Anthropology and Political Science: A Convergent Approach 9780857457264

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Anthropology & Political Science

Anthropology & Anthropology & Law James M. Donovan and H. Edwin Anderson, III Anthropology & Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium Mark Allen Peterson Anthropology & Political Science: A Convergent Approach Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik

ANTHROPOLOGY & POLITICAL SCIENCE A Convergent Approach

Myron J. Aronoff & Jan Kubik

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2013 Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aronoff, Myron Joel.     Anthropology and political science : a convergent approach / Myron J. Aronoff    and Jan Kubik.         p. cm. — (Anthropology &)     Includes bibliographical references and index.     ISBN 978-0-85745-725-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-726-4    (e-book)     1. Anthropology—Methodology. 2. Political science—Methodology. I. Aronoff,    Myron J. II. Kubik, Jan. III. Title.    GN33.A76 2012    301—dc23 2012001691

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

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-0-85745-725-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-726-4 (ebook)

In loving memory of Rita and to Martha with love

CONTENTS

List of Tables

ix

List of Figures

xi

Acknowledgements

xii

Preface

xv

Chapter 1 Introduction

1

Chapter 2 Methods: Ethnography and Case Study

23

Chapter 3 Beyond Political Culture

60

Chapter 4 Symbolic Dimensions of Politics: Political Ritual and Ceremonial

86

Chapter 5 The Politics of Collective Identity: Contested Israeli Nationalisms

110

Chapter 6 Democratization in Deeply Divided Societies: The Netherlands, India, and Israel

132

Chapter 7 Camp David Rashomon: Contested Interpretations of the Israel/Palestine Peace Process

171

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Contents

Chapter 8 What Can Political Scientists Learn about Civil Society from Anthropologists?

198

Chapter 9 Homo sovieticus and Vernacular Knowledge

240

Chapter 10 Conclusions

279

Bibliography

286

Name Index

326

Subject Index

334

TABLES

Table 2.1. Location of ethnographic studies in the studies of power and politics

27

Table 2.2. Five types of ethnography

29

Table 2.3. Three dimensions of the ethnographic subject

42

Table 3.1. Types of symbols

70

Table 3.2. Logos versus Mythos

72

Table 3.3. Characteristics of traditional rituals, secular rituals, and ceremonies

75

Table 3.4. Dimensions of rhetoric

76

Table 3.5. Custom and invented tradition

79

Table 4.1. Ideal type classical distinctions between traditional and modern societies

89

Table 5.1. Types of nationalism

126

Table 6.1. Cultural and political forms of accommodation and control in fissured societies

136

Table 8.1. Legal transparent civil society (ideal type of civil society) and “incomplete” civil societies (secondary groups)

205

Table 8.2. Extreme flaws undermining linkages among civil society and other polity domains

208

Table 8.3. Civil society attributes, their “non-civil” counterparts, and hybrid solutions

218

x

List of Tables

Table 8.4. Early split within Solidarity: revolutionaries versus reformists

230

Table 8.5. Cultural affinity between civil society and the Cieszyn culture

234

Table 8.6. Unemployment in the Bielsko Voivodship, June 1993

235

Table 9.1. Summary of the analysis based on two ethnographies

270

Table 9.2. Selected results of the parliamentary elections 21 October 2007

271

FIGURES

Figure 4.1. Rituals of rebellion

102

Figure 4.2. Rituals of confirmation

103

Figure 4.3. Transformative ceremonies/ceremonial revolutions

104

Figure 8.1. Civil society and other domains of the democratic polity

206

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

W

ere we to attempt to acknowledge all of those to whom we are indebted it would require far more space than our publisher permits and would exhaust the patience of our readers. Therefore, we shall keep the list short with apologies to those omitted. Aronoff pays tribute to his intellectual mentors—professors Max Gluckman, David C. Rapoport, and M. G. Smith. He also thanks the participants in the extraordinary 1974 Burg Wartenstein conference on secular ritual (Moore and Myerhoff 1977) who profoundly influenced his understanding of ritual. Kubik owes special debt to Andrzej Paluch, friend and first mentor in anthropology; Professor Alex Alland, without whom there would be much less anthropology in his life; Professor Joan Vincent and Professor Morton Fried, who stoked his love for political anthropology; and Marian Kempny, a friend and fierce interlocutor who is sorely missed. Special thanks go to our many informants and interviewees. Those quoted are named in the endnotes. However, they are only a small minority of the hundreds from whom we have learned. The invaluable suggestions for revisions by the two “official” readers for the press, Edward Schatz and Nadav Shelef, allowed us to improve the manuscript in dozens of major and small ways. We are grateful to them for revealing their names and thus making it possible to acknowledge their most wonderful critical work. All remaining imperfections are, of course, of our own doing. We owe a special debt to Karen Stasevich for her careful reading and extremely helpful editing of the entire manuscript. Deepta Janardhan, Kristyn Manoukian, and Parag Shende provided many hours of indispensable assistance during the final stages of editing. We are particularly grateful to the wonderful staff of Berghahn Books, in particular to Marion Berghahn, Ann Przyzycki DeVita, Melissa Spinelli, and Kristine Hunt. Among the many colleagues who commented on various drafts of our work at conferences, symposia, etc., we list those whose comments

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have resulted in revisions. We are most appreciative of their input and absolve them of any responsibility for remaining errors. Our sincere gratitude to these most valued colleagues: Rudy Andeweg, Yael Aronoff, Yossi Beilin, Michael Bernhard, Indrani Chaterjee, Jose Ciprut, Hans Claessen, Eric Davis, Grzegorz Ekiert, Charles Enderlin, Leela Fernandez, John Gillis, David Guterman, Steve Hanson, Ehud Harari, Aldona Jawłowska, Arie Kacowicz, Robert Kaufman, Marian Kempny (in memoriam), Michael Kennedy, Grazyna Kubica, Joanna Kurczewska, Richard Lau, Arend Lijphart, Amy Linch, Julie Livingston, Anna MalewskaSzałygin, Radek Markowski, Marina Mogilner, Cas Mudde, Tim Pachirat, Robin Wagner Pacifici, Ami Pedahzur, Jeremy Pressman, Jean Rosenfeld, Edward Schatz, Anna Seleny, Shaul Shenhav, Andrew Spath, Gadi Taub, Dan Tichenor, Michael Warner, Jacek Wasilewski, Lisa Wedeen, Leszek and Iwona Werpachowscy, Dvora Yanow, Eviatar Zerubavel, and Yael Zerubavel. We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint revised versions of the following previously published material: For Myron J. Aronoff: “Camp David Rashomon: Contested Interpretations of the Israel/Palestine Peace Process,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 124, no.1 (Spring 2009), pp. 143–167. Reprinted pp. 31–55 in Daniel Byman and Marylena Mantas, eds., Religion, Democracy, and Politics in the Middle East. New York: The Academy of Political Science, 2012. “Democratizations in Fissured Societies: The Makings of Citizenship,” pp. 253–286 in Jose V. Ciprut, ed., The Future of Citizenship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. “The politics of collective identity: contested Israeli nationalisms,” pp. 168–189 in Jean E. Rosenfeld, ed. Terrorism, Identity, and Legitimacy, London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. For Jan Kubik: “Ethnography of Politics: Foundations, Applications, Prospects,” pp. 25–52 in Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, Edward Schatz, ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. “Hybridization as a condition of civil society’s portability,” pp. 107–29 in Building Civil Society and Democracy in New Europe. Sven Eliaeson, ed. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

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“How to study civil society: the state of the art and what to do next.” East European Politics and Societies, 19 (1), 2005, pp. 105–20. “The Role of Decentralization and Cultural Revival in Post-Communist Transformations: The Case of Cieszyn Silesia, Poland.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 27 (4), 1994, pp. 331–55. The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power. The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (pp. 243–49). College Park: Penn State University Press, 1994. Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989-1993. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999 (with Grzegorz Ekiert).

PREFACE

T

he central vision of this book is succinctly expressed in the subtitle—a convergent approach. We are trained in social and cultural anthropology (specializing in political anthropology) and political science (with a concentration on comparative politics). Throughout our professional careers we have worked in the interstices between the two. But we have always strived to build bridges between them by combining concepts and methodologies from both. This convergent (or hybrid) approach has often drawn from political science the choice of research topics like political parties, party systems, regime change, processes of democratization, civil society and the state, and some concepts developed to analyze them. Our central concern with legitimacy is a traditional topic in political theory (philosophy). Our conceptual focus on culture—the symbolic and semiotic dimensions of politics, e.g., the importance of symbol, myth, rhetoric, and ritual—derives from anthropology. This discipline provides us also with the key methods used in the empirical studies presented in the book: various types of ethnography (most based on participant observation) and the extended case study. These anthropological methods par excellence are employed to produce a greater understanding of some of the most challenging political issues of the day. We also suggest how anthropologists can provide political scientists with more nuanced understandings of the range of factors or variables that are essential to develop context-sensitive interpretations of political phenomena. Anthropological insights can also help make better coding decisions, e.g., in identifying preferences in game theoretical analyses. In this work we tend to emphasize the contributions of anthropology slightly more than those of political science. This is likely because we have spent most of our professional careers with our primary affiliation (i.e., our lines) in political science departments—impelling us to demonstrate to our colleagues the “added value” of anthropology.

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However, we are no less convinced that anthropologists can benefit as well from this convergent approach. For example, the importance of comparison, of midlevel generalization leading to midrange theory, the need to deal with causation even if to specify the nature of mutual causality, and the importance of specifying the nature of systematic data collection are all potentially important contributions of political science. Our goal is to demonstrate the value of this convergent approach without staking a claim for a new discipline. Such a goal is not only beyond our aspirations, but would most likely be counterproductive. We illustrate our approach through the cross-disciplinary analysis of a number of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and postcommunist transformations. When we began thinking about this book—at least ten years ago— political science and anthropology were on diverging trajectories. The practitioners of the former were increasingly enamored by formal methods borrowed from economics, and many relied heavily on sophisticated statistical tools coming from econometrics. But at the same time a rebellion was brewing in political science. The adherents of qualitative methods embarked on the task of taking stock of their own approaches and developing explicit codification of their methodology. This led to the veritable boom in the study of qualitative research techniques (Brady & Collier 2004; Collier 1993; George & Bennett 2004; Gerring 2001; Goertz 2006). The related field of historical methods has also entered a period of fruitful self-examination and systematization (Goodin & Tilly 2006; Mahoney & Rueschemeyer 2003; Pierson 2004). And finally, at least since mid-2000s, a similar movement commenced to examine both the philosophical foundations and the technical specifications of interpretive methods (Bevir 2010; Yanow & Schwartz-Shea 2006) as well as political ethnography (Schatz 2009; Wedeen 2010). This sea change was largely inspired by the Perestroika movement (Monroe 2005).

Chapter Summaries: Part 1 In chapter 1, but in several other places as well, we examine the different assumptions routinely made by the practitioners of each discipline regarding the nature of reality (ontology) and the nature of knowledge, i.e., how we understand reality—especially the limits to our understanding and criteria for validating our knowledge (epistemology). We explore key concepts of each field and their methods of research, and discuss the divergent, ancient intellectual roots of anthropology and

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political science as well as the more contemporary origins of both subfields. We review the troubled “courtship” between the two, pointing out some of the problematic aspects of the relationship. We discuss also, among other differences, how political anthropology challenges as an illusion the “autonomy of the political,” assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. In our discussion of the centrality of ethnography (chapter 2) we analyze the significance of the cultural dimension of social/political reality and the consequences of the recent turn from macro- to microlevels of analysis in political science. This shift is related to the increased interest in understanding the behavior of politicians—through “their own eyes”—while they engage in politics. We note the utility of ethnography for several research programs—comparing ontology, epistemology, and methodology. This allows us to distinguish five types of ethnography: positivist, interpretive, postmodern, global, and paraethnography. In the empirical chapters we demonstrate the utility of each type of ethnography for specific research tasks. For example, interpretive ethnography based on participant observation of semiotic practices is premised on: (1) constructivism (the interpretation of actions “meaningful” to actors), (2) ontological realism and an epistemology that focuses on actual actions of real people, rather than variables, and (3) microscale observation of actual settings and the reconstruction of relevant mechanisms. By relying on this type of ethnography we challenge the concept of Homo sovieticus, a hypothesized type of human being ostensibly found often in the countries that emerged from communism. This approach to ethnographic research is also indispensable for understanding such pressing contemporary issues as the politics of identity—an issue we explore in depth in chapter 6. Chapter 3 examines political culture—the core concept employed in this book. We trace the intellectual roots and evolution of the concept as well as the different traditions and approaches existing in the broad and diverse field of cultural studies. The debate between proponents of Homo economicus and Homo sociologicus is elucidated. Approaches that theorize the workings of cultural factors as constraints of human behavior are contrasted with those that view them as resources that can be deployed in achieving behavior’s goals. We compare the socialpsychological approach favored in political science with the semiotic interpretive approach (especially semiotic practices) associated with anthropology, but recently finding adherents also among political scientists, including us. We do not, however, discuss all approaches that theorize the relationship between political and cultural in political science. Richard Wilson (2000) provides a useful review of most of them.

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In particular, we do not engage the culture theory approach that has some following in political science but differs significantly from ours. It builds upon the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas and has been developed by political scientists Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky (1990). It postulates a universal division of polities (and other political phenomena) into four ideal-type subcultures (fatalistic, individualistic, egalitarian, and hierarchical [collectivistic]) based on two criteria (grid and group). Analysis focuses on the contestation within polities between competing subcultures and explains change in terms of their different competencies and biases.1 Major concepts employed in the analysis of political culture—symbol, myth, rhetoric, and ritual—are explicated. We elucidate the central concept of legitimacy and discuss the relationship between legitimating discourses and hegemony. Important concepts of cultural analysis such as ideology and utopia, collective memory, and custom and invented tradition are introduced and examined. We conclude: “The concept of political culture is critical if not indispensable for several research concerns central to political science, including legitimacy, consent, coordination, collective identity, conflict resolution, and even rebellion.” In chapter 4 we analyze political ritual in what at the time was the dominant Israel Labor Party: a state funeral (orchestrated by the leader of the party whose success ended the long period of Labor Party dominance) held for the reburial of remains reputedly of the fighters and followers of the leader of the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire, and the revolutionary impact of the appearances of Pope John Paul II during his visit to Poland. However, prior to the analysis of these cases we engage in a critical review of the scholarly distinction between “traditional” and “modern” societies. We contend that concepts developed for the study of the former need to be modified when applied to the latter. This point is illustrated by the application of Max Gluckman’s notion of “rituals of rebellion” to explain symbolic behavior in a contemporary political party in Israel and to shed light on revolutionary changes in Poland. We stress the importance of illustrating the difference in the social conditions as well as the similarities of the symbolic practice.

