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Our Division of the Universe: Making a Space for the
Non-Political in the Anthropology ofPoliticsAuthor(s): Matei
CandeaReviewed work(s):Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 3
(June 2011), pp. 309-334Published by: The University of Chicago
Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
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http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659748 .Accessed: 28/02/2012
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011 309
2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2011/5203-0001$10.00. DOI:
10.1086/659748
Our Division of the UniverseMaking a Space for the Non-Political
in the Anthropology of Politics
by Matei Candea
Anthropologys extremely successful efforts to expand the
category of the political has left an-thropologists with a
reticence when it comes to the definition of the political itself.
The political isleft intentionally open-ended so as to enable
critical engagement with an increasing range of topics,but this
often entails an abandonment of the political as an ethnographic
category. What, for instance,are we to make of claims by bilingual
schoolteachers in Corsica that education and politicsshouldin some
instances at leastbe kept separate? This article starts from an
ethnographicexploration of the boundary between the political and
the non-political in Corsican bilingualeducation, suggesting that
there is more to it than straightforward antipolitics on the part
of theFrench state. Drawing on the one hand on ethnographic
evidence of the potentially productive andenabling effects of
boundaries drawn between the political and the non-political and on
the otherhand on Jacques Rancie`res performative definition of the
political, this article suggests that anthro-pology might benefit
from an explicit rethinking of what we mean by the politicaland
where,if at all, and with what effects we might imagine it to
end.
We therefore have three characteristics that should serve to
start our division of the universe into what is political
and
what is not. (Swartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966:7)
Anthropologys definition of politics and its political
content
has almost invariably been so broad that politics may be
found everywhere, underlying almost all the disciplines
concerns. (Vincent 2002:1)
Introduction: Dont ConfuseEducation and Politics
The small town of Ajaccio in the south of Corsica could bea
piece cut from the glitzy garment of the French Riviera.That, at
least, was the less-than-complimentary view from thenorth of the
island, where my doctoral research was con-ducted. However, when I
first arrived in Ajaccio in March2002 for a prefieldwork trip, I
was not yet a master of thecultural frames through which some
northerners perceive theadministrative capital of Corsica. What was
on my mind, asI strode toward the regional offices of the French
ministry ofeducation, was how my proposed research project on
bilingualschooling would be received by the local authorities.
Matei Candea is Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the
Departmentof Anthropology at Durham University (Dawson Building,
SouthRoad, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom
[[email protected]]). This paper was submitted 9 III 09 and
accepted 5XI 09.
Corsican bilingual education (see Jaffe 2003, 2005), whichwas
given the go-ahead by the French education ministry in1995, was the
latest and most extensive instance of a seachange in
late-twentieth-century French educational policy.The complex role
of schooling in French nation building hasbeen studied at length
and has acquired a notoriety far beyondthe circles of academic
history.1 With the rise of regionalistmovements in the 1970s, some
of the more nuanced analysesof this process were muted by a
simpler, more politicallyeffective narrative. According to this
narrative, the Frenchstate school had been the uniform and
centralized tool ofuniformity and centralization. It had
methodically eradicatedlocal languages and local senses of
belonging and replacedthem with French and French patriotism. The
turn-of-the-century French public schoolheaded by the
schoolmasters(instituteurs), the famous black hussars of the
Republicwas often portrayed as the cultural arm of the internal
co-lonialism (Hechter 1975) through which Paris subjected
itsprovinces. Since the 1960saccording to this same
narra-tivecommitted regionalists in Brittany, Corsica, and
else-where had been fighting step by step to introduce
regionalcontent into national education in order to reverse this
cen-tury-long process of cultural erasure.
I had, of course, come across a number of more nuancedretellings
of this complex story, to which I return below (seeMcDonald 1989;
Thiesse 1997; and for Corsica, Di Meglio
1. See, e.g., Grew and Harrigan (1991), Noer (1988),
Reed-Danahay(1996), Thiesse (1997), Weber (1976), and Zeldin
(1980).
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310 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
2003; Jaffe 1999), but I was vividly aware of the saliency
andpower of the simpler moral narrative outlined above. I
there-fore expected a whiff of this strong brew of power and
re-sistance at my first encounter with the local administratorsin
charge of bilingual education. I was sorely disappointed.My first
meeting with one of the Corsican administrators ofthe project set
the tone for what would be a cordial and mostlyunproblematic
welcome into the world of Corsican bilingualteaching. Bilingual
education in Corsica had received exten-sive media and academic
coverage, and my own appearancewas a comprehensive nonevent. One
point, however, was clar-ified by my interlocutor from the outset:
I was not to confuseeducation and politics.
As a warning, the administrator recounted the followinganecdote.
A few years previously, a Welsh television crew hadasked him to
authorize and facilitate a documentary on bi-lingual education.
This he did, opening up a classroom forthe crews benefit. The crew
filmed the children learning Cor-sican songs and then interviewed
the teacher in the school-yard. The first question they asked was
So, when do youthink Corsica will finally be independent? At this
point, theadministrator told me he had to intervene. I forbade
theteacher from answering he said. He then made it clear tothe
Welsh interviewer that they were in a school, and if hewanted to
talk about such things, he would be happy to goto a cafe and do so.
The crew finished filming and returnedto Wales. A few months later,
the administrator continued,he received a copy of the documentary
in which he discovered,to his horror and consternation, images of
children learningCorsican mixed in with images of armed and masked
Corsicannationalists, anti-French graffiti, and the wreckages of
bombedhouses and public buildingsthe all-too-familiar iconogra-phy
of violent opposition to the French state. Neither he norhis
colleagues could understand the Welsh commentary, butit was clear
to anyone involved in Corsican bilingual educationthat the
documentary was treading roughshod over some im-portant
boundaries.
Post-60s political anthropologywhat Joan Vincent (1990:30,
2002:2) refers to as the third phase in anthropologysengagement
with politics2has been grounded in an implicitrefusal to define the
political. One symptom of this refusal isthe fact that anthropology
(and the humanities and socialsciences more generally) has
progressively discovered the pol-itics of culture (Handler 1984);
gender (Gal and Kligman2000); food (Appadurai 1981); the body
(Bordo 1994); cloth-
2. Vincent distinguishes three phases in anthropologys
engagementwith the political (although her exact periodization
varies between Vin-cent 1990 and Vincent 2002). In the first phase,
politics is a marginalsubject of interest for anthropologists,
whereas the second marks thespecialization of political
anthropology within a broad functional andstructural framework. The
third, with which I am mostly concerned inthis article, follows
from 1960s challenges to anthropology to break awayfrom business as
usual . . . and confront the issues of the objectiveworld of
national liberation movements, imperialism and
colonialism,communism and growing global inequalities (Vincent
2002:3).
ing (Miller 2005:8); knowledge (Marcus and Fischer 1999:xxii);
comparison (Stoler 2001); symmetry (Pels 1996); belief(Huq 2006);
taste (Bourdieu 1984); identity (Friedman 1992);race (Stoler 1989);
friendship (Derrida 1997); language (Des-jarlais 1996); victimhood
(Jeffery and Candea 2006); nature(Latour 2004b); space, time, and
substance (Alonso 1994);and indeed the politics of life itself
(Rose 2006).
In and of itself, the multiplication of such politics
oflocutions suggests the increasing difficulty of giving any
par-ticularly sharp meaning to the first term: it is
sometimesunclear in this context how examining the politics of
Xdiffers from examining X itself.3 Defining the political wasonce a
fairly standard preliminary procedure for authors whoproposed to
use the concept but one that has gone intenselyout of fashion in
recent political anthropology. One might betempted to argue that
the political has become such a per-vasive explanatory form that
some anthropologists have for-gotten to ask what politics means,
but I think that there ismore to it that this. This lack of
definition is constitutive ofpolitical anthropologys own
hermeneutics of suspicion (Ri-coeur 1970), the implicit and often
explicit principle that weshould refuse to predetermine where the
political ends be-cause the political could be hiding in the most
seeminglyanodyne, high-minded, or objective of places. Nothing
shouldde facto be left off the hook of our critique, because
anythingcould turn out to be political. In other words, the
unbound-edness of the political cannot simply be put down to
sloppythinking or oversight (although there has, of course,
beensome of that); rather, the refusal to define the political is
apurposeful methodology, one that, as I show below, reachesits apex
with the popularization of antipolitics arguments.The problem,
howeverand this is the crux of my argu-mentis that this leaves the
political itself off the hook. Theone truth that cannot (should
not) be historicized or subjectedto genealogy in political
anthropology is the political itself.4
As Vincent (2002) points out, today, political anthropol-ogists
consider sensitiveness to the pervasiveness of powerand the
political a prime strength (1). I broadly agree withthem,
notwithstanding Marshall Sahlinss pithy strictures inWaiting for
Foucault, Still (Power, power everywhere; Sah-lins 2002:20). My aim
here is not, therefore, to belittle theconsiderable achievements of
post-60s political anthropologybut rather to nudge the debate
onward, toward the meth-odological value of redrawing the
boundaries of the politi-cal.
