for being contentious claim-makers as well as influential actors who are comfortable in the policy arena. I thus lend support to studies that show that public sector funding may have invigorating, not deadening, effects on an organization’s work in the political arena (Kramer 1994; Chaves et al., 2004). However, my story closely ties Project H.O.M.E.’s capacity as an advocate to its structural position, which suggests that public funding and institutionalization will not have uniform effects on all organizations and not all “insider” organizations will be as capable as Project H.O.M.E.
I highlight how Project H.O.M.E. can be viewed as a goal-oriented claim-maker even when it engages in what looks like “mundane” activities. Goffman (1959) is helpful for underscoring the fact that mundane activities may actually be meaningful interactions that are entered into with purpose and for an effect. I show that Project H.O.M.E., because of prior advocacy achievements, has the capacity to perform well on the inside; in particular, staff can shape the context within which they interact with and deliver challenging messages to authorities and the downtown community.
I show that the business community plays an important role in the Philadelphia homeless political arena by applying pressure on local authorities to resolve their complaints concerning the street population, which in turn opens up opportunities for various claim-making performances by the homeless service providers and periodically reignites networks for advocacy. By pointing to the role of this third party in keeping homeless service providers’ advocacy identities vibrant, I suggest that Giugni and Passy’s (1998) model, which focuses on the two way relationship between the state and social movements, is incomplete.
Giugni and Passy (1998) aim to understand the continued vibrancy of modern social movements even after they establish collaborative relationships with the state. They argue that part of the explanation lies in the fact that the modern state needs social movements for the knowledge they have, and that the state has a reflexive awareness that they need social movements. Using the conflict over the downtown street population as a lens through which to view and understand the homeless policy arena, I show that it is not reflexive awareness on the part of the city that gives the providers their “space for action” on the streets; rather, the advocates’ ability to constrain the choices the city has with regard to the management of the street population explains the role the providers have. When the advocates act as an obstruction to the city’s use of the police against the street population, a type of vacuum is created. Since interest remains in minimizing the street population, the providers can step into that vacuum and build their influence there. In addition, my data suggests that it is not expertise per se that sustains them in this “space” but their ability to lay claim to expertise and insist that experts are needed. Finally, since the construction of homelessness as a social problem has always been closely connected to its visibility in urban centers, Logan and Molotch’s (1987) theory of urban politics may shed more light than the theory of the state’s reflexivity on the earliest efforts of local governments to respond to homelessness: local government action, even from the beginning, may have been fundamentally connected to the politics of “growth” and the focus on protecting and building urban land values.
I have described Project H.O.M.E. and its allies as advocates whose actions reflect a continuing commitment to protecting what they view as homeless people’s interests. Arguments can be made that the providers’ political work on this matter has a self-serving aspect, as the gains that are made often further expand the provider system. I would refute that interpretation since much of Project H.O.M.E.’s advocacy on this issue occurs in response to new threats, accumulating grievances or concerns about homeless people’s safety. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that the strategy the advocates fashion requires them to act as cheerleaders, even protectors, of a system that does little more than act as a band-aid on a serious social problem. As I explained above, Project H.O.M.E. has a member on staff paid by the city to advertise the capacities of the system. Emphasizing the system’s effectiveness may also require quieting criticisms of the services system. In fact, at one subcommittee meeting, a police officer presented data to support his argument that panhandlers were homeless and that their presence on the street reflected that the shelter system was failing them. The CODAAP representative responded defensively, declaring that the system was not a “revolving door.” A city official present at the meeting argued that the system was chockfull of helpful programs for homeless men. Project H.O.M.E. staff did not dispute the positive descriptions of the shelter system. Conversation on the issue quickly died. Such dynamics may help explain the public’s ignorance of the very real and many problems in and with the shelter system.
Finally, during the summer it became clear (both to me and Project H.O.M.E. staff) that many in the business community were ultimately hoping for legislation that would target individuals behaving in non-threatening ways. At the meetings, some of the downtown representatives had expressed annoyance with a range of nonviolent individuals; for instance the persistent individual who would return to the same spot to panhandle despite being repeatedly warned away; or the young men and women who begged in silence with signs or dogs resting close to them. The business people and residents would, often, indicate that they were more concerned about the atmosphere on the streets than they were about issues of safety or crime. The subcommittee’s response to a presentation made one day by the police sergeant was particularly revealing. The sergeant explained to the group that, actually, a law against “aggressive panhandling” was not even necessary. He explained that the police already had adequate tools for addressing aggressive behavior, for instance, they can charge people with assault. However, the sergeant’s point was ignored; the downtown groups pushed on with their attempts to define “aggressive panhandling” in order to legislate against it. The underlying dynamics to the summer-long political process were thus made clearer: the pro-legislation groups were drawing on cultural stereotypes of the dangerous poor as political cover for a policy that would target the non-dangerous but visible poor they found annoying. Because their strategy was focused on maintaining friendly ties, Project H.O.M.E. was not in the position to denounce fellow subcommittee members for promulgating these stereotypes. This type of restraint likely only strengthens those stereotypes and increases the chances that this issue will emerge again.
The case of Project H.O.M.E. suggests that an institutionalized and even heavily publicly funded organization can be an effective advocate in the local policy arena and can successfully wield influence against political and business interests. At the same time, Project H.O.M.E. clearly accepts trade-offs as it seeks to maintain its status, relationships and political effectiveness. These decisions demonstrate that it is not fully independent or free to consistently act aggressively on behalf of its homeless population constituency.
**** References
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** Chapter 9. Field Research During War: Ethical Dilemmas
Elisabeth Jean Wood
Field research in conflict zones is challenging for both methodological and ethical reasons. In conflict zones, the usual imperatives of empirical research (to gather and analyze accurate data to address a relevant theoretical question) are intensified by the absence of unbiased data from sources such as newspapers, the partisan nature of much data compiled by organizations operating in the conflict zone, the difficulty of establishing what a representative sample would be and carrying out a study of that sample, and the obvious logistical challenges. Similarly, the ethical imperative of research (“do no harm”) is intensified in conflict zones by political polarization, the presence of armed actors, the precarious security of most residents, the general unpredictability of events, and the traumatization through violence of combatants and civilians alike.
As should always be the case, researchers in developing their research design and methods should take account of ethical imperatives from the beginning of the project’s development. In the hope of contributing to further research in conflict zones, in this essay I discuss ethical dilemmas that confront field researchers working in conflict zones and assess the extent to which research procedures can adequately address those dilemmas. I argue that whether research procedures can address many such dilemmas depends critically on the particular conflict setting; there are some settings where research cannot be ethically conducted and should not be attempted or should be curtailed. In many settings, on the other hand, research procedures can address many dilemmas reasonably well but ethical research always depend critically on the judgment of the researcher; following abstract rules will not be sufficient. Thus training of field researchers should explicitly prepare them for anticipated ethical dilemmas and also instill ethical principles to guide their judgment in the field.
For this essay I draw on my experience of 26 months of field research in rural areas of El Salvador during the civil war. After briefly summarizing the purpose and general methodology of the research, including workshops in which local residents depicted land occupations by drawing maps, I first discuss the particular conditions of the war during the period of research. I then discuss ethical dilemmas that I confronted and analyze the adequacy of the research procedures I followed to implement the “do no harm” ethic, with an emphasis on the protocol meant to ensure that my interviews took place with the fully informed consent of those interviewed and the procedures with which I sought to ensure the confidentiality of my field data. I identify dilemmas that I did not encounter, stressing the relatively constrained violence in the latter period of the Salvadoran civil war. I also discuss the dilemmas that arise in the dissemination of research findings and the repatriation of research. As those procedures do not address all dilemmas the researcher may encounter in conflict zones, ethical research inevitably depends on the informed moral judgment of the researcher. I identify some of the emotional challenges of field research in highly polarized settings that may undermine the researcher’s judgment.
*** The Research: High-Risk Collective Action and Democratization as a Way out of Civil War
In El Salvador I carried out research on a variety of issues, including why democratization resolved violent political conflict in that case (Wood 2000) and why some poor residents of the countryside actively supported the leftist insurgents despite the very high risks they thereby ran (Wood 2003). In five case-study areas in contested regions of the countryside, I interviewed more than 200 civilians, eight insurgent commanders, and approximately two dozen staff members of nongovernmental organizations of various political allegiances. The case-study areas varied in the degree of mobilization in support of the insurgency and in the form of agrarian production.[68] Through interviews and observation of meetings, I documented the history of the conflict in the local communities, the political trajectories of individuals (both those who supported the insurgents and those who did not), political divisions within communities, the relations between civilians and the armed actors, the pattern of insurgent land occupation during the war, and the origins, evolution, and political affiliation of nongovernmental organizations active in the area. I also gathered material to analyze the origins and evolution of the reconstruction of a bombed and abandoned village (Tenancingo) under a unique agreement between the insurgents and the governments to allow its repopulation.
In San Salvador and provincial cities, I gathered data and documents on the evolution of the economy during the conflict, the course of negotiations between the insurgents and the government over land transfer to insurgent supporters, landlords’ perceptions of the conflict and its economic consequences, and military officers’ analysis of the origins of the war and the proper strategy of counterinsurgency. I interviewed government officials, military officers, USAID staff members, UN staff members, insurgent political officers (during the cease-fire), as well as approximately a dozen landlords of properties in the case-study areas.
While I was able to gather a number of primary documents and databases and to observe many meetings of different organizations, my principal research method was that of the semi-structured interview in which I asked open-ended questions from a prepared list and pursued topics in depth as seemed appropriate and relevant. Returning several times to interview many respondents was essential to the quality of information eventually gathered.
It was important for the purpose of the research to gather opinions on these issues from social groups across the political spectrum (including the armed actors). As I discuss in more detail below, except for high-level public officials, I assured all those I interviewed that their identity would be kept confidential (in many cases, their participation was anonymous). Initial contact with USAID officials led to interviews with Salvadoran government and military officials as well as landlords. My initial entry to my first case-study, Tenancingo, was facilitated by the nongovernmental organization carrying out its reconstruction. The local Catholic nun introduced me to residents. My affiliation with the Jesuit University facilitated contact with pastoral workers in other areas, with whom I stayed in the countryside. Various contacts in San Salvador introduced me to members of nongovernmental organizations working in the other field sites, who then facilitated my entry to the other four case-study areas. In the countryside, I was vetted by the insurgent faction present in each area. After listening to my explanation of the project, field commanders checked with urban contacts to confirm my identity.[69] I assume a similar process took place among government officials.
Thus prospective interviewees were identified through the construction of several parallel and evolving networks of contacts (urban, rural, insurgent-affiliated, government-supporting, and rural residents who supported neither side). In the circumstances of political violence and polarization, I did not attempt to construct representative samples of local respondents but did my best to interview members of a wide variety of organizations, both those affiliated with the government and those affiliated with the opposition. Local priests and nuns introduced me to a variety of local residents, including people who supported neither side (otherwise not easily identified). I did not carry out research in areas controlled by the insurgent army, as not supporting the insurgents was not an option in those areas. Nor did I attempt to conduct field research in an area where insurgent activities were entirely absent (which would have been the ideal research design, as it would have added a clearly contrasting case). Ethnographic research on such politically sensitive questions in areas of uncontested government and landlord control would have been dangerous for those interviewed (and perhaps for me). That is, ironically, field research in the conditions of the Salvadoran war during the period of my research was generally safer in areas contested by armed insurgents. The reason is that a military and political stalemate of sorts prevailed in the case-study areas in the latter half of the war, a political space that reflected the inability of the government to reimpose the hegemony of security forces and landlords but also the inability of the insurgents to prevent government troops from controlling the area. In the shadow of that stalemate in the conditions of this particular war, rural residents with a variety of political loyalties could live and work, and field research on patterns of collective action was possible.
I also drew on another method. In 1992 insurgent activists from four of the case-study areas drew maps for this study. I asked representatives of a dozen cooperatives to draw with marker pens on large sheets of butcher paper maps of their localities showing property boundaries and land use before and after the civil war. While some cooperatives were established by the government as part of an agrarian reform to mitigate rural grievances, these insurgent-affiliated cooperatives had occupied land during the war without landlord permission. Drawn collaboratively by at least two and usually several members in a process interspersed with much discussion of the history of the area as well as gossip, jokes, and teasing of one another (and of me), the resulting maps document how cooperatives of insurgent supporters literally redrew through their collective action the boundaries of class relationships.[70]
Drawing maps was not a familiar task; only a few said they had ever seen a map. Insurgent field commanders had a few, well-worn maps held together with tape. One nonliterate elderly leader traced property lines with his forefinger while his grandson drew the line in its wake. Each pair of maps took 2 days to draw, a sacrifice of time that I understood as an indication of their enthusiasm that the history of the war in their area be documented.
The mapmakers knew and took time to show the name of every property (or the owner), appeared to remember the pattern of land use before the war, and knew or estimated the size of every property. In depicting the land claims by the insurgent cooperatives, the makers took particular care to indicate property borders, on some maps reiterating the word “propiedad” (property) repeatedly, claiming them plot by plot by labeling each one “property of the cooperative.” The captions also reiterate the word and thus the claim. The maps reproduced here exhibit an extraordinary cartographic projection. Figure 9.1 shows in the foreground the hamlet Loma Pacha, which lies east of the town San Francisco Javier, and the nearly conical hill Mount Taburete, which was planted almost entirely in coffee before the war. The hill was owned by three landlords, including one colonel. The drawer of the map, assisted by two other members of the insurgent cooperative El Jobalito seem to have imagined standing on the next hill to the east, looking down at the houses of the workers in the hamlet and up toward the hill, and then unwrapping the hidden backside of the hill onto the paper just beyond the triangle of the cone.
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-7.jpg][Fig. 9.1 Cerro Taburete, 1970–1980. Courtesy of the authors. Reprinted from Wood (2003), used with permission of Cambridge University Press.]]
A color version can be seen at [[http://www.cambridge.org/us/features/wood][www.cambridge.org/us/features/wood]]
The map-drawer wrote the following on the map (with the original idiosyncratic spelling), “Asía el serro del taurete propiedades tomadas por personas campesinas,” which means, “Toward Mount Taburete, properties taken by campesino persons,” an unprompted assertion of defiance and achievement. As is clear in the corresponding postwar map, Fig. 9.2, nearly all of the coffee trees on the hill were destroyed during the war, as the guerrilla encampment there was frequently attacked. The cooperative planted corn in the lower skirts of the hill and claimed nearly the entire hill at the war’s end. On this map, the drawer wrote, “Grasias por un recuedo de mi trabajo,” which means, “Thank you for a remembrance of my work,” thereby both reminding me to return the map as I had promised and claiming the redrawn boundaries and the literal drawing of the map as his work.
Such notations on the maps suggest that cooperative members saw the building of cooperatives in the difficult conditions of the war as a source of pride in the effectiveness of their historical intervention. In general, “the map as plan is the map as product and recorder of human agency” (Black 1997, p. 165). In this case the maps record the human agency of the drawers themselves. In drawing the maps, workshop participants had to decide whether to include the name of the cooperative and their own names. The mapmakers without exception wrote the full title of their cooperative on each map. Many of the names evoked a sense of achievement: “new dawn,” “the guardians,” “joyful bluff,” “light on the horizon,” and “conscience.” Others retained the former name of the property but replaced “hacienda” or “finca” with “cooperative.” I did not ask the mapmakers to sign the maps, but most chose to do so. Nearly all identified themselves along with their titles as the leaders of the cooperative, a symbolic assertion of authority and collective ownership of the properties claimed. The mapmakers who inscribed their names did so after a discussion amongst themselves regarding the purpose of the exercise (which I described as the eventual publication of a history of the war in the case-study areas) and, among some of the groups, of the potential risks given the uncertain conditions of the cease-fire at the time. Judging by these conversations, to sign one’s name was an expression of commitment to tell their communal history. The naming of names, particularly for the express purpose of having them published with the maps, thus seemed to be an indication of both a desire to testify to the community’s history and to claim authorship of the cooperative’s achievements. Thus the maps are ideological constructions, acts of critical remembrance and redemption as well as an assertion of power to claim and hold land.[71]
[[l-j-lauren-joseph-matthew-mahler-javier-auyero-new-8.jpg][Fig. 9.2 Cooperativa El Jovalito, 1992. Courtesy of the authors. Reprinted from Wood (2003), used with permission of Cambridge University Press.]]
A color version can be seen at [[http://www.cambridge.org/us/features/wood][www.cambridge.org/us/features/wood]]
In retrospect I am aware of many mistakes I made during my field research, of which two deserve mention. I wish I had better recorded the comments, jokes, and discussions that occurred during the map-drawing sessions. I was slow to understand the value of those interactions as I initially had an overly simple understanding of what the maps represented. Only later did I come to understand the maps as documents demonstrating the emergence of a new political culture rather than as illustrations of land occupations. I also came to wish that I had interviewed more residents of the case-study areas who did not support the insurgency, as the material I gathered from this group was generally less rich than from supporters.