Brief Discussion of Research Techniques I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

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Because we consider explication of the techniques of research so important, in the spirit of reflexive anthropology, we discuss below how we obtained the data analyzed. After this brief introduction to our methodology, we introduce specific analyses of several issues built on our own case studies (chapters 5 through 9). Although this work is the result of collaboration, each of the authors carried out independent research for the respective chapters. Therefore we identify ourselves individually when discussing the nature of our research methods. Aronoff I had no formal training in fieldwork methods in the department of social anthropology and sociology at the University of Manchester, where I arrived in 1965 as a doctoral candidate in political science from UCLA. My knowledge of fieldwork was acquired primarily through the intensive (almost Talmudic) reading of classic texts in graduate seminars, the periodic colloquia of professors and fellow graduate students who gave presentations upon returning from the field, and the anecdotes and gossip in bull sessions in the common room and pubs. When I departed for Israel, Professor Max Gluckman (my supervisor) gave me only one fieldwork instruction: “Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut tight.” Another of my professors, A. L. (Bill) Epstein, edited The Craft of Social Anthropology (1967) that was published when I was in the middle of my first fieldwork in Israel. At each stage of my career my methodology has evolved from conventional ethnographic fieldwork to more unorthodox techniques leading to paraethnography.2 My first study was a traditional ethnography. I lived with my wife and infant daughter in the town I studied, participating in the life of the community from October 1966 through the summer of 1968 (including the war of June 1967). My second major research project involved eight years of participant observation of the national institutions and local branches of the Israel Labor Party during the period I taught at Tel Aviv University (1969–1977) (See M. Aronoff 1977 and 1993). Whereas I regularly attended meetings of major institutions, when I asked my informants (a few of whom had become friends) about the possibility of my attending the “closed” meetings of the standing committee, they all replied that the leaders would never permit it. So I simply asked the secretary who composed the list of invitees to put me on the list—which she did. Since I had spent so much time “hanging around” party headquarters, she apparently assumed I “belonged” there. The ritual aspects of these meetings discussed in chapter 4 were crucially important to understanding the workings of the party as well as the broader theoretical implications we discuss.

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My third major research project was even more unconventional since it was an ethnography of Israeli society, culture, and politics in the period from 1977 to 1990, which was a period of major cultural and political transformation and polarization (M. Aronoff 1989). Based largely on fieldwork in Israel during 1982–1983 and 1987–1988, I utilized a wide range of methods including participant observation of selected meetings of the Ministerial Committee on Symbols and Ceremonies, the Knesset plenary, parliamentary committees, and the delegates’ dining room (the best place to meet with parliamentarians without having to make appointments), the activities of several peace movements (particularly Peace Now), the major settlers movement (Gush Emunim or Bloc of the Faithful), academic conferences, theater performances, movies, television programs (e.g., a documentary series on the 1981 election campaign), and the first Palestinian uprising (intifada). I interviewed more than a hundred political, religious, cultural, and educational leaders. I also examined the archive in the prime minister’s office of more than twenty years of the meetings of the Ministerial Committee on Symbols and Ceremonies, from which I selected for analysis two major decisions of this fascinating committee (see chapter 4). The research for chapter 5 and the data on Israel in chapter 6 are the culmination of forty years of the study of Israeli society, culture, and politics rather than any one specific trip to the “field.” I spent two wonderful sabbatical years at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and many extended vacations visiting my in-laws and friends in the Netherlands. I speak fluent Dutch and have followed developments in the Netherlands since my first visit in 1960—although much more systematically during one summer conducting research for this comparative case. Rudy Andeweg and my dear friend Hans Claessen were my expert informants. My two trips to India were grossly insufficient to provide the depth of understanding of this complex and fascinating “continent.” I was forced to rely almost exclusively on the work of specialists under the expert guidance of our former colleague Leela Fernandez. I have employed what we call in chapter 2 ethnographic problematization and framing to the analysis of works of fiction (M. Aronoff 1999a). This form of paraethnography best describes the method employed in the analysis of the Camp David peace negotiations in chapter 7. It is based on the analysis of all academic works on the subject published in English and Hebrew, several of which are by participants in the negotiations, published interviews of the participants, and original interviews of thirty of the main Israeli and Palestinian leaders and participants in the negotiations and a couple of key US mediators con-

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ducted by my daughter, Professor Yael Aronoff, and myself. Some of these were quite extensive. For example, former prime minister Ehud Barak generously spent three hours with us. His tendency to answer his critics and the questions he thought we should ask took more the form of a monologue rather than a dialogue. It provided important insights in understanding his negotiating style and personality. It is noteworthy that several top Israeli and Palestinian negotiators (as well as two important American mediators) were trained as academics, which gave their publications and our interviews with them the “added value” as expert, albeit not disinterested, participant observers. Kubik My infatuation with anthropology began in the mid-1970s at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I studied sociology and philosophy, but I was increasingly attracted to cultural anthropology, a discipline that was not institutionally practiced in Poland. My main interest was in the sociology of art and culture, so somewhat “naturally” I was reading anthropological studies to which we had rather spotty access under the restrictions of state socialism. I was, however, a member of a small group that formed a unit devoted to the study and teaching of social/ cultural anthropology in the Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian. Eventually, I was lucky to obtain a fellowship to study anthropology at Columbia in New York. My doctoral dissertation—conducted from a distance, as I was unable to return to Poland in the 1980s—was written on the basis of meticulous studies of all available sources (mostly underground periodicals) that provided descriptions of various ceremonies and street demonstrations in Poland during the late 1970s. But it was also based on my personal experience of many events in which I participated, particularly the game-changing visit of John Paul II to his native country in May 1979. I had experienced these events in the late 1970s not as an ethnographer, but in the mid-1980s I was reworking my memories within an ethnographically tuned frame of mind. I was also confronting my personal recollections with the existing written accounts and massive pictorial documentation. This kind of intellectual work seems to be akin to at least some elements of the method recently labeled paraethnography (see chapter 2). As soon as state socialism was gone, I went back to Poland to conduct a long-term study of the initial phase of postcommunist transformations. I chose a small town in the region I knew well, not far from the town where I was born. The centerpiece of my work was an extensive ethnographic study based on participant observation of the local elite. Initially, I spent nine months in Ustron; (October 1990–June 1991),

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one of the major towns of the region (population about 15,000). During that visit I was accompanied by my wife and our two small sons (ages 4 and 2 when we arrived). There were several additional visits (mostly in the summers of 1992, 1993, and 1994). I also relied on the works of and countless conversations with Grazyna Kubica (2011) and Marian Kempny (2005), both anthropologists and good friends, also born in the region. My “natives” were usually well educated, often having college degrees. On an average day I would hang around, following them as they engaged in their daily duties, observing their actions, listening to their arguments, and discussing with them the momentous changes we were experiencing together. I also tried to live a “normal” life in my neighborhood, talking with neighbors, store attendants, teachers, students of local schools, and other members of several local communities. The material gathered during these months constitutes the empirical backbone of my analyses in chapters 8 and 9. In chapter 9 I contrast my findings from Cieszyn Silesia with the data gathered by my colleagues in another region of Poland, Podhale. The British anthropologist, Frances Pine, conducted a long-term ethnographic study in a single village while the Polish anthropologist, Malewska-Szałygin (2008) supervised a group of researchers (mostly students), who visited several villages of the region and spent a considerable amount of time talking to people in the market square in Nowy Targ, from 1999 to 2005, mostly during summer research trips. The main method was an open-ended conversation, mostly with males, based on a questionnaire that was designed to remind the researchers to provoke verbal responses to such questions as: “What is the state? How would you explain it to your grandchild?” During the six-year period, 356 conversations were recorded. In 2001, the researchers changed the method and allowed their respondents more control over the flow of conversations; researchers’ questions and provocations were limited to a minimum. The discourse was now definitely coproduced by the respondents. Some conversations, during the final stages of the project, were carried out at the open-air marketplace. It turned out that in this specific space, people (mostly men) were much more willing to talk about politics than in their homes. Also, in many cases the researchers could now record animated, multivocal conversations, instead of dialogues between themselves and individual “respondents.”3 All “natives” in Malewska-Szałygin’s study came from villages surrounding Nowy Targ and were poorly educated. About a half had only elementary education, a large portion finished vocational schools, only about

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one-tenth went to technical high schools (but most never took final exams). No members of the local elite were invited to participate in the project.

Chapter Summaries: Part 2 The politics of collective identity is both ubiquitous and universal. In chapter 5 we outline the constructionist approach that is based on the notion that human sociability and politics are expressed and facilitated through the cultural construction of bonds of collective identity. This process entails political competition among groups that, while pursuing conflicting interests and values, negotiate their internal and external social boundaries by publicly communicating and demanding “respect” for specific cultural constructs—visions of collective identity. The outcome of this competition determines their relative social and political centrality or marginality. Two of the most important forms of collective identity, particularly in the post–Cold War era, are ethnicity and nationalism. We examine the cultural and political dimensions of the dynamic relationship—particularly tensions and competition—between attachments to ethnicity and to the state. In our analysis of contested types of Israeli nationalisms we move beyond the conventional dichotomized categories of more inclusive civic and more exclusive ethnic nationalism by introducing the intermediary model of ethnic republicanism. We analyze four major cultural building blocks of nationalism—conceptions of time (the relationship between past, present, and future), space (the borders of the state), and religion (secular, traditional, and orthodox) as well as cultural constructs of individual and collective security/insecurity. Specific patterns of these attributes correlate with the alignment of political movements and parties in Israel. Among others, the understanding of the dynamics of the ongoing struggle over the definition of the collective “us” as opposed to “them” has significant implications for the possibility of successful resolution of the conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and other Arab states with which the Jewish state is still at war or in conflict. This is a subject we take up in chapter 7. In chapter 6 we examine a problem that has preoccupied students of comparative politics for generations—how can stable democracies be established in culturally plural, deeply fissured societies? Many scholars focus primarily on a single dimension (political or cultural) depending on their disciplines. We demonstrate through a comparative analysis

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of post–World War II Netherlands, India, and Israel the importance of examining how different combinations of mechanisms of control and conciliation are employed to different sectors of society in changing conditions over several generations. For example, we cite cases of control in restrictions imposed on Palestinians who became citizens of Israel during the first decade and a half after independence and India during martial law (1975–1977). The two main conceptual models employed to analyze the three cases in the first phase from the end of World War II until 1967 are a form of elite accommodation known as consociationalism for the Netherlands (aspects of which apply to Israel) and the dominant party system for Israel and India. But over time these institutional arrangements, while combined with the elite’s commitment to democratic rules of the game that recognizes that all of the players must get a turn at bat, undermine themselves. In other words, pragmatic ideological adjustments to foster the creation of tactical political alliances and coalitions eventually lead (in conditions specified in the chapter) to enduring, major shifts in cultural and ideological positions. And this, in turn, calls for the recalibration of the political system in a seemingly unending and dynamic process. Attempts at resolution of the major outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are the subject of chapter 7. We examine several aspects of the Oslo peace process with specific focus on the “failed” summit negotiations at Camp David (11–25 July 2000) and Taba, Egypt (21–27 January 2001). We contend that the dichotomized account of discourse about Camp David—dominant and revisionist narratives—is inadequate. We prefer to sacrifice parsimony by complicating the model to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the complex events. Each of the delegations—Israeli, Palestinian, and US mediators—was significantly internally divided. Divisions were based on seniority (proximity to the leader), organizational role (diplomat, civil servant, military, security/intelligence), political and personal rivalries, generation (especially among the Palestinians), and institution (e.g., State Department, National Security Council). We show how these divisions influenced the outcome. Three “schools of interpretation” are examined. The “orthodox school” became the dominant narrative, which primarily blames Yasser Arafat for the failure of negotiations. The “revisionist school” debunks the former school’s position and places blame for failure primarily on Barak and also on Dennis Ross (the lead US negotiator). The “eclectic school” articulates a more nuanced and balanced analysis, and our “thick” interpretive analysis essentially supports the findings of this approach.

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Chapter 8 is devoted to the analysis of another “hot” object of interest in social science at the turn of the century: civil society. After reviewing some of the most important contributions to the literature, we offer a precise conceptualization of civil society. We review several recent studies and then move on to a more in-depth analysis of civil society (both as a concept and actual social practice) in non-Western societies. This analysis reveals that while the replication of the Western structure and practice is hard, if not impossible, there are places around the world where civil-society-like hybrids exist and work as civil society functional equivalents. The last section of the chapter is devoted to the detailed analysis of civil society’s emergence and functioning in the region where Kubik conducted his ethnographic fieldwork—Cieszyn Silesia. We show that despite frequently expressed criticisms and doubts concerning civil society’s applicability outside of the West, much depends on the specifics of local/regional cultures. Whether civil society can work outside of the West cannot be determined a priori; it needs to be demonstrated empirically after a careful analysis of local cultural and social contexts. In chapter 9 we conduct an empirical ethnographic test of one of the most pressing issues found in the literature on postcommunism. The question is whether people who were socialized under state socialism—Homo sovieticus, as they are sometimes called—can “properly” function in a new system built around the precepts of capitalism and modern democracy. Even if we assume that they can, how long is the process of necessary adjustment? And what exactly needs to be adjusted: the “capitalist” and “democratic” institutions imported from the outside of the people themselves? Either way, the analysis is based on the assumption that such a construction of the human being as Homo sovieticus (culturally constructed, socially transmitted, and psychologically internalized) has certain coherence and can be seen as a useful concept capturing the essence (or at least a median tendency) of a large, complex society. Moreover, scholars may assume that such concepts express the durability of certain constellations of attributes of whole, large societies. We show that detailed ethnographic studies do not confirm the existence of the Homo sovieticus syndrome, certainly not as an attribute of the whole society. The chapter is designed to demonstrate that certain cultural generalizations that sometimes underpin political analyses can be verified, adjusted, or rejected as a result of ethnographic studies conducted in specific locations. The chapters are introduced. Let’s move on to chapter 1 in which we present several major debates, outline the key concepts, and discuss in some detail the main concerns that animate our work.