My argument resonates with those of some recent voicesin
anthropology that have expressed dissatisfaction with
thelimitations of the Foucault-Agamben canon (see, e.g.,
Yurchak2008 and comment by Dominic Boyer). My aim, however, isto
prompt a wholesale reconsideration of the political as
3. This is not unlike (and indeed not unrelated to) the ubiquity
ofthe locution the social construction of . . . (for which see
Hacking2000).
4. An important exception is Andrew Barrys Political Machines
(2001).
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Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 311
an anthropological analytic. What does this term or conceptdo
for us, what has it come to mean, and what kinds ofinsight does it
enable or impede? In this respect, my argumentis in tune with a
more general concern that critique in thesocial sciences has run
out of steam (Latour 2004a).
Principally, however, the argument emerges from the par-ticular
ethnographic context adumbrated in my opening vi-gnette. This is in
important ways an anthropological argumentfor, as well as from,
ethnography. For as Jonathan Spencer(2007) recently pointed out,
the particular deficit that hascrept into political anthropology is
of an ethnographic nature.I argue that this ethnographic deficit is
a direct consequenceof the expansion of the political as an
analytical category. Thetheoretical openness to the pervasive
nature of the politicalhas made it very difficult to see the
political as an ethno-graphic category. Let me illustrate this by
returning to myopening vignette.
This situation might seem deceptively simple to interpret.Is
this not, after all, a classic gatekeeper situation, one withwhich
anthropologists are only too familiar? Here we have astate
official, himself in a rather complex political positionwith regard
to potentially conflicting loyalties, allowing meinto a politically
sensitive research space but in return sug-gesting political
limitations on the account I should produce.Many current
anthropological observers would agree thatwhatever else it may be,
his injunction not to confuse edu-cation and politics is an
eminently political move in itself.The scene, then, clearly reveals
the French schools role as anantipolitics machine (Ferguson 1994).
There is value in thisinterpretation, and I flesh it out below. But
the drawback ofsuch an analysis is that by itself it cannot take
seriously whatthis man is actually saying.
The educational officials attempt to separate two concep-tual
spacesthe space of politics in which claims are made(violently or
otherwise) on the French state and the other,non-political, space
of education in which children areschooled and Corsican is taughtis
entirely out of joint withthe sensibilities of political
anthropology and its hermeneuticsof suspicion. Yet the price of
this suspicion, which in and ofitself may be quite healthy, is
ethnographic sensitivity. I amnot, of course, suggesting that we
simply take the educationalofficers word for it, but neither should
we rush to dismisshim. For if we redefine this educational
officials separationof education from politics as in itself a
political move, wehave de facto trumped and discarded his own
interpretationof what he is up to. The problem is not simply that
we aredisagreeing with him (there is nothing necessarily wrongabout
that) but that redefining the whole situation as po-litical thereby
renders the distinction he is attempting todraw unintelligible: we
are unlikely ever to inquire what hemeans by the political (nor is
it particularly clear what wemean by it either). We will have
effectively given up on thepolitical as an ethnographic
category.
Politics, Limited
The administrators statements bring to mind the kind ofclassic
or limited definition of politics against which theanthropological
study of politics has historically constituteditself; the political
theorist Michael Oakeshott will serve as anavatar. For Oakeshott,
political activity is one type of humanactivity that happens
alongside and is distinct from otheractivities (he gives the
examples of fishing, writing poetry,raising a family, etc.;
Oakeshott 2006:3334). Oakeshott fur-ther specifies three conditions
for the emergence of politicalactivity. First, political activity
requires a particular socialsetup: the existence of a plurality of
human beings associatedthrough common rules and norms yet divided
by a diversityof sentiments, feelings, and beliefs. As he puts it,
politics,from one important point of view, may be said to be
theactivity in which a society deals with its diversities
(Oakeshott2006:35). Thus far, however, almost anything could be
polit-ical. Second, the really discriminating feature in
Oakeshottsdefinition is that political activity requires a
particular insti-tutional setup: a distinction between public and
private anda government, a ruling authority that is concerned
withpublic affairs. Here Oakeshott is in the tradition of those
who,like Max Weber, understand by politics only the leadership,or
the influencing of the leadership, of a political association,hence
today, of a state (Weber 1998a [1918]:77). Third,Oakeshotts
definition of politics requires a particular con-ceptual setup: a
shared belief that government, law, and policy(or at least one of
the three) are not fixed by nature or ne-cessity but amenable to
change through human choice anddecision (Oakeshott 2006:36).
Most readers will recognize in Oakeshotts definition pre-cisely
the kind of limited notion of the political againstwhich political
anthropology, particularly in its poststructur-alist incarnations,
has developed its critique. There have ofcourse been attempts
within anthropology to proceed to sim-ilar definitions of the
political, notably Swartz, Turner, andTudens (1966) famous
introduction to Political Anthropology,from which my title is
drawn. And yet, as far back as Fortesand Evans-Pritchards African
Political Systems (1940), eventhose anthropologists who considered
the political as a dis-tinct domain have been wary of the patently
Eurocentric ten-ure of most definitions of the political that they
encounteredin political philosophy. Oakeshott (2006), who claims
thatthere have been many peoples who have had no politics,and who
are consequently innocent of political thought (34)and indeed that
politics is, in the main, a European inven-tion (36), is unlikely
to find much favor with anthropologistsof any generation. He is
interesting for my purposes here,however, first because at least
some of the people I workedwith in Corsica would, in the main,
agree with him (although,of course, other people I worked with
there would not), whichopens up a poignant conflict of interest
between anthropol-ogys tradition of ethnographic attentiveness and
its equallyentrenched suspicion of European political philosophy:
what
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312 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
if Oakeshott were your informant? Second, Oakeshott is
in-teresting because his limited notion of the political
high-lights what I have described as the refusal to define the
po-litical in recent anthropological work on the subject.
Refusing to Define the Political
As my earlier enumeration of politics of titles suggests, oneof
the central projects of the anthropology of politics fromthe 1970s
onward has been an extension of the concept ofthe political to
fields that would not, in the above limiteddefinition, be
considered political. This has served to highlightthe undeniable
political importance of subjects that were tooeasily forgotten in
an Oakeshott-style approach, but it hasalso led to a concomitant
weakening of the meaning of thepolitical itself.
Other factors have contributed to the undefinition of
thepolitical in anthropology, notably the old suspicion
againstpredetermined Eurocentric concepts mentioned above.Equally
important was the problematization of the main cri-terion of the
limited (let us call it Oakeshott-Weber) definitionof politics,
namely, the state as a unitary and identifiableinstitution. We
could perhaps trace this to Abramss Marxist-Engelsian critique of
the state as an idea, a legitimating fictionof a common striving
for the common good that obscuresthe reality of the mundane,
interested, and often uncoordi-nated contests of power that make up
the individual andinstitutional state system (Abrams 1977). In
Abramss ac-count, the state is no longer either a legitimate
collectiveagent or a set-apart or privileged space; it is revealed
asbeing made up of the very same stuff as the rest of humanreality:
power contests between human beings. Abrams thuscalls for a
demystifying critique of the state idea. Along withthe material
boundary between state and nonstate, what isimplicitly dissolved in
Abramss account is the categoricalgrounds for a boundary between
the (classically defined) po-litical and non-political. The state
cannot be a criterionseparating properly political activity from
other relations ofpower because it is a mere mask behind which we
find nothingmore than relations of power.
My argument here follows in the line of those who haveargued,
contra Abrams, that anthropologists need to attendto the continuing
effects in peoples everyday lives of the stateand of the production
of a state-society boundary (Mitchell1991; Navaro-Yashin 2002). To
follow this insight to its logicalend, however, means also
attending to the ways in which aboundary between the political and
the non-political (the kindthat Oakeshott talks about) can actually
be realized. To saythis is to consider the non-political not as an
ideological,discursive, or psychic effect of (implicitly more real
or atleast prior) political processes but on precisely the same
leveland with the same reality as the political itself. This is
thepart that much recent political anthropology seems to forgetin
its refusal to bound the political, to leave anything
outsideit.
For as a result of the expansion of the political in
anthro-pological analysis, the non-political has tended to
becomefigure rather than ground. While classic political theorists
suchas Oakeshott marked out the political against the
enormousbackground of everything that was not political (fishing,
po-etry, raising a family, etc.), the anthropology of politics
hasincreasingly begun to problematize this non-politicalground as
an effect of politics itself. Indeed, a central featureof political
anthropology has been its relentless questioningof the imagined
safe havens in which politics supposedlydoes not operate. For the
non-political is often claimed pre-cisely as a sphere in which we
could feel safe and leave asideour critical acumen: in the
non-political, we can bask in thereflected warmth of community or
human emotion or exertourselves with a clear conscience in the
disinterested pursuitof objective truth; in the non-political, we
can rest on oursolid moral judgements about what is right, and we
can followthe voice of our beliefs and enjoy beauty and partake
of(high-)cultured entertainment. These various non-politicalspaces
are those that anthropologists have progressively be-come
suspicious of. Politics is there, too, says the realist.Politics
should be there too, says the activist.