*** Field Conditions in Comparative Perspective
Field research across this range of political allegiances during a bitter civil war proved possible because of particular aspects of the Salvadoran war. My research began in 1987, after the intense violence of the early years of the war had declined. The principal reason for this decline in violence was the US decision in late 1983 to convince Salvadoran military leaders to rein in the military’s human rights abuses. The large majority of violence against civilians in the Salvadoran war was carried out by the state; the UN-sponsored Truth Commission attributed more than 85% of civilian deaths to state actors and their agents. While the military did not dismantle the death squad networks responsible for the violence, violence decreased as the military reluctantly embraced counterinsurgency measures that emphasized winning the “hearts and minds” of civilians over the indiscriminate violence of the early years of the war. The insurgent organization also reorganized its forces into small, more mobile and autonomous groups. This new strategy soon proved effective and the insurgents slowly extended their covert presence in both rural and urban areas, carrying out brief sorties against military forces and intensifying economic sabotage.
In this latter period of the war, state violence was generally much more selective, although extensive and egregious violence recurred when the regime felt threatened. For example, during the insurgents’ 1989 offensive, the government’s Atlacatl Battalion, on the order of the High Command executed six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper, and her daughter on the campus of the Jesuit University, and the Air Force bombed civilian neighborhoods of San Salvador. Nonetheless, the changes in government and insurgent strategies made it possible for many displaced peasants to return to the countryside. Despite ongoing violence against activists, insurgent supporters in some areas began forming insurgent cooperatives and formally declaring abandoned land (some of which they had been working on covertly) as their property.
Thus my field research occurred during a period of relatively organized and limited violence, a sharp contrast both to the indiscriminate violence earlier in the war and the criminal violence after the war. On occasion, people on both sides of the conflict with whom I had contact would suggest that my planned trip to certain areas be postponed. I always took such advice without further questions; I noted that fairly frequently, violence would occur in my case-study areas during those times.
In particular, my initial field research in Tenancingo took place in a context of ongoing international pressure on the armed actors to end their violations of human rights. This pressure, together with the fact that the military admitted bombing the town on two occasions made possible a unique agreement between the armed groups to allow the reconstruction of the town and its repopulation in the midst of a very conflicted area. The project received significant European funding and press coverage, which may have raised the costs to both armed actors of hostility to an academic researcher. That I was not from El Salvador but from the USA may also have contributed to the feasibility of field research in the town for two reasons, the importance of US funding to the government and the attention given to harassment (by either side) of US citizens.
Field research in the other case-study areas took place later in the war; indeed, much of it (though not all) occurred during the cease-fire that began in early 1992. Although political tension was often very high in those case-study areas, the presence of UN observers and the separation of the two armies to distinct sites made travel to those areas much less dangerous than it would have been earlier. And, with a few minor exceptions, I had excellent luck: I was never caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such luck is a not-to-be-underappreciated aspect of fieldwork in settings of political violence (Sluka 1995).
However, in addition to these reasons particular to the second half of the Salvadoran war, I believe my research in contested areas was possible for a more profound reason. My inquiries met with the enthusiastic collaboration of many residents of the case-study zones (and of nearly all those approached in San Salvador as well), irrespective of class, occupation, or political affiliation. Residents acted on a willingness (perhaps even a need in some sense) to discuss with an outside researcher their own history and that of their families and communities. Perhaps this willingness is a measure of the trauma and change brought by the war. Those interviewed frequently expressed a desire for their story to be told, that some account (or accounting) be made of the local history of the civil war. For example, one Tenancingo resident not allied with any political faction told me in 1987, “The people here are suffocating from the cries and shouts that we cannot speak. It suffocates. It does me good to talk to someone — I can’t speak to people here about these things.” A longtime insurgent activist remarked.
I understand that you are asking us to consider participating in the construction of what we might call a history of the war in the conflicted zones. [pause] There are no more hidden things. We have suffered so; it would be right that there be such a history. What a period we have lived through! The campesino [peasant] does not have the capacity to do it; you engage with such things more there [in the US; in US universities]. But it is something we have lived and we are still living. I don’t know where to start...
This willingness of many residents of contested areas to talk about their personal and community histories at length with a researcher (given the right introduction and setting) is common to many other ethnographies of civil wars.[72]
Yet the statements that civilian members of the insurgent cooperatives made in interviews were concerned not only with violence. While most stories they told began as histories of injustice, violence, suffering, and loss, many continued as proudly told stories of the achievements of opposition organizations during the conflict — of land occupied and defended, of new organizations founded, and of new identities asserted. The campesinos recounted these achievements with enthusiasm. With groups I interviewed repeatedly over months and sometimes years, support for this project was particularly evident on my return after an absence. I would often be met with shouted greetings such as “Well, Elisabeth, do we have something to tell you!” or (to each other), “What did we say we should remember to tell Elisabeth?”
These assertions of pride contrast sharply with ethnographic material gathered in many other studies of civil war, for example, the ethnography of war widows in Guatemala by Linda Green (1999). The felt achievements of insurgent civilians in my case-study areas were enabling conditions of my field research: many residents who supported the insurgency felt they had important and triumphant stories to tell. The terms of the political settlement that ended the war allowed both sides to claim victory of a sort: the insurgents claimed they had earned the right of participation in a fully democratic polity, while government supporters parried the insurgents’ economic demands (Wood 2000).
Thus the Salvadoran conflict differs from many civil wars in several relevant ways.[73] After the initial years of the war, state violence became much more selective. Both because of their ideological commitments and their reliance on civilian support, particularly for intelligence, the insurgents were particularly selective in their use of violence and built extensive networks of civilian support (Wood 2003). The fact that there were merely two actors, each with a fairly coherent chain of command, meant that the vetting process was apparently thought by the armed actors to be an adequate basis on which to decide whether or not to cooperate with the project. This pattern of limited and well-targeted violence by two coherent actors during the latter half of the Salvadoran conflict contrasts sharply with the patterns of violence in many other civil wars. In many wars, leaders exercise little control over armed followers, armed factions perceive few ideological or practical constraints on their use of violence, armed groups rely on the use of indiscriminate terror (particularly if their goal is to control resources or to carry out a campaign of ethnic or political cleansing), or armed groups rely on the kidnapping of foreigners to finance their activities.[74] In some wars, the multiplicity of factions makes difficult any sustained presence in rural areas. And in some wars, neutrality on the part of rural residents and researchers is rejected by one of more armed party to the war. In particular, in some conflict zones at the present time carrying a US passport may invite violence whereas in the Salvadoran context it raised the costs of such hostility.
Other conditions less directly related to violence might also make ongoing field research during other wars exceedingly difficult if not impossible. Where there are a variety of local militias and other armed actors, gaining adequately authoritative permission to carry out research may be impossible. The logistics of field research in some conflict zones may also be prohibitively difficult.[75] I was able to identify field sites to which I had adequate access most of the time by public transportation or riding with members of nonthreatening nongovernmental organizations (Tenancingo), or driving myself in a small truck. In many wars, such relative ease of access and autonomy of movement is not possible. Rather, researchers must negotiate transport with nongovernmental organizations that some actors may perceive as biased. Finding secure and reliable sources of shelter, water, and food that will not bias the research may be very difficult. Those providing hospitality and transportation may impose restrictions on where the researcher may go and with whom he or she may interact. Other factors also enabled the logistics of field research in El Salvador. That very nearly all rural residents speak Spanish meant that fluency in one language obviated the need for a translator. In contrast, in some conflict zones the field research must conduct interviews in a wide variety of languages and dialects and therefore will probably need to engage translators, with attendant practical and ethical challenges.
*** Ethical Challenges
In my research, the most important challenges in following the “do no harm” imperative were to ensure that those I interviewed and the organizations I observed had given me their informed consent to my research project, to protect the politically sensitive data that I gathered, and to decide what material to publish. In short, I sought to ensure that those who participated in the project did not run any greater risk as a result and that potential research subjects made their own informed decision to participate. I discuss each in turn, along with some lesser challenges and dilemmas. (I did not work with research assistants or “key informants” whose security might require particular consideration.)
For field research to be ethical, research subjects must consent to their participation in full understanding of the potential risks and benefits (Kelman 1972; Belmont Report 1979[76]). In the context of my field research, this norm of informed consent meant that those I interviewed should understand the purpose of my research and the potential risks that they ran in talking with me (as well as any potential benefits) so that they could make a fully informed decision as to whether they wanted to speak with me.[77] The challenges of implementing this norm were numerous: what were the risks and benefits of participation? Would illiterate and marginally literate rural residents understand the informed consent process or would it alienate potential participants? Research protocols, including oral consent procedures, were approved by institutional review boards at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and New York University.
The approval of and adherence to protocols is of course not sufficient to ensure adequate ethical judgment; such protocols cannot anticipate the many dilemmas other than issues of informed consent and data security that arise in the course of research, particularly in conflict zones. I found my ability to judge field conditions and to understand the challenges and dilemmas of field research increased over the course of my work. I was aided significantly in this process throughout my field work by the fact that the rural residents I interviewed had a more highly developed sense of the evolving risks of violence in their area than I did. Their political expertise in this far exceeded mine, which was too inexperienced and too naive, and I did my best to learn from them.
The consent procedure that I used with rural residents was oral, not written, as any written record would link participants to my project and would comprise a risk to participants. (A secondary reason was that the majority of civilians interviewed in the case-study areas were at most semiliterate.) The stated purpose of the project was the writing of a history of local communities through the war for a US university that I hoped eventually also to publish in El Salvador. I presented myself as an academic researcher working for an academic degree in the United States (initially an MA, later a doctorate), affiliated also with the Jesuit university in San Salvador.[78] The stated benefit was the writing of this history; I explicitly stated that no other benefits were available.[79] Near the end of my field work, various international aid agencies were beginning to explore development projects in my field sites so an explicit denial of any connection between such benefits and my project was important. Of course I cannot know that I entirely succeeded; in any case, no such benefits materialized over the many months of my field work, and those I approached for subsequent interviews nonetheless all agreed to be interviewed again.
The principal emphasis of the oral consent procedure was on informing those who participated in my project about potential risks. I emphasized that I would be gathering information for the history from all actors in the conflict, including the armed actors of both sides. I assured potential interviewees that their identity would be kept strictly confidential, that I would in no way identify them to anyone else, verbally or in print, as having been part of my project or as having said particular things. The one exception was high-level government officials who were often interviewed by journalists. I also assured interviewees that they could choose what to tell me and whether it was for publication (without attribution to ensure confidentiality of identity) or merely for my own information (not to be used in publication) and in the later case whether or not I could write it down. I stated explicitly that they could refuse to participate at all and to decline to answer particular questions. I assured them also that they could change their mind at any point and decline to participate further (and withdraw permission to use previously disclosed material).
The consent procedure included a statement that was meant to ensure my accountability to local residents. I assured potential interviewees that if they had questions or complaints they could approach local pastoral agents who knew how to contact authorities of my home university. I gave two nuns and a local priest, chosen because they appeared to be respected by residents who did not support the insurgents as well as those who did, a letter informing them how to contact the relevant body at my university (in US parlance, the institutional review board).[80] To my knowledge, no one ever approached them with concerns or questions about my research.
While the discussion of this consent protocol initially caused some interviewees some confusion, once the idea had been conveyed that they could exercise control over the content of the interview and my use of it, participants demonstrated a clear understanding of its terms. In particular, many residents of my case-study areas took skillful advantage of the different levels of confidentiality offered in the oral consent procedure. This probably reflected the fact that during the war residents of contested areas of the Salvadoran countryside daily weighed the potential consequences of everyday activities (whether or not to go to the field, to gather firewood, to attempt to go to the nearest market) and what to tell to whom. Moreover, I had an abiding impression that many of them deeply appreciated what they interpreted as a practice that recognized and respected their experience and expertise. Although for many telling their histories involved telling of violence suffered and grief endured, I did not observe significant re-traumatization as a result, as have researchers in some conflict settings (Bell 2001). I believe the terms of the consent protocol may have helped prevent re-traumatization as it passed a degree of control and responsibility over interview content to the interviewee.
The second fundamental ethical challenge was to ensure the security of data gathered, particularly sensitive data that might have political implications if in the wrong hands. In my case, the most challenging aspect of this dilemma was how to manage the security of data gathered in the countryside and brought to the capital, often through military checkpoints and occasionally through insurgent checkpoints. Such data included interviews in which the person’s political preferences were evident, particular biographical details such as participation (past or present) with one of the armed groups, indications of covert membership in an armed group on the part of apparent civilians (including staff members of nongovernmental organizations), information about the relationship between nongovernmental organizations and the insurgents, data concerning land occupations, and criticisms of the armed organizations by residents (including by their supporters).
In addressing this challenge, maintaining the confidentiality of the material gathered and anonymity of my research subjects was of course essential. Names were often not recorded at all; if they were recorded they were always recorded in a separate notebook, usually after my return to the capital. I did not tape interviews in the countryside (and only on two occasions in the capital); rather, I took sketchy notes in nearly illegible longhand, filling in missing details once back in the capital. I used fresh notebooks on every trip into the countryside so as not to expose to risk previously gathered data once again. In each notebook I first took notes on newspaper reports, government documents, and so forth in the capitol, leaving some pages empty for interview notes. While my belongings were occasionally searched at checkpoints, no one ever gave more than a cursory glance at my notebooks. The notebooks were kept in a locked cabinet in a locked office at the university; copies were sent home every few months and the originals carried out of the country in hand luggage whenever I left. (Of course field researchers today protect their laptops with passwords and encrypt their notes and send them home by email or by courier.)
Rural residents themselves chose to reject anonymity in drawing the maps for the project. After extended discussion in the map-drawing workshops, those who drew the maps decided to write the names of their cooperatives on the maps. And in some cases, again after discussion of the potential risks, the map-drawers decided to write their own names on the map. As the names of all cooperative members had already been passed by nongovernmental organization to the government land transfer office, I judged the risks of including names on the maps to be minimal. I interpreted their decision to do so as a claiming of agency in redrawing the boundaries of properties, class, and land use in the Salvadoran countryside.
Lesser dilemmas also arose in the course of field research. For example, I was occasionally mistaken for a nun or a lay religious pastoral representative. I always corrected any such misunderstanding before I spoke at length with anyone, but I did not always go out of my way to correct it during passing encounters in the field. For example, at times combat occurred in the immediate proximity of Tenancingo and on occasion either the insurgent or military forces occupied the town. I did not tell combatants who saw that I was staying with the local nun and talking with a range of civilians that I was not a church worker. So while I never directly misrepresented myself, I did not actively correct all misunderstandings of whom I was and why I was there.
Field researchers often have to decide whether or not to challenge lies that they are told in the course of their work. This is both a practical and ethical dilemma: should the researcher confront the liar it might result in hostility toward the project and perhaps toward participants. This dilemma occurs with particular force in interviews with perpetrators of violence. My resolution was not to challenge lies told to me but to invite elaboration in a bland and naive way, which incidentally often led to extremely useful material reflecting the speaker’s ideology, values, analysis of events, and so on.
The third fundamental dilemma I experienced was the extent to which I would include sensitive field materials in publications. Some decisions were simple as they were essentially dictated by the conditions given by research subjects (some material was excluded from publication by the interviewee). I distributed very few copies of my MA thesis on the repopulation of Tenancingo until well after the end of the war.[81] And I waited nearly a decade after the end of the civil war to publish some of the most sensitive material, particularly the relationships between various nongovernmental organizations and the insurgents. But I decided not to use some material, although I had permission from those interviewed to do so, because it seemed sensitive even in light of El Salvador’s sustained peace since 1994.[82] A particular dilemma arises when interviewees insist that their name be used and the researcher judges that to do so may run a risk of harm to that interviewee.
A fourth and related dilemma was how to thank those who made my research possible. This was an ongoing discomfort for me as I felt that I could never in any meaningful way reciprocate the generosity of those with whom I worked, be they residents of the case-study areas or government officials. This was particularly troubling with respect to the residents of my case-study areas who generously lent their scarce time to my project. I attempted to reciprocate in shamefully minor ways such as giving people rides in my small pickup. I came to believe that for many of the rural residents I interviewed, sharing their life story with an engaged listener was some sort of service that I provided in the course of my research, as described above.
Anthropologists and other ethnographers endorse a particular form of reciprocity: materials gathered in the field should be returned to the community of origin. Some years ago this was understood as making publications available to the academic communities of the countries where field research was conducted. This was easily achieved: copies of the two books were given to major national libraries. An articlelength version of the first book was published in Spanish in the leading academic journal in El Salvador. The second book is now being translated for publication in Spanish in El Salvador. Increasingly, however, ethnographers agree that the field researcher’s obligations extend far beyond the dissemination of publications to include the return of field materials themselves. But the norm says both too much (not all material should be returned; for example, confidential material should not be) and too little (returned to whom and when?).[83] In my case, there was no question of returning field notes given the confidentiality of much of their content. I did return the maps to those who drew them, after photographs had been taken.[84] I should add that I have yet to pursue what I believe would be a truly reciprocal act, to publish a version of my second book accessible to semiliterate people.