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Notes 1. The idea of grid and group first appears in Mary Douglas’s influential Natural

Symbols (1970). For the introduction of the cultural theory see Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990. A symposium on “A Cultural Theory of Politics,” edited by Brendon Swedlow, was published in the October 2011 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics. It provides a review of the most recent work produced within this approach. 2. For a more detailed discussion see Aronoff 2006. 3. The results are presented systematically in such chapters as “The Nowy Targ Region—Images of the State,” “Images of the Authority,” “Images of the Nation,” or “Images and the Participation in Public Life.”

Chapter 1

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INTRODUCTION

Answering Grand Questions from Different Epistemological and Ontological Stances Recent dramatic changes on the political map of the world, including the fall of the Soviet system, the ensuing “third” wave of democratizations, and the acceleration of the globalization processes, contributed to the reinvigoration of the two fundamental debates in the social sciences: • Can all political phenomena be described, interpreted, and explained by the same universal theory (epistemological dimension)? • Do all societies operate according to the same set of political and/ or economic principles, encapsulated in the “universal” laws of, say, the socioeconomic development or reconstructed in the model of the rational choice behavior (ontological dimension)? There is no agreement among social scientists on how to answer these questions, but there are clear disciplinary tendencies. With a number of important exceptions, today’s political scientists tend to give positive answers to both questions, while anthropologists tend toward negative responses. This is, of course, related to the fact that the “mainstreams” of these two disciplines have, by and large, privileged different conceptualizations of their subject matters, methods, and strategies of theory building. It is also important to note that those differences in ontological and epistemological stances systematically influence the execution of the third important task of any social scientist: providing “normative evaluations of states, institutions, and policies” (Sen 1989: 301).1 Notes for this section begin on page 21.

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Both political science and anthropology are quite diversified and each is divided into a number of theoretical approaches or schools (see, for example, Munck & Snyder 2007). Trying to come to terms with this diversity is beyond the scope of a single, moderately sized volume. Our goal here is much more modest; we are interested mostly in two smaller subfields of each discipline: political anthropology and comparative politics. The choice is not only influenced by our professional training and affiliations; it is primarily dictated by the fact that these two fields share one common characteristic: an ambition to produce systematic knowledge about the exercise of power and politics (understood broadly as an institutionalized, collective effort to solve problems of collective existence) in various types of societies, from the simplest to the most complex. At the same time, despite this common goal, each discipline produces quite different bodies of knowledge. Disciplinary epistemologies, languages, assumptions, and methods are sufficiently different to produce often dissimilar if not contradictory interpretations or explanations of the same events or processes. We want to study those different pictures of political reality, contrast specific disciplinary findings and poke under the surface of different, specialized disciplinary terminologies in order to learn more both about each discipline and about the phenomena they study. The best way to compare these two disciplines is to work through a series of specific analyses of concrete events or processes. Several chapters in this book offer such closely knit analyses. Yet, before they are offered, it is useful, if not necessary, to provide a basic road map that explicates several basic differences between comparative politics and political anthropology. It must be remembered, however, that the contrasts outlined below refer merely to the most central tendencies in each discipline; one could easily point to examples of anthropologists pursuing quite “political scientific” agendas or political scientists engaged in anthropological studies tout court. Putting aside the areas of overlap (which our own work exemplifies) for a moment, comparative politics and political anthropology can be contrasted in several ways. Perhaps their most significant difference is related to the differences in the epistemological/methodological and ontological foundations of the broader disciplines: political science and cultural anthropology. Goals and Methods: Universalism and Explanation (of Political Science) versus Particularism and Interpretation (of Anthropology) With all possible caveats necessitated by a considerable number of important exceptions, it is safe to claim that anthropologists prefer focusing on single cases, favor rich narrative descriptions of their “material”

Introduction

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(idiographic focus), and define their discipline’s goal as interpretation of specific features of the cases they study.2 By contrast, political scientists are more comfortable with a larger number of cases whose features are distilled into variables that are seen as related to one another. Those relationships, captured by propositions, are hypothesized and then tested due to procedures of “science.” For most of its practitioners, the ultimate goal of political science is explanation.3 A more extensive exposition of various issues related to the concept of explanation in social sciences is not possible here (see, for example Brady 2008; Little 1991; Miller 1987); suffice it to note that scholars sometimes distinguish two basic types of explanations: (1) genetic and (2) nomological-deductive. According to the former, to explain an occurrence of a phenomenon is to reconstruct the chain of its causes or to determine the “causal effect” that brings the phenomenon about (King, Kohane, & Verba 1994: 77–85; Nagel 1961: 567–58).4 According to the latter, to explain a phenomenon is to offer a set of propositions from which a sentence stating the occurrence of this phenomenon can be logically deducted (Hempel 1962; Popper 1959: 59). The political-scientific preoccupation with explanation is linked to the general universalizing tenor of this discipline, while anthropology’s stress on interpretation reflects this discipline’s particularizing tendency. To illustrate this contrast one may recall Geertz’s (1983: 57) distinction between an “experience-near concept” which a person would use to define “what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine,” and an “experience-distant concept” employed by specialists, e.g., ethnographers to further their scientific (or other) aims. “Clearly, the matter is one of degree, not polar opposition.” (1983: 57). The goal is to produce an interpretation of lives that is sensitive to, but moves beyond a group’s mental horizons. For example, the concept “human individual” is universal but has enormous cultural variability. For it to be understood in non-Western contexts requires not just “empathy,” but putting aside the Western notion of the person and, according to Geertz (1983: 59), “seeing their experiences within the framework of their own idea of what selfhood is.” Anthropology tends to rely more on experiencenear concepts and work from the particular to the universal or to find the universal within the particular. As Geertz (1973: 23, emphasis added) says, “Small facts speak to large issues.” Political science has tended to work with experience-distant concepts and reason by beginning with abstract theory and gathering data to test it. Level of Epistemological Doubt and Self-Awareness In a conventional picture, mainstream political scientists tend to accept the ideals of the positivistic philosophy of science and share the opti-

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mistic belief in progress of scientific knowledge, while anthropologists are far more consumed by epistemological doubts and are quite sympathetic to critical paradigms of social scientific theorizing. This contrast may be overdrawn these days,5 but it usefully signals the dominant philosophical tendencies in each discipline. It is enough to remember that Marxism, feminism, critical studies, and postmodernism, to name just the main paradigms, have easily moved to the center of the (cultural) anthropological enterprise while they have remained more peripheral in political science.6 Moreover, at least since the publication of Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) anthropologists engaged in a thorough reevaluation of their discipline’s assumptions, goals, and methods, concluding that the interpretation of other cultures rarely, if ever, is politically neutral; it usually creates knowledge that helps, even if inadvertently, to justify the power of colonial empires (the West, the “whites”) over the “natives.”7 Political scientists, by contrast, tend to focus on what they perceive as the beneficial effects of the “Western expansion”: the spread of democracy and the market economy (capitalism). Anthropologists have also become highly self-aware and self-critical of the distortions and limitations of the knowledge they produce that results directly from the nature of the medium through which this knowledge is conventionally conveyed: a genre of “ethnographic narrative” (Clifford 1988; Clifford & Marcus 1986; Marcus 1998; Marcus and Fischer 1999). Interestingly, this heightened awareness of the problems related to the specific disciplinary genres or styles of writing has also led to a thorough self-examination of the narratives produced in sociology (see, for example, Seidman & Alexander 2001) and history (White 1978). In political science, such problems have been less central to various epistemological and methodological debates, though they have gained some prominence with the emergence of the “Perestroika” movement. The movement, which came into existence in October 2000, eventually attracted scholars who were practitioners of “political history, international history, political sociology, interpretive methodology, constructivists [sic], area studies, critical theory and last but not least—post-modernism” (Monroe 2005: 10). They came from a variety of approaches, but were united by the conviction that limiting political science to the work built on large n studies or game-theoretical modeling was insufficient. Since 2000 the “raucous rebellion” of Perestroikans has arguably contributed to the profound transformation of the discipline: qualitative methodology has acquired sophisticated institutional8 and intellectual elaboration (Collier 1993; Brady & Collier 2004; George & Bennett 2004), conceptual analysis has been revived (Goertz 2006; Collier and Ger-

Introduction

5

ring 2009), historical methods have returned to the center of many approaches (Mahoney & Rueschemeyer 2003), ethnography has been rediscovered as a utilizable tool (Schatz 2009b), and interpretive methods have begun vying for equal status with quantitative and qualitative methods (Bevir 2010; Yanow & Schwartz-Shea 2006). Almost invariably, “critical” approaches favor more complex, multidimensional portrayals of social reality, while the more “scientific” or “positivistic” approaches tend to value parsimony. Ontological Underpinnings of the Interpretive-Explanatory Divide With his characteristic sardonic wit, Ernest Gellner caught the essence of the dominant cleavage of the European epistemology when he suggested that there exist two principal strategies for generating the overarching, grand visions of the social world: positivistic and Hegelian. The former produces a world “which is granular; where the grains, as in well-cooked rice, are discrete from each other and easily separable” (1984: 252–53) and their relationships are describable by theoretical formulations produced in an objective manner by professionals detached from their subject matter. The latter depicts the world of organic wholes composed of interconnected elements. “The interconnected elements have meaning for each other in that they play roles in each other’s fates and the wider plans of which they are parts. Elements in the pattern, such as actions, are what they are in virtue of what they mean to the agents who perform them, rather than in virtue of merely external traits” (1984: 253, emphasis in original). In this world researchers cannot afford detachment; they need to immerse themselves in the lives of the studied “subjects” to understand the meanings that drive those subjects’ actions. No doubt the positivistic conception of objective science, whose ideal is the dispassionate gaze of a Cosmic Exile, is considered attractive by political scientists much more often than by anthropologists, who prize immersion (rather than detachment) into whatever it is they study and have a hard time conceiving of their subject matter outside of the meaning it holds for the “actors” and in separation from moral concerns. In other words, modernist empiricism—as Bevir labels it—that is “atomistic and analytic” dominates “much of political science” (2009: 51). Gellner was an anthropologist but also a philosopher who—like many of his colleagues—was acutely aware of this basic duality in Western thought. Arthur C. Danto organized his brilliant introduction to philosophy around it. He writes: Bertrand Russell once jocularly divided philosophers into those who ‘believe the world is a bowl of jelly, and those who believe it is a bucket of shot’—between those who think there is one single unitary fact, every-

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thing being part of it, and those who, like Wittgenstein, see the world as a collection of logically independent facts. (1989: xvii)9

In a way, the main task of this volume can be construed as an attempt to facilitate a dialogue between the anthropologists’ attempt to work with the holistic image of the (social) world as a “bowl of jelly” and the political scientists’ effort to built a science of the social around the metaphor of a “bucket of shot.” The second fundamental ontological distinction is between naturalists and antinaturalists. Extreme or hard naturalists, who argue that there is no difference between the natural and social words, are arguably increasingly rare. But there are many “soft” naturalists who assume that the social and natural worlds are sufficiently similar to warrant the use of a single method (King, Koehane, & Verba 1994). The key question then is whether societies and their politics, populated by meaning-creating and interpreting creatures and permeated by symbolic struggles, can be studied in the same manner as “natural systems” examined by the “hard” sciences? Sahlins (2004) argues that Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War provided a positive answer to this question, thus setting Western social science on a naturalist course. Since Thucydides, the debate between naturalists and antinaturalists has run through almost the entire course of Western social reflection. In the second half of the nineteenth century naturalism and antinaturalism in the social sciences were defined and deliberated with great clarity by such German scholars as Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Max Weber (for overviews see: Bevir 2010; Bambach 1995; Bleicher 1980; Palmer 1969). Perhaps the most influential among them, Wilhelm Dilthey,10 proposed a sharp distinction between the “positivistic” (Naturwissenschaften) and the “humanistic” (Geisteswissenschaften) disciplines and sharply differentiated it from explanation, the proper procedure of the former. Geertz revived this distinction in his trend-setting 1973 volume, as he famously declared: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical” (1973: 5). Thus, while political science has, by and large, adopted as its ideal the nineteenth-century positivistic model of natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften),11 cultural anthropology has always been much more open to the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften, with its emphasis on understanding (Verstehen) and interpretation, rather than explanation. And

Introduction

7

since the publication of Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures in 1973, this tradition has emerged as a hegemonic theoretical core of the discipline, at least in the United States. Geertz’s seminal works of interpretive anthropology have been criticized from four main directions, by those who deemed them insufficiently scientific/positivistic and excessively voluntaristic (Martin 1993; Shankman 1984); those for whom they were not sufficiently concerned with the material underpinnings of cultural processes (Asad 1983; Roseberry 1982); those who found them marred by such positivistic vices as the imposition of the writer’s authority on the way the narrative is constructed, while in fact ignoring the “native’s point of view” (Crapanzano 1986); and those who saw them as too conservative and uncritical of the dominant powers (Gledhill 2000: 219–20). Yet, while debating vigorously the proper method of interpretation and its underlying philosophical and ideological commitments, most anthropologists agree that their principal job is to interpret other cultures for an audience coming from their own culture, an undertaking somehow resembling work of the translator.12 Today, while some argue for a basic unity of the “scientific” method (King, Keohane, & Verba 1994; Miller 1987), the question remains: given that social activity entails human agents producing, transmitting, receiving, and interpreting meaning systems, does social research require specifically tailored techniques? It is a complex debate that has been recently revived (Fay 1996; Gerring 2001; Henderson 1993; Little 1991, 1998; Mahajan 1997; Yanow & Schwartz-Shea 2006). Nor is it merely a methodological (how to study something) debate; it is also—if not primarily—epistemological (What are the conditions of knowability of certain types of objects?) and ontological (How are the objects of knowledge “actually” constituted?).13 Many thinkers have articulated unequivocal ontological-epistemological antinaturalist answers to these questions, the clearest of which may be that offered by Thomas and Znaniecki (1918–20). What has come to be known as the “Thomas theorem” is usually formulated as: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Already in the early 1920s both Thomas and Znaniecki offered an extensive set of comments on this proposition, emphasizing that humans construct social reality (in their case, Polish peasants in Poland and in the diaspora). This position—clearly indebted to phenomenology—was later developed by Schutz (1962) and influentially propagated by Berger and Luckmann (1966). It eventually spilled over to other disciplines in various forms of constructivism (constructionism).14 In this way, a strong philosophical position emerged that combines constructivism as an ontological stance with interpretivism as an epistemological-methodological position.