Increasingly, such non-political spaces have come underscrutiny
as the products of antipolitics or depoliticization.While such
arguments are usually attributed to a Foucaultianturn in
anthropology, a notable earlier use of the term de-politicization
dates back to Carl Schmitts interwar essay TheConcept of the
Political (Schmitt 2007 [1927]:2123), in whichhe challenges the
supposedly apolitical nature of religion, cul-ture, economy, law,
or science (2223) and vehemently rejectsuniversalism (5455), claims
to impartiality (27), and appealsto humanity (54), justice, and
freedom (66) as all being, bydefinition, political ploys that take
the form of a depolitici-zation. The current popularity of
antipolitics arguments inthe social sciences and humanities is not
unrelated to therediscovery of Schmitt by radical critical
theorists and phi-losophers in the 1990s (Agamben 1998; Mouffe
1993).5
In anthropology, however, the depoliticization argumentfirst
emerged through James Fergusons extremely influentialaccount of the
development apparatus in Lesotho as
an anti-politics machine, depoliticizing everything it
touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of
sight,
all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-
5. There has been much heated debate around the need to and
pos-sibility of dissociating Schmitts theory from his involvement
with theGerman National Socialist Party. Without reopening that
particular canof worms, it remains the case that reading Schmitts
The Concept of thePolitical from our present historical vantage
point brings home ratherchillingly how indebted his arguments seem
to be to a specific reactionagainst the purportedly impartial or
universal justice of the victoriousallies in World War I (Schmitt
2007 [1927]:54, 73, nn.). Indeed, Schmitthimself explicitly relates
his arguments to various historical momentswhen it became important
for the German people to defend themselvesagainst an expanding
enemy armed with a humanitarian ideology (66).
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Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 313
eminently political operation of expanding bureaucratic
state power. (Ferguson 1994:xv)
If we take this argument at face value, the non-political ishere
the result of an eminently political operation on a pre-existing
political reality. This double moveexpanding thepolitical,
problematizing the non-politicalproduces a fig-ure-ground reversal
(Wagner 1986:99). Politics is no longermerely a subset of human
action (as in Oakeshott or Weber),the rest of which is presumably
something other than political.Political reality is the ground from
which everything (eventhe supposedly non-political) is
madepolitically.
It is notable but perhaps not surprising in this context
thatwhile arguments about the political are a constant feature
ofanthropological writing, definitions of the political are
in-creasingly rare. Often, political anthropologists have arguedby
implicit analogy to the classic, limited definition of
politicswhile extending its purview. It is notable, for instance,
thatneither James Ferguson in The Anti-Politics Machine (1994)nor
Nikolas Rose in his excellent The Politics of Life Itself(2006)
feels the need to open with a definition of politics.In a
post-Foucaultian world in which everything is danger-ous (Foucault
1983:231), defining the political is coming toseem not a pointless
or scholastic enterprise but a positivelyillicit or suspicious one.
For to define the political, to boundit, also means defining
something outside it, a non-politicalsomething anthropologists seem
rather shy of doing, becauseit would expose them to the accusation
of depoliticization.Not so the people whose lives we share and
study, however.
Politics, Alterity, and Argumentsfrom Ethnography
An extremely powerful technique in anthropological
con-frontations with political philosophy has been the
foreground-ing of an ethnographic case that does not fit: a context
inwhich supposedly universal or merely taken-for-granted con-cepts
(the state, civil society, participatory democracy, thepublic
sphere, etc.) are not analytically useful or are cast ina new and
surprising light. Such an approach may seemtempting here, given the
extensive anthropological literatureon the particularities of
politics in Corsica, whose principalfocus has been on the interface
between local systems ofpatron-client relations and national
politics (Dressler-Holo-han 1993; Gil 1984; Olivesi 1983;
Ravis-Giordani 1983:129141). From this literature, one could
imagine an argumentresting on a reconstruction of an alternative
Corsican politicalsensibility at odds with mainstream Euro-American
politicaltheory; this would then allow one to claim that the
educationaladministrators notion of politics would be
irretrievablymangled by the imposition of our assumptions about
thepolitical. However, this is not the approach taken here.
For while the above analyses of Corsican politics have inthe
main been sensitive and nuanced, it would be unwise touse this
literature to overemphasize the distinctness of Cor-
sican politics. As anthropologists such as Fernandez (1983)and
Pina-Cabral (1989) have argued of the broader traditionof
anthropological studies of patronage in the Mediterra-nean
(Banfield 1958; Gellner and Waterbury 1977; Pitt-Rivers1954),
culturalized distinctions between northern and south-ern European
understandings of politics, when drawn rig-idly, tend to tell us
more about northern Europeans self-image than they do about
southern Europeans actualpractices.6 Indeed, such distinctions
(between proper po-litical functioning and patronage, between civic
sense andpersonal self-interest, between local and national
politics) arethemselves part of the ethnography. To use them as
analyticaldevices, therefore, is not simply insensitive; it is to
miss alarge part of the picture. In the case I am concerned
with,such distinctions have been central to French discourses
aboutCorsica since the nineteenth century. Indeed, the
discursiveconstruction of Corsica as a problematic internal other
hasbeen a key part of the process of French nation building,
towhich I return below (see also Candea 2010a, chap. 2).
Inparticular, the definition of proper French political processand
civic behavior has often relied on the externalization ofunwanted
features (personal ties, interests, patronage, etc.),which could
then be invoked as counterexamples else-whereCorsica being the
usual suspect in these cases.7
Today, such concerns still animate debates about the cat-egory
of the political in Corsica, with distinctions drawn be-tween high
and low politics (alta pulitica and bassa pu-litica or
pulitichella; see Ravis-Giordani 1983:129141).
6. This is perhaps most evident in Banfields (1958) infamous
contrastsbetween the amoral familism of a southern Italian backward
societyand proper American civic sense. As Fernandez (1983) puts it
with moregeneral reference to anthropological attempts to locate a
Mediterraneanculture complex, One must be aware how invidiously, if
implicitly, thisconcurrent set of traits exalts the values of the
northern core countriesand justifies the subordinate condition of
the southern peripheries (168).
7. In a typical instance of this kind of discursive work, French
jour-nalist Paul Bourde wrote in 1887, The word politics no longer
has thesame meaning in Corsica as on the continent. On the
continent, Frenchvanity means that the voter who goes to add his
ballot to the box isconvinced that he is deciding the question of
the happiness of humanity;he gives his vote to the system of
government which, in his mind, mustbring about universal virtue and
happiness. The purely theoretical natureof his choice softens the
bitterness of defeat. If his ideas fail to rally themajority, he
tells himself that the world will only be happier sometimelater,
and he returns, without grudge, to his own business. But in
Corsica,politics and business are one and the same thing; on his
ballot, the voteris risking his safety and his personal fortune.
Victory brings immediateadvantages, and defeat carries the promise
of unbearable vexations(Bourde 1999 [1887]:7980; except as noted in
References Cited, alltranslations are my own). Explicitly, the aim
of this passage is to describea strange Corsican approach to
politics that deviates from the nationalnorm. But the effort that
goes into defining this national norm (theFrench voters
disinterested and idealistic engagement with politics) sug-gests
that it, rather than the supposed Corsican particularity, is at
thecenter of the account. Corsican political practices act as the
framing devicefor the definition of proper French administrative
functioning. In thisway, Bourde is externalizing a distinction
between proper and improperpolitical practice that ran through
contemporary French discussions ofmainland politics as well.
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314 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
Contrasts between selfish and selfless, concrete and
abstract,interpersonal and impersonal, local and national do not,
inother words, map two different political ontologies, one
Cor-sican and one French or Euro-American. These contrasts andthe
debates that emerge from them are the very fabric of whatthe
political means in Corsica (as indeed they are in France).In this
respect, and despite differences in tone and content,contemporary
debates around the political in Corsica (andFrance) draw on the
same enlightenment traditions and Eu-ropean canons of political
philosophy (including Weber,Schmitt, etc.) against or with which
anthropologists have tra-ditionally pitched their claims. Here, as
in other respects, ourrepresentations are on the same level as
peoples own per-ceptions of themselves (McDonald 1993:235; see also
Reed-Danahay 1993).
In particularand this is my main interest herefor manypeople I
worked with in Corsica, it is rather important toremember that not
everything is political, and the boundariesbetween what is and what
is not political are an importantpart of reality even though they
may disagree radically overwhere these boundaries actually are or
should be. In this, theyaccord with the position of thinkers such
as Oakeshott andWeber rather than with Foucault or Ferguson.
Others, orindeed the same people at other moments, espouse a
Fou-cault-like position according to which everything is
political.
In sum, my method here is to take the counterpoint ofclassic
ethnographic theorizing. Rather than hold up alterityas a challenge
to the canons of European political philosophy,I ask what happens
to our critique of these canons when wetry to consider them with
the same ethnographic sensitivityanthropologists traditionally
accord to their fieldsites. Withthis in mind, let us go back to
bilingual teaching.