A final, diffuse, and ongoing dilemma during my field research (and after) concerned my understanding of my role as researcher. In carrying out research in conflict zones, the researcher inevitably comes to wonder why the research is worth pursuing over purely humanitarian relief work. And in settings where violence against civilians is overwhelmingly carried out by one party to the conflict, as in El Salvador, researchers may wonder whether they should actively support the other party rather than continue with less politically engaged forms of research. Some researchers take the long view and argue that research is nonetheless justified because a sound understanding of conflict is essential to successful intervention and the recreation of social fabric (Smyth 2001, pp. 3–4). I agree with that but note that my own belief in the value of what I was doing was sustained by the ongoing endorsement of the project by rural residents willing to spend many hours telling me the history of their families and communities. Their belief in my project helped me stay on course in many ways. I persisted in my role despite attractive offers to become involved in policy work, such as serving as a consultant on land issues to the UN mission. Their belief kept me clear that my core value was the purpose of the project, to document the history of the war in the case-study areas.
Yet there were many ethical challenges that I did not confront during my field research. I did not have to make a decision whether or not by sharing confidential information I should attempt to prevent or mitigate an attack on civilians, for example. I did not have to decide how to leave an area under attack at short notice, retreating with one force or seeking shelter from another. I never faced direct threats that I turn over material I had gathered. I did not have to judge how far to press respondents about violence they had suffered or observed because the focus of my research was on the emergence of voluntary collective action in the high risk circumstances of the war, not directly on patterns of violence. The absence of these dilemmas of course reflects the relatively benign and coherent conditions of my field research. To carry out research in other civil wars, researchers may need to enter the field with and reside with a nongovernmental organization that may impose explicit restrictions or implicit constraints on the research, thereby compromising the researcher’s independence in order to carry out the research at all. Conditions in many civil wars simply preclude ethical field research.
*** Emotional Challenges in Field Research
In carrying out field research, ethnographers often go through predictable periods of loneliness and perhaps depression during which they question the meaning and feasibility of their project and whether they are adequate to the task. Such fieldwork “blues” typically occur a few months after arrival once the first excitement has lessened, and also after their return home. In part, these periods reflect the stress and loneliness of making a transition between cultural settings, leaving family members and friends behind. Many ethnographers find the emotional reserve necessary in field research (to engage subjects empathetically while retaining one’s scholarly purpose — what question must I be sure to ask, to what extent should I steer this interview) emotionally draining.
Those carrying out extended field research in conflict zones are likely to experience additional and intense emotions in the course of their work, including fear, anger, outrage, grief, and pity, often through observing, suffering, or fearing the effects of violence. Indeed, field researchers in extreme cases may suffer from “secondary trauma,” the sustained effects on witnesses of observing gross human rights violations. And field researchers often feel tremendous stress in their efforts to keep their data secure (as when carrying their data through check points). In sharply polarized settings, researchers may also feel it stressful to “manage” information from both sides and to engage in interviews with all parties. I experienced all these emotional challenges during my field research despite its setting of relatively limited and coherent violence.
I mention these emotional dynamics because I am persuaded that inadequate attention to them may lead field researchers to make errors in judgment that may have significant consequences for their research subjects as well as themselves. In such emotionally challenging circumstances, most people are susceptible to flattering invitations to share their experiences (and inevitably their data), to entertain new friends with stories (and data) from their field site, to embark on friendships or relationships that may be perceived as compromising the project, or to “make a difference” by passing on field data “confidentially” to some (supposedly responsible) person.
Good field researchers find ways to manage these challenges and take care to shelter their ongoing research from their emotional vagaries. In addition to the affirmation I took from the enthusiasm of residents of the case-study areas to participate in the project, I found that a few close friendships with those who were similarly positioned as sympathetic “outsiders” but whose own interests were far from mine (technical assistance and pastoral work) were helpful in my maintaining the confidentiality of my material and staying in role among my research subjects. Occasional weekend holidays gave me perspective as well as rest. During my most extended period of field research (18 months), it was particularly important to return to my university to consult with colleagues not just for academic advice but for some particular political advice about some of these ethical challenges, and to reaffirm a sense of engagement with my academic community.
*** Conclusion
Informed consent protocols and security procedures help ensure that the field researcher “does no harm.” However, conflict zones differ enormously in their conditions. The contested areas of El Salvador during the second half of the civil war saw forms of violence that were generally more limited, better targeted, and more predictable than was the case earlier in the war and in many other conflict zones. So I was spared facing some ethical dilemmas that other researchers confront.
The research practices described appears to have been sufficient to address the ethical dilemmas encountered during my field research. But they might well not have been sufficient for conditions at other times and in other places. I did not attempt field research during the 1989 insurgent offensive, for example. There are field conditions in which ethical field research is not possible.
Even with research practices and protocols tailored to specific field conditions, inevitably field researchers rely on their judgment in interpreting those norms. Yet very often academic training does a poor job preparing us for field research, particularly in conflict zones. Training in field research methods and in the ethical dilemmas frequently encountered in the field should comprise part of graduate training for social scientists and other professionals who venture into such settings. In particular, such training should also instill an awareness of the emotional dynamics in field research in conflict zones and their possible effects on the judgment of the field researcher.
Despite the challenges, ethnographic research is often possible in conflict zones — indeed, it is often the only kind of research possible as residents may refuse to participate in surveys or field experiments or any activity that does not involve the careful construction of trust. Without field research, the social, political, and economic processes that reshape the social structures, political economy, and political culture in a particular conflict zone (Wood 2000, 2003) will not be well understood.
Identifying political actors and their perceptions of their strategic interactions with other actors — what choices they confronted, their beliefs concerning the likely consequences of different choices, their analysis of paths not taken — is often essential to our work as social scientists seeking to understand such processes. Relevant data is usually unavailable except through face-to-face interaction with the actors themselves, that is, through ethnographic research, particularly when the actors are subordinate or insurgent groups, when internal political processes are an important component, and when actors have reasons to obscure their preferences and beliefs from public view, as when they are engaged in strategic interactions with other actors. Surprisingly often, such actors are nonetheless willing to talk with academic researchers.[85]
Of course the researcher must evaluate such data gathered through ethnographic research as residents of conflict zones may well interact strategically with the researcher in order to obscure something believed to be illegitimate, to exaggerate or minimize one’s own role, to mislead the researcher concerning rivals, and so on. A researcher should not take reports and observations as true per se or as a complete report of the causal forces at work, but as data reported within a particular, conflictual context. The researcher should attempt to interview, observe, or survey others to explore whether identified patterns are general or particular to particular research subjects or the specific conflict zone. Where available, the researcher may also “triangulate” with other sources, by comparing reported data to judicial, newspapers, human rights reports, and other records of relevant events. The purpose may be to prod the memory of those interviewed or to assure them that the interlocutor already knows quite a lot and thus a superficial answer is not desired and a fallacious one unsustainable.
Acknowledgments Thanks to Severine Autesserre, Samuel Bowles, Alexandra Garrison, Micheline Egge Grung, Richard L. Wood, and the participants in the seminar “Research Ethics in Conflict Zones — Facing the Ethical Challenges for the Researcher” sponsored by the National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Oslo, April 4, 2005) for their comments on an earlier version, and to the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and the Santa Fe Institute for research support.
*** References
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Das, V. (1990). Our work to cry: Your work to listen. In V. Das (Eds.), Mirrors of violence: Communities, riots and survivors in South Asia, (pp. 345–398). Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press.
Green, L. (1995). Living in a state of fear. In C. Nordstrom, & A. C. G. M. Robben, (Eds.), Fieldwork under fire: Contemporary studies of violence and survival, (pp. 105–127). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Green, L. (1999). Fear as a way of life. New York: Columbia University Press New York, NY.
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Kelman, H. C. (1972). The rights of the subject in social research: An analysis in terms of relative power and legitimacy. American Psychologist 27, 989–1016.
Nordstrom, C. (1997). A different kind of war story. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Sluka, J. A. (1995). Reflections on managing danger in fieldwork: Dangerous anthropology in Belfast. In C. Nordstrom, & A. C. G. M. Robben (Eds.), Fieldwork under fire: Contemporary studies of violence and survival, (pp. 276–294). Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
Peritore, N. P. (1990). Reflections on dangerous fieldwork. The American Sociologist 21, 359–72
Smyth, M. (2001). Introduction. In M. Smyth, & G. Robinson, (Eds.), Researching violently divided societies: Ethical and methodological issues. Tokyo and London: UN University Press and Pluto Press.
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Wood, E. (2000). Forging democracy from below: Insurgent transitions in South Africa and El Salvador. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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Wood, E. J. (2007). Field research. In C. Boix, & S. Stokes (Eds.), The handbook of comparative politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
** Chapter 10. Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist Understanding of Political Engagement
Matthew Mahler
Man is by nature a political animal
-Aristotle
One of the greatest paradoxes of contemporary social scientific research is that students of politics are hard pressed to find any evidence of man’s nature as a political animal in the extant political science or political sociology literature. Certainly there is no shortage of scholarly exchanges employing the term “politics” or purporting to have arrived at a better “model” of political participation or political outcomes, just as there is any number of studies exploring the relative salubrity of modern democracies. Conspicuously missing, however, from most of these inquiries is any consideration or account of the political animal cum animal — a living, breathing, suffering, sensual being who is shaped by more than just rational calculations, symbolic exchanges, the dictates of public opinion, or any of the other more fashionable explanatory variables employed in current political research such as levels of partisanship, institutional structures, or one’s degree of social capital. To put it differently, we might say that what is absent from such analyses is the human being as characterized by Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts — a being which is actively “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being aware, sensing, wanting, acting, [and] loving” (Marx [1972] 1978, p. 87). Indeed, the political animal of current thinking is less an animal and more of a deus ex machina composed of an admixture of preference curves, optimums, schemas, and institutional structures, along with a pinch of statistical correlations.
Just as the political animal conceptualized by social science fails to pass muster as an animal, so too does it, upon examination, fail to pass muster as a specifically political being. Rather than analyzing the logics unique to politics — the particular modes of thought and ways of being that set it apart as a world all its own — the tendency present in much research is to treat politics and political action as though they are derivative of other baser logics. Thus, one assumes that models of economic calculability can be transferred unproblematically from the study of markets to the study of politics, or as is often done, the irrational rationality of game theory is used to represent the nomos of political life. A similar reductionism is evident in approaches that treat the logic of politics as nothing other than the simple logic of power — thus, turning all political action into teleology. In short, rather than probing the depths of Aristotle’s political animal and successfully identifying the origins of its distinctive appetites and aesthesis, social science has served as the handmaiden for its evisceration.
Because social science has so effectively written the political animal out of its analyses, one of the central tasks facing political ethnographers, if we are to capture the dynamics and character of political practice, is to reinsert it into our examinations of political life. This is decidedly not to say that the role of sociology should be simply to describe the political animal in its varying empirical manifestations, in light of some a priori or programmatic concern to “bring men back in” as Homans (1964) suggested, by re-centering our analyses on political agents and their actions. To do so would be to once again do violence to the political animal and its twofold existence — both as a being that is endowed with a unique set of categories, competencies, and desires and as a being whose distinguishing characteristics are derived from its ongoing relationship to and membership in a specific universe — namely that of politics. Any endeavor that seeks to plumb the forces shaping the practice of this unique species of being, must focus on both of these aspects and their mutual imbrication so as to avoid replicating the piecemeal evisceration that contemporary political scholarship has visited on the political animal; the challenge is not simply to focus on the animal and its actions, but to dissect it as a means to arriving at a better understanding of its surrounding environment and the ties through which the two are inextricably bound.
One of the ways in which to begin delineating the sociological reality of this animal is through an analysis of existing accounts of politics-in-action, in the form of political autobiographies, biographies, and journalistic articles. Such accounts can be particularly worthwhile given that the political field is a relatively closed social universe, where the ability to gain access to insiders and “important” players is largely determined by one’s degree of social capital. As a result, these materials can serve as a window onto ways of being, thinking, and feeling that can otherwise prove difficult to capture.
While some may question the reliability and validity of these sources, this should not lead to a dismissal of their usefulness tout court. To do so would be to fall victim to the positivistic fallacy that assumes that all quanta of information exist in a quasi-inert state and naturally fall into one of two categories — that of scientific (i.e., objective) data on the one hand and unreliable subjective impressions on the other. Absent from this understanding, however, is a properly historicized conception of reason and scientific inquiry, which recognizes that data do not come premade, nor do they magically appear ex nihilo; they are produced through the incessant use of “polemical reason” and the generative powers of theory (Bourdieu et al., 1991) so that even the most seemingly “objective” data (i.e., survey instruments) are never simply collected. What follows from this is that better and worse forms of data are determined based on the rigor of the theory and the degree of epistemic attention that goes into producing them. So although political biographies and autobiographies may be suffused with obfuscation, dissembling, and half-truths, this does not, in and of itself, preclude them from serving as potentially valuable sources of data. After all, as Goffman (1959) has shown so incisively, political nonfiction is far from the only genre of social life where impression management is carried out.[86] Unless sociology falls back onto a laissez-faire approach of treating all data as equally valuable or damns itself to toil in perpetuity on an epistemologically slippery slope from which virtually no data warrant inclusion in a properly scientific study, the challenge is to develop analytical tools that allow us to think through and to see beyond such difficulties. Here Katz (1988, p. 281) offers some help in terms of how best to identify better forms of qualitative data over worse forms: (1) an action that is witnessed is preferable to thoughts that an agent is presumed to have had, (2) acts that can be verified by multiple observers are preferable to acts witnessed by only one or two individuals, and (3) repeated modes of behavior or actions are preferable to those that seldom occur. These criteria can then be used to evaluate the relative merit of one book against another just as they can be used to evaluative the relative merit of different parts of a single book.
While this rubric for evaluating qualitative materials serves as a useful starting point in how to “sociologically” read nonfiction materials, it is necessary to expand on it in one important sense: autobiographies which by their nature tend to be almost exclusively based on a logic of personal narration rather than cross-verification of events by multiple witnesses, as do biographies, nonetheless offer an important degree of perspicacity into the construction of political selves that cannot be found elsewhere. Regardless of whether or not autobiographers wholeheartedly “believe” the accounts that they are providing of their actions, or whether or not their narratives can be said to be “objectively true,” these interpretations are nevertheless revealing in that they are part and parcel of the process of crafting a self with an eye to how others will view it — a process carried out with the use of political categories. These categories, including the vocabularies of motive (Mills 1940) that political actors use to explain their actions, can be particularly useful for our analysis because “their use both anticipates the situational consequences of participants’ actions and implies strategies for action” (Csordas [1994] 1997, p. 22). As such, they can be said to reflect the “concrete character” (p. 22) of the political world.
Drawing data from works of political nonfiction that help to reveal the moral and sensual underpinnings of political practice, the goal of this paper is to serve as a prolegomenon to a sensualist understanding of political engagement. Beginning with a brief discussion of Weber’s seminal essay “Politics as a Vocation,” I then construct an ideal type of political passion with which to highlight the inherent shortcomings in traditional explanations of political action. I argue that these approaches are all vitiated by their reliance on Chinese-box epistemology. I go on to suggest that in order to obtain a genuinely sociological account of political engagement, one must develop methods that are true to the experiential specifics of politics while recognizing the conditions that shape the possibility of those very experiences.
*** Politics as a Vocation
The seemingly banal question of why one engages in professional politics proves to be quite vexing for contemporary political research. In order to understand the troubles that such lines of study present, it his helpful to return to Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation” ([1946] 1958). Under the conditions of increasing bureaucratization of states, Weber believed that the necessary counterbalance was the modern professional politician who possessed sufficient charisma so as to allow him to attract a significant following with which to challenge the institutional inertia of bureaucracies. In addition to the quality of charisma, Weber argued that the politician must also embody a unique principle of responsibility, namely, that of taking “exclusive personal responsibility for what he does, a responsibility he cannot and must not reject or transfer” and that he feels with “heart and soul” (p. 95, 127, emphasis mine). Lastly, Weber’s ideal politician was one who lived his life passionately, which is to say in accordance with a calling and/or in devotion to a cause (p. 115) all the while making certain to ensure that these passions were tempered and directed via a healthy amount of proportion (p. 115). Ultimately, it was the individual who successfully exhibited these qualities and was willing, nay devoted, to doing battle with the insuperable forces of formal and substantive rationality — of an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of conviction — for whom it could be said that politics was his or her vocation. Thus, for Weber, taking politics as a vocation meant much more than simply engaging in politics for personal gain or as something that one merely happens upon. Instead, Weber hinted at a relationship to politics that is qualitatively different from this — a relationship characterized not by its arbitrariness but by a sense of duty — something, that to borrow Weber’s words again, one feels with “heart and soul.” The paragon of such a sense of duty for Weber was of course the figure of the Puritan who had rationalized his entire existence under an ethic inspired in and through what he experiences as his calling from God.