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Political scientists hotly debate whether “subject-dependent realities” (as opposed to “objective realities”) are the proper subject matter and thus what tools of inquiry are appropriate.15 Meanwhile, much of sociology and almost all of cultural/social anthropology are de rigueur constructivist, as are, basically by definition, cultural studies, much of feminist work, and art history.16 Importantly, this embrace of constructivism often leads to ethnographically inflected inquiry in these fields. Anthropologist Richard Shweder (1997), for example, defines ethnography as a “species of qualitative research” that by definition deals with “qualia” whose ontological status often remains undertheorized as researchers focus on narrow methodological rather than ontological/ epistemological issues: I propose that the tension between quantitative and qualitative turns less on methodological issues than it does on one’s answers to questions about how to best study subjectivity and how to best study realities that are perspective and context dependent. Basically it is the difference between studying something that exists regardless of your’s [sic] or anyone’s reactions to it, and studying things that come into real existence by virtue of their meaning and the perspective that is taken on them. (1997: 160)

Sociologist Andrew Abbott (2001a: 61) argues that constructivism (or “constructionism,” as he calls it) is characterized by idealism (attention to how reality is mediated by interpretation), diachronism (attention to process), and interactionism (attention to social interaction as constitutive). It seems that any investigation guided by Abbott’s idealism, diachronism, and interactionism is more likely to succeed when the researcher privileges a micro- (over macro-) approach, as actual people need to be observed in real-life situations. There is an elective affinity between holism and antinaturalism/ contructivism (both emphasize the significance of “context”), just as there is one between individualism and naturalism. Also, adherents of the holistic approach tend to be more interested in interpretation while the individualists are more inclined to look for explanations. And since anthropologists tend to be holists preoccupied with the problematic of meaning, culture has always been the central concept of their discipline, even today when it has come under intense critical scrutiny. For example, Clifford and Marcus (1986: 19) argued for the specification of discourses, more self-reflexive ethnography, and the treatment of culture as “contested, temporal, and emergent.” Brightman (1995: 509) evaluates such critiques of culture “to reflect on the essentialist ideology at play in the current disciplinary self-consciousness of paradigmatic transition or emancipation.” He recognizes that the concern with power constitutes “a substantially new perspective on what we call culture

Introduction

9

and cultures” and that in the anthropological studies of culture there has been a shift in thematic emphasis from order, unity, and synchrony to disorder, contestation, and diachrony (Brightman 1995: 540). He, however, concludes that what is at stake “is the question of securing and exercising the authority to define and characterize culture” (1995: 541). Regardless of whether this authority belongs to the researcher or the “native,” cultural anthropology retains the status of the discipline whose primary objective is the study of culture. Political scientists are even more divided over the usefulness of the concept of culture for the analysis of politics; quite a few of them find the concept useless. In summary, while political science tends to be naturalistic, individualistic, nomological, deductive, and explanatory, cultural anthropology is decisively antinaturalistic, holistic, idiographic, inductive, and interpretive.

Different Analytics: Elementary Binary Oppositions The binary oppositions discussed in this section used to be taken very seriously by the early taxonomists of science. Yet, over the years they have come under strong criticism for their excessive simplicity that often muddles the epistemological and methodological debates instead of clarifying them. Mario Bunge (2000), for example, offers a useful summary of the debate between individualism and holism and proposes systemism as a middle-of-the-road position that avoids the pitfalls of both extreme stances. We believe, however, that rudimentary binaries retain a basic heuristic value by putting into a very sharp relief the extreme points delineating several axes along which important debates are conducted, for example, the one between political scientists and anthropologists. After outlining several pairs of such useful, albeit crude, oppositions, we employ them to analyze concrete issues in several chapters of this volume in order to assess whether the distance between political science and cultural anthropology is indeed as extensive as those very binaries suggest. But we caution here and elsewhere that such distinctions are heuristic and should never be reified. Unfortunately, there is a strong tendency to do so even by conscientious social scientists. Monodimensionality versus Multidimensionality In research practice, the adherents of the holistic approach do not work with a concept of some undifferentiated whole. They do, however, tend to approach social processes or events as multidimensional phenomena (economic and social and cultural) and they privilege an image

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of the social world as a complex network of connections, whose study may call for expertise coming from several traditional disciplines. While conceptualizing explanation, they are often sympathetic to the concept (or metaphor) of mutual reinforcement. In short, they tend to be both multidimensional and multidisciplinary. Individualists, by contrast, are more comfortable with construing the world as a collection of individual occurrences (events, facts), collecting information about such well-defined singular occurrences (conceptualized as variables), and arranging them in (causal) chains. They are partial to the concept of linear causality. In sum, they tend to see their subject matter as monodimensional (economic or social or cultural) and prefer working within the boundaries of a single academic discipline. Balandier (1970) observed this contrast in two basic approaches to political phenomena. While anthropologists tend to be maximialists and see politics and the exercise of power in many ostensibly non-political contexts, such as ritual, religion, kinship groups, the arts, etc., political scientists subscribe, rather, to a minimalist view of politics. “To most of them … government and political phenomena transpire and exist within formal political institutions, almost all of which are associated with modern state formations” (Kurtz 2001: 2). Such a contrast between holistic/multidimensional and individualistic/monodimensional approaches does not characterize the difference between political science and cultural anthropology alone. For example, it has been introduced to contrast economic and anthropological approaches. Desmond McNeill, while outlining an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable development, contrasts those approaches sharply: Economics is concerned with human beings interacting with each other as (rational, self-interested, autonomous, maximising) decision-makers, with the emphasis on the individual entity; nature is typically treated as a material resource/constraint. Anthropology is concerned with human beings interacting with each other not only as decision-makers but also as meaning-makers, with the emphasis on the collective; nature is regarded both as a resource/constraint and as a locus of meaning. (2001:3)

Importantly, over the last several decades economics has become the leading supplier of theories, methods, and conceptualizations for several key branches of political science, thereby introducing or reinforcing the latter’s individualistic/monodimensional tendencies. Political scientists are, however, usually unaware that while the economic thinking has by and large coalesced around a single view of economic activity, anthropology, by contrast, has been for a long time split between two,

Introduction

11

very different conceptualizations of the economic. Our claim is that comparativists, particularly those who study complex, non-Western economic systems, may profit from the approach anthropologists call substantivist. Economic Anthropology: Substantivists versus Formalists The debate between substantivists and formalists in economic anthropology has been one of the most celebrated and clear manifestations of the grand cleavage between two groups of scholars who subscribe to contrasting ontologies of the social: the “bowl of jelly” holists and the “bucket of shot” individualists (for a recent critical summary see Hann and Hart 2009). The distinction between real (substantivist) and formalist definitions of economic activity was first introduced by Karl Polanyi (1957) and popularized by George Dalton (1961). Polanyi introduced the distinction in the opening paragraphs of his famous essay “The Economy as Instituted Process”: The two root meanings of “economic,” the substantive and the formal, have nothing in common. The latter derives from logic, the former from fact. The formal meaning implies a set of rules referring to choice between alternative uses of insufficient means. The substantive meaning implies neither choice nor insufficiency of means; man’s livelihood may or may not involve the necessity of choice and, if choice there be, it need not be induced by the limiting effect of “scarcity” of the means. (1957: 243)

The formal understanding of the “economic” came to dominate the “compartmentalized” analyses of economic activity in economics, while the substantive approaches have always been dominant in sociology and anthropology where economic activity is usually analyzed as “embedded” (Granovetter 1985) in various “contexts.” In Polanyi’s formulation: The human economy, then, is embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and noneconomic. The inclusion of the noneconomic is vital. For religion or government may be as important for the structure and functioning of the economy as monetary institutions or the availability of tools and machines themselves that lighten the toil of labor. (1957: 250)

The distinction can be thus understood in three ways: (1) ontologically, (2) methodologically, and (3) historically. In ontological terms, the substantivist (holistic) approach treats the economic activity as an “aspect of social life rather than a segment of society” (Plattner 1989: 14). Accordingly, the economic domain is construed as inseparably embedded in other domains and cannot be fruitfully analyzed in isolation. Formalists conceptualize economic activity as a separate domain (segment of

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the society) with its own specific mechanisms, best specified by neoclassical microeconomics. Methodological formalists attempt to apply the methods of modern microeconomic analysis to non-Western societies. They assume that “individuals in every culture exercise rational choice in a means-ends, constraints, and opportunities framework” (Plattner 1989: 13). They also propose that the economic domain activity can be usefully isolated from other domains of social life (religious, familial, etc.) in every society and people can be always studied as “utility maximizers.” Methodological substantivists claim that since the economic activity is usually (or always)—even in the capitalist system (see Gudeman 2001; Narotzky 1997)—embedded in social, cultural, and political contexts, it can/should be fruitfully studied sociologically/anthropologically (in its full social context). Historically, the distinction helps to separate modern societies that operate on the market principle and in which the “market” becomes the dominant coordinating principle and other societies where the market principle is either absent or is inseparably intertwined with other principles (moral, familial, or statist). The echoes of the substantivist-formalist dispute can be clearly heard in at least three important debates on the most pressing issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. First, many scholars working on the postcommunist transformations observed that the tools of “formalist” economics have proven to be insufficient to describe and analyze the enormous complexity of survival strategies employed by the people whose livelihoods were undermined by the dramatic changes in their political and economic environments (see chapter 9 for a more detailed analysis of this issue). To fashion viable responses to the dismantling of the previously predictable property relations, channels of supply, and sources of income, many people turned to innovative cultural strategies and formed or activated complex informal networks. The dominant cultural strategy was the construction of narratives that could help people make sense out of the new reality, including the nostalgic idealization of state socialist past (Buchowski 1997: 70; Kideckel 2008: 46) and/or the rejection of the neoliberal ideology, often couched in a religious or nationalistic idiom. The profusion of such narratives has influenced, often decisively, the politics of economic reforms and rendered analyses relying exclusively on standard tools of microeconomics ineffective. For example, the assumption of universal rationality does not suffice to reconstruct people’s preferences or strategic interests that are shaped by specific, culturally transmitted understandings of reality (Dunn 2004: 7). The development of massive informal net-

Introduction

13

works, pervasive in many areas of economic life and built on localized, culturally specific notions of trust, has undermined the usefulness of another tool of the neoclassical economic analysis: the assumption of a relatively isolated, calculating individual. Richard Rose (1999) and his collaborators showed that it is easier to make sense out of the Russian economic situation if the “basic” unit of economic calculations is not construed as an individual but as a network of kin and/or friends. Moreover, David Woodruff argues in his analysis of Russia in the 1990s that in the system that failed to consolidate the monetary system and in which people routinely resorted to barter, an economic analysis focused on transactions involving monetary means is bound to be incomplete (1999). Second, similar skepticism about the sufficiency of “pure” economic models emerged over the last three decades of the twentieth century in the area of developmental studies. While the earlier literature dealt with economic development as an area “properly” studied by economics, political economy (thus focusing on the interaction of political and economic variables) or sociology (often focusing on the problematic of social “modernization”), a group of scholars offered eventually a new, cultural-analytical angle. They construed “individuals as driven by a culturally influenced set of motives, incentives, beliefs, and identities that interact with economic incentives and affect outcomes” (Rao and Walton 2004a: 9). Some of them approached development not only as an economic process but also as a specific cultural frame that deforms the actors’ thinking about the world, and thus may justify their (subordinate) position in it. It also limits how they imagine their participation in politics. Arturo Escobar proposed: To speak of development as a historically singular experience, the creation of a domain of thought and action, by analyzing the characteristics and interrelations of these axes that define it: the forms of knowledge that refer to it and through which it comes into being and is elaborated into objects, concepts, theories, and the like; the system of power that regulates its practice; and the forms of subjectivity fostered by this discourse, those through which people come to recognize themselves as developed or underdeveloped. (1995: 10)

Other scholars, less focused on exposing negative consequences of the developmentalist ideology for people’s lives, began building a framework for the study of the relationship between culture and economic action that is sensitive to specific cultural frameworks and yet helpful in providing actors with concrete strategies of unleashing these frameworks’ creative potential. They have gradually concluded that this task can be successfully realized only though multidisciplinary work:

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“Economists have increasingly begun to think about the role of social and cultural interactions in human behavior, and anthropologists and sociologists have increasingly come to recognize the practical light their disciplinary perspectives can shed on policy and positive change” (Rao and Walton 2004a: 31). Third, a vigorous challenge to the formalist economic analysis, quite substantivist in spirit, came from two prominent economists trying to explain the shockingly swift collapse of the housing market, a large segment of the banking sector, and the resulting recession in 2008–10. They revived the largely forgotten, complex conceptualization of human motivation, proposed originally by Keynes in his famous The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). As they put it: Keynes appreciated that most economic activity results from rational economic motivations—but also that much economic activity is governed by animal spirits. People have noneconomic motives. And they are not always rational in pursuit of their economic interests. In Keynes’ view these animal spirits are the main cause for why the economy fluctuates as it does. (Akerlof & Shiller 2009: ix, emphasis in original)

Akerlof and Shiller show how five different aspects of animal spirits, “confidence, fairness, corruption and antisocial behavior, money illusion, and stories” influence economic decisions (2009: 5). Anthropologists are, of course, pleasantly surprised by the economists’ admission that “stories” matter. The authors are quite emphatic in their claim that “our sense of reality, of who we are and what we are doing, is intertwined with the story of our lives and of the lives of others. The aggregate of such stories is a national or international story, which itself plays an important role in the economy” (Akerlof & Shiller 2009: 6, emphasis in original). This is congruent with an anthropologist’s observation, “The allocation of resources, the coordination of production, and the distribution of goods and services, seen (as they must be) in political perspective, involve linguistic forms and verbal practices in many ways” (Irvine 1989: 249). In summary, substantivists and formalists offer strikingly different conceptualizations of how people go about procuring for themselves the necessities of life. While the former (most anthropologists) may sometimes err by promoting what Granovetter called the oversocialized conception of human action that takes place in embedded economies, the latter (mostly economists and political scientists) routinely rely on the undersocialized model of the human being who operates in disembedded markets (Gudeman 2001: 19). In other words, substativist approaches tend to conceptualize human relations as multistranded and

Introduction

15

complex, while the formalists emphasize single-stranded relations, depending on the issue that is studied. The divisions discussed in this section not only separate disciplines; sometimes they cut right through them (as in the case of substantivism and formalism in economic anthropology). Jeffrey Alexander, for example, observes it inside of sociology: Why, then, the great divide in sociological discussion today? Because, I believe, theorists falsely generalize from a single variable to the immediate reconstruction of the whole. They have taken one particular system—the economy, the culture, the personality—as action’s total environment; they have taken one action mode—invention, typification, or strategization—as encompassing action in itself. … Rather than being thought of as independent variables, these elements should be conceived as parameters and variables in an interactive system comprising different levels of different ‘size’. (1987: 314–15)

Political scientists tend to ally themselves with those sociologists who prefer the “generalization from a single variable,” while anthropologists are more likely to subscribe to a more comprehensive and interactive view of social action, espoused also by the “holistic” sociologists. This general characterization of the two approaches can be further fleshed out through a brief look at two important debates on (1) variable orientation versus case orientation in the methodology of social sciences and (2) Homo sociologicus versus Homo economicus as two competing models of the human being, underpinning two different types of social scientific theorizing. We discuss case study methodology (and its contrast with the variable orientation) in chapter 2, together with our analysis of ethnography. The contrast between the two models of the human being is presented in chapter 3. But before we turn to the discussion of methods, ethnography, and the extended case study, a brief history of the relationship between anthropology and political science is in order.