Bilingual Education in Corsica
Recent historical sources on the turn-of-the-century expan-sion
of French public schooling have tended to temper thefamiliar image
of a relentless centralized drive to eradicateregional diversity in
language and culture. Certainly, manypoliticians and educators bent
on turning peasants intoFrenchmen (Weber 1976) saw themselves as
continuing thework of revolutionaries such as Gregoire and
Barre`re, forwhom the patois were instruments of damage and
error(Bertrand Barre`re [1794], quoted in de Certeau, Julia,
andRevel 1974:291ff.) that needed to be broken and replaced
byFrench. However, there were also far more nuanced
positions.Schoolteachers were admonished to study and try to
under-stand their local surroundings (Thiesse 1997:1014,
103117).Some pedagogues and educational administrators,
followingMichel Breal, suggested that schoolmasters use the local
patoisin school as an aid to learning French (Boutan 1998;
Chanet1996; Di Meglio 2003). During the first part of the
twentiethcentury, school geography and history manuals were
region-ally adapted to exalt the historical greatness and
picturesquebeauty of the pupils region alongside that of France as
a
whole (Thiesse 1997). The state schools reproduced the
dis-course of regionalist societies on the need to preserve
andcherish local folklore (Thiesse 1997:104ff.). Patriotic
feelingand an attachment to France, the great Fatherland,
weretheorized by pedagogues as a secondary development follow-ing a
primal attachment to ones region, ones little Father-land (Thiesse
1997:15ff.). These ambivalences do not, how-ever, change the fact
that through the combined action ofschooling, military service, and
the use of French in publicemployment, regional languages were
progressively relegatedover the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries tothe private sphere when they were not
altogether extinguishedby the expansion of French (for an account
of this processin Corsica, see Jaffe 1999).
At the same time, as Anne-Marie Thiesse argues,
the school of the [Third] Republic had made local iden-
tities into heritage in a way that valorized the link
between
the individual and his immediate environment consistent
with national integration. (Thiesse 1997:120)
The subsequent move, in Fourth- and Fifth-Republic school-ing,
away from the specific glorification of the regional tomore general
panegyrics of an imagined French rurality dis-articulated the
regional from the national while retaining thenostalgic imagery of
a rural paradise lost. This, in part, laidthe ground for the
revival of regionalism in the late 1960s,with its antagonistic
framings of region versus France (Thiesse1997:120). This is the
context that saw the emergence ofprivate schools run by
associations of enthusiasts for theteaching of regional language
and culture. These schoolswere often adamant about providing a
radical alternative (po-litical and pedagogical) to the French
state system (McDonald1989; Urla 1988). In Corsica, however, the
main drive ofregional language teaching focused on the French
publicschool system, the Education Nationale (Di Meglio 2003;
Jaffe1999; Noer 1988). The main private educational
association,Scola Corsa, organized optional Corsican lessons in
publicschools during the 1970s, but there were never any
indepen-dent schools as such. Even Scola Corsa slowly subsided
asCorsican language militants concentrated on the French pub-lic
school as a terrain for the teaching of Corsican.
The gradual expansion of the teaching of Corsican in thepublic
school followed a range of national legislative decisionsstarting
in 1974, when the Deixonne law allowing the teachingof local
languages and dialects was extended to Corsicanlanguage and culture
(langue et culture Corse [LCC]). A yearlater, the limits of this
new school subject were fixed to 1hour per week in primary school
and up to 3 hours per weekin secondary school; in 1982, after the
change to a socialistgovernment, this timetable was extended to 3
hours per weekfor all levels, and provision was made for a 3-year
experimentin the use of Corsican as a teaching language, known as
leCorse integre (integrated Corsican); in 1995, the journal ofthe
Education Nationale laid out the official guidelines forthe
creation of bilingual sites; in 2001, these guidelines were
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Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 315
updated, and a distinct recruitment path for
regional-languageschoolteachers was created within the national
administration(Di Meglio 2003; Jaffe 1999; Noer 1988).
From the start, these legislative changesoriginally set inmotion
by the demands of regionalists and nationalists inCorsica and
elsewherewere matched and anticipated onthe ground (in the classic
spatializing terminology so aptlydeconstructed by Ferguson and
Gupta 2002) by a number ofschoolteachers who were also committed
supporters of theCorsican language. Over the years, many of these
teachersmoved up the administrative ladder, becoming
inspectors,pedagogical advisors,8 teacher trainers, and regional
ad-ministrators for LCC. When bilingual education was author-ized
nationwide by the ministry in 1995, these LCC admin-istrators saw
the potential of the new legislation and movedto open a few
bilingual classes on the island. This involvednegotiations and
information meetings with schoolteachers,parents, and sometimes
local government officials. Theschools chosen for the opening of
bilingual classes were thosein which the project would find teacher
support, that is tosay, schools in which strongly committed
teachers were al-ready using Corsican, often beyond the official
mark of 3hours a week.
While it would be misleading to refer to them as a close-knit
community, teachers and administrators committed tofurthering LCC,
even when they were not in direct contact,knew of each others
teaching posts, news, and promotions.The local-level LCC
administrators, such as inspectors andpedagogical advisors, who
often paid formal and informalvisits to teachers in their schools,
relayed this information,together with news about legal and
administrative changesrelevant to the teaching of Corsican. These
informal networksfound institutional support in the pedagogical
meetings,training courses,9 and at the recently formed bilingual
teach-ers association, A Sciolilingua.
It is a common characterization in Corsica that teachersand
educational administrators who are highly committed to
8. Inspectors are nonteaching educational officers of various
rankswithin the administration. One inspector oversees each
district (circon-scription) within an academie. It is their
responsibility to periodicallyinspect the work of every teacher in
their district. Pedagogical advisorsare also nonteaching officers
of lesser rank whose role is to keep teachersinformed on particular
fields of education. Each academie has a numberof pedagogical
advisors, for instance, for music, arts, sports, and, morerecently,
regional languages.
9. Pedagogical meetings were organized every term by
pedagogicaladvisors for bilingual teachers from the district
(circonscription). Theytook place in the district offices of the
Education Nationale and lasteda few hours at most. Training
courses, which could be held at districtlevel or at the level of
the whole island, were part of the EducationNationales continuous
training policy (la formation continue)theidea being to keep
teachers up to date with new pedagogical developmentsand to give
them a chance to gain new skills and advance their careers.Courses
were organized every year in every academie on various
sub-jectssports, music, sciences, and, in Corsica since the late
1970s, LCC.In 20022003, I attended a 1-week district-level training
course and a 3-week regional-level one held at the Corsican
university at Corte.
Corsican language and culture are often broadly sympatheticto
regionalism and in some cases to nationalist political pro-jects.
Some, although by no means all, adhere to nationalisttrade unions,
and some are members of nationalist parties.To give a sense of the
latters representation in Corsican pol-itics, nationalist parties
united under a single banner for thefirst time in 2004 and garnered
17.34% of votes, winning 8out of 51 seats at Corsicas local
parliament (Assemblee Ter-ritoriale). There are, however, a
multiplicity of ways of beingcommitted to Corsican culture and
identity beyond the nar-row confines of nationalist party politics.
Furthermore, themultiplicity and complexity of the Corsican
regionalist/na-tionalist scene, both underground and official, and
the widespectrum of their methods, aims, and discourses are such
thatit would be quite absurd to deduce from a commitment
tonationalism (let alone to Corsican culture) an acceptance ofarmed
combat against the French state or a claim for theindependence of
Corsica, as the Welsh TV crew seemed tohave done (for a
comprehensive English-language study ofearly Corsican nationalism,
see Loughlin 1989; for later de-velopments, see Hossay 2004).
The constitution of this network of LCC teachers solidifiedin
the 1990s at a time when, in the words of Janne Jensen(1999), the
Corsican language had ceased to be a hot potatopolitically (85) to
the extent that its existence, its positivestatus, and the need for
the government not just to recognizeit and allow its teaching but
even to be proactive about doingso, had all become fairly
commonplace. In 2001, the Frenchsocialist minister for national
education, Jack Lang, visited anumber of Corsican bilingual schools
in person. In September2002, the school of the village I was
working in received anofficial visit from the head of the regional
assembly. Thesevisits and events, at which the health and progress
of thebilingual project were officially celebrated, were echoed in
theregional media.
From the perspective of the bilingual teachers I workedwith,
however, this image of a wide and triumphant proCorsican language
consensus was deceptive, and the enemiesof the Corsican language
were still out there. This was notjust a vague accusation; in
private, bilingual teachers coulddraw quite precise pro-Corsican
and anti-Corsican mapsof the island. Indeed, current official
support could not simplyerase decades of a fraught sociolinguistic
history, and theteaching of Corsican in schools still raised strong
feelingsamong those parents, teachers, and educationalists who,
inline with the educational discourses of their youth,
consideredFrench to be the proper language of public schooling
(seeJaffe 1999, 2007). It is against this complex background thatI
return to the administrators injunction not to confuseeducation and
politics, which we can now begin to unpack.
French National Education as aPrepolitical Space
The administrator was, first of all, referring to a specificity
of
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316 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
the French educational system. Given to a young
researcherhailing from a British university, his injunction not to
confuseeducation and politics was not framed as a universal truth
somuch as a call to attend to and respect a national specificityin
a move familiar to anthropologists, the Welsh crew wereoffered up
as an example of the dangers of categorical mis-match (McDonald
1989): one might say that they had missedsomething very French.