The importance of all of this is decidedly not to say that taking politics as one’s vocation, in the sense that Weber attributed to it, is the modal category for those who are engaged in professional politics. It remains an empirical question as to what extent this unique relationship to politics exists in modern democracies and for which individuals this is most likely to happen. The point to be taken from Weber’s conceptualization of politics as a vocation is that for him a particularly pertinent aspect to the study of politics is the feel that one has for the game — whether politics is felt to be something that is compelling or insipid — or what we might say are the unique sensual and moral valences of practicing politics. What this implies is that a mode of analysis is needed — specifically one that scrutinizes the various relationships that individuals take toward politics and the unique ways in which politicos come to think and feel about their craft — that is significantly different from the dominant approaches in both political science and political sociology. Unless our conception of the political animal is one that asserts a priori that political involvement is dictated simply by dint of rational calculations or by the shear burden of structural forces bearing on agents, then sociology must endeavor to examine and explain the processes through which political agents are endowed (or not) with the categories, competencies, and desires necessary for political life. In doing so, we can come to better comprehend the trajectories and relationships that agents take vis-à-vis the world of politics that existing modes of analysis have trouble explicating.
*** The Political Passions of Lyndon Johnson and Joe Trippi
As a means of bringing into relief some of the difficulties that traditional explanations of political engagement run up against, it is helpful to construct a quasi-ideal type of political passion,[87] using anecdotes from works of political nonfiction that analytically accentuate the sensual aesthetic of political practice. This, of course, is not to say that this distinct mode of political engagement is in any way representative of political action in general. The purpose, here, is to give “unambiguous means of expression” (Weber 1949, p. 90) to the experiential dimension of political life and the role that it plays in shaping political engagement.
Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senatorial campaign was scheduled to kick off with a rally at Austin’s Wooldridge Park on the night of Saturday, May 22. A day or two before the rally, a dull ache that had been bothering Johnson for a few days turned into an acute pain that radiated throughout his back and side. Doctors determined the cause to be kidney colic — the pain resulting from the passing of a kidney stone — known to be one of the worse pains a person can experience. With the primary election just 9 weeks away, Johnson refused to even consider his doctors’ advice that he should undergo surgery, which would have likely required 6 weeks of recovery time during which he could not have campaigned. Johnson had little, if no, luck keeping food down — gagging every time he attempted to eat. Asked at one point how Johnson was feeling, Dr. William Morgan, Johnson’s physician, simply shook his head, saying nothing. When Johnson’s speech writer, Paul Bolton, arrived at the Congressman’s apartment (Johnson at that point still represented Texas’s 10th Congressional district) to deliver the final version of the speech for that night’s event, he discovered Johnson, “mother naked — obviously sick, and obviously he had been shot full of painkillers.” According to Bolton, Johnson began to rant, insisting on how he was still going to give the speech, while his arms flailed about. Then later that evening, at precisely the appointed time, the Congressman arrived at the park, got out of his car, and waved to supporters, as though he was in perfect condition. He ran onto stage, with his “head thrown back,” his “hands in the air” and threw his Stetson into the audience with one “carefree, sweeping gesture.” Dr. Morgan later said that he did not know how a man could function while in such pain.
The pain and fever had only gotten worse come Monday and Tuesday, both days of extensive campaigning. Johnson had always been known to sweat profusely, but observers said he was now sweating at an even greater rate — so much so that he went through the six or seven fresh shirts that his personal assistant gave him throughout the day. The pain had become so intense that sometimes in private moments away from the public, Johnson “would double over, clutching his groin and gasping for breath.” But Johnson never gave the public any indication of the pain he was in — while his face may have continually been covered with sweat, there was always a smile to go along with it. On Tuesday, which was a particularly long day of campaigning that began at 6 a.m. and continued until after 11 that evening, Johnson never cut a speech short, just as he never left a room or a rally without first shaking every hand there was to shake (Caro [1990] 1991, pp. 195, 197–198).
While some may see Johnson’s willingness, nay determination, to continue campaigning despite the condition he was in as proof that Johnson had a particularly high threshold for pain, the fact that he at times doubled over, “clutching his groin and gasping for breath” suggests that Johnson was not altogether immune to the pain. So too, of course, does the probability that Johnson had been administered painkillers at least once during his bought with kidney colic; if he was not in pain, why take painkillers? One should also be wary of reading the account as a testament to the powers of modern medicine (although Johnson’s condition was eventually treated with a medical procedure that did not require full surgery — thus allowing him to only miss a few days of campaigning), as though it was the palliative effects of the painkillers that allowed Johnson to persevere through otherwise impossible circumstances. While painkillers may have eased his discomfort, it seems certain that they did not erase all the complications of the kidney stone for Johnson (he still had his assistant carry extra shirts for him knowing how much he was sweating, just as he still let out signs of anguish in quiet moments away from the spotlight of the campaign).
Proving just as inadequate in explaining the puzzle of how Johnson was able to continue campaigning are utilitarian conceptions of political action. If ever there were a rational perspective in instances of medical emergencies such as Johnson’s — that perspective would have to belong to medical experts — experts, who in this case, were, in all likelihood, well aware of the importance that this election held for Johnson.[88] Yet it was these experts who insisted on encouraging Johnson to consider surgery for fear that he would subject himself to more serious complications should he wait any longer — advice he dismissed without any serious consideration. Even if by some complex calculus an external observer could conclude that Johnson’s decision to ignore his doctors’ opinions was “rational” — the question remains as to how Johnson himself came to view this to be a rational decision. Complicating the analysis further is the fact that this episode of kidney colic is far from the only example of Johnson’s desire to devote himself completely and selflessly to the job of politics — a propensity that characterized Johnson’s entire career — even during periods when he was not up for election or holding a political office. As one individual who worked for Johnson commented: “[t]here weren’t any hours with him; there weren’t any days of the week,’ so long as there was the work of politics to be done” (Caro [1990] 1991, p. 353).
Similarly, it is just as difficult to explain the eagerness with which Johnson devoted himself to politics simply by conducting an analysis of the “political structures” that may have shaped his actions. While such structures may have indeed played a role in pushing Johnson into the world of politics, just as the circumstances of the 1948 campaign may have functioned as a crucible that pushed Johnson to new extremes, evidence suggests that he had a love for all things political, which one struggles to explain with objective forces as the only explanans. For example, several assistants who had worked with Johnson during his career in politics commented that “they had never seen [him] so ‘high’ [as] ‘when he got in a crowd of people [during a campaign].’ ” Another aide remembering Johnson during the 1948 campaign added, “ ‘He was energized, he was really charged up … When he was shaking hands, that was when he got most charged up … It was like he was plugged into electricity’ ” (Caro [1990] 1991, p. 242). His wife remembers the mood Johnson, then a Congressman, would be in after returning from meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt: “Every time he came from the White House, he was on a sort of high” (Caro [1990] 1991, p. 668). Try as one might, it requires a huge leap of causal faith to believe that external objective pressures can directly and without modification, mitigation, or some other intervening process, lead one to experience politics as something that is inherently attractive — even something that is comparable to drug-induced euphoria.
Exhibiting many of the same patterns that were present in Johnson’s relationship to politics is the political career of Joe Trippi. Trippi began his career in politics when he left college just credits shy of graduating to work on Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign. Four years later, he was again working on a presidential campaign — this time as a top aide for Walter Mondale. In 1988, he worked for both Gary Hart and then Dick Gephardt. After Hart’s campaign ended abruptly as a result of the Donna Rice scandal and Gephardt lost the democratic nomination to Michael Dukakis, Trippi “checked out” and had, what he calls, a “fuck this” period with politics. He continued to work on campaigns, but only on a smaller scale — races for Congress, governorships, etc. Then sometime in the fall of 2002, Steve McMahon, one of the partners from Trippi’s political consulting firm, who was working with Howard Dean, asked Trippi to come watch Dean at a preliminary campaign appearance in Iowa, in hopes that this might entice Trippi to work on Dean’s presidential campaign. Trippi’s first reaction to McMahon’s overtures was an unequivocal no. As he would later comment on what his initial response was to the possibility of working on another presidential campaign: “I’ve sworn it off, I’m not shootin’ up heroin anymore .... I don’t care how good the shit is, I’m not doing it.” But after continued persistence on the part of McMahon, Trippi eventually gave in, and by January 2003, he had agreed to be the manager of Dean’s campaign — a campaign that at that time had only $157,000 in the bank, seven staff members, 432 known supporters, and a candidate who was hardly known outside of Vermont. Over the next year or so, Trippi proceeded to work close to 20 hours a day for 7 days a week — a work pattern, that few would consider “healthy” but which was particularly dangerous for Trippi given that he suffers from high-grade diabetes. As he says, “[E]very doctor I’ve ever seen has told me, ‘Get out of the business — you’re gonna kill yourself. This is the worst fucking business you can be in’ ” (Depaulo 2004).
This discussion of Johnson’s and Trippi’s relationships to politics should emphatically not be interpreted as a moralizing tale of political hagiography, although, admittedly, constructing an ideal type that intentionally emphasizes a class of ostensibly “exotic” forms of behavior can encourage just such a reading. If one of the purposes of sociology is to de-exoticize the extraordinary, then the challenge before us is to find the socio logical bases of such seemingly irrational forms of political engagement. Unfortunately, it is here that traditional modes of political scholarship flounder. Just as Johnson’s relationship vis-à-vis politics cannot easily be subsumed under wholly utilitarian or objectivist accounts of political practice, neither can Trippi’s involvement in politics, as it eschews objectively rational logic and is riven by contradictory feelings of love and hate. Thus, if the maxim that in the extreme one can find the ordinary is true, then one must question how well traditional approaches are equipped for understanding political engagement in general.
*** Chinese-Box Epistemology and Beyond
In order to understand why traditional modes of scholarship struggle to explain such vividly sensual forms of political involvement, along with other more “mundane” relationships to politics, it is helpful to examine how they answer the question of why one engages in politics. For rational choice theory, which has gained dominance within many branches of both political science and political sociology,[89] thanks largely to the influence of James Coleman (1986, 1990) and Jon Elster (1984, 1989, 1993), one engages in politics because of purposive action in which the politico is intentionally seeking to obtain public office or one of its accouterments (power, material gain, recognition, etc.). Organizational approaches, which are often coupled with a rational choice theory of the agent (see Moe 1984; Shepsle 1989), seek to analyze varying governmental structures and the ways in which they channel, shape, and encourage certain individual choices[90] (March and Olsen 1989). Culturalist approaches point to local cultures and the degree to which they militate for or against political engagement as explanations for varying degrees of political involvement.[91] Still others, following in a line of research dating back to Toqueville’s ([1835–1840] 2003) Democracy in America, point to the structures of civil society, and the levels of social capital developed therein, and argue that these networks of trust and support are responsible for pulling the agent into politics (see e.g., Skocpol and Fiorina 1999; Putnam 1995a, b, 2000). Political psychologists rely on one’s early childhood experiences[92] and the extent to which they imbue agents with a lust for power[93] and/or expose them to political environments as explanatory factors. Elite theorists argue that one enters politics based on one’s (relatively) advantageous position in the overall social structure (e.g., Dahl 1961 or Domhoff [1983] 1986) or that it is one’s high levels of certain characteristics (education, disposable income, charisma, motivation[94]), pertinent for the practice of politics, which ultimately lead to political action.
Implicit in all of these approaches is what we might say is a “Chinese-box” epistemology. According to the Chinese-box worldview, the social scientist reaches an understanding of agents’ actions through a closer and closer analysis of the various groups to which they belong or positions that they occupy. The analyst begins by separating the individuals to be studied into each of the bigger boxes to which they belong (i.e., white/black, high class/low class, male/female), and then, by using progressively more detailed analysis, the analyst places them into smaller and smaller boxes, so that, for example, all upper-class white women with high levels of education and social capital might be grouped together in one box. Although one could continue indefinitely, in an infinite regress of smaller and smaller boxes, so that only one or two individuals could fit in the final boxes, most analysts stop somewhere along the way in the name of “parsimony.” Upon arriving at the final box, the assumption is made that through this process of association and disassociation, one has developed a causal model capable of explaining the logic of agents’ actions.[95] Combining the findings of each of the traditional analyses of political participation, we might conclude that it is relatively wealthy, well-educated, Protestant white men, from powerful families, who are consciously seeking power to compensate for low-estimates of self, and who are well-connected politically, who take politics as their vocation.
While this characterization borders on a grotesque oversimplification of what are incredibly sophisticated methods for studying social-life, more generally, and political participation, more narrowly, the Chinese-box analogy is nonetheless helpful in that it highlights the problems that are inherent in each of these approaches — problems that must be overcome in any attempt to arrive at a complete understanding of the processes through which one enters politics. The first problem one encounters in Chinese-box epistemology is that it cannot specify which individuals in the smallest box will enter politics, because inevitably not all wealthy, well-educated, Protestant white men from powerful families do. Similarly, it cannot account for the select individuals, from bigger boxes, who, contrary to the logic of the model, end up entering politics. Third, their a-historic view of political socialization, which assumes that politicos are inculcated with the categories, capacities, and/or desires for political life prior to their involvement in politics, cannot explain the changing relationships that individuals take towards politics over the course of their careers — relationships that for many are characterized as more of a twisted, tortured, love affair of ups and downs than an either/or on/off commitment.[96] Fourth, traditional models cannot account for the different qualities or modalities of political engagement among politicos, as their one-size-fits-all models assume that one is either engaged in professional politics or not. Finally, and most damning to traditional modes of political analysis, is the fact that they do not identify the specific mechanisms and/or processes through which politics is taken as a vocation. Although identifying a class or classes of individuals most likely to enter professional politics adumbrates the most general of parameters that can be said to shape political involvement, this only obscures the fact that the essential work of explanation is left undone: how and why does politics specifically come to be experienced as a sensible or meaningful vocation among any number of other potential career paths? What is the “experiential hook” (Willis 1977, p. 103) that draws one to (and to stay in) politics and causes all other relevant lines of action to be cast aside onto the rubbish heap of history?
Before pointing to a way in which to resolve these difficulties, we must first examine another of the implicit assumptions upon which Chinese-box epistemology is based — the assumption that all causal factors are located in the background of the agent. Despite the variation between the perspectives described here — RCT, political psychology, political culture, organization-centered approaches, civic associationalism, and elite studies — their Chinese-box epistemology is based on the shared assumption that the factors that shape an agent’s practice are all causally prior to their involvement in politics; or to put it differently, the causal principles, under Chinese-box thinking, are all assumed to be “background” factors or “independent” variables. For instance, political psychology analyzes how childhood experiences create psychic formations that lead the individual to pursue positions of power later in life. Cultural studies analyze how different systems of belief condition different individuals to view politics in different lights. Organization scholars look at systems of rules, regulations, and incentives and how they then shape agents’ actions. Elite scholars attempt to delimit the structures of society and how they disproportionately predispose certain groups or individuals to enter positions of power. Even RCT, which appears to discuss action in terms of things to be done or goals to achieve, falls back on the explanatory power of background factors when it resorts to the assumption of underlying preferences to explain variations in action. Given this view of causality, it then becomes evident why these schools of thought all rely on Chinese-box epistemology; if it is assumed that background factors are the only causes of action, then one only needs to capture or parse these variables via systematic comparison across cases by building smaller and smaller boxes until the all-important causal factor is isolated.[97] What is missed, however, in focusing solely on background factors, is the range of attractions that exist in the phenomenal foreground of action and that can summon agents into action and compel them to pursue a given objective — attractions that themselves serve as “causal factors.”[98]
Here Jack Katz’s path-breaking work, Seductions of Crime (1988), is illustrative in that it highlights the importance of understanding the foreground of action for any explanation of practice. Katz argues that criminological accounts that point to sociological and psychological background factors as explanations of criminal behavior are misguided and incomplete because they ignore the “distinctive sensual dynamics” underlying the criminal act. Since the agent’s background factors including early childhood experiences (i.e., history of Oedipal conflicts), level of income, amount of education, or position in the system of class relations all remain constant in the moments prior to the crime, they cannot provide the analytical leverage needed to explain the actual occurrence of the crime. Instead, Katz avers that the causally essentially change that leads one into a criminal enterprise occurs in the situational dynamics of the foreground, as “the assailant must sense, then and there, a distinctive constraint or seductive appeal that he did not sense a little while before in a substantially similar place” (p. 4). And it is for this reason, according to Katz, that if one is to understand the commission of the criminal act, one must not ignore the agent’s active engagements with the world, for to do so is to obscure the moral and sensual attractions in the phenomenal foreground of action that pull the agent into criminality.