Brief History of (Political) Anthropology, Political Science, and Their Relationship There is no consensus concerning how far both political science and anthropology can trace their roots within the tradition of the European thought.17 Historians of both disciplines invoke one or another thinker of the classical antiquity. Political scientists often claim Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics as the founding texts of their discipline; Herodotus is being claimed as the most illustrious grandfather of anthropology, for

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it was “his hand in the fifth century B.C., which first set down in an organized and vivid form a description of a series of human cultures” (Hodgen 1964: 20). Others would rather see both disciplines as offspring of the Enlightenment (Hann & Hart 2001: 10–12; Wolff 2007), with Jean-Jacques Rousseau inflicting upon European imagination an indelible image of the “noble savage” and setting the terms for the interminable debate on the nature of the “social contract” and with Johann Gottfried Herder sensitizing us to the fact that all peoples possess “cultures.”18 Still, others would perhaps begin the respective stories in the nineteenth century and link the birth of both disciplines with the ascent of modernity. In this version, both claim the same lineage of legendary forefathers: Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, to name just a few. In a book on the masters of anthropological thought, Andrzej Paluch writes: “Social anthropology— as well as many other humanistic disciplines, among them linguistics, psychology and sociology—is the legacy of the development of the European thought during the nineteenth century” (1990: 11). Anthropology is seen here as one of the several new disciplines epitomizing the new, “modern” spirit of progress, scientism, and the rapidly increasing mastery of man over nature.19 Political science is sometimes seen as springing from the same spirit that is succinctly summarized in an Encyclopedia Britannica entry: The origins of contemporary political science are to be found in the enthusiasm for the creation of social science that was widespread in the 19th century, an enthusiasm stimulated by the rapid growth of the natural sciences. It might be said that one starting point for the development of modern political science is the work of the Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, a notable Utopian Socialist, who in 1813 suggested that morals and politics could become “positive” sciences; that is, disciplines whose authority to command belief would rest not upon subjective preconceptions but upon objective evidence. With him worked the mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte, the two collaborating in the publication in 1822 of the Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for the Reorganization of Society, which argued, among much else, that politics would become social physics and that the purpose of social physics was to discover unchanging laws of progress. Out of this collaboration emerged the law of the three stages through which knowledge had to pass—the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive—that Comte was to establish as the theme of the science of social physics, a study he came to name sociology.20

Yet, although political science can trace its intellectual roots to the classic Greek philosophers, except for political theorists (philosophers), most contemporary political scientists are the products of a much younger intellectual tradition born in the post–World War II behavioral revolution that rarely recognizes “the tradition of discourse which pro-

Introduction

17

vided it with most of its basic assumptions, concepts, and vocabulary” (Zashin & Chapman 1974: 291). While a legitimate and informative debate on the origins of anthropology continues, the subdiscipline of political anthropology can claim a more definitive date of birth. Many illustrious nineteenth-century scholars (most prominently Maine, Spencer, Marx, Morgan, and Tylor) studied non-Western political systems and, particularly, their evolution.21 They can be seen, therefore, as precursors or early practitioners of the discipline. But the modern field of political anthropology is often said to have emerged with the publication of M. Fortes’s and E. E. EvansPritchard’s African Political Systems (1940). In this volume the editors rejected the scientific value of political philosophy. It is prudent, however, to remember that the very act of establishing such genealogies gives legitimacy to the “mainstream” and marginalizes other approaches. As Joan Vincent cautions: “Tracing of genealogies may be seen as an exercise in political ideology, one of the several practices accompanying the institutionalization of political anthropology as a specialized subfield after 1940” (1990: 11). Despite their almost universal rejection of the scientific relevance of classical political philosophy, major figures in anthropology “courted” and even proposed “marriage” to political science. Max Gluckman and Fred Eggan (1966: xx–xxi) observed: “Since Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, with African Political Systems, virtually established political anthropology, their successors have turned increasingly to political scientists for assistance in their analysis. … Political anthropology, at least, is linking up with its cognate discipline.” Marc Swartz, Victor Turner, and Arthur Tuden, editors of the influential Political Anthropology (1966: 9), considered “that the time is now ripe for dialogue, if not marriage, between anthropology and other disciplines concerned with comparative politics.” Unfortunately, they defined key concepts like power and authority differently than widely accepted definitions in political science, demonstrating the difficulty of the interdisciplinary dialogue, which they encouraged.22 Ronald Cohen promoted the interdisciplinary character of the emerging field of political anthropology in his “Anthropology and Political Science: Courtship or Marriage?” (1967).23 The courtship between the two disciplines experienced many lovers’ quarrels as they confronted the challenge of analyzing the newly independent states of Africa and Asia. Political scientist David Easton (1959: 210) concluded his influential and controversial evaluation of the contribution of political studies in anthropology to the general study of politics by suggesting that political anthropology as a “subfield does not yet exist and will not exist until a great many conceptual problems are

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solved.” Its greatest weakness, according to Easton, was the failure to conceptually distinguish between the political and other social spheres. Two influential volumes produced from a 1963 conference of the Association of Social Anthropology in Cambridge, Political Systems and the Distribution of Power (1965) and The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (1966), contained essays by a new cohort of British and American political anthropologists who responded to Easton’s critique, as did Max Gluckman and Fred Eggan in their introduction to the volumes that appeared in a series edited by Michael Banton. Ted Lewellen (1992: 1) observed that it took a decade for anthropologists to gain sufficient “confidence to protest that Easton had completely misunderstood the nature of political anthropology and had construed its greatest virtue into a vice (Bailey 1968; A. Cohen 1969; Southhall 1974).” Joan Vincent (1990: 315) noted that Easton’s essay proved “important not for its intrinsic quality but because it made political anthropologists face up to the question of self-definition.” Ultimately, such questioning led John Gledhill (2000: 12) to suggest, “We need to think about how the political has come to be seen as something separate.” He concludes that “the perceived autonomy of the ‘political’ in Western societies is one of the key ideological dimensions of Western ‘modernity,’ a way of representing power relations that obscure the social foundations and the way they work in practice.” Following Abélès (1992a: 17), Gledhill (2000: 21) suggests “the ‘autonomy’ of the political in modern societies is an illusion.” Between Easton’s provocative challenge and Gledhill’s radical response—a critique of “the ethnocentrism of universalizing a particular model of social and political power ultimately derived from a model of the modern Western state”—political anthropology has undergone considerable transformation. It has become comfortable with the holistic, multidimensional conceptualization of the social, within which the political is seen as always embedded and thus hardly separable. Political science, in the meantime, has proceeded along a different intellectual trajectory, isolating the political from its social, cultural, and economic contexts, posing as a problem the relationship among those dimensions, and looking for a solution in the analysis of correlations among specific variables. What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? We deal with this question throughout the book. Here we make a note of two lessons. First, as Abner Cohen observed already in 1969, the main lesson of political science for anthropology was the importance of the role of the state (1969). Many anthropologists have subsequently recognized the state’s importance.24 For example, John Gledhill (2000: 22) submits, “Little that is happening anywhere can be understood without

Introduction

19

reference to the historical discontinuities produced by the rise of the modern state and modern forms of power.” Second, Cohen asserted that the principal contribution of social anthropology to political science was the analysis of the symbolism of power relations. He directly responded to Easton’s (1959: 210) challenge that “the central need of political anthropologists today is for a broad, theoretical orientation to politics” and opined that Easton “neglects whole streams of thought within anthropology” and “completely misunderstands the nature of the central theoretical problems with which social anthropology deals” (A. Cohen 1969: 215). Instead, he asserted that “the central theoretical problem in social anthropology has been the analysis of the dialectical relations between two major variables: symbolic action and power relationships” (A. Cohen 1974:13) and suggested that this is exactly the problematic that needs to be incorporated into political science. Thirty years later this lesson is still not fully learned, though notable exceptions have always existed (Chabal & Daloz 2006; Edelman 1964, 1971, 1988; Edles 1998; Lane 1981; Petro 2004; Wedeen 1999, 2002, 2004, 2008). For example, W. J. M. Mackenzie’s (1967: 280) survey of social science literature stressed the lack of analysis of “political ritual” in contemporary politics. David Schwartz’s (1974: 107) review of the literature in political science confirmed this lack of application by political scientists of “anthropological work on political myths, rituals, symbols and the like.” At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, this lacuna has only been partially filled. Sixteen years after the publication of the original edition of Power and Ritual in the Israel Labor Party (1977), which sought to help fill this particular void in the literature and thereby to contribute to the development of the interdisciplinary field indicated by the subtitle A Study in Political Anthropology, Myron J. Aronoff noted in his preface to the Revised & Expanded Edition (1993) that the analysis of nationallevel politics had rarely been undertaken by anthropologists despite the call by prominent anthropologists Laura Nader (1974) and Eric Wolf (1969/1974) to study the politically powerful.25 He also observed that political scientists had failed to utilize participant observation in their studies despite the call by political scientist David Schwartz (1974: 130, italics in the original) to “make observations at the time and place in which we are most interested, namely, when the individual is most actively engaged in the political behavior we are trying to explain.” Nor had his symbolic analysis of representation on party institutions, the manipulation of agendas, suppression of issues, and the ritualization of party politics been emulated by political scientists studying political parties at the national level. Aronoff concluded that the methodology of

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participant observation was essential to analyze crucial aspects of the cultural dimension of politics. The Political Anthropology series edited by Aronoff focused on a range of themes examining the relationship between culture and politics by anthropologists and political scientists: Ideology and Interest: The Dialectics of Politics (1980), Culture and Political Change (1983), Cross-Currents in Israeli Culture and Politics (1984b), Religion and Politics (1984c), and The Frailty of Authority (1986), the first of nine volumes in the series, are illustrative of the types of topics covered. The fifth volume is perhaps the best example of one of the central themes of this book in a wide range of settings. It contained analyses of cases of the establishment of and challenges to authority in relations between Chinese peasants and the party-state, the effect of dynastic trusts on the efficacy of authority expressed in family tradition and ideology among power elite families in the United States, representations of collectivity and family in holiday celebrations in Israeli kindergartens, political rituals through which the Likud government in Israel unsuccessfully attempted to establish hegemony, the allegories of experience and the paradoxes of occupation among the Mzeina Bedouin of the Sinai, the radical ideological challenge of the punk rock group the Clash, the use of Calypso to challenge authority in Caribbean politics, and responses of the Moroccan monarchy to challenges to its authority. Aronoff (1986: 6) concludes: “Once the socially constructed nature of such [invented] traditions becomes transparent, they cease to be taken for granted and lose their power to compel belief. Similarly, as older traditions are exposed to novel interpretations of reality which challenge them, they can lose their compelling quality. When this happens revitalization movements commonly arise to restore coherence by reinventing traditions.” During the last twenty-five years (1985–2010), political anthropology has undergone far-reaching changes. First, building on earlier Marx-inspired critiques of the discipline (Gough 1968), political anthropologists developed multidimensional critical analysis of Western dominance and colonialism (Gledhill 2000; Vincent 2002) and scrutinized the political and economic impact of the ideology of developmentalism (Escobar 1995). Second, as the impact of Geertz’s work increased and the “cultural turn” matured, the discipline witnessed a renewed interest in the politics of culture, in the works ranging from semiotic and hermeneutic studies to radical postmodern critiques. Third, postcolonial studies exemplified by Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Experience (1973) analyze the impact of the politicization of all social issues with the emergence (and imposition) of the state political system. Fourth, under the influence of both the postmodern theorizing and booming feminist anthropology, the concept of the political has become

Introduction

21

much more spacious to include many ostensibly apolitical dimensions of human life, particularly gender (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 2000: 24). Fifth, the fall of state socialism allowed anthropologists both to reconsider the nature of “actually existing socialism” (Yurchak 2005) and contribute productively to several important debates on post-communism. To list just a few, there is a debate on property and property transformations (Verdery 2003; Verdery and Humphrey 2004; Allina-Pisano 2008), transitional dislocations and impoverishment (Humphrey 2002; Kideckel 2008), and the revival of religion and “religious” politics (Hann 2010). During roughly the same period, some political scientists—also influenced by the “cultural turn”—developed approaches to the relationship between culture and politics based on the definition of culture that treats it as a “web of meanings” (Geertz 1973) rather than a “syndrome of attitudes” (Almond & Verba 1963). Johnson (2003) called for the redefinition of culture in political science, Chabal and Daloz (2006) and Green and his collaborators (2002) contributed to the constructivist approach in comparative politics , an approach earlier legitimated in international relations (see for example Katzenstein 1996, Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, Hopf 2002). Wedeen engaged in a detailed study of “semiotic practices” in contemporary Syria (1999) and Yemen (2008). Schaffer showed that among the Wolof people of Senegal, “democracy” is understood very differently than, say, in the United States (1998). Some of these works rely heavily on ethnography and extended case studies as their principal methods. In the next chapter we discuss these methods in depth.