In recent years, debates around the French state school asa
supposedly neutral space have centered mostly around re-ligion,
following the famous law banning the wearing of re-ligious symbols
(Bowen 2006; Silverstein 2004). Yet the muchpublicized French
concerns with secularism (lacite) are onlyone element, albeit a
central one, in broader conceptualiza-tions of the state school as
a neutral space. Thus, the 2003report on religious symbols on which
the controversial de-cision was based justified lacite in terms of
the followingbroader principles:
Pupils must be able to learn and construct themselves in a
serene climate so as to attain autonomy of judgement. The
States duty is to shield their minds from the violence and
fury of society: although it should not be a sterile
environ-
ment, the school must not become the echoing chamber
for the passions of the world, lest it fail in its
educational
mission. (Stasi 2003:14)
The passions of the world include not only the specter,
everpresent to French educationalists, of religious
fundamental-isms but also the cut and thrust of party politics.
Further-more, schoolteachers and educational administrators,
likeother civil servants (fonctionnaires), are under what is
knownas the obligation of reserve. As the government Web
sitedetailing the rights and duties of civil servants, puts it,
Theprinciple according to which the public service shall be
neutralforbids the civil servant from making his office the
instru-ment of any form of propaganda
(http://www.fonction-publique.gouv.fr).
The flip side of the civil servants obligation of reserveis his
legally guaranteed right to freedom of opinion, be itpolitical,
philosophical, or religious. The law known as Loi lePors (1983)
states this explicitly: Freedom of opinion is guar-anteed to civil
servants (La liberte dopinion est garantie auxfonctionnaires). As a
reward for enforcing the states contain-ment of the political, the
state employee him- or herself isentitled to a space of private
interiority within which thepolitical can be given free reign.
The principle behind this containment of the political isas old
as the definition of the national French schoolingsystem itself.
Jules Ferry, a Comtian positivist and the min-ister of education
who in 18821883 passed the famous lawsdeclaring school to be
mandatory, free of charge, and secularfor 613-year-olds, wrote the
following in 1881, in a famousopen letter to schoolteachers:
One terrain, gentlemen, on which I allow and indeed rec-
ommend that you hold firmly to your right is that of ev-
eryday militant politics. Do not allow yourselves to be made
into political agents. . . . Were you to encounter
indiscreet
administrators or, what is more likely, overly pressing can-
didates, you would answer Our minister does not wish it.
(quoted in Ozouf and Ozouf 2001:141)
This rejection of politics by a minister may seem
coun-terintuitive if not outright laughable from the purview of
apost-Foucaultian hermeneutics of suspicion. But in keepingwith
what I wrote above, I would like to suspend that criticalreflex for
a moment and examine this ethnographically as acultural logic of
sorts. Such a willing suspension of disbeliefis one of
anthropologys most trusted methodswe shouldbe prepared to apply it
to what is familiar as well as to whatis alien. How does this claim
to separate the political fromthe educational make sense in its own
terms? I will argue thatthe consistency of this view for its
proponents is that theschool is not so much non-political as it is
prepolitical.The abstention from politics is integral, in this
view, to therole of the school in framing and constituting the
politicalitself.
Examined ethnographically, the logic here is replete
withpsychological and developmental assumptions entwined withan
Oakeshott-style political philosophy: the space of the po-litical
is understood to be a space of debate in which rational,autonomous
actors pursue their divergent interests and goalswithin a broadly
common framework; the formation of aproperly political subject
requires an extended operation onthe malleable mind of the child
who must, on the one hand,be formed to this common framework but
must not, onthe other, be prematurely foreclosed by an early
indoctri-nation into one or other political ideology. This is not
unlikeWebers delimitation of the educators role in science as
avocation: not to instill particular values or propound
specificpolitical projects but rather to furnish students with the
fac-tual knowledge and the critical tools they need to
contextu-alize, analyze, refine, and in the end better pursue
whicheverprojects and values they choose to pursue (Weber
1998b[1918]).
The school thus emerges as a veritable political machine(Barry
2001), one that makes possible the political (later) bysuspending
it (now).10 Its aim is, in principle, to produce
10. Described in this way, the state-driven suspension of the
politicalseems like the perfect instance of Agambens (1998) state
of exception:the sovereign suspension of the political that founds
the political order.I have more to say about Agamben later in the
article, but suffice it tosay for now that this model does not
account for the temporal, durationalaspect of the phenomenon I am
describing. The Agambenian sovereigndecision is profoundly
antidurational: it is both an instantaneous, arbi-trary,
foundational act and also permanently present, always justifyingand
enabling sovereignty, its precedence logical rather than veritably
tem-poral. By contrast, the French schools suspension of the
political happensin the extended yet limited durational time frame
of teaching, forming,and informing. It is neither instantaneous nor
eternal: from the point ofview of the individual pupil passing
through it, it lasts for a while andthen stops. In this sense, it
differs also from the kind of suspension ofthe political proposed
by Jameson (2004; see Yurchak 2008:213). Jame-
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Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 317
politically active citizens: votersbut not voters of a
specificparty. As Barry (2001) reminds us, the political actor
doesnot come isolated into the political arena any more than
theconsumer comes isolated into the market place. They comewith a
whole array of material devices and forms of knowledgewhich serve
to frame political action (86).
The French school has been configured for more than acentury to
function as one such framing device: as the nine-teenth-century
schoolteacher and later senator Jean Mace(18151894), founder of the
influential league for schooling(Ligue de lenseignement), famously
noted, the schoolteachersrole is to form electors, not to influence
elections (quotedin Ozouf and Ozouf 2001:144). Notwithstanding the
extensivechanges in French education in the intervening century
(Prost1992), much of this logic remains in present-day
definitionsof school as a neutral spacenot sterile, because the
flameof reason must be fed some limited and controlled amountof
contention, but protected from the passions of the worldthat could
so easily snuff it out.
To return to my own specific case, the administrators
dis-tinction between politics and education was thus drawingon a
century-old history of French national education. It isinsofar as
the school protects children from a prematureentry into politics
that it can form and shape them intoadequately prepared citizens
who can then enter the politicalarena armed with a range of
prepolitical skills and knowl-edges that are better left to the
positive purview of pedagogicalscience than to the vagaries of
political decision.11 In otherwords (and I am still speaking
ethnographically), a distinctionbetween the political and the
non-political is crucial in en-abling the political itself.
Critique Is in the Field
Now for the critical reflex. Any anthropologist who has
readJames Fergusons (1994) excellent dissection of developmentwill
recognize in the above an antipolitics machine, an ex-tremely
well-honed mechanism for the containment of thepolitical that
naturalizes and removes from political conten-tion the framework
within which politics is then supposed tooperate, the kinds of
actors who are supposed to participatein it, and the range of
matters to which it applies. But hereagain, the critique can be
found ethnographically. For in-stance, Stephane, a bilingual
schoolteacher to whom I men-
sons suspension of the political (which as Yurchak points out,
chimesin with Rancie`res visions of politics as a foundational,
utopian act) refersto what one can only call a revolutionary
refusal to play the game ofpolitics and accept the existing
political regime. I refer to the space ofthe school as prepolitical
rather than antipolitical in order to point tothis processual
aspect.
11. The fact that Emile Durkheim had a more than accessory
handin honing and disseminating such French definitions of national
edu-cation in the early twentieth century opens up a series of
links to fas-cinating recent explorations into sociology,
positivism, and the contain-ment of politics that I unfortunately
do not have space to pursue here(Karsenti 2006; Latour 2005b).
tioned the educational administrators comment,
respondedprecisely in this Foucaultian vein. He noted that in the
Cor-sican context, it was very clear that political was being
usedby the administrator as a code word for nationalist.
Hecomplained that being opposed to nationalism would not becounted
as political whereas supporting it would, and hedenounced the
double standards according to which defini-tions of the political
are drawn up. Shoring up these doublestandards, in his view, was
the entire setup of the Frenchstates apolitical school. Stephane
thus provides us with anindigenous critique of the antipolitical
mechanism ofFrench state education that closely parallels the
hermeneuticsof suspicion to which political anthropology is
accustomed.
Yet even Stephane, while he was keen to denounce any falseclaims
to impartiality and was intimately convinced that ev-erything is
political, still described his own teaching practicein terms that
reintroduced some measure of distinction fromthe rest of his
political engagement. Although he was a mil-itant for the Corsican
Green Party, Stephane noted that agood teacher does not
proselytize. Those opposed to na-tionalism had no qualms
proselytizing in their classrooms(under cover of supposedly not
being political), he claimed,but not so he. But then what is
proselytizing if not confusingpolitics and education? The rivers of
French political theoryrun deep.