Making what is in many ways a similar point to Katz’s, Paul Willis, in Learning to Labor (1977), argues against Chinese-box like explanations that understand the (re)production of labor power to be the direct result of class inequalities so that those at the bottom of the class hierarchy are assumed to automatically obtain working class jobs based on their structural position. Instead, Willis proffers that there is an active side to reproduction that is just as integral to the entire process. More specifically, Willis argues that the system of class relations is produced in and through the “lads’” daily struggles for legitimacy and recognition in their schools. Although the lads damn themselves to further marginality by actively opposing the dominant middle class values that emphasize book smarts over street smarts, mental ability over physical ability, they do not experience their actions as such. A contrario, they experience their goofing off and talking back to figures of authority “as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance” (p. 3, emphasis mine). What appear to the teachers and honor students as nothing but churlish forms of behavior that reflect the lads’ poor upbringing and general lack of propriety, the lads believe to be testaments to a person’s “street smarts” and inner character. Thus, following Willis, we might say that the engine of class reproduction is not direct structural coercion, but a dialectical process in which objective forces are transmuted through practice, so that, paradoxically, they exert their influence via the sensual foreground of action.
What help can Katz and Willis provide us in unearthing the pitfalls of Chinese-box epistemology as a theory of political engagement? First, contrary to the best inclinations of many sociologists, objective forces cannot be said to wholly determine practice. For no matter how economic or psychological factors might predispose an individual for violent activity, without the appropriate sensual and emotional valences to the setting, the criminal enterprise is no longer compelling; and without the active complicity of the lads who insist with great moral indignation, that the honor students and their sycophantic ways will never monopolize the teacher’s attention, the class structure is not reproduced. All of which suggests that it is through the mediation of local moral, political, and sensual economies that objective structures can be said to determine political engagement. Or to put it differently, we might say that political engagement is the product of “both antecedent causes and projective purposes” (Jackson 1996, p. 6) so that in order to obtain a properly sociological understanding of the processes through which one engages in professional politics, one cannot exclude subjective understandings for the sake of a strictly objectivist account; one cannot ignore the sensual attractions present in the “positive moment” (Wacquant 1995a, p. 173) of politics in favor of the negative determinants captured through the use of Chinese-box epistemology. Against rational choice theory that posits that underlying preference curves explain variation in political outcomes, a school of political psychology that assumes that socialization has happened once and for all in early childhood, or sociological accounts that point to variations in cultural beliefs or structures of civil society as providing the explanations of why one engages in politics, one must follow the line of thinking established by Lindesmith (1947), Becker (1953), and Hughes (1958) who all point to agents’ active involvements with their environment as recursively developing the motivation necessary for the action.
What follows from this is that in order to understand why one engages in politics, we cannot rely, as has been traditionally done, on disembedded and disembodied reconstructions of politics-in-action.[99] Instead we must attempt through up close observations and detailed descriptions to reconstruct the feel of the action and the “immanent sociality of human experience” (Ostrow 1990, p. 7) — or what we might say are the lived realities of the political animal.[100] Central to our examinations must be an analysis of the ways in which politicos “think and feel about their trade,” just as we must ask “what virtues it holds for them, and how it affects their life and self” (Wacquant 1995b, p. 490). While emphasizing the necessity of description as a prelude to a genuinely sociological study of political practice may grate against the better sensibilities of some social scientists, it is important to emphasize that as Katz (2001, 2002) points out, rich descriptions of how an action is accomplished, naturally lead to an understanding of why the action is conducted.[101] At the same time, however, we must identify the objective conditions that shape the possibility of those experiences. While some politicos may experience politics as consisting of unique moral and sensual valences that are seen as inherently attractive, these attractions are shaped by specific social conditions of possibility that determine which individuals are most likely to experience them. As Durkheim puts it in regard to maintaining a sense of duty: “If a sense of duty is to take strong root in us, the very circumstances of our life must serve to keep it active. There must be a group about us to call it to mind and, as often happens when we are tempted to turn a deaf ear. A way of behavior, no matter what it be, is set on a steady course only through habit and exercise” ([1957] 2001, p. 12). Without a group to bring them to mind, habit to keep them active, or appropriate categories with which to experience them, these phenomenal attractions of politics have no causal purchase of their own.
*** Towards an Analytic of Political Experience
Where then might sociologists begin the task of richly describing and reconstructing the texture and experiences of political life? What categories or concepts might be helpful for this endeavor? One worthwhile place to begin, as Arthur and Joan Kleinman (1996, p. 170) suggest, is to attempt to determine what is at stake for agents in any given setting. While this may strike some as nothing more than a passé platitude of ethnographic research, the Kleinmans argue that there are indeed important theoretical reasons to begin with just such a question. These reasons are to be found in the long and reasonably diffuse line of what we might term “experiential philosophy” which contains such figures as William James, John Dewey, Alfred Schutz, Helmuth Plessner — and to which we might add somewhat paradoxically, in that neither of them spoke at any length, if at all, on the subject of experience in their writings, Durkheim and Goffman. Regardless of whatever differences these thinkers might have had with respect to theoretical influences or substantive interests, all of their works, in some way, however obliquely, speak to the fact that experience is the “intersubjective medium of social transactions in local moral worlds” (p. 170) — transactions that inherently carry stakes for those involved, including, but not limited to, survival, coherence, and transcendence (p. 189). Thus by identifying what is at stake for agents in a given setting, we can begin to understand the character and quality of their experiences.[102]
While the limits of this paper do not allow us to engage in an in-depth discussion of the form, content, and origins of the various stakes that political agents struggle over, or the conditions that shape their possibility, the following examples from political nonfiction can help us begin to consider what they might look, sound, and feel like, and how we, as sociologists, might go about deciphering them. The purpose here is not to suggest that these examples are wholly representative or wholly exhaustive of the range of stakes at play in political life. They are meant to serve as preliminary evidence of the fruitfulness of examining the stakes of a given setting as a means of elucidating the experiential details of the foreground of action.
He would get someone to do something for him, and he had a real pipeline to all the [governmental] bureaus. And he wouldn’t take no — he would pursue these things like it was life and death. And when he got something for somebody — when we could write and tell somebody that they could look forward to getting something — that was a real victory. He’d put down the phone — “Stelle! Yay!” He’d just practically jump up and down. (Caro [1982] (1990), p. 226, emphasis mine).
—Stelle Harbin, One of LBJ’s assistants, when he was secretary for Congressman Dick Kleberg, commenting on his excitement upon securing a constituent’s request.
This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was supposed to back me, had already made a deal with a former crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss’s .... I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried out. I had to let a former saloonkeeper and murderer, a friend of the Boss’s, steal about $10,000 from the general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don’t know .. Anyway I’ve got the $6,500,000 worth of roads on the ground and at a figure that makes the crooks tear their hair. The hospital is up at less cost than any similar institution in spite of my drunken brother-in-law [Fred Wallace], whom I’d had to employ on the job to keep peace in the family. I’ve had to run the hospital job myself and pay him for it .. Am I an administrator or not? Or am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can’t (McCullough 1992, p. 186).
I wonder if I did the right thing to put a lot of no account sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers and save $3,500,000. I believe I did do right. Anyway, I’m not a partner of any of them and I’ll go out poorer in every way than I came into office. (p. 187).
—Harry Truman, then presiding judge of Jackson County, Mo.
[Luther] Jones would remember ‘being awakened at five a.m. and walking to the office in the snow, and wondering was it worth it.’ But he concluded it was worth it because “I always had the feeling that if I worked for Lyndon Johnson, goodies would come to me .... I was on the make, too.... I wanted to improve myself ” (Caro [1982] (1990), p. 238).
—Luther Jones, one of LBJ’s assistants when he was Secretary for Congressman Dick Kleberg.
In short, well-known or not, I still had to sell myself — or as [my campaign manager] so fetchingly phrased it, peddle my ass like any hooker on a dark street corner. A good many ways exist to accomplish that — working to get press coverage, mass media advertising, direct mail. There’s no substitute, though, for simply being seen by the people you want to vote for you. There’s no substitute for going where the people are. And, once they see you in the flesh, they’re more likely to vote for you than for some other candidate they’ve never laid eyes on. (Lynch 2001, p. 114, emphasis mine).
No, I decided, I was not about to express agreement with Jim Mancuso’s contention on my radio program that most people believe all Italian-Americans to be “goons and buffoons” involved in organized crime. That was nonsensical on its face. I would stand up firmly for free expression. I wasn’t going to pander to this group. I was not about to whore myself into public office. (p. 177, emphasis mine).
For me, shame was strictly a thing of the past when it came to raising money. I made no promises, neither stated nor implied, in exchange for campaign cash, but I solicited it vigorously. (p. 269).
—Dan Lynch, an independent who ran as a Democrat for NY State Assembly.
Public life is always in your blood .... It never quite leaves you. (Confessore 2005, p. 1).
It was kind of like being on the rebound, you know? ... Your girlfriend dumped you, and somebody else is coming up, and you think, welllllll .. (p. 2).
—Rick Lazio, former Congressman and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, commenting on life outside of politics and on receiving offers to run again.
What do these anecdotes reveal about the universe of professional politics? What is at stake in the everyday comings and goings of a politico that might lead one to jump up and down upon securing a constituent’s request? What can be so distinctive and compelling about public life that it “never quite leaves you?” The common myth of politics is of course that it is the purview of “great men” whose actions promise to single-handedly change the course of world events. In contrast to what the “great men” view of politics might suggest, however, the nitty-gritty reality of political life is often comprised of relatively common or even mundane activities. Luther Jones, for example, consistently woke up at 5 a.m. to complete the task of responding to constituents’ letters and to carry out the other administrative tasks that LBJ would ask of him. During his campaign for State Assemblyman, Dan Lynch made a concerted effort to “go where the people [were]” so that he could be seen by potential voters. Harry Truman, during his time as County Judge, or what might be known today as a County Executive, was responsible for the implementation of a voter-approved public works project. Looking beyond the myth of “great men” and “great actions” to the everyday routines and rituals of political life, forces us to break with the illusion that politics is somehow a preordained world of excitement and intrigue. If the everyday nuts and bolts of political life — making telephone calls to inquire about unanswered requests (LBJ), meeting new people (Dan Lynch), responding to complaints and requests (Luther Jones), working to implement a new program (Harry Truman) — are not unique to politics and are in fact quite common across a wide range of jobs (e.g., bureaucrat, sales person, administrative assistant), then whatever is unique to the experience of politics — the “it” of public life that Lazio referred to — must be a product not of those actions themselves but of how they are carried out and to what end they are conducted. To put it differently, we might say that the seductions of political life are not something that one passively “experiences,” they are something that one manages to appropriate through specific forms and/or modalities of engagement.
So what is it in “how” political action is carried out that can make politics a compelling vocation? The short answer is that, for politicos, politics comes to be, following Goffman’s ([1967] 1982), “Where the Action Is” a “consequential and problematic” endeavor that is willfully engaged in (p. 185). Thus, it is no accident that natives to political life often compare politics to other forms of “action” — that is, contests where the outcome is uncertain, but where there are clearly defined winners and losers. For example, war analogies abound in the political lexicon: you “target” the opposition by using such “clever tactics” as “outflank[ing]” them, “smok[ing] them out” (Klein 2002), employing a “machine gun attack,” or by using a “pincer” movement (Faucheux 1997, p. 30). Newt Gingrich, borrowing from Mao Zedong, posited a much more direct link between politics and war when he stated that: “politics is war without blood” (quoted in Faucheux 1997, p. 26). Another native informant offered additional confirmation of the relative abundance of “folk” associations between politics and war, when he confided that in his experience, “most campaign metaphors are martial” (Klein 2002, p. 163). Further analysis of works of political nonfiction suggests that sports metaphors are also quite popular in the vernacular of the politico. Whether the best way to beat one’s opponent in politics is to use a “full court press,” or whether your antagonist is guilty of “moving the goal posts,” there is certain to be plenty of action in the “main bout” (NPR 2005).[103]
If, indeed, politics is “where the action is,” then what is the “action” that politicos are participating in or fighting over? A strictly materialist account might argue that the “action” of politics is about controlling the levers of society — about winning office, holding office, and exercising power. Undoubtedly, this is to a certain extent true, as politics is, as Lasswell (1936) famously put it, a battle over “who gets what, when, and how.” But to telescope all of politics and political practice into nothing more than an intentional quest for elected office implies that there is not much “action” to be had in politics. For example, if we limit our discussion to national offices in the USA, in which elections are held every 2, 4, or 6 years, then the “action” is spread across such extended periods of time that few if any acts could be considered “fateful” in terms of ever concretely affecting the politician’s chances of being reelected. If we take a somewhat similar tack and assume that the “action” of politics is entirely about the procurement of goods for others through the passage of bills — whether for altruistic or more nefarious reason — then we are in the problematic position of assuming that unless one is in the actual process of passing a bill, they are out of the “action” (here again though “action” is a rather diffuse thing depending on how quickly one’s bill is voted on). Ultimately, the ground on which to justify delimiting, a priori, the “action” of political life to struggles over material resources is inherently shaky. To do so would cause us to overlook the more “mundane” forms of action that can be found in political life, and which, paradoxically, can serve as avenues to other more transcendent attractions of practicing politics.
While activities such as sports and gambling are readily structured in a zero-sum form with clearly defined winners and losers — making it difficult for one to participate in them without also being involved in “the action” — other realms of social life tend to be structured in such a way so that individuals can manage their “time and time off so as to avoid fatefulness”[104] (Goffman [1967] 1982, p. 170). One might think that the latter would be true for the world of politics since many of the everyday rituals that politicos participate in consist of relatively routine interactions[105] — from making telephone calls to ask a favor of a contact, to meeting new people, and attending strategy sessions on how best to implement a new plan — in which “action” could conceivably be easily avoided. But when we look at the actual details of political life, however, we notice, that not only is fatefulness regularly not avoided but that it is also something that is actively “carved out” (p. 200) of relatively routine interactions so that it comes to imbue the entire lebenswelt of the politico.[106] Thus, Johnson pursued things with his contacts at the governmental bureaus like they were “life and death,” even though procuring favors from the Byzantine bureaucracies was no simple matter and he could just as easily have told the district’s constituents that the matter was largely out of his hands. Truman struggled over whether or not his actions were “right” or whether he “compounded a felony,” even though he could have rightly insisted that he was ‘forced’ into allowing the Boss’ friend to steal $10,000 because of the nature of the Boss’ seedy connections. Rather than refusing to solicit money so as not to embarrass himself, shame became “a thing of the past” for Lynch, and he solicited it vigorously. While public encounters with strangers could have remained a relatively undifferentiated part of his daily comings and goings, they were now strategic opportunities for Lynch to “peddle himself.”
The tendency might be to see this proclivity for fateful encounters as being dictated by an underlying logic aimed at maximizing profits. Perhaps Lynch’s willingness to sell himself and to solicit money were direct products of his intention to be elected. Perhaps Truman was simply assessing his actions in terms of how they might affect his future election chances. And, in those often striking moments when fatefulness is apparently avoided, according to common logic so as to avoid damaging one’s reputation or future chances at election, perhaps there is yet further evidence to support the idea that political action is dictated by utilitarian aims. But to assert that the game of politics is played according to nothing other than rational calculations of how best to increase one’s power or one’s likelihood of holding office is to seriously distort the logic of political practice and to prematurely truncate the process of inquiry and explanation. Indeed the “action” of politics need not be seen as a product of an abstract commitment to a future goal. The appeal of the “action” is something that one experiences as being inherently appealing or seductive — as alluring as, say, a new romantic relationship — so that it need be raised to the level of consciousness in order to have any significance for the politico. As Lazio described the possibility of getting back into politics: “It was kind of like being on the rebound, you know?...Yoi.ir girlfriend dumped you, and somebody else is coming up, and you think, welllllll ....” In restructuring relatively routine activities and interactions into zero-sum games to be won or lost, politicos deftly create the possibility for “action” in their lives, and it is this taking of chances, this pressing of limits, that allows them to construct uniquely compelling selves. Whether the contest is geared towards convincing someone to support them by showcasing their “character,” “vision,” or “empathy,” or whether it is geared towards “beating” another opponent by employing cunning and strategy, politicos are engaged in a project of struggling to construct transcendent selves.