Notes 1. See also Flyvbjerg 2001. 2. By necessity then treated as “text-analogues” (Taylor 1971: 3). 3. For the already classical analysis of the difference between explanation and understanding see von Wright 1971. See Rosenberg 1989 for an analysis of Rorty’s attempt to overcome this distinction. For extremely lucid analyses of the relationship in the sociological literature see Habermas 1984 and Giddens 1976: 130–54. Mahajan 1997 provides another useful introduction. 4. To be more precise, Nagel defines in this way genetic explanations (1979: 567). Boudon writes: “‘Explaining’ means ‘finding the causes.’ Explaining a social phenomenon means identifying its cause(s)” (1998: 172). 5. We write these sentences in November 2011. 6. Peripheral does not mean absent. Witness the emergence of the critical, interpretivist, and “ethnographic” modes of inquiry: Monroe 2005; Schatz 2009; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006. 7. For an informative summary of this problematic see Vincent 2002: 128–32 and the selection of texts that follow her text on pages 133–254.

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8. The Consortium on Qualitative Methods. See: http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/ moynihan/programs/cqrm/. 9. Alexander and Giesen see the distinction between holism and individualism, and between macro and micro, as belonging to the “core oppositions in Occidental thinking” related to the philosophical controversy between nominalism and realism (1987: 3). 10. Dilthey’s writings are available in English in several editions. See, for example, Dilthey 1976. 11. Anthony Giddens provides the most succinct characterization of positivism: “In nineteenth-century social philosophy and social theory positivism was in the ascendant, if positivism is taken to mean two things. First, a conviction that all ‘knowledge,’ or all that is to count as ‘knowledge,’ is capable of being expressed in terms which refer to an immediate way to some reality, or aspects of reality that can be apprehended through the senses. Second, a faith that the methods and logical structure of science, as epitomized by classical physics, can be applied to the study of social phenomena” (1976: 130). 12. But there are also significant differences between anthropologist’s and translator’s job. See, for example, Crapanzano 1986. 13. For an excellent analysis of this point in comparative politics see Hall 2003. 14. Green 2002 offers an interesting way of distinguishing these two concepts. We use them interchangeably. 15. Constructivism has become an accepted and vibrant option in many branches of political science, albeit it is not dominant. See, for example, Blyth 2002 on political economy, Katzenstein 1996 and Klotz & Lynch 2007 on international relations, and Green 2003 on comparative politics. 16. As Tobin (1999: 1) writes, “Paintings, as is the case with all cultural production, are not merely reflections of larger social and economic forces; they participate in the production of meaning, in the dynamic construction of identities, and in the structuring within discursive fields of particular positionalities.” 17. Clifford Geertz, the most influential anthropologist of the last 40 years, muses: “beginning of the field whenever it was (Rivers? Tylor? Herder? Herodotus?)” (2000: 90). 18. Vincent offers a useful summary of the debate on the genealogy of political anthropology (1990: 11–14). 19. The Royal Anthropological Institute was founded in 1843 as the Ethnological Society of London (Hann 1998: 15). 20. ‘Political science.’ (2010). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 20 November 2010, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/ topic/467721/political-science. 21. See Vincent 1990: 33–77. 22. Later interdisciplinary approaches within cultural studies, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, etc. went to even greater extremes in inventing their own jargon to set themselves apart from the disciplines from which they emerged. In anthropology, cultural studies have been both a competitor with and an ally of different approaches in political anthropology, cf. the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, the Journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. 23. Cohen held a joint appointment in departments of anthropology and political science. 24. See, for example, Cohen and Toland 1988, Skalnik 1989, and Claessen and van de Velde 1991. For an important earlier work see Fried 1967. 25. We discuss in chapter 3 important exceptions to this generalization.

Chapter 2

_

METHODS Ethnography and Case Study

The Promise of Ethnography It is difficult if not impossible to provide a simple and concise answer to the question: What is the use of ethnography for the students of politics and power?1 It depends on the aim of the research project, the specific ontological assumptions about social/political reality, and the particular conception of ethnography. Since it is impossible to consider all possibilities in a chapter, we delimit the scope of these remarks to two problématiques that are central to the comparativist enterprise, both in comparative politics and in anthropology: the significance of the cultural aspect of social reality and the consequences of the recent turn from macro- to microlevels of analysis in political science (Elster 1985; Geddes 2003; Kalyvas 2006; Weinstein 2007). The relative utility of ethnography is closely related to our understanding of politics. March and Olsen (1989: 47–48) typify a commonplace, materialist-institutional understanding by suggesting, “The organizing principle of a political system is the allocation of scarce resources in the face of conflict of interests.” This is a time-honored way of thinking about politics, for, as March and Olsen observe, “a conception of politics as decision making and resource allocation is at least as old as Plato and Aristotle” (1989: 47–48). Yet March and Olsen are keenly aware of a significant shortcoming of this conception: “Although there are exceptions, the modern perspective in political science has generally given primacy to substantive Notes for this section begin on page 57.

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outcomes and either ignored symbolic actions or seen symbols as part of manipulative efforts to control outcomes” (1989: 47). Not all politics can be reduced to competition over material resources; indeed, much of it concerns the struggle over collective identity, including often deadly contests over the meaning of symbols signifying this identity. Dirks, Eley, and Ortner develop this thought further: Politics is usually conducted as if identity were fixed. The question then becomes, on what basis, at different times in different places, does the nonfixity become temporarily fixed in such a way that individuals and groups can behave as a particular kind of agency, political or otherwise? How do people become shaped into acting subjects, understanding themselves in particular ways? In effect, politics consists of the effort to domesticate the infinitude of identity. It is the attempt to hegemonize identity, to order it into a strong programmatic statement. If identity is decentered, politics is about the attempt to create a center. (1994: 32)

Such centers emerge and disintegrate as a result of specific actions by concrete actors who propose, disseminate, and interpret cultural meanings encoded in a variety of symbolic ways. To study such processes, social scientists—at least those who recognize that any attempt to propose and propagate a vision of collective identity, thus any “cultural” effort whose aim is endowing human (particularly collective) action with meaning, is par excellence political—must move beyond the materialistinstitutional perspective and employ a symbolic-cultural approach.2 And within such an approach, “the researcher should ask whether the theory is consistent with evidence about the meanings the historical actors themselves attributed to their actions” (Hall 2003: 394). For researchers who embrace ontologies that include the “meaningful” layer of reality, ethnographic approaches emerge as promising tools for studying politics. If we understand politics as, in some important measure, locally produced, we again might turn to ethnography. Indeed, attention to the microlevel of analysis constitutes an important trend in today’s study of politics (Geddes 2003; Weinstein 2007: 351–65; Wood 2003). Gametheoretic ambition to develop a concise theory of politics (Bates et al. 1998) and a more sociological quest to identify microlevel or mesolevel mechanisms governing social and political life (Tilly 2001) both share an assumption that progress in the social sciences is more likely when our analytic gaze is focused on the concrete details of interactions rather than the workings of “large” structures. This turn to the local coincides with renewed interest in observing “actual” human behavior: students are increasingly admonished to focus on the “real-life” interactions of people in “real time,” rather than

Methods: Enthnography and Case Study

25

on interactions of variables in abstract theoretical spaces.3 Hall captures this perspective: The systematic process analyst then draws observation from the empirical cases, not only about the value of the principal causal variables, but about the processes linking these variables to the outcomes. … This is not simply a search for “intervening” variables. The point is to see if the multiple actions and statements of the actors at each stage of the causal process are consistent with the image of the world historical process implied by each theory (2003: 394).

This attention to the symbolic-cultural and to the local, microscale, and “actual” should make political scientists hungry for more ethnography, a research tool well suited for addressing these emergent concerns. But we need to pause to consider the intellectual, philosophical, and epistemological origins of the long and tangled traditions of ethnographic inquiry before we can appreciate ethnography’s potential value for the study of politics. Most writers posit participant observation as the defining method (or technique) of ethnography (Bayard de Volo & Schatz 2004: 267; Tilly 2006: 410).4 In Wacquant’s words ethnography is “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” (2003: 5). Below, we investigate the usefulness, if not indispensability, of ethnography for studying a reality that is construed as meaningful (ideal), processual (diachronic), and interactive (see chapter 1, page 8). Suffice it to note here that ethnography’s usefulness for studying “constructed” realities has been demonstrated in sociology (where it serves as an auxiliary tool) and anthropology (where it is the principal tool) and should be thus examined by political scientists, particularly comparativists, who are often admonished to take culture seriously (Chabal & Daloz 2006; Harrison & Huntington 2000; Norton 2004; Rao & Walton 2004b).5 In sociology, it supplements various interpretive techniques (for example, content or textual analysis) in studies that treat cultures as assemblages of (broadly understood) texts; in anthropology, it is indispensable for studying culture in action. But ethnography obviously can and has also been employed by more positivistically oriented researchers. It is thus imperative to outline the differential uses of ethnography in positivistic and interpretivist research programs. Let us begin in ethnography’s “maternal” discipline, cultural/social anthropology. To be sure, culture is not the only object of this discipline that is composed of several, partially separate intellec-

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tual traditions, to some extent overlapping with “national” schools.6 An exhaustive discussion is beyond our scope, but it is worthwhile to highlight one distinction: while the British have developed social anthropology, the Americans tend to practice cultural anthropology. Beyond semantics lie fundamental ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues. In a nutshell, while the British generally tend to focus their efforts on studying social structures and their “political” dimension (initially in non-Western societies), the Americans tend to construe the object of their studies as culture(s) and the multiple ways in which it interacts with power. These different definitions have consequences for the nature of specific projects, their conceptualizations, and methodologies. But, at the same time these two traditions have something in common: they both approach politics as an aspect of social relations that needs to be studied in practice, in statu nascendi, through extensive fieldwork centered on (preferably long-term) participant observation. What ethnographers observe (via participation) depends on the particular school or research tradition. By and large, while British lenses “detect” structure, American ones are fitted for studying culture. Importantly, both “structure” and “culture” can be, and often are these days, defined in a constructivist manner. It is enough to consider Giddens’s theory of structuration or Bourdieu’s theory of practice—par excellence constructivist conceptions of social structure. Moreover, at least since the wave of postmodern critiques, we know that “objects” of study do not exist out there, in an “objective reality,” ready to be “discovered”; rather, they are co-constituted by the two (or more) participants in a research interaction. Ethnography as a method (participant observation), therefore, is not limited to the study of culture. Just as many interpretive studies of politics rely on participant observation, noninterpretive studies use the same method (e.g., studies of organizational structures, informal networks, economic exchanges, etc.). At the same time, not all interpretive studies of power and politics are ethnographic (Bayard de Volo & Schatz 2004: 267). In fact, most are not. Table 2.1 illustrates these distinctions, based on examples drawn mostly from comparative studies of politics. Most research in political science is based on a naturalist ontology of the social and does not rely on participant observation; Przeworski’s and his collaborators’ work (2000) on the relationship between economic development and the survival of political regimes is exemplary. Such work is also practiced to great effect in the broadly defined area of “political culture”; consider the large n studies of Inglehart and his collaborators who survey “values” of the world’s population. Also, most work in game theory is noninterpretive, as it is built on deductively

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Table 2.1. Location of ethnographic studies in the studies of power and politics (with examples) Preferred ontology of the social and the attendant epistemology/methodology

Participant Observation Research Technique

Nonparticipant Observation

Meaningful/ Interpretivist

Natural/Positive/ Noninterpretivist

M. Aronoff (1991); Kertzer (1996); Wedeen (1999)

Laitin (1998a); Fortes & Evans-Pritchard (1940)

Przeworski et al. (2000); Kubik (1994a); Edles Acemoglu and Robinson (1998); Bonnell (1997); (2006); Haggard and O’Neill (1999) Kaufman (1995)

derived models of purportedly universal motivation mechanisms. Some game-theoretic work is sensitive to local contexts and is “ethnographic” in its tenor, although it does not typically use participant observation. (Petersen’s work, for example, deals with past events, as we discuss below). The second category features naturalist/positivistic works that rely on participant observation but do not provide interpretive accounts of the social worlds actors live in. Much of classical British social anthropology belongs to this category. Most influential works in comparative politics that rely at least partially on participant observation belong to the naturalistic, noninterpretive genre, though some—such as Laitin’s influential study (1998a)—are close to the boundary between interpretive and noninterpretive types of work. The third type includes works that are interpretive but do not use participant observation. Bonnell’s (1997) analysis of Soviet posters as tools of power, Edles’s (1998) work on the symbolic dimension of Spanish democratization, or Kubik’s (1994a) study of Polish “Solidarity’s” symbolic challenge to the hegemonic power of the Communist Party belong to this type. Finally, works belonging to the fourth type combine interpretive epistemology with participant observation as the main method. Consider Aronoff’s (1991) study of the inner workings of the Israel Labor Party, Kertzer’s (1996) detailed reconstruction of the Italian Communist Party cell’s operation in a local setting, or Wedeen’s (1999) analysis of everyday, counterhegemonic challenges to Hafez AlAssad’s power in Syria. Krzyzæanowski (2011a) analyzes the relationship between ethnography and critical discourse analysis, an important interpretive method. To summarize: as a method of research, ethnography is used to study culture (meaning systems) or other aspects of the broadly conceived so-

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cial, such as economy, power (politics), or social structure. Its essence is participant observation, a disciplined immersion in the social life of a given group of people. Ethnography is sometimes erroneously equated with (1) in-depth interviewing (opposed to administering surveys), (2) case studies (opposed to large-n statistical studies), (3) process tracing (opposed to finding correlations), and (4) interpretation of meaning (opposed to the “naturalistic” study of “objective” social facts). Studies based on these four methods are not necessarily ethnographic; they become so when they rely on participant observation of considerable length.7 But ethnography is more than a method of research. The term ethnography refers to at least three overlapping yet sufficiently distinct types of intellectual activity and research practice: (1) data collecting, (2) modeling of social reality, and (3) genre of writing. The essence of ethnography as a specific method of data collecting is, of course, participant observation. Second, ethnographic models are built around specific theoretical assumptions about “reality”—or its fragment—to be observed (for example, holism of the social system in early, functionalist, ethnographies). Finally, ethnography is a genre of writing (or, to be more precise, a set of genres) the author employs to narrate the reality in a manner that is different from presentations of formal or statistical models. The literary tropes of these genres can and often are subjected to intense scrutiny, for example, with the help of methods borrowed from literary criticism (Clifford and Marcus 1986; for a recent review see Rumsey 2004). The development of ethnography often progressed simultaneously along all three dimensions. Consider Malinowski, who pioneered the method of extensive fieldwork, formulated the principles of holistic analysis of social systems, and had a powerful influence on the literary style of the whole enterprise.8 Parenthetically, the study of the relationship between theoretical models and the literary tropes “modelers” utilize, has a long tradition in history (White 1978), sociology, and anthropology (Rumsey 2004). In political science, such investigations are rare (but see Patterson and Monroe 1998), though it should be noted that David Laitin (2004) champions narrative as one of the three forms of modeling reality in studies on politics.