Whereas Stephanes reaction to the administrators sepa-ration of
education and politics was one of suspicion,another, much more
sympathetic reading was given by Pascal,the bilingual schoolteacher
of the village of Crucetta withwhom I worked most closely
throughout my time in Corsica.12
Like Stephane, Pascal pointed out that political here
meantnationalist, but he went on to explain that keeping
politicsand education separate was important in the fraught
contextin which Corsican bilingual schoolteachers (and LCC
teachersmore generally) worked. For a prime accusation that
theiropponents leveled at LCC teachers, both in overt
confron-tation and through widespread gossip and insinuation,
wasprecisely that they confused education and politics. In
Cru-cetta, the village in which I did most of my fieldwork,
wildrumors ran about the educational practices of Pascal the
bi-lingual schoolteacher: was he teaching entirely in
Corsican,ignoring French-speaking children who did not
understand?was he promoting nationalist agendas and indoctrinating
hispupils in antistate rhetoric? Parents who befriended me in
thevillage often asked me to report back to them on such
matters,and these rumors continued to run no matter how often
Iexplained that, on the contrary, Pascal adhered meticulouslyto the
official 50%/50% bilingual timetable, made sure all thechildren
understood by repeating the most difficult Corsicanwords and
phrases in French, and steered clear of any dis-cussion of party
politics in the classroom.
Bilingual schoolteachers were extremely vulnerable to such
12. Names of people and places are pseudonyms except for the
regionalcapital Ajaccio.
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318 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
accusations, however, by virtue of being intricately enmeshedin
the often contradictory associations and processes de-scribed
above: employees of the French state performing astate-sponsored
project that itself had been carried by thedemands of antistate
nationalists with whom some of theteachers had more than passing
sympathies. The Welsh TVcrew, following their own agenda and
probably with somedegree of naive sympathy, had collapsed this
complex land-scape into a straightforward tale of
educational-political ac-tion, showing bombs and grammar to be part
of the sameproject. Opponents of bilingual education in Corsica
oftendid the same, with much less naivete and much more
directimpact.
The force of the accusation that LCC enthusiasts
confusededucation and politics can be understood only in the
contextof the particularly strong distinction between these two
realmsinstituted by the French state, and the LCC enthusiasts
de-fense was mostly couched in the same official language.
Nearlythe entirety of Pascals beginning-of-year meeting with
parentsconsisted of his explanation of the solid pedagogical basis
ofthe bilingual method, drawing evidence from linguists,
psy-chologists, and pedagogues to the effect that early
bilingualismis good for a childs intellectual development. On one
oc-casion, my presence in the room was explicitly pointed to asan
indication of the scientific interest that the bilingual projectwas
attracting. No mention was made of political projects orclaims
(nationalist or otherwise), and when the choice ofCorsican (over
English, for instance) was justified, it was pri-marily in terms of
the long-standing pedagogical principlethat a child should be
coaxed from the known into the un-known, from immediate reality to
abstract principle, frompatrimonial attachments to universal
openness.13
At the same time, Pascal made no secret in the village ofhis
personal attachment to Corsican nationalism. As he him-self put it,
I dont hide my flag in my pocket, and he claimednever to have
obeyed the official injunction to vote in theprivacy of the booth
(isoloir). However, such considerationswere explicitly excluded
from this particular setting; here thefocus was on educational
matters. When we discussed theadministrators injunction to separate
education and politics,Pascal made it clear that this separation
was much more thana ploy: it entitled him to a measure of personal
freedom, thefreedom to vote the way he did and yet to be able to
teachwithout the political dogmatism of some convinced
nation-alists: Children, after all, are a different audience, he
noted.
In Stephane and Pascal we have, in effect, two
differentresponses to the accusation that bilingual teaching is
overlypolitical (read nationalist). Stephane challenges the
sep-aration between politics and education, whereas Pascal
provesthat he is enforcing it. Before we are tempted to
conclude
13. This pedagogical principle, which is at least as old as
RousseausEmile (Thiesse 1997:17, 63), was reflected in an Education
Nationalecatchphrase popular at the time of my fieldwork: anchoring
oneself soas to be more open (sancrer pour mieux souvrir).
which is the more mystified or counterhegemonic of thesetwo
strategies, it would be worthwhile to consider two things.First,
Stephanes rejection is far from absolute: because he stillwishes
after all to critique the propaganda put forward bycolleagues of
opposing political persuasions, he must retainsome basic features
of the notion that there should be a limitto the political; hence
his strictures against proselytism. Sec-ond, Pascals upholding of a
separation between politics andeducation can be a most enabling way
of pursuing a politicalproject, a dichotomy necessary to attain a
unity of purpose.
What this section shows is that debates around the
political,where it is, and where it ends, are intrinsic to this as
to manyother contexts in which anthropologists work. Politics
thusmust be retained as an ethnographic category, which
willsometimes entail a suspension of a critical reflex that
comesall too easily to anthropologists today. With the political,
aswith everything else, we should be prepared, as Bruno
Latour(2005a) puts it, to allow actors to deploy their own
contro-versies and not to interrupt them on the assumption that
weare much better placed than they to know what the politicalis to
begin with. Crediting people with the capacity to thinkthrough
their own problems need not entail a loss of criticaledge. Indeed,
we will usually find that critique is already
thereethnographically, and we may find comfort for our own
crit-ical impulses in those of the people we work with.14
On the other hand, allowing actors to deploy their
owncontroversies can introduce elements that a premature
criticalreflex might have made us miss, such as, here, the notion
ofthe productive (rather than merely repressive) potential of
adistinction between the political and the non-political.
Par-adoxically, the French national education system emerges asboth
a politics and an antipolitics machine, a mechanism thatby
containing politics also enables it in a range of differentways.
This is only a special case of Foucaults famous pointabout the
productive nature of power, but applied to politicsitself, it is a
special case that could turn the entire traditionof critical
sociology on its head.
Necessary Dichotomies
We employ a dualism of models merely in order to reach
toward a process that would negate any model. [Dualisms]
are the enemy, the necessary enemy, the piece of furniture
we are forever moving. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980:31)
In contexts other than those described above, Pascal
acknowl-edged, indeed defended, the fact that his educational
practice
14. I draw my inspiration here from a comment by the late
SusanBenson, made some years ago to an undergraduate caught in the
throesof the relativism-versus-critique debate: if you disagree
with somethingthe people you work with are doing, you will almost
invariably find thatsomeone else there disagrees with it, too,
albeit on their own terms andfor different reasons. Critique is, in
other words, immanent in the eth-nographic context, which is why
there is no contradiction in practicebetween relativism and
engagement.
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Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 319
was informed by his personal political convictions. Yet at
nopoint did he collapse this distinction. The separation
betweenpolitics and education was not merely a mask that allowedhim
to counter accusations; it was intrinsic to his own def-initions
and justifications of his practice, particularly by op-position to
that of other teachers. Pascal, who had been acommitted advocate of
the Corsican language since the 1970s,was sometimes gently critical
of the newly qualified teachersof the younger generation. He felt
that because they had comethrough a system in which teaching
Corsican in school anduniversity was already an established
reality, they lacked theirforebears sense of militant engagement.
While he consideredthese youngsters too institutionalized and
academic, however,Pascal was equally dismissive of those of his own
generationwho had not grounded their enthusiasm for Corsican
lan-guage and culture in solid pedagogical bases and who, likethe
independent Breton schoolteachers in the 1970s (Mc-Donald 1989),
had turned their teaching into an antistruc-tural, carnivalesque
experience premised on an explicitly po-liticized rejection of
French educational norms. Baking cakesand singing Corsican songs
was all very well, but only if itwas grounded in a solid pedagogy
(for a complex accountof the interplay of politics and pedagogy in
the bilingual class-room, see Jaffe 2003).
Pascal also distinguished education from politics in his
dis-cussion of trade unions. Although, as we have seen, he wasa
convinced nationalist, he did not subscribe to the nationalistunion
Syndicat des Travailleurs Corses (Syndicate of CorsicanWorkers;
STC) in part because his experience as a teachermade him dubious of
their hard-line position on language.He recalled an STC demand,
long before the establishmentof bilingual education, that all
teaching be done entirely inCorsican. He commented wryly that they
make me laugh,explaining that no teacher at the time could have
done it evenif any child could have understood it. Even today, he
oftensaid, bilingualism cannot be decreed; however desirable
apolitical move, teaching bilingually requires a level of skill,on
the part of both the teachers and the pupils, that can onlybe the
result of patient and painstaking applicationthe kindof skill he
had spent a lifetime acquiring. In sum, one mightsay, to borrow
Bruno Latours characterization of the specificpower of modernity,15
that it was Pascals painstaking pu-rification of politics from
education that allowed him to soeffectively translate them into
each other in his own practice(Latour 1993).