All of which suggests that the experience of everyday life in politics hinges on the outcome of an untold number of, what we might call, following Goffman, “character contests,” in which “border disputes are sought out and indulged in (often with glee) as a means of establishing where one’s boundaries are” (Goffman [1967] 1982, p. 216). Just as Katz (1988, p. 102) showed that being a “badass” “becomes seductive when one senses in interactional detail the transcendent significance of manifesting meanness,” politicos experience the allure of being “presidential”[107] when they sense in their everyday routines and interactions with constituents or other politicos, the transcendent significance of embodying the universal. For Johnson, the metaphor of having a pipeline to the bureaus is hardly arbitrary; by successfully obtaining a favor from his contacts in order to assist a constituent, he shows that his transcendent powers were not limited to the “here and now” but were in fact effective “over there” as well. For Jones, the transcendent significance of Johnson’s abilities was made evident to him in Johnson’s everyday political battles. While Jones figured that goodies would come to him if he worked for Johnson, we recognize the full extent of Johnson’s transcendent appeal for Jones, when Jones says that by working with Johnson he was also on the path to transcendence, as he was “on the make, too... I wanted to improve myself.” For both Trippi and Johnson, their dedication to the work of politics shows that politics is not just something that they do or act out; it is also fundamentally who they are. If, as Bourdieu (2005) shows, the elected official or leader, by speaking and acting on behalf of a given group, can bring that group into de facto existence and out of the nonexistence of isolated individuals, then the opposite dynamic is also true. By bringing a group into existence, whether it is by attracting a significant crowd at a campaign stop (Johnson), or whether it is by building a grass-roots organization, which in turn mobilizes voters for a candidate (Trippi), the group in turn brings the politico out of the nonexistence of an anonymous individual and into the existence of a transcendent being whose self has become objectified in the group.
But therein lies one of the central paradoxes of politics. While one of the routes to embodying the universal is to be all things to all people, in being all things to all people, one risks being nothing at all. Alternatively, however, by “taking a stand” and refusing to “give in” to external pressures, one risks adopting an inherently narrow and/or limited position, which falls short of being “universal.” Testifying to this very conundrum is the double-sided meaning to be found in the all too apt suggestion by Lynch’s campaign manager that Lynch should peddle himself like a hooker on a dark street corner. On one hand, there is perhaps no greater threat to the sanctity of the self and its potential for transcendence than voluntarily allowing the self to be penetrated for the purpose of financial gain: not only am I not over there, but you are also penetrating me here; not only am I being penetrated by you, but I am allowing you to do so for your reasons (money) and not mine. With these dynamics pulsating through his immediate foreground of action, Lynch insists, with the moral indignation of someone whose self is threatened with penetration, that he is not about to whore himself into public office. In so doing, he reverses the situational dynamics and reclaims his project of transcendence by showing that he is not affected by the traditional political logic of quid pro quo, which others might be persuaded by. Simultaneously, however, there is a deeper, more hidden, irony to be found in the metaphor of prostitution; namely, that there is a fine line between the loss of self through penetration and the affirmation of self through the taking in of the other: you may think you are penetrating me, but I am really the one who is penetrating you, because what I have to offer is so alluring that you cannot say no. Thus, Truman, who admits to putting a lot of “no account sons of bitches on the payroll” and to paying other “sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth,” ultimately concludes that he did do right as it allowed him to save the county $3,500,000. And with an ever-so-swift legerdemain, he is able to reverse the dialectic between master and slave as he claims: “no I am really the one who is penetrating you.”
*** Conclusion
Marx famously stated that the chief defect of materialist thinking was its penchant for considering reality “only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, [or] practice” (Marx [1972] 1978, p. 143, original emphasis). The same could be said today apropos of the dominant modes of thought used to explain political involvement. In order to more fully identify the factors that affect both the functioning of democracies and the actions of political leaders, we must scientifically interrogate not only the objective structures of states or the background factors that characterize those leaders, but also the moral and sensual attractions of doing politics. For it is only once we have descended from the heights of abstract political thought and have captured the character and texture of the political animal’s everyday life that we will be able to suggest which environments might be most conducive to its health.
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** Chapter 11. Afterword: Political Ethnography as Art and Science
Charles Tilly
Adam Ashforth has written one of the recent political ethnographies I most admire. His Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa draws on a total of about 3 years’ residence during the 1990s in Soweto (South West Township), an Apartheid-built black suburb of Johannesburg, plus subsequent visits to his adopted family and friends there. Earlier, Ashforth wrote an impressive historical analysis of the process by which Apartheid took shape (Ashforth 1990). But preparation for his book on witchcraft, violence, and democracy plunged him shoulder-deep into ethnography. Through first-hand observation, personal intervention, and incessant interrogation of his acquaintances, Ashforth built up a powerful picture of coping, strife, and hope amid vicious violence. Ashforth’s ethnographic involvement forced him to abandon many a preconceived category and explanation of struggle during and after Apartheid.
Ashforth’s ethnography yielded remarkable, even disturbing, results. His analysis persuades me, at least, of two surprising conclusions I long resisted when hearing them from Adam: first, that no one can make sense of local South African politics without understanding the enormous part played by fears about, accusations of, and reactions to witchcraft in Soweto’s (and, by extension, South Africa’s) everyday politics; second, that no one can hope to deal with South Africa’s devastating AIDS epidemic or build local-level democracy without confronting witchcraft directly.
Many a political ethnographer will resonate to Ashforth’s reflection:
Fortunately, from my first day in Soweto I was blessed with remarkable friends who guided me through the pleasures and perils of life in the township. They steered me toward what little understanding of their world I can now claim, though they do not always agree with the way I have come to understand this place. I have read widely in the years since I began getting to know Soweto, but the essence of whatever I know about this place I have learned through my friends: how I know it is by being there as a friend. This is both the strength and the weakness of what follows. For what I came to understand — dimly, slowly, over many years of fumbling in the dark — is that their world is my world, and mine theirs, and yet we also live in worlds apart (Ashforth 2005, pp. x-xi).
In order to do his ethnography, Ashforth had to become at least moderately competent in Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, and the special brands of English Sowetans speak. It helped that he learned to play the violin Zulu style with other musicians in local drinking places, and that he was ready to defend his adopted brothers and sisters from recurrent threats of attack by weapons and witchcraft. His deep involvement in local life allowed him to reconstruct South African politics at the levels of persons, households, and small groups.
To the extent that politics actually consists not of big structures and prescribed roles but of dynamic, contingent interaction among persons, households, and small groups — and I believe that extent to be very large — political ethnography provides privileged access to its processes, causes, and effects. It makes little difference in this regard whether we take politics in the extremely broad sense of all interactions involving the exercise of power or in the narrower, more manageable sense I prefer: interactions in which at least one government participates as actor, object, and/or influential third party. In either the broad or the narrow sense, political ethnography brings field workers into direct contact with political processes instead of filtering that knowledge through other people’s testimony, written records, and artifacts of political interaction.
As the superb reports in this collection indicate, to be sure, “political ethnography” commonly includes a continuum of procedures for collection of evidence, from intrusive to inobtrusive:
1. In-depth interviews
1. Conversation
1. Participant observation
1. Passive observation of interaction
1. Covert observation of interaction
1. Inobtrusive observation concerning residues and consequences of interaction
With the exception of Matthew Mahler (who relies on a version of item 6: analysis of nonfiction retrospective reports of political involvement), every author in this special issue employs more than one of these approaches to political ethnography. Each approach has distinctive strengths and weaknesses. To avoid turning this brief introduction into a methodological treatise, however, let me concentrate on examining what our authors actually have to teach us about political processes, and about how to study them.
Here is my main point: if you believe (as I do) that how things happen is why they happen, then ethnography has great advantages over most other conventional social scientific methods as a way of getting at cause-effect relations. Most methods depend on correlations and comparative statics, asking whether observed variation corresponds to plausible consequences of one condition or another. Ethnography engages the analyst in looking at social processes as they unfold rather than reasoning chiefly from either the conditions under which they occur or the outcomes that correlate with them.
Effective political ethnography resembles good clinical medicine in connecting art with science. A clinical artist picks up clues about patients and their maladies that even probing mechanical and chemical tests fail to detect, then assembles them into competing causal accounts that suggest alternative therapies. But only systematic knowledge of the body’s operation, of the symptoms presented by different diseases, of test results, of the available therapies, and of those therapies’ probable consequences — in short, of the relevant science — allows a diagnostician to move from preliminary observation to treatment. On the whole, political ethnographers stop short of intervening directly to cure the ills they observe. Otherwise, the analogy holds: art involving shrewd observation integrates with systematic use of accumulated knowledge. First-rate political ethnography cannily combines art with science.
Yet the analogy fails us in one crucial respect: the range of questions being asked and answered. Despite the somewhat different orientations of epidemiology and public health, by and large medical clinicians are trying to figure out what caused some individual’s pathology, and what will alleviate that pathology. Political ethnographers ask a wider range of questions. In the set of papers at hand, we can group those questions in three rough categories: (1) How does a given cause produce its effects? (2) What explains the variable processes that occur in ostensibly similar situations? (3) How can ethnographers produce valid, credible knowledge of social processes? Seen in this light, the papers cluster as follows:
*** From Cause to Effect
Wendy Wolford: How do people get involved in political mobilization, and what impact does it have on them, especially on their sense of what happened?
Rosanne Rutten: In patron-client relations, how does shame affect a worker’s interactions with employers, and how do activists overcome the inhibitions produced by shame?
Patricia Steinhoff: How do protest participants and police negotiate limits to acceptable performances?
Pamela Price: How does the decline of authoritative inequality affect interpersonal interaction patterns, and participants’ interpretations of those interaction patterns? Enrique Arias: How does the emergence of powerful criminal organizations affect the operation of previously existing patron-client systems connecting politicians to citizens?
*** Variation in Processes
Tammy Smith: How does the presence or absence of interpersonal trust affect the capacity of groups to confront collective problems?
Kathleen Blee and Ashley Currier: How and why do social movement groups vary in their response to national electoral campaigns, and how does the character of their involvement in such campaigns affect their retrospective assessments?
Mirella Landriscina: What determines the extent to which activist organizations operate within routine politics, in contentious politics, or both in alternation?
*** How to Create Knowledge
Elisabeth Wood: What ethical choices confront ethnographers in conflict zones? How should (and do) those choices affect their work?
Matthew Mahler: What analytic approaches yield adequate accounts of individual experience in political engagement?
I won’t spoil readers’ enjoyment of these rich papers by summarizing how the authors answer their questions. But notice two features of the questions. First, all of them overflow the immediate situations in which the authors did their ethnographies; they give the lie instantly to the idea that the chief value of ethnography is to provide more interesting or adequate descriptions of social situations. Second, they all concern processes rather than correlations or comparative statistics.
I rest my case.
*** References
Ashforth, A. (1990). The politics of official discourse in twentieth-century South Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ashforth, A. (2005). Witchcraft, violence, and democracy in South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
** [Back Matter]
*** About the Contributors
Enrique Desmond Arias is Associate Professor of Government at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center at City University of New York. He is the author of Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). The volume examines the politics of crime and violence in Rio de Janeiro shantytowns. He has published articles on the politics of crime, NGOs, social mobilization, and human rights in Latin American Politics and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and The Journal of Latin American Studies.
Javier Auyero is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics, Contentious Lives, and Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina, and has published numerous articles in Theory and Society, Ethnography, Mobilization, Latin American Research Review, and The Journal of Latin American Studies, among others. He is the current editor of Qualitative Sociology.
Kathleen M. Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She has written books on organized racist groups and the development of regional poverty. She is now completing a comparative ethnography of emerging social movement groups in Pittsburgh and an ethnography of how victim communities experience hate violence.
Ashley Currier is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Texas A&M University. Her prior research examines how, when, and why Namibian and South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) social movement organizations become publicly visible or withdraw from public visibility.
Lauren Joseph is a Ph.D. student at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, urban sociology, political ethnography, and identitybased social movements. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of the contested meanings of politics within the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movement. She is currently a researcher in a study of HIV and heterosexual sexual behavior in suburban areas with high rates of poverty and HIV incidence. She is also the managing editor of Qualitative Sociology.
Mirella Landriscina is currently Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Department at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, New York. Her research interests include social movements, poverty, homelessness, and the nonprofit sector.
Matthew Mahler is a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University. His dissertation, entitled Homo Politicus: On Politics and Passions, examines the social production of political agents. His broader research interests lay in the areas of social theory, politics, and the epistemology of sociological research.
Pamela Price is Professor of South Asian History at the University of Oslo. Beginning her research career with studies of nineteenth-century India, after moving to Norway she shifted her focus to postcolonial politics. Her recent work on state-level politics in South India includes “Ideological Integration in Post-Colonial (South) India: Aspects of a Political Language” in Crispin Bates and Subho Basu, eds., Rethinking Indian Political Institutions (Anthem, 2005) and “Ideological Elements in Political Instability in Karnataka: Janata Dal in the Late 1990s,” forthcoming in the volume Development in Karnataka: Challenges of Governance, Equity and Empowerment, edited by Gopal Kadekodi, Ravi Kanbur, and Vijayendra Rao.
Rosanne Rutten is Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her ethnographic research concerns worker activism, guerrilla politics, and counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Recent publications include Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements: Framing Protest in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (coedited with Michiel Baud, Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Tammy Smith is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2006. Her research interests include the impact of war and displacement on social trust, historical narratives, gender inequalities, and the development of new formal institutions. Her work benefits from a decade of experience in the field of international development and human rights in the Balkans and Central Eastern Europe.
Patricia Steinhoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. A Japan specialist who studies Japanese radical left groups, she is the author or editor of 14 books, including three in Japanese, and over 80 articles and book chapters. Recent publications include “Kidnapped Japanese in North Korea: The New Left Connection” Journal of Japanese Studies 30:1, Winter, 2004, and Gilda Zwerman and Patricia Steinhoff, “When Activists Ask for Trouble: State-Dissident Interactions and the New Left Cycle of Resistance in the United States and Japan,” in Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller, eds., Repression and Mobilization (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). She is currently writing a book on Japan’s invisible civil society.
Charles Tilly is Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University. His most recently published books are Regimes and Repertoires (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Wendy Wolford is Assistant Professor of Geography at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research interests include social movements, the political economy of development, and political ecology. She has written two books: To Inherit the Earth (Food First Press, 2003, coauthored with Angus Wright), and This Land is Ours Now (Duke University Press, forthcoming), both on the Rural Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil. She has published several articles in journals such as Environment and Planning A, Mobilization: An International Journal of Sociology, and The Journal of Agrarian Change. Recent awards include a fellowship at the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies and a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study institutional aspects of land distribution in Brazil.
Elisabeth Jean Wood is Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In her research on civil wars — patterns of political violence, the logic of collective action, the conditions for robust negotiated settlements — she draws on ethnographic field research, formal modeling, and analysis of macroeconomic, human rights violations, and other data. She is the author of Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
*** Index
A
Abu-Lughod, L., 18, 25
Action
meaning of, 141
path-dependent sequences of, 158
Actors, in social groups, 138–139
Adam Ashforth’s ethnography, 247
Agrarian reform movement, 15
Akihito’s coronation and protests, 64
Allied Occupation, 61
Alvito, M., 118–119
American Journal of Political Science, 2
American Political Science Review, 2
Anti-Emperor protests, a study, see Japanese anti-Emperor protests, a study
Archer, R., 130
Aristotle’s political animal, 225
B
Balapalle village, quatitative studies of agrarian changes
caste struture, 90–92
forms of democratization, 106–108
indication of shifts in authoritative
relations, 95–97
respect, notion and status, 97–104
values and beliefs in 1970s and 1980s, 93–95
village governance, present, 104–106
Bhayam-bhakti attitude, 93
Bosnia postwar, institution building
analysis of administrative discrimination development of confidence, 145–147 participation of municipal officials and
citizens, 147–151
background, 141–144
data collection, 144–145
Brazilian military regime, 113
Brizola, L., 114
Brulle, R. J., 183
Buraku Liberation League (BLL), 69
Bush, George W. See social movement groups (SMGs), ethnographic research on
C
Cardoso, F. H., 30
Carioca clientelism, 116
Casa da Paz, 127
Chaves, M., 183
Chinese-box epistemology, 231–237
Cicero’s interviews, context of social mobilization. See Interview, of rural worker
Clientelism
in America, 112–113
in criminal environments, 115–117 ethnographic analysis of clientelist practices in three favelas
Santa Ana, 125–127
Tubarao, 121–125
Vigario Geral, 127–129
in Jamaica, 115–117
in Rio de Janeiro. See Organized Violence and Clientelism, in Rio de Janeiro
traditional, 112
Confidence, 140
Conflictual cooperation, 183–185
“Continuum of care” model, for addressing homeless people, 185
Corbridge, S., 90
Cress, D., 158
D
Davis, M., 89
Dayton Peace Agreement, 143
Deference rituals, 39–40
della Porta, D., 184
Diani, M., 184
Dictatorship era, of Brazil, 113–114
Drug gangs, 114
Drug trafficking and clientelism, in Rio de Janeiro, 111–112
Dynamics of shame in face-to-face encounters, 40–43
E
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx, Karl), 224
Edwards, B., 160
El Salvador, research study at emotional challenges in research, 220–221
ethical challenges in research, 214–220
field conditions, 211–214
purpose and general methodology of the research, 206–211
Emotional energy, 37
Emotion work
definition, 51
techniques, 51–52
Environment First (EF), strategic response to elections, 172–173
Ethical dillemas, in field research. See El Salvador
research study at El Salvador, 206–211
Ethnographers and credible knowledge of social processes, 249–250
Ethnographic research, within sociology
definition, 2
notion of repertoire of collective action, 3–4
political, 2–3
Experiential philosophy, 237
F
Face-to-face encounters, 37
Favela-Bairro program, 119
Fear, physical basis of, 93
Feminist movements, analysis of, 157
Foley, M., 160
French-style demonstrating by Japanese, 75
G
Garner, R. A., 184
Gay, R., 113
Giugni, M., 181, 184
Goffman, E., 37–38, 182, 226
H
Handler, J. F., 183
Hardin, R., 139
Harriss, J., 90
Helping Hand program, 30
Hochschild, A., 51
Homans, G., 225
I
Institutionalized advocacy organization, case analysis
nonprofit organizations, perspectives of, 183–185
Project H.O.M.E.