Five Types of Ethnography An answer to the question “What is ethnography good for (in the study of power and politics)?” depends primarily on the definition of ethnography. The problem is that, as our review of the existing studies reveals,

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there are at least five types of ethnography: traditional/positivistic, interpretive, postmodern, global (multisited), and paraethnography. Each of them is characterized by a specific combination of the three elements listed above: type of participant observation, principal model of (the aspect of) reality selected for study, and genre of writing. An effort to find a firmer place for ethnography in political science is going to be more effective and precise if we remember that there are several distinct types of ethnography and that each of them needs to be considered in three dimensions (see Table 2.2). In this chapter we focus, however, almost exclusively on ethnography as a method of research, only occasionally remarking on the model of reality or genre of writing. It is nonetheless worthwhile to provide a simple sketch of the terrain a more comprehensive investigation would need to cover. We do so in Table 2.2. The contributions of five types ethnography-as-a-method are the main topic of this chapter. Here we sketch brief characterizations of each type’s ontological assumptions and most representative genres of writing. The traditional (realistic, positivistic) ethnography, pioneered by Malinowski, was designed to produce knowledge about a social system treated as a whole composed of functionally related elements; its results Table 2.2. Five types of ethnography9 Type of ethnography Traditional/ positivist

Interpretive

Postmodern

Global/ multisited

Paraethnography

Participant observation of the “totality” of social life

Participant observation of semiotic practices10

Reflexive participant observation (usually of semiotic practices)

Multisited participant observation of social practices

Reconstruction of (formal and informal) semiotic practices

Social Dimension system of “reality” approached selected for holistically the study albeit and its composed of principal identifiable characteristic segments

“Web of meanings” i.e., a (relatively coherent) semiotic system

Mosaic of various dimensions of semiotic reality

Discourses System of developed by intercon“symbolic” nected specialists localities, (particularly often in difin supraferent parts national of the globe institutions)

Realistic prose

Multivocal interpretive essay

Burawoy

Marcus and Holmes

Dimension of ethnography

Dominant fieldwork method

Literary trope/genre of writing

Realistic prose

Interpretive essay

Collage (sometimes poetic) “Messy” text Polyvocal text

Exemplars

Malinowski

Geertz

Tyler

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were written up in realistic prose. The main goal of interpretive ethnography, most famously represented by Geertz, is to interpret “the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action” (1973: 145). That “fabric” or “web” of meaning constitutes (often loosely) integrated semiotic system. Interpretations are presented to the reader in the form of a densely written interpretive essay, in which the voice of the “author” is clearly dominant. Postmodern ethnography also focuses on the semiotic dimension, but drops the assumption of systemicity and instead privileges a mosaic-like model of reality that needs to be accessed from several angles via a collaborative effort of the researcher and his/her “subjects,” now reconceptualized as partners. The voices of the “subjects” should be heard as clearly as the voice of the “ethnographer” (Tyler 1986).11 Global and multisited ethnography is developed to “fit” the globalized reality in which people are no longer primarily attached to a single location, but are increasingly mobile in the increasingly interconnected world. But the genre of ethnographic writing returns to the canons of realistic prose, characteristic of the early “realist” style. Finally, paraethnography is a research strategy whose goal is to reconstruct both formal and informal modes of reasoning and writing in major (particularly supranational) institutions. It is often not based on participant observation but rather on close reading and interpretation of available written sources.12 The focus is on discursive practices and the preferred genre of writing tends to be multivocal interpretive essay. Let’s now move to the more systematic analysis of five types of ethnographic method of “data gathering” as it contributes to the study of power and politics.

Ethnography in Realist (Positivistic) Political Anthropology In this section we take stock of the contributions that traditional, positivistic ethnography has made to the study of power. We do so to emphasize a central point: ethnography can benefit positivistic research agendas at least as well as it can contribute to interpretive ones. Political anthropology is a sub-discipline with a distinguished tradition of realist inquiry. As we point out in chapter 1, the beginning of “modern” political anthropology is routinely dated to publication of M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s African Political Systems (1940). All studies collected in that volume were based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, but, by contrast to today’s anthropologists—who would emphasize the cultural specificity of each case—the editors made an explicit effort to strip all social processes of “their cultural idiom” and

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reduce them “to functional terms” to generate comparisons and arrive at generalizations (Vincent 1990: 258). At the time of the volume’s publication, anthropology (including political anthropology) was still predominantly characterized by its focus on non-Western, “exotic,” or at least “marginal” societies. As Vincent (1990: 24) notes, “Not until the 1950s, in the face of challenges from other disciplines on the eve of their massive intervention in the anthropological domain, did anthropologists make manifest that ‘anthropology is characterized by a set of methods rather than bound by a subject matter’ (Bohannan 1967: xiv).” Ethnography and the Study of Power Long before Foucault made it fashionable, ethnographers were tracking down the exercise of power within the interstices of official structures, behind the veil of various officialdoms, and in ostensibly apolitical spaces and domains. But, perhaps more important, there is no other method that can allow researchers to study power in statu nascendi in all settings, formal and informal, and—particularly—to reconstruct the informal workings of formal power structures. Ethnography is thus used to map out the multiple layers of power within and behind complex bureaucratic structures and to complement if not supersede reconstructions of “modern” power generated by other methods. For example, Scott (1985) examines in great detail the “weapons of the weak”—various strategies of resistance to the state among the Malaysian peasants; Wedel, Shore, Feldman, and Lathrop (2005) detail the anthropology of policy making in complex, modern organizations; Abélès dissects the workings of the European Parliament (1992b) and the European Commission (2004); Aronoff (1991) explores the Israel Labor Party; Bailey (1983) unravels the politics of various committees (at parliaments, governments, universities, etc.); Wedeen (1999) reconstructs the intricate mechanisms of resistance in authoritarian Syria; and Gaventa (1980) exposes the politics of inequality in an Appalachian Valley. Likewise, ethnography seems indispensable to the study of collective action; no other method can better expose mechanisms of the important, early stages of mobilization (Blee & Currier 2006). Petersen (2001) uses an “ethnohistorical” approach to reconstruct the mechanisms of anti-Nazi mobilization in Lithuania in the 1940s. He begins by modeling the sociological mechanisms and group features that help to explain why individuals in certain communities (at certain times) rebel against oppressors while others remain passive or collaborate. His model specifies such attributes of the community as: (1) the initial distribution preferences and constraints concerning the risk of rebellion, (2) the types of norms (of honor or family obligation, for example)

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that define the types of subgroups, and (3) the distribution of those subgroups within the larger community. Petersen divides mobilization into two stages: (a) from passivity to resistance and (b) from resistance to rebellion. Then, he considers separately the problem of rebellion’s sustainability. For each stage or problem he identifies a different set of mechanisms and shows how they reinforce each other, propelling the process forward (to rebellion) or backward (to collaboration). Since Peterson studies past events, he cannot employ participant observation, but he collects and interrogates his data as if they were generated by such a method. The ethnographic tenor of his study does not come, therefore, from participant observation, but rather from an ethnographic problematization and framing of the work.13 He sets out to study the minutiae of community organization and uses all available information not only to reconstruct actors’ views and preferences, but also to map out their actions within the local structures that both empowered and constrained them and to identify the mechanisms that make mobilization possible. His is a quintessentially ethnohistorical, indeed ethnographic, project. Ethnography and Game Theory Ethnography is particularly well suited to test the limits of rationality in game-theoretic models, which otherwise run the risk of circular reasoning. As Morrow proposes: “Rational behavior means choosing the best means to gain a predetermined set of ends. It is an evaluation of the consistency of choices and not the thought process, of implementation of fixed goals and of the morality of those goals” (1994: 17). But, to determine whether such consistency exists, researchers often infer both the intention to employ certain means and their actual employment from observing ex post facto the very same action. In order to determine an actor’s rationality, one would have to: (a) infer that an actor intended to employ certain means to achieve a given goal, (b) observe the actual means employed, and (c) compare the two. Such tests of rationality are rare, perhaps because the ethnographic method is seldom used in studies relying on game-theoretic models. Ethnography and the Study of Social Structure Any full understanding of power requires an understanding of social structure, which is both a product of and a constraint on individual and collective action. This is the area where the holistic tenor of traditional ethnography is most clearly visible: politics is analyzed as embedded in social structure(s). Traditional ethnography makes at least three contributions to the study of social structure, much of it relevant for the study of politics. First, while focusing on small-scale phenomena, ethnogra-

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phy allows the researcher to see the way social structure actually works in people’s daily lives (say, how a position in class structure influences one’s life choices; see Willis (1977, 2000) or Sider (1986). Second, it contributes empirical material to the study of one of thorniest problems of social theory: the relationship between structure and agency. By observing people up close, ethnographers can gauge the “structural” limitations actors face, reconstruct the range of strategic choices they have, observe their actual action, and assess its possibly transformative impact on structure. Third, ethnography is the best method of studying the complex interplay between (formal) social structure and (informal) social organization.14 Political scientists should carefully appraise ethnography’s contribution to the study of the relationship between formal and informal institutions. After all, this relationship has been one of the hallmarks of new institutionalism, an influential approach. In a path-breaking and influential study, the economist Douglass North shows how economic behavior is shaped by both formal and informal institutions (1990: 4).15 Positing that economic performance is determined by a complex interplay of three factors—demography (human capital), the stock of knowledge (including everyday beliefs), and the formal institutional framework—North warns that “we know very little about this interaction” (1997: 14). Participant observation is well suited to studying the complex interplay of such factors. Ethnography and the Study of Social Process Research methods typical of political science, such as opinion surveys, periodic collection of economic statistics (usually aggregated on a yearly basis), or pooled expert opinions on institutional changes (also routinely aggregated and reported yearly; see the World Bank or Freedom House, etc.) register the occurrence of change; they do not specify the mechanisms of change. As political science faces increasing calls to turn from macro to micro and to study actual mechanisms, the value of ethnography should become apparent. As Trickett and Oliveri (1997: 149) argue, “ethnography can capture the dynamic of change in ways that snapshot surveys using pre-established dimensions and response categories cannot.” Ethnography allows researchers to reconstruct the manner in which large-scale social processes (say, postcommunist transformations) actually occur and how they constrain or empower people in their daily lives. It is, after all, the reproduction and transformation of daily lives that are observable, not “structural change.” Ethnography can also detect how the macro- and microdynamic of change may be out of step. Introducing a collection of ethnographies about postcommunist transformations, Burawoy and Verdery opine:

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Our view of the relation between macro structures and everyday practices is that the collapse of party states and administered economies broke down macro structures, thereby creating space for micro worlds to produce autonomous effects that may have unexpected influence over the structures that have been emerging. … It is precisely the sudden importance of micro processes lodged in moments of transformation that privileges an ethnographic approach. (1999: 3)

Importantly, they do not merely signal the differential rhythms of macroand microchanges; they claim that the often ignored (or/and unintended) microprocesses may influence, derail, or even halt macrochanges. Such observations dovetail with recent writing on the mechanisms of social change in historical sociology and historically oriented comparative politics.16 Finally, ethnography is critical, if not indispensable, for identifying and dissecting the mechanism of impending or actual social change. Norton (2004: 41) observes that, since change often comes from the periphery, it is important to “recognize the power of liminal, or marginal, groups. … Because they stand on the boundaries of identity, they are often central to debates over those boundaries.” Ethnography and the Study of Political Economy Bird-David observes, “A diversity of exchange forms had been reified by anthropologists into either ‘gift’ or ‘commodity,’ while in the concreteness of social life—among indigenous people as among Westerners—there are multiple kinds. These have to be studied, too” (quoted in Herzfeld 2001: 111). To study economic transactions in isolation from their cultural and social contexts entails a risk of serious distortion. Aware of this, most anthropologists rely on ethnography to advance what has come to be known as the “substantivist” conception of economy (as distinct from the “formalist” view derived from neoclassical economic theory). The distinction between substantivist and formalist definitions of the economic activity is discussed in chapter 1. There, we point out that one way to think about this distinction is historical. While many people subscribe to some version of an evolutionary paradigm, believing that societies move from a substantivist to a formalist phase, ethnographers have problematized this claim. For example, anthropologists who study postcommunist transformations have shown that the “progress” from ex-communist substantivism to neocapitalism formalism at best is uneven, slow, and full of reversals. Moreover, to survive under adverse conditions, people create and maintain complex networks that can be conceptualized as “economic” only at a risk of serious conceptual

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stretching. The extensive and empirically convincing literature on this phenomenon is found mostly in anthropology (Humphrey 2002; Burawoy & Verdery 1999; Buchowski 1997), but also sociology (Stark & Bruszt 1998) and political economy (Woodruff 1999; Blyth 2002). These insights about postcommunist transformations follow on the heels of a long anthropological tradition of recognizing complex relationships between economy and culture, as noted in chapter 1. Beginning in the 1960s, anthropologists using ethnographic evidence wrote books with titles like Political Economy and Culture of… showing, for example, that while in practice economic relations tend to be complex and multistranded, in ideology (of capitalism or communism), they appear as separate and single stranded. In a recent, sophisticated ethnography of family firms in Italy, Yanagisako (2002: 13) performs a similar service, showing that even today, “Family and kinship processes, relations, and sentiments are crucial for the production and reproduction of all forms of capitalism, whether family capitalism or non-family capitalism”—in spite of a prevailing discourse that normatively separates “family” from “business” relations. It is hard to imagine how such a demystification of the dominant view of economic activity could have been accomplished without ethnography. Importantly, this realization has already filtered to the World Bank, as a path-breaking volume indicates (Rao & Walton 2004b). From the onset of anthropology (political anthropology in particular), ethnography has been successfully employed to locate power in hardly accessible or atypical places, beyond the world of formal institutions. And as cultural/social anthropology has come to be defined by its method rather than object, its preoccupation with marginal or peripheral phenomena has continued. Thus, the major contribution of traditional positivistic anthropology—via ethnography—is to the study of power and politics outside of centers and mainstreams, within a complex interplay with economic and cultural processes, and in locations and crevices where the exercise of power or authority is often invisible to other disciplines.