15. In positing the intertwined processes of purification and
trans-lation as the characteristic hallmark of modernity, Latour
(1991) suggeststhat the power of the moderns has rested precisely
in the explicitpurification of nature from society and of humans
from nonhumans,which covered (and thereby allowed) an implicit
translation resultingin new hybrids: The moderns believe that their
expansion is due solelyto the careful separation of nature and
society, . . . while in actual fact,they succeeded because they
mixed much larger masses of humans andnon-humans, without
bracketing anything off, and allowing themselvesany potential
combination! (61)
Nor was this a purely individual concern. Among them-selves,
bilingual teachers were constantly rethinking the sep-aration
between political engagement and pedagogical prac-tice. The
association A Sciolilingua is a case in point. ASciolilingua (the
tongue twister) aimed to provide a forumfor bilingual teachers
outside of the structures of the Edu-cation Nationale. It had been
created by two highly committedteachers of Corsican who had been
actively engaged in thepromotion of Corsican throughout their
careers and were,like Pascal, among the earliest practitioners of
bilingualism.Many members of A Sciolilingua were also members of
thenationalist trade union STC. Like trade union meetings,
ASciolilingua meetings took place in the classroom of one oranother
of the members outside of school hours. Discussionsin A
Sciolilingua meetings were often critical of the admin-istration
and the ministry in a way that was generally moresubmerged in other
public contexts, such as the pedagogicalcourses. As a result, in A
Sciolilingua, as in trade union meet-ings, the position of Corsican
enthusiasts and former teacherswho were now administrators could
sometimes be revealedas slightly ambiguous.
However, any practical link between the association andthe trade
union was explicitly rejected by one of the founders,who explained
that la revendication (antagonistic politicizeddemands,
characteristic of trade unions) was contrary tolesprit associatif
(the spirit of association). Although A Scioli-linguas founders
were keen to be identified as outside theofficial system, their
main aim was to encourage discussionand cooperation among bilingual
teachers and facilitate thesharing of pedagogical experiences and
practices, to comple-ment, in other words, rather than directly
challenge the Ed-ucation Nationale.
Furthermore, the notion that a specific category of actionthat
concerned, as Weber (1998a [1918]) would have put it,the
leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of . . .[the]
state (77) was to be kept separate from education itselfwas nowhere
more crucial than when the teachers flirted withthis boundary, as
they occasionally did. In one training sem-inar for bilingual
schoolteachers, for instance, the fairly senioradministrator
suggested in his opening addressostensiblyas a pedagogical
pointthat it would be easier to create aCorsican environment for
pupils if the school personnel(including teaching assistants,
administrative staff, janitors,etc.) were all Corsican speakers.
This comment held powerfulimplications in the context of many
Corsican nationalistscontroversial demand for affirmative action on
the Corsicanjob market (a claim referred to as the Corsicanization
ofjobs); in the current sociolinguistic landscape of Corsica,
torestrict jobs to Corsican speakers would mean restrictingthem, in
practice, to Corsicans, something that the Frenchstate in 2003 (and
indeed now) was highly unlikely to allow.The reference, however
veiled, was not lost on those present,and hence, at the
administrators suggestion, there were know-ing smiles, hums, and
one or two comments of dream on!
On the same occasion, the district primary-school inspector
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320 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
suggested that the teachers work of today might lead to-morrow
to what he referred to in a very roundabout way aslinguistic
results in institutional terms (des retombees lin-guistiques au
niveau institutionnel). Here, the reference wasto the nationalist
demand for the promotion of Corsican tothe status of an official
language on a par with French in allpublic institutions (Jaffe
1999). The inspector immediatelyqualified this by saying its not
necessarily what were after.
The extremely powerful distinction between education andpolitics
that runs implicitly through these examples both in-hibits and
permits such subtle challenges and repositionings.Once again,
purification and translation are conjoined. It isthe separation
between education and politics that enablesthe smuggling of
positions from one side to the other: ishaving a Corsican-speaking
team a pedagogical question oris it a political one? If enough
people speak Corsican as aresult of effective schooling, will this
amount to a politicaloutcome? As issues are shifted subtly from one
side to theother of this border between the political and the
educational,the border itself is shifted and transformed.
My argument here dovetails, up to a point, with that of arecent
paper by Alexei Yurchak (2008). Yurchak shows howRussian
Necrorealist artists during the Soviet years subvertedthe power of
the state, opening up zones of freedom at thevery heart of the
state of exception, by engaging in what heterms a politics of
indistinction based on a suspension ofthe political. The result is
a powerful challenge to Agambensformulations about bare life: While
the states bio-politics isthe mechanism that enables the creation
of the subject-citizen,there are contexts in which it cannot fully
account for thatsubject (Yurchak 2008:221). I would go farther,
however;there are contexts in which it does not try. The
Necrorealistsdescribed by Yurchak managed to subvert the states
attemptsat total control, producing what Boyer in his comment onthe
piece calls zones of subjectivity and agency (Yurchak2008:216) by
constituting themselves simultaneously as po-litical and
nonpolitical subjects (Yurchak 2008:214). By con-trast, the
bilingual teachers do not need to do this; this doubleposition is
already institutionally set up for them. By natu-ralizing the
prepolitical authority of the educational whileenshrining the right
of the civil servant to personal politicalpositioning, French
national education produces teachers assubjects who are empowered
and limited in specific ways:empowered insofar as they can draw on
the uncontested au-thority of the prepolitical (as educational
experts) while re-taining the right to an unquestioned interior
political space;limited insofar as their legitimacy rests on the
interdiction totransgress this boundary. But in the context of
multiple andshifting attachments, conflicting pressures and
demands, thevery work that is constantly necessary in order to hold
apartpolitics and education leads teachers to reconfigure
thatboundary itself (cf. Yarrow 2008b for a similar argument
re-garding productive dualisms in development). The
Frencheducational system as a politics machine opens up some
zones of subjectivity and agency for both its teachers andits
pupils in the very act of closing others.
This, in sum, is the ethnographic observation:
bilingualschoolteachers are sometimes acting politically and
sometimesnot while all the while reflecting on and inflecting what
thisdifference entails. We may be tempted to step back from thisas
anthropologists and redescribe this entire metaprocess aspolitical.
I think that we should resist this temptation. Forif we redefine,
for instance, everything Pascal is doing as po-litical (including
his constant work on his own Corsican lan-guage skills, his study
of pedagogical principles, or the atten-tion he pays to making sure
weaker pupils keep up), wethereby remove the very thing that gives
his practical inter-ventions their power and effect.16
Conclusion: Taking Politics Seriously
It should not be forgotten that there is a specificity to
pol-
itics. Max Webers sense of the importance of considering
the particular characteristics of politics as a vocation has
often been forgotten in the effort to expand our sense of
politics. (Barry 2001:86)
The expansion of the political and the concomitant
suspiciontoward the non-political in anthropology are in
themselvesvery productive moves. One of the most fundamental
insightsof post-Foucaultian anthropology is that non-political
spacehas to be produced, that there is nothing natural, basic,
orunquestionable about the kinds of spaces that are
routinelyclaimed to lie outside of politics. The non-political is
an out-come of action rather than some natural backdrop for it.
The pitfall in this denaturalization of the
non-political,however, lies in a concomitant naturalization of the
political.Often, the price to pay for insight into the
non-political isan assumption about the ontological status of
politics as thereally real ground of reality. If politics simply
becomes thenew real against which the (always ultimately illusory)
pro-duction of the non-political is to be studied, then we havejust
exchanged one set of blinkers for another. To leave un-questioned
the ontological status of political realities whenwe happily
dissect that of figures of the non-political such asethics,
objectivity, economics, or taste seems rather strange.Why does
politics deserve this privileged treatment? Whycan it not actually
be an ethnographic object in its own right?Or in other words, why
could we not, as anthropologists,refrain from establishing the
political as either figure orground but rather attend to it as the
people we work withmake it appear?
Such an ethnography of politics might find an uneasy andpartial
ally in the French philosopher Jacques Rancie`re (2004;also
Nordmann 2006). Rancie`re claims that political philos-ophy negates
politics insofar as it seeks to ground political
16. This is why I would not extend to this case Yurchaks
thought-provoking coinage of a politics of indistinction.
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Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 321
action definitionally, once and for all, in a specific
distributionof reality. If this takes care of Oakeshott (and the
Frencheducational systems neutral school), Rancie`re is no kinderto
the inspiration behind much of the anthropology of pol-itics. He
criticizes the metapolitics of suspicion that fromMarx through
Althusser and Bourdieu (and we might addAbrams and others) has
concentrated on revealing the wayideals of equality are perverted
and negated by an unequalsocial reality. For Rancie`re, for whom
the performative as-sertion of equality is the first sign of
politics, the often well-intentioned hermeneutics of suspicion that
denounce falseclaims to equality have an effect exactly the
opposite of whatthey propose to achieve: they cancel politics by
constantlyreducing the possibility of equality to the reality of
inequality.This sociological account of politics, which has lost
anyredemptive purpose, merely enshrines inequality by redes-cribing
it.
By contrast to both classical political theory and the
her-meneutics of suspicion, Rancie`re defines politics
recursivelyas the redrawing of the demarcation itself:
Political action consists in showing as political what was
viewed as social, economic, or domestic. It consists
in blurring the boundaries. It is what happens whenever
domestic agentsworkers or women, for instancere-
configure their quarrel as a quarrel concerning the common,
that is, concerning what place belongs or does not belong
to it and who is able or unable to make enunciations and
demonstrations about the common. It should be clear there-
fore that there is politics when there is a disagreement
about
what is politics, when the boundary separating the political
from the social or the public from the domestic is put into
question. Politics is a way of repartitioning the political
from
the non-political. This is why it generally occurs out of
place, in a place which was not supposed to be political.