media coverage on homeless people, 186–187
overview, 180–181, 185–186 panhandling issues and reactions, 188–200
strategic response to media outrage, 187–188
Institution building, post war
and administrative discrimination, 136
In Bosnia, a study
analysis of administrative discrimination, 145–151
background, 141–144
data collection, 144–145
in the context of social capital, 138–141 development programs in Bosnia, 136
Interview, of a rural worker
about MST, 27–29
agrarian reform and the MST, 22–23 as an undocumented worker, 22 discussions on his participation in MST, 20 early years, 21
government-subsidized projects, 26–27 life at job, 21–22, 24–25 of national politics, 30–31
opinion of the rural trade union, 29–30 participation in MST, 23–26 sugarcane cultivation, 27 transformation in tenancy norms and mobility, 21
vision of “organization,” 29
Iranian Revolution 1979, 18
J
Japan Communist Party (JCP), 61
Japanese anti-Emperor protests, a study compliance with the limits of dissent, 80–82
Japanese anti-Emperor protests, a study construction of limits of dissent, 62–64 demonstrations as a social form, 64–68 findings of the study, 82–84 historical contexts, 60–62 isolation of demonstrations and protestors, 68–72
Japanese anti-Emperor protests, a study (cont.) methodology, notes on, 84–85 permissible protests, 72–80
Japan Socialist Party (JSP), 61
Joe Trippi’s political career, 230–231
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 1
K
Katz, H., 226
Katz, J., 234–236
Katzenstein, M. F., 184
Klingemann, H.-D., 136
L
Land reform movement, in Brazil, 15
Learning to Labor (Willis, Paul), 235
Leeds, E., 115
Levi, M., 135–136
Lipsky, M., 183
Lula’s election, 30–31
Lynch, F., 46
Lyndon Johnson’s political passions, analysis, 228–230
M
Mainwaring, S., 112
Marcos’s martial law period, 56
McCarthy, J., 157
McPhail, C., 62
Meyer, Megan, 157
Michels, R., 184
Mollering, G., 140
Movement of Rural Landless Workers (MST), 14 motive of, 25
Movimento Democrático Brasiliero, 114
MST squatters, 15–16
Mueller, C. M., 157
N
National Institute for Colonization and
Agrarian Reform (INCRA), 23, 25, 28
No More War (NMW), strategic response to elections, 170–172
Nonprofit organizations, 183
O
O’Donnell, G., 120–121
O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem
Terra, 14
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) program, Bosnia, analysis of, 142, 145–147
Organized Violence and Clientelism, in Rio de Janeiro
contemporary clientelist practices, 129–131
drug trafficking and clientelism, 111–112 ethnographic analysis of clientelist practices in three favelas
Santa Ana, 125–127
Tubarao, 121–125
Vigario Geral, 127–129
history, 113–115
in modern times, 118–121
Outcast status, of the demonstrators, 70–71
Outreach Coordination Center (OCC), 185
P
Passy, F., 181, 184
Paternalistic and poverty-ridden political culture, in the Northeast, 23
Path-dependent sequences, of action, 158
Patrimonialism, 112
Patriot Act, 166
Patronage politics, 113–115
Peace groups, analysis of, 157
Peace Management Initiative, 116–117
Permissible protest limits, study of. See Japanese anti-Emperor protests, a study
Philadelphia Code, 187–188
Phillipines workers, experiences of background of revolutionary movement, 44–47
confrontation with planters, 47–51 deference of workers, 46–47
emotional complex, 45–46 patronage complex, 44 self-confidence in public encounters, building of, 54–55
seminars, role of, 52
shift in reference group, reinforcement of, 52–53
workers attitude towards planters, 45
Pierson, P., 158
Pleasure of agency, 18
Police-demonstrator encounters, 60
Police Law (1954), 61
Police responses, to demonstrations, 77–80
Policing, styles of, 73–75
Political anecdotes, analysis, 237–243
Political engagement, understanding Chinese-box epistemology, 231–237 elite theorists, views of, 232 examples from political nonfiction, 237–243
Lyndon Johnson’s political passions, analysis, 228–230
political career of Trippi, Joe, 230–231
Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation,” discussion on, 227–228
Political ethnographers, 225
Political ethnography, 19, 248–249
Pred, A., 159
Professional reform organizations, 183
Project H.O.M.E., ethnographic analysis of methods, 182–183 observations on advocacy movements media coverage on homeless people, 186–187
panhandling issues and reactions, 188–200
strategic response to media outrage, 186–187
overview, 180–181, 185–186
Pruijt, H., 184
Putnam, R., 135–136
Q
Qualitative analysis, 19 forms of data, 226
Qualitative Sociology, 2
R
Radical outcasts, 68–70
Rational choice theory, 231
Respect, notion and status in rural India, 97–104
Rucht, D., 184
Rural coroneis, of Brazil, 113
Rural India, quantitative studies of agrarian changes
forms of democratization, 106–108 indication of shifts in authoritative relations, 95–97
respect, notion and status, 97–104 setting, 90–92
values and beliefs in 1970s and 1980s, 93–95
village governance, present, 104–106
Rural Workers’ Statute (1963), 29
S
Seductions of Crime (Katz, Jack), 234
Seligman, A., 140
Serra, José, 30
Shame, defined, 37
Sidewalk Behavior Bill, 181, 187, 189
Sives, A., 115–116
Smith, S. R., 183
Snake dance style demonstration, 76
Social mobilization, Brazilian Northeast
changes at Flora, 17–18
context of counter-discourse, 18
creation of settlements, 16
cultivation patter of rural settlers, 16
influencing factors
international prices for sugar, 14 social movements, 14–15
qualitative analysis. See Interview, of a rural worker
state government intervention, 15 Social movement groups (SMGs), ethnographic research on
conceptual approach, 158–159
data analysis
analysis of actions, 170–173
SMG events between September 2003 and April 2005, 162–165
SMG’s strategies of action, 165–170
discussion, 173–176
methodological approach, 159–162
Social movements, in Western Europe, 181 Social movements and elections
general discussion, 156–158
social movement groups (SMGs) research analysis of actions, 170–173 conceptual approach, 158–159 discussion, 173–176 methodological approach, 159–162 SMG events between September 2003
and April 2005, 162–165
SMG’s strategies of action, 165–170
Social movement theory, 184
Souto, A., 31
Spatial and conceptual dislocation, of protest, 71–72
Special Higher Police (Tokko), 60
Srinivas, M. N., 89
Stage fright, as personal anxiety, 37 Street demonstrations. See Japanese anti-Emperor protests, a study
T
Tapper, B., 89
Tarrow, S., 135–136
Telugu Desam, 92, 99
Tilly, C., 148, 182
Tokyo Metropolitan Police
Department, 61
Toqueville, A., 232
Traditional clientelism, 112
Trustworthiness, 141
U
UN-OPS project, 142 | Women’s responsibility, in Philippine society, 53–54
Worker-employer relationships. See |
| W
“Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation,” | Phillipines workers, experiences of |
| discussion on, 227–228
Weight of the World (Bourdieu, Pierre), 19 | Z
Zald, M. N., 184 |
[1] Spatial location was a very good indicator of occupational position on the plantation. At one end of the hierarchical spectrum were the plantation owners who lived in the Casa Grande (Big House) and had the run of the plantation (Freyre 1978). At the other end were the moradores (common laborers) who lived in row houses on the plantation, and the clandestinos (illegal workers) who occupied the most insecure positions because they were forced to reside in town and look for work on a daily or seasonal basis (Sigaud 1979).
[2] I do not use real names in this paper, unless they are political figures who spoke “on the record.” Research was conducted in the region in 1999, 2001, and 2003.
[3] The renter still lived on the settlement because his wife and grown son had both accepted plots of land from the government, being eligible according to the government law that gave priority to people with some (any) former association to the land. As extraordinary as it seems, the renter — a well-off man in his late fifties — would also have received a plot if he had not been actively renting out another mill down the road. The renter was almost universally hated, even by people who had liked previous renters (one worker had worked for three renters since he arrived on the plantation in 1962).
[4] Between 1992 and 2000, 12 former plantations in the municipality were expropriated and distributed among 926 families.
[5] In 2001, an official report written by the Mayor’s office (of Agua Preta) listed the municipality’s Human Development Index at.354, less than half the HDI for Brazil as a whole (with an HDI of.742 in 2001) and significantly lower than Pernambuco (with an HDI of.572).
[6] Over the course of fourteen months (in 1998–1999), I worked in the southern state of Santa Catarina (SC) and the northeastern state of Pernambuco (PE). In both regions, I interviewed settlers on three different settlements according to the following criteria: one MST settlement with a history of collective production, one MST settlement with no history of collective production, and one non-MST settlement. In all of the settlements, I interviewed at least one representative from each family, for a total of roughly 200 interviews with rural settlers. In both regions, I asked MST leaders beforehand where I should work. I did this for four main logistical, strategic and political reasons: (1) I am not a member of the MST, and I was dependent on the leaders’ goodwill for access to the settlements; (2) I believe in the right of social movements to limit or manipulate access to their activities: representation is their most important asset and they need to control it in certain ways; (3) although the leaders were asked to suggest settlements as research sites, they did not control who I talked to, what people told me, or what I wrote; (4) finally, knowing that I was on settlements that MST leaders considered successful constituted an important part of my research: it enabled me to ask, how does the MST evaluate success and why?
[7] Because of the strong relationship between agrarian reform and social movements in Brazil, settlements created after 1985 are usually affiliated with a political representative: a social movement, trade union, or religious organization. These political organizations help to lead the settlements’ association and mediate the relationship between settlers and the state. In 2001, numbers issued by the Mayor’s office for settlements created in the 1990s listed five settlements with the MST (including Flora), three with the state federation of agricultural workers (FETAPE), four with a nongovernmental organization, and one autonomous settlement.
[8] The Brazilian currency is the real (R$). In October 1999, one real was equivalent to roughly 50 cents and in October 2003, one real was equivalent to roughly 34 cents (from the Brazil currency exchange calculator: [[http://wwp.brasil-br.com/currency.htm][http://wwp.brasil-br.com/currency.htm]]).
[9] Elisabeth Wood’s (2003) insightful study of insurgents in El Salvador stresses the causal power of what she calls the “pleasure of agency,” where agency is defined as acting purposefully to change life’s circumstances. Jasper (2004) argues for more attention to agency, defined as or through strategic choice-making in social movement settings.
[10] See Javier Auyero (2003) for an excellent example of this.
[11] See Ann Swidler’s 1986 article on “Culture in Action,” where she argues that ideology can be defined as highly articulated, self-conscious aspects of culture, tradition as the articulated cultural beliefs and practices, and common sense as the set of unselfconscious assumptions that are taken for granted or seen as natural (p. 279). Clifford Geertz also outlines the ways in which ideology, religion, and common sense form a cultural whole. Antonio Gramsci of course suggests that common sense (as opposed to ideology, philosophy, and good sense) is the uncritical, perhaps immediate, sense that people make of events, ideas, and social relations.
[12] In a well-argued paper, Charles Kurzman (2004) suggests that understanding why people do things will ultimately undermine our ability to build post hoc explanations. He focuses on events characterized by what he calls “confusion” (to differentiate it from simple uncertainty), such as the 1979 Iranian Revolution: “In this case, and by extension in other cases like it, explanation aspires to make actions expected, after the fact, that even the actors did not expect at the time” (p. 332). In this paper, instead, I argue that a close understanding of why people joined the MST in Agua Preta is necessary to explaining the movement’s subsequent trajectories, both local and national.
[13] This parallels a Foucauldian appreciation for contradiction and contingency in building genealogies instead of neat, linear histories (also see Gupta and Ferguson, 1997 on the need to incorporate contradiction into studies of governmentality). Diani and McAdam (2003) who argue that qualitative analyses can — and is needed to — explain some of the issues or problems raised by the significant quantitative (and structural) work already done over the past 30 years.
[14] In the collected volume of essays edited by Bourdieu (1991), researchers present interviews with minimal introduction and ask readers to “see [the interviewees’] lives as necessary through their reading” (1).
[15] Brazilian currency, approximately one to two US dollars at the time.
[16] The MST’s “agrarian populism,” as I call it in other work (after Gupta 1998; see Wolford 2005), is less evident in political discourse than it is on the ground, in the settlements.
[17] See, for example, Jasper (1998), Goodwin (2000), Taylor (2000), Goodwin et al. (2001), and Aminzade and McAdam (2001, 2002).
[18] Hacienda Milagros (the name is fictitious) is a plantation of some 130 hectares, located in the north-central part of the province, with some 50 to 60 worker families living and laboring on its land. The owner lives with his family in the provincial capital Bacolod City, a half-hour ride from the hacienda. I lived in the hacienda in 1977–1978, 1992, and 1995, for a total period of more than a year, and visited briefly in 1985 and 2000. The early fieldwork, in the 1970s, focused on women workers and their participation in the first unions in the hacienda. Later research, complemented with fieldwork in an upland village in the same province, explored the rise and decline of the Maoist guerrilla movement CPP-NPA as experienced by women and men in these two communities.
[19] For parallels with political patronage and clientelism, see Auyero (2001).
[20] By 1986, the CPP-NPA had mobilized across Negros Island in hundreds of haciendas and villages, organized some 100,000 hacienda workers and peasants into mass organizations, established 251 party branches, and had 27 guerrilla squads fielded across the island. It assisted in staging numerous protest marches and rallies (Coronel 1991, pp. 658, 660, 665–666). Founded in 1969, the Maoist CPP-NPA gained considerable influence and support nationwide, only to lose much of this support again from the late 1980s onwards under the influence of counterinsurgency, democratization, and internal strife. At present, the movement counts an estimated 8,000 cadres nationwide, from a high of 24,000 cadres in 1988. On the CPP-NPA, see, for example, Abinales (1996), Jones (1989), and Weekley (2001); on the CPP-NPA in Negros Occidental: Rutten (1996, 2000).
[21] On worker-employer relationships, Lynch (1973) notes that a request or complaint would be couched in such a way as to express the “assurance that the basic relation of alliance and loyalty had not been disturbed” (ibid., p. 12). Such “smooth” interactions are produced, in particular, by (1) “giving in”: “following the lead or suggestion of another,” usually the stronger party; (2) euphemism, an “art that has long been highly prized in Philippine society;” (3) the use of go-betweens, whereby “the embarrassing request, complaint, or decision is often communicated through a middleman, to avoid the shame... of a face-to-face encounter”; go-betweens are also used to remedy “an existing state of conflict or tension” (ibid, pp. 10–13). Breaching this code of conduct is sanctioned by embarrassment and personal insult — a threat to a person’s self-esteem (amor propio). This sensitivity to personal affront is “an emotional high-tension wire” that protects “from disparagement or question the qualities [a person] most jealously guards as his own best claims to others’ respect and esteem” (ibid., p. 16). Actions that degrade such qualities often provoke violent reactions.
[22] For a penetrating analysis of shame and the worker body, see Scheper-Hughes (1992).
[23] Worldwide, women’s identity as mothers may offer inner strength and social legitimacy to collective struggles, specifically in the context of oppressive relationships where claim-making on the basis of other identities would risk a violent clampdown. Well-known examples are the movements of mothers of victims of state repression, e.g., Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, CO-MADRES in El Salvador, and the Mothers’ Front in Sri Lanka. See, for example, De Alwis (1998).
[24] Ex-untouchables, also known as Dalits, are commonly referred to as Scheduled because of their protection under the Indian Constitution.
[25] States have created reservations in government employment and local elections for “Backward Caste” groups known as OBCs, Other Backward Classes, who are non-Scheduled Caste, low status groups.
[26] I will just mention the regular electoral analyses that appear in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, Wallace and Roy (2003), Yadav (1997), Jaffrelot (2003), Inkinen (2003), and Pai (2002).
[27] Recent work includes Gupta (1998), Fuller and Benei (2000), Hansen (2001), and Ruud (2003).
[28] A pseudonym.