Interpretive Ethnography: The Study of Meaning (Culture) in Action Wittgenstein should perhaps be declared a patron saint of the ethnographic study of meaning, as he emphasized that the meaning(s) of a sign (word, picture, and sound) is best determined through studying its use, its employment in social practice. As we demonstrated earlier, eth-

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nography and interpretation are not necessarily paired; quite often they are not. But their combination allows for the reconstruction of how culture (the meaning-creating machine) operates in practice and how the actual production and interpretation of meaning are practical activities, often central to both power struggles and economic maneuvers, and shot through with emotions. There are many definitions of culture; ethnographers need one that goes beyond treating it merely as a symbolic structure. The Comaroffs, for example, speak about meaningful or symbolic practices that constitute culture construed as a semantic space, the field of signs and practices, in which human beings construct and represent themselves and others, and hence their societies and histories. It is not merely an abstract order of signs, or relations among signs. Nor is it just the sum of habitual practices. Neither pure langue nor pure parole, it never constitutes a closed, entirely coherent system. Quite the contrary: Culture always contains within it polyvalent contestable messages, images, and actions. (1992: 27)

Contests within this semantic space are by their nature political, as they often constitute attempts to achieve legitimacy or to establish collective identities (nation, class, gender, race, etc.) and endow them with an aura of naturalness. Can societies and their politics, permeated by such symbolic struggles, be studied in the same manner as “natural systems” examined by the “hard” sciences? The answer depends on the ontological stance of a given scholar: naturalists say yes, antinaturalists say no. The latter—as we show in chapter 1—cannot do without interpretation that they see as a replacement for (radical interpretivists) or complement to explanation (moderate interpretivists). Interpretivism in cultural anthropology had its heyday in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The masters of interpretive or symbolic anthropology—Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Marshall Sahlins, Edmund Leach, David Schneider, and Mary Douglass—proposed rich and multifaceted theoretical frameworks for studying the complex relationship between the political and the symbolic; the essence of this relationship was captured by the title of Abner Cohen’s seminal Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in Complex Society (1974). Through careful conceptualization and detailed ethnographic fieldwork, these (and many other) scholars showed that culture is not an immutable, monolithic terrain composed of structured configurations of symbols and signs, available for (contemplative) interpretation; it is rather a complex set of signifying practices via which humans collectively create the worlds they inhabit and within which they compete for power and material advantages.

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Since the 1980s, interpretivism has changed, mostly under the impact of the postmodern challenge, but it has retained its viability as a research program not only in cultural or political anthropology (e.g., Kwon 2006), but also in other disciplines, including political sociology (Ashforth 2005; Wagner-Pacifici 1986) and comparative politics (Chabal & Deloz 2006; Edles 1998; Fernandes 1997). The relationship between interpretive methodologies, such as critical discourse analysis, and ethnography continues to be carefully studied and produced increasingly precise methodological directives (Krzyzæanowski 2011a, 2011b).17 Ethnography of Nation Building Much of the competition for symbolic power and cultural hegemony remains inscrutable for such standard methods of political science as surveys or institutional analysis. Interpretive ethnography offers a solution. Take, for example, the study of nation building, one of the central preoccupations of today’s comparative politics (Smith 2004). It is hard to imagine a method other than ethnography that would highlight and clearly demonstrate that national-level meaning formation and similar, local-level processes are often incongruous and, if related, their relations are complex.18 Herzfeld (1997) investigates the relationships between national and local levels of identity formation and shows that there is no single logic that would apply to the formation of “national identity” in all locations where this process takes place. Gagnon (2004) shows how ethnic identities of “Serbs” and “Croats” are formed, re-formed, and deformed through a series of mobilizations and demobilizations whose local and national rhythms vary considerably. Interpretive ethnography can capture this variation. Interpretive Ethnography and Democratization Interpretive ethnography has also made critical contributions to the study of democratization. For example, by showing that “democracy” is interpreted and thus practiced in many different ways that depend on local cultural contexts (Paley 2002; Wedeen 2004), ethnographically inclined researchers help us understand why democracy-promotion projects built on decontextualized, universalistic assumptions are beleaguered by often insolvable problems. Ashforth’s (2005) nuanced and multilayered ethnography shows that the fragile legitimacy of South African democracy is seriously threatened by the persistence of witchcraft. As the country undergoes rapid political and economic change, many people, particularly in poorer areas such as Soweto, feel increasingly insecure and unsure why the benefits of the post-Apartheid development are sparse and slow in coming.

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They also feel jealous of those whose life fortunes have improved. To deal with insecurity and a growing sense of injustice, they look for explanations offered by their own culture in which personal misfortunes are attributed to evil acts of witches. This culture also suggests a remedy: affected individuals or communities need to enlist the help of traditional healers. But the healers’ authority challenges the efforts of the new, democratically elected and “modern” government to achieve legitimacy. As Ashforth puts it: Belief in witchcraft presents severe challenges for the project of democratic government within a modern state. A democratic regime cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of ‘informal’ efforts to seek justice in the face of witchcraft, but if authorities prevent communities from securing their own forms of justice while refusing to address the underlying problem of occult violence, they open themselves to the charge that they are either ignoring the dangers facing the community or in league with evil forces themselves. (2005: 314)

Ashforth’s (2005) study demonstrates that the “top-down” political logic of democratizing projects often clashes with the “bottom-up,” usually local, cultural mechanisms that dictate the meaning of democratization for the “target” populations. Insensitivity to such localized cultural understandings often derails or deforms even the most promising democratization projects. Interpretive Ethnography and the Politics of Collective Memory Kwon (2006) provides another example of the clash of between nationaland local-level logics in a study examining collective memory and its impact on regime consolidation in Vietnam. Again ethnography proves indispensable. The Vietnamese, whose society had been ripped apart by devastating wars, have recently engaged in the rebuilding of their country’s social and cultural tissue. In a society whose edifice rests on a scaffolding of multigenerational kinship regulated by elaborate rituals, this is a particularly demanding task. The ritual reconstruction of lineages that were destroyed by “bad deaths” that occurred “in the streets,” while the proper location for dying is “at home,” is fraught with difficulties. Death outside of the culturally legitimated locations disrupts the viability of family units grounded in the cult of ancestors. Given that family units are the building blocks of social order, a society that lost hundreds of thousands of its members in ritually uncontrolled conditions, either as soldiers on battlefields or victims of killing fields, is unbalanced. Reburying under the “proper” conditions can “re-fit” ancestors into their “rightful” ritual locations and thus restore social order.

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This is exactly where the state’s politics and the culture of lineage and community clash. The communist authorities of Vietnam, although reluctantly supportive of society’s self-healing efforts, are also interested in the victims of the foreign invasions. Reburying can become a political ritual that promotes the regime’s interests; the dead are splendid candidates for hero worship. But the cultural logics of hero worship, championed by the regime, and cults of the ancestors, needed by the families, are at odds. Engaging in the latter can undermine the regime’s claims to legitimacy and weaken the nation-building potential of official heroism. Kwon (2006) contributes to the literature on the relationship between the politics of memory formation and the struggle for political legitimacy (see, for example, Davis 2005) and confirms that the study of this relationship is seriously flawed when cultural mechanisms involved in this process are abstracted away. But he insists that collective memory is always formulated according to specific cultural rules in concrete social locations and constructed on several levels, at different scales, often simultaneously. The political and cultural logic that governs this construction at the national level, where it contributes to the regime’s self-legitimizing efforts, can be undermined or annulled by the local, regional, or familial processes of collective memory formation. Interpretive Ethnography and Comparisons What about the relationship between (ethnographic) interpretation and comparison, a chief task of comparative politics? While within traditional positivistic anthropology, participant observation was seen as a reliable and unproblematic tool for collecting data that was directly fit for comparisons and generalizations, the interpretive turn undercut this methodological optimism. As Holy (1987: 4–5), aptly puts it, while in positivistic anthropology “generalization was seen as problematic, description was not,” “subjective” or “interpretative” anthropology problematized description as it moved from “the theory of social facts as things to a theory of them as constructions.” Constructivism made comparisons dubious, and the word “comparison has completely disappeared from the vocabulary of methodological discourse” (Holy 1987: 6–7). Such a conclusion may sound ominous to the practitioners of comparative politics, but in all fairness many of them have arrived at a similar position (Bowen & Petersen 1999; Chabal & Daloz 2006; Smith 2004; Wedeen 2004), prefigured in the work of a philosopher who once took a good critical look at their practices (MacIntyre 1978). Comparativists, whose field has been stretched—in Collier’s seminal formulation (1993)—between case studies and large n studies, used to search for a

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“scientific” salvation in the direction of an “ever larger n.” These days, however, many of them opt for a method of “small scale controlled comparison,” which promises that “through a focus on process and mechanism within the detailed study of the cases, much of the complexity of political life can be addressed while maintaining an ability to generalize” (Bowen & Petersen 1999: 11). To summarize: interpretive ethnography based on participant observation of semiotic practices delivers important and original bodies of knowledge for research programs founded on three commitments: (1) constructivism/interpretivism (interpret—not just explain—actions that are “meaningful” to actors), (2) ontological realism and an attendant epistemology (focus on actual actions of real people, rather than variables),19 and (3) microscale (observe actual, “small-scale” settings and reconstruct relevant mechanisms).20 These three commitments undergird a research agenda that is indispensable in a world that stubbornly refuses to be rationalized and homogenized and in which the politics of identity is pervasive.

Postmodern Ethnography It is paradoxical that when some political scientists have begun turning toward ethnography, anthropologists21 have thoroughly reevaluated, and often scathingly critiqued, the method that traditionally is the raison d’être of their discipline. With the postmodern turn, ethnography has been equipped with new tasks; its role in the study of power therefore needs to be examined afresh. As we will suggest, a “reformed” ethnography remains just as relevant to the study of power as ever (for a strong articulation of this point see Borneman and Hammoudi 2009). The reexamination of ethnography’s value has been propelled by a double engine of postmodernism and globalization. The former cast doubts on the epistemological adequacy of social scientific methods, particularly their claims to “objectivity,” “detachment,” and the possibility of “accurate” representations of reality; the latter accelerated a reconceptualization of the object of study by discarding earlier conceptions of “ethnographic” realities as isolated and self-enclosed systems. Debate about the relative (de)merits of “ethnographic” representations of reality has been particularly heated since the publication of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Clifford & Marcus 1986), whose authors examine ethnography as a literary genre belonging to a broader category of “scientific” writing. Crapanzano, for

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example, criticized Geertz for being too domineering and not allowing enough space in his narrative for the natives’ unfiltered voices: Despite his phenomenological-hermeneutical pretensions, there is in fact in “Deep Play” no understanding of the native from the native’s point of view. There is only the constructed understanding of the constructed native’s constructed point of view. Geertz offers no specifiable evidence for his attributions of intention, his assertions of subjectivity, his declaration of experience. (1986: 74)

Postmodernists challenge the authorial authority of the interpreter, the hero of the interpretive turn. They posit that ethnographic texts should be polyvocal, allowing the “natives” to speak in their own voices and to represent (textually, narratively) themselves.22 While very few scholars would relinquish control over their texts, the idea that the work should allow the reader to “hear” the natives’ own conceptualizations of reality is not alien to many practitioners of today’s comparative politics (Ashforth 2005; Laitin 1998; Schaffer 1998; Wedeen 1999). It is, however, clear that the postmodern critiques of ethnography as a genre of writing have not changed fundamentally the way most social science narratives are composed. Nor have they diminished interest in ethnography as a research method, although globalization has called for its overhaul. Trouillot (2003) argues that the conceptualization of ethnography as a method focused on the study of small, relatively homogenous communities has prevented anthropologists from achieving the proper understanding of the relationship(s) between the broader world (however it is conceptualized) and specific location. This blinded them to the phenomena that constitute the bread and butter of today’s social science: the expansion of capitalism and its “local” consequences, colonialism and postcolonialism, migrations, and globalization(s). Postmodern sensitivity demands that location be construed not as a relatively bounded and separate whole, but as a place where various flows intersect. According to Marcus, postmodern ethnography needs to be sharply distinguished from what he calls positivistic or “realist” ethnography. Specifically, three dimensions of ethnographic inquiry need to be reconceptualized: the spatial, the temporal, and the perspective or voice (1998: 62). First, the concept of community “in the classic sense of shared values, shared identity, and thus shared culture” (Marcus 1998: 62) needs to be replaced with the concept of “multi-locale, dispersed identity” (1998: 63) constructed, often simultaneously, by often mutually independent flows of cultural material, complex political configurations, and economic relations. Marcus argues, “It is the burden of the mod-

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ernist ethnography to capture distinctive identity formations in all their migrations and dispersions” (1998: 63). Second, to “[post]modernize” the temporal dimension of ethnography, Marcus asks that we replace dominant “Western historical metanarratives” that have routinely served as a historical background for many scholars with local histories and carefully reconstructed local collective memories. He contends, “The past that is present in any site is built up from memory, the fundamental medium of ethnohistory” (Marcus 1998: 64).23 Finally, the traditional ethnographic perspective, heavily indebted to the concept of structure (social or semiotic), needs to be replaced with the concept of “voice.” For Marcus: “Voices are not seen as products of local structures, based on community and tradition, alone, or as privileged sources of perspective, but rather as products of the complex sets of associations and experiences which compose them” (1998: 66). As we understand this postulate, today’s increasingly mobile people need to be studied as members of (several) networks and participants in (several) flows, rather than products and producers of clearly identifiable structures. Table 2.3 summarizes Marcus’s distinctions. Table 2.3. Three dimensions of