(Rancie`re 2003:3)17
One could draw various conclusions from this passage, oneof
which would involve enlarg[ing] our definition of politicsto the
point where it accepts its own suspension (Latour2005a:35), which
would lead us once again to the conclusionthat everything is
political, including the non-political. How-ever, what I wish to
retain from the above is not this butrather the implied reality and
concreteness of the non-politicalas an actually existing condition
for and outcome of politicalaction. And at the risk of departing
quite radically from whatI think is Rancie`res own intention
here,18 I will draw thesymmetrical conclusion: that the political
is itself a result andcondition of non-political action. The
political and the non-political emerge as opposed performative
projects rather thanas figure and ground (Jeffery and Candea 2006).
As Andrew
17. By this definition, political anthropologys expansion of the
po-litical is indeed a political act as long as it is an
always-recommenceddemonstration and does not become a de facto
analytical truism.
18. Those interested in a more faithful anthropological
treatment ofRancie`re should read the above-mentioned article by
Yurchak (2008).
Barry (2001) puts it, Those engaged in politics are
necessarilyconcerned with the tension and the relation between
politicaland antipolitical activity; between the politicisation and
thedepoliticisation of other realms (4). Claims about the
polit-ical or non-political nature of various spaces are an
intrinsicpart of the performative process that make such spaces
existor inexist (Bourdieu 1980; cf. Austin 1975; Mol 1999).
Suddenly, what the educational official was saying beginsto make
more sense. What as a descriptive statement seemedeither obviously
naive or obviously deceitful (how could youseparate education from
politics?) is perfectly cogent as partof a performative project.
The educational official was ob-viously aware both that one could
very well connect andindeed mix up education and politics (this is
what the Welshfilmmakers did) and that when this is done by people
withsome measure of representational power, such as filmmakersor
anthropologists, it could have severe negative effects onthe very
intricately balanced project he was involved in. Failingto respect
the boundary he was indicating would not be somuch a descriptive
mistake as an adverse performative in-tervention on his lived
reality.
My proposal, then, is that anthropology keep in view
bothdepoliticization and politicization, both antipolitics
machinesand politics machines of various kinds. This requires us
totake seriously the achieved spaces of the non-political in
whichthe people we work with have invested themselves. What welose
thereby in instant, out-of-the-box critique we gain inethnographic
sensitivity. Why does this matter? Because (andhere is the coda)
much of what I have said about bilingualteachers applies also to
anthropologists. Post-60s political an-thropology has accustomed us
to think of the discipline asan intrinsically political or critical
project; for such a projectto have any effect, however,
anthropology still must retain itsdistinctive ability to separate
(at least momentarily) ethno-graphic sensitivity from critical
intent.
Comments
Michael CarrithersDepartment of Anthropology, Durham University,
SouthRoad, Durham DH1 3LE, United
Kingdom([email protected]). 3 VIII 10
Some years ago I was in the audience at a local rally againstone
of the United States foreign wars when a speakerwhowas, like me, a
studenturged a plan for more united andvigorous antiwar action, and
he capped his argument withthese words: If youre not part of the
solution, youre partof the problem! Judging by the applause around
me, thisshot hit the bulls-eye, and it may even have led to
moreconcerted action. But for me the speakers words led to
im-mediate prereflective distaste and rejection and later to a
line
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322 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 3, June 2011
of somber reflection that Candeas lucid and engaging ar-gument
has revived for me.
Candeas argument has many strands: it can be read
asmethodological, arguing for ethnographic openness
againstprepackaged theorizing, or it can be read asI hesitate touse
the wordpolitical, arguing for discursive-political equal-ity
between the ethnographer interpreting subjects lives andthe
subjects interpreting their own lives. Orand this is whatdraws
Candeas argument together with my own reflectionshis argument can
be read as moral, a matter of evaluatingactions toward others in
the light of a moral aesthetic standard(Carrithers 1992). Candea
expresses this moral judgmentwhen, at the end of his essay, he
again raises the educationalofficials hard-won distinction between
education and politics.One could, implies Candea, reinterpret the
officers dis-tinction as being itself political and therefore a
sort of self-misunderstanding. But that would be wrong, argues
Candea,for such a reinterpretation would not be so much a
descrip-tive mistake as an adverse performative intervention on
[theeducational officials] lived reality. Similarly, the
antiwarspeakers presumption that if I did not agree with his plan
Iwould be part of the problem was an adverse
performativeintervention on my lived reality (although the word
chutz-pah comes to mind more readily).
Let me call the argument shared by these two cases thejujitsu
trope. I choose the term to suggest that it projects,in the first
place, a twist, a flip, a total reinterpretation of asituation. So
it has an effect that appears in so many settings:in Marxist
explanations, in Foucaultian ones, in psychoana-lytic
redescriptions, or indeed in many religious descriptionsof
apparently everyday life. In all these cases ones
immediateunderstanding is overturned by some other, allegedly
morepenetrating, understanding. But the act of interpretative
flip-ping does something else as well: it reinterprets the
interloc-utors in the speech situation. Thus, if I have the nerve
to tellyou that what you thought was a simple dream in fact has
asexual meaning revealing your secret desires, or that youravowedly
non-political ideas are in fact entirely political, Ihave not only
made an assertion about reality but have alsomade myself into the
defining authority over your reality. Ihave flipped you, my
interlocutor, from equal conversationalpartner to passive recipient
of my wisdom. And it is just thisimplicit moveimplicit because, if
it were explicit, it wouldnever work so wellthat I rejected when I
rejected the antiwarspeakers presumption and that Candea rejects
when he res-cues the educational officers actual views from
distortingreinterpretation. Similarly, the Welsh filmmakers, who
showedthe teaching of Corsican mixed with violent nationalism
andthereby perverted the education officials careful
distinctions,may be judged morally as breaking the trust between
officialand film crew.
Another of Candeas examples, however, presents a moredifficult
case, and that is Fergusons (1994) anti-politics ma-chine. Ferguson
argues that as a result of the discourse ofdevelopment in Lesotho,
state power ends up or turns out
to be much extended, although that was not the stated aimof the
discourse. The argument owes much to Foucault inthree senses: (1)
there is a systematic effect achieved throughdiscourse, (2) the
effecting system is impersonal, and (3) theapparently non-political
discourse can be flipped to show thereality of its pervasively
political nature. Candea evaluatesFergusons argument as excellent,
and we could conceivablyinfer that excellence to be morally
positive in that Fergusonuses the jujitsu trope on behalf of those
victimized by bu-reaucratic power.
But I suspect that this excellence cannot, in fact, be moralin
nature. For Ferguson takes great pains to show the system-atic and
impersonal effects of discourse such that any actualrelation of
persons that might be called moral is effaced.In fact, to add
morality would be to do injustice to Fergusonsargument, and I
imagine that neither Candea nor I wouldtake so immoral a step.
Rather, the excellence of Fergusonsargument is incommensurable with
the moralizing argumentwith which Candea ends his own (excellent)
reasoning. Nev-ertheless, the two styles of thought must be
entertained to-gether, which can be done only through irony. But
then, asI have pointed out in this journal (Carrithers 2005), irony
isthe natural, indeed desirable position of anthropologists. Foras
Kenneth Burke observes, irony is a perspective of per-spectives
among which none of the participating sub-perspectives can be
treated as either precisely right or pre-cisely wrong. They are all
voices, or personalities, or positions,integrally affecting one
another (Burke 1969 [1945]:512).
Charlie GalibertCentre Interdisciplinaire Recits, Cultures,
Langues et Socie-tes, Universite de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, Campus
Carlone,98 Boulevard Herriot, 06204 Nice Cedex 3,
France([email protected]). 23 VIII 10
Matei Candeas article approaches the question of the
anthro-pological definition of politics (and of doing politics)
eth-nographically through an exploration of the boundaries be-tween
spaces involved in the order of the political in bilingualeducation
as it is practiced in Corsica within the legislative andpedagogical
frameworks of the Education National. This in-teresting distinction
provides me with an occasion to reflect onthe kind of
Mediterraneanist analyses whose popularity haveled some to suggest
the existence of fundamental north/southcultural oppositions or
perhaps even a clash between two dif-ferent political ontologies:
the one Mediterranean and theother European or Euro-American.
Anthropologys return from its distant and exotic fields tothe
local and the nearby is seen as having led to a fetishizationof the
local object through the invention of an infra-Europeancultural
area, the Mediterranean, under the influence ofAmerican
anthropologys interest in peasant communities,values of honor and
shame, and small-scale local commu-
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Candea The Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics 323
nities. In the synthesis of their review of the anthropologyof
the Mediterranean (Albera, Block, and Bromberger 2001),Bromberger
and Durand (2001:742743) note the family re-semblances that make
such diverse (and in some cases evencontradictory/opposed)
societies comparable, complementingthe picture drawn by geographers
and ethnohistorians.
Lenclud (1977), in his Corsican fieldwork, had alreadynoted that
his anthropological approach to Corsica had to bedetermined by the
phenomena he proposed to study. Theconstant practice of detac