[29] Forward Caste (FC) designates groups with high caste and/or dominant landholding status.
[30] I write a non-English word with italics the first time it appears. I am dropping diacritics and using common Telugu spellings in the Roman alphabet.
[31] The empirical basis of this piece comes from semi-structured, open-ended conversations which took place periodically over six months with approximately 35 people. Among farmers I talked with mostly medium and large landholders in the village, including SCs, BCs, and FCs. A medium size farm holding is between 3 and 8 acres. A large holding is over 8 acres. Among SCs I talked with four men and two women and among BCs, with goldsmiths, weavers, a Kurma man and a washer caste man. Among BC Gowdas I talked with seven women and eight men, including the president of the village government, the leader of Telugu Desam Party members, and a major Congress Party activist. Other partners in conversation were the former Mali Patel and two other members of the ruling group of the former regime. Among the FC Reddys I included two women and six men. Also among the FCs were two Velama men. I usually met with people at their homes and on occasion kinsmen/women, friends or passers-by would listen in and take part in the conversations. I thank Mr. M. Raju, Mrs. Praveena Rao and Mr. Srinivas Dusi for serving as translators. I did not use a tape recorder, but took notes from conversations which I transcribed soon after.
[32] Tapper (1984) gives a discussion of this ideology and its articulation in village ritual.
[33] One lakh is 100,000.
[34] Conversation with Sacha, daughter of founder of Spiritist crèche, October 19, 1998. Conversation took place in the subject’s office at the crèche and ranged over a variety of issues related to the history of the community and the crèche.
[35] Conversation with Jorge, former leader of Ceuzinho AM who would five months later again became president, January 17, 1999. This conversation, in which he was very critical of Bernardo, began at a large street fair late one Sunday afternoon and continued as we walked along Zona Sul beaches and ran into numerous acquaintances of his.
[36] Conversation with Jorge, January 17, 1999.
[37] Observed meeting in samba quadra in Ceuzinho January 25, 1999. The meeting took place on a hot, humid night. Sacha, Alexandre, and other community activists were present. The conversation was free ranging but usually was structured as a dialogue between the other attendees and Bernardo.
[38] Conversation with Elizete, former drug trafficker, on the roof of her building prior to meeting about the possibility of Bernardo taking over the Ceuzinho AM, January 8, 1999.
[39] Observed conversation in darkened AM between Bernardo and Mario, a campaign manager for a politician, August 26, 1998, the conversation was very rapid and both men eventually retired, with the AM vice president, to a back room for a private conversation.
[40] Statements by Bernardo in AM, October 7, 1998.
[41] Brazil has a two-round election system in which all legislative positions are resolved in the first round in an open-list multi-member district plurality voting system. In the first round of voting all parties can contest executive positions. If no candidate wins a majority in the first round the top two vote-getters participate in a run-off election the following month.
[42] Conversation with Bernardo in the AM during which he angrily reflected, in the presence of others, that he needed more help with his work and that he was tired of working with those who weren’t “as smart as” himself, October 6, 1998; Observed conversation between Bernardo and Jusara in which Bernardo angrily complained about demands the traffickers made of him in return for payments and worked, with Jusara, to plan a party for local children, October 7, 1998.
[43] Conversation with Joselino on return visit to favela after one year absence, June 14, 2002.
[44] Conversation with Joselino about a variety of topics on short visit to favela, October 23, 1998.
[45] Conversation with Marco, community garbage collector, October 23, 1998.
[46] Conversation with Gabo, young evangelical, and Odisseu, his father, January 14, 1998.
[47] Conversation with Joselino about a variety of topics on short visit to favela, October 23, 1998.
[48] Seu is short for senhor (mister) and is used as an honorific in some favelas for local leaders; Conversation with Miguel, November 25, 1997.
[49] Conversations with Rubia, restaurant owner in community, Evanildo, and others, October 5, 1998.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Conversation with Bête, as she prepared lunch in her home and introduced me to the favela, July 26, 1997.
[52] The term “Bosniak” connotes Bosnian individuals of Muslim religion and identity.
[53] Evidence from Cyprus from 1960–1963, a period of administrative breakdown that contributed to civil unrest on the island, Turkey’s discrimination of ethnic Kurds, and historical cases such as the post-World War II Yugoslav harassment of ethnic Italians suggest that administrative discrimination is a common problem before, during and after wars.
[54] As Hans-Deiter Klingemann (1999) observes, distrust can foster participatory governance when citizens engage institutions while monitoring government or seeking reform (see also Gamson 1971; Barber 1983; Braithwaite 1998; Levi and Stoker 2000; Tarrow 2000). While a measure of distrust undoubtedly promotes citizens’ participation, too much distrust leads to citizens’ withdrawal from government institutions and even the development of competing “shadow” institutions, as in the Yugoslav autonomous region of Kosovo/a during the 1980s and 1990s. This chapter presumes that while institutions can function with a certain level of citizen distrust, distrust cannot be so great that it prevents citizens from engaging institutions of the state or their administrators.
[55] Dietlind Stolle (2004) and Robert Putnam (1993) are among the very few scholars to closely examine municipal and regional level governments. Instead, the vast majority of empirical studies examining social capital employ national-level survey data.
[56] An exception was the USAID-funded Municipal Infrastructure and Services (MIS) program, which supported the return of former residents to war-damaged towns by reconstructing infrastructure systems and selected community facilities over four and a half years. The program aimed to boost employment of demobilized soldiers by contracting local firms to implement the infrastructure improvements; the program, however, did not provide any technical assistance or training to the local governments that would ultimately be responsible for the operation and maintenance of these investments. An earlier USAID pilot project that did seek to train a handful of municipalities to budget for capital improvements was closed by 1998.
[57] Estimates are not included here for voter turnout in the 1996 elections because independent election monitors have never agreed on a legitimate estimate. Both journalists and international organizations alike place the figure at an impressive — and implausible — 104%-116%. In addition to possible illicit voting (elections monitors reported that citizens across Bosnia attempted to vote “on behalf of” deceased relatives), OSCE admitted that confusion in composing the list of eligible voters may have contributed to the difference between expected eligible voters and actual eligible voters (Balkan Watch, Vol. 3.39, September 23, 1996).
[58] The state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is comprised of two regional Entities: Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Federation is further divided into cantons. Municipalities exist as the most basic administrative level in both Republika Srpska and the Federation.
[59] Mayors from the municipalities included in this study were all men. Women who held other positions within municipal governments and NGOs, or represented citizens’ interests, constituted approximately 45% of program participants.
[60] Buzim, located in the “Bihac pocket,” was the site of inter-ethnic alliance building lead by local political and business leader Fikret Abdic, who is Bosniak. Abdic’s decision to ally with Serbs in the region prompted fighting between Bosniak followers of Abdic and the Bosnian Army Fifth Corps (Woodward 1995; Silber 1996).
[61] This paper is adapted from my dissertation, electronic copies of which were sent to Project H.O.M.E. and the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness in May of 2005. Except for the names of the directors of the organizations and public officials, the identities of all individuals referenced have been protected. Tape recordings were only made with the approval of interview subjects. I did not seek final approval or input from staff or directors on the content of my manuscript.
[62] The acronym refers to housing, opportunities, medical care and education.
[63] This information was available through links on Project H.O.M.E.’s website.
[64] The organization was known as the Philadelphia Committee for the Homeless from 1982–1993.
[65] This assertion glosses over the fact that the business community appear to be interested in immediate action in getting the streets cleared; whereas, I learned during my time at Project H.O.M.E., outreach staff prided themselves on their patient approach to people on the streets. Many individuals take months, even years to be persuaded to enter the shelter system.
[66] Under the existing ordinance a violation for sitting on the sidewalk could receive a fine of up to twenty dollars, and a violation for aggressive solicitation could receive up to one hundred dollars.
[67] Pseudonym.
[68] The five case-study areas met the following research criteria. Each area had to be reasonably accessible to me in my small truck and should be politically manageable (in the Salvadoran context this meant that only one or two of the five insurgent factions should be active there). Across the case-study areas, I sought variation in the social relations that prevailed before the war (wage labor, share-cropping, peasant agriculture, etc.) and in the patterns of political mobilization (i.e., areas where some civilians actively supported the insurgents and some the government). However, this research design emerged through a more convoluted process than this indicates, as explained in chapter 3 of Wood (2003).
[69] Once that process was completed, as far as I was aware there were no restrictions placed on my movement or research.
[70] The accuracy of the claims by these cooperative leaders to occupy extensive areas of land in 1992 was confirmed by my own travel and observation in the case-study areas and by examination of the land claims data held by the insurgent group, the government, and the UN during the postwar land transfer process.
[71] For more discussion of the maps as representations of insurgent political culture, see chapter 7 of Wood (2003).
[72] See for example Green (1995), Nordstrom (1997), Das (1990).
[73] For further discussion of the challenges of ethnography in wartime, see Wood (2003, chapters 2 and 3). See also Nordstrom (1997), Peritore (1990), Smyth and Robinson (2001), and the essays in the collection by Nordstrom and Robben (1995).
[74] See Kalyvas (2006) and Weinstein (2006) for discussion of patterns of violence in civil wars.
[75] Severine Autesserre, personal communication.
[76] See National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979), known as the Belmont Report.
[77] Such procedures are required for researchers based in the US through a mandatory review of research proposals involving human subjects by institutional review boards, which must either approve project procedures or rule the project exempt. Although ethnographic research that poses minimal risk to human subjects can be reviewed under expedited procedures, that is clearly not the case for research in conflict zones. See National Research Council (2003) for discussion of the conditions for expedited review.
[78] I initially feared that this affiliation would discourage government officials and landlords from speaking with me: the government and rightist elites throughout the war repeatedly denounced the university as supporting the “terrorists.” While some landlords shared their opinions of the university with me, none declined to participate in the project on these grounds.
[79] I did, however, provide lunch for those drawing maps in the workshops.
[80] In the Salvadoran setting, it might not have been appropriate to ask the local priest or nun to support the project by taking on this role: in other areas, pastoral agents were clearly allied with one party or another.
[81] I gave copies to the non-governmental organization that had carried out the reconstruction and to members of my MA committee. The official copy of my MA thesis held by the University of California at Berkeley was held by the library under an agreement that it would not be made available for 5 years after its filing.
[82] My caution was recently confirmed when a review of my second book appeared in an issue dedicated to understanding insurgency of a publication (Special Warfare, December 2004) of the US Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, which may well be read by Salvadoran military officers.
[83] See the essays collected in Jaarsma (2002) for extended discussion of the difficulties in implementing this norm.
[84] I initially regretted this decision (although I never doubted it was the right thing to do) as the photographs when developed showed merely slightly colored lines on a background of light gray, as might be expected of a photograph of a hand-drawn map. Fortunately, once the photographs were digitized restoration proved possible, thanks for Carolyn Resnicke of the Santa Fe Institute.
[85] See Wood (2007) for a more extended discussion of conditions that increase the importance of field research.
[86] For another account that examines the role that prevarication plays in social life and its abundance therein, see Sacks’s (1975) “Everyone Has to Lie.”
[87] I refer to passion in the dual sense of both love and suffering, following Wacquant (1995b).
[88] After already losing one election for Senate in 1941 and having committed himself to not running again for the Congressional seat he currently held, Johnson’s 1948 Senate campaign was, at least retrospectively (see Caro 1990/1991), an election that would determine Johnson’s future in politics — should he lose, there was a strong chance that he would never hold elected office again.
[89] Speaking to its dominance is the wealth of subjects that rational choice theory has been applied to: voter turnout (Aldrich 1993), rebellion (Mueller and Opp, 1986, Lichbach, 1990), the drafting of the United States’ constitution (McGuire 1988), decision-making by Nasser during the 1967 crisis (Mor, 1991), the differing responses to the transition from communism to democracy between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Whitfield and Evans, 1999), and what is more relevant for our current discussion, the selection of politics as a career (Payne and Woshinsky, 1972; Recchi, 1999).
[90] For example, Norris (1997) explores the processes of legislative recruitment by looking at how potential candidates and party gatekeepers “interact within different institutional settings” to determine who runs for political office.
[91] Perhaps the two most paradigmatic exemplars of political culture approaches are Almond and Verba’s (1963) The Civic Culture and Bellah’s (1985) Habits of the Heart.
[92] Sears and Valentino (1997) report that periodic political events such as elections create pre-adult political dispositions that continue to exist later in life, while Hyman (1959) argues that the political values of most Americans have crystallized by age 16.
[93] For example, Lasswell (1948) argues that “[o]ur key hypothesis about the power seeker is that he pursues power as a means of compensation against deprivation. Power is expected to overcome low estimates of the self by changing either the traits of the self or the environment in which it functions” (39). Applying similar analyses, Winter (1987) has explored leader appeal and performance, and Barber (1972) has examined presidential success based on measures of activity vs. passivity and optimism vs. pessimism.
[94] Given the basic postulate behind elite theory — that all societies can be divided between two classes — the ruling class and that which is ruled — much of the research on elites is aimed at determining the factors that differentiate one class from the other, much of it with an eye to how the two are said to differ psychologically (Hedlund 1973; Shamir 1991; Sullivan et al., 1993; Winter 1987).
[95] Prewitt (1970) stands out in his adherence to Chinese-box epistemology in analyzing the recruitment of city council members in or around San Francisco. Some of the other “better” examples of Chinese-box epistemology include such classics in social scientific analysis of politics and political participation as Lane’s (1959) Political Life: Why and How People Get Involved in Politics, Lipset’s ([1959] 1960) Political Man, and Milbrath’s (1965) Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics.
[96] These first three shortcomings are the same ones that Katz (1988) claims plague traditional criminological accounts.
[97] Made evident in their overarching emphasis on background “factors” is the fact that these approaches are all based on an intrinsically substantialist ontology — which is to say that they view the reality “out there” to be identified, dissected, and measured by the scientist as one of substances or variables rather than one that consists of relations or processes. For two trenchant critiques of substantialist thought, see Bourdieu (1968) and Elias (1978; especially pp. 104–128). My chief grievance against Chinese-box epistemology, however, is more in line with the challenges that Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962) brought against traditional empiricist and idealist philosophies of action — that they elide the active engagements between habitus and world through which the motivation for action is dialectically developed by a “mutual moulding and immediate ‘inhabiting of being and world’ ” (Wacquant 2005, p. 466).
[98] Just as phenomenal attractions can seduce one into action, we might hypothesize that the inverse is also true: namely, that the phenomenal foreground can carry repulsive features which repel one away from a given course of action.
[99] Here one is well-advised to recall Elias’s (1956, p. 237) advice that “while one need not know, in order to understand the structure of molecules, what it feels like to be one of its atoms, in order to understand the functioning of human groups one needs to know, as it were, from inside how human beings experience their own and other groups.”
[100] It is worth emphasizing that there is every reason to believe that the lived reality of the political animal is indeed plural — thus there are lived realities, not a single reality. Such is one of the insights behind Bourdieu’s concept of field, spelled out most forcefully in his Rules of Art (1996). Although they exist as relatively autonomous worlds unto themselves with their own unique logics, fields contain not one viewpoint but multiple discrepant viewpoints that exist within the broader shared logic of the field as a whole.
[101] For other works arguing that examinations of “how” an action is accomplished can lead to an understanding of “why” it is done, see Jackson (1983) and Bearman (2000).
[102] For example, Katz (1988, p. 10) uses a “theory of moral self-transcendence” to vivisect the experiential details in the phenomenal foreground of criminal action.
[103] One might even hypothesize that this consequential and problematic structuring of political life is the root cause of the various “conspiracy theories” that arise from time to time among politicos. After all, the last thing one would want before willfully entering into fateful activities is to have the deck stacked against him.
[104] The limiting case of such forms of association is of course “sociability,” in which there is “no ulterior end, no content, and no result outside itself” (Simmel and Hughes 1949, p. 255).
[105] This is not to say that all such interactions are in fact “routine.” The point is to again call attention to the fact that the basic structures of these interactions — their form and content — are not altogether different from a range of other occupations which one would scarcely consider to be “where the action is.”
[106] Some may question such an assertion given the apparent frequency in which politicians avoid the “important questions.” Following one such instance, the headline in the Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia) read: “Condit ducks and weaves on TV” (Beach 2001). The article went on to report that, “Mr. Condit’s bid to restore his image failed as the Republican congressman repeatedly refused to answer questions about his affair with Ms Levy” (emphasis mine). That politicians avoid such encounters, however, only serves to confirm, the fact that they, indeed, recognize that the given circumstances are pregnant with the possibility for fatefulness — something that they are not willing to subject themselves to in instances in which the odds are clearly against them.
[107] In many ways, the notion of being “presidential” has come to signify, at least within the US, everything that politicians should embody, from their depth of conviction, to their way of carrying themselves, and their devotion to the broader good. For example, one recent headline read: “Bush Using Electoral Timeout to Practice Being Presidential (Coile 2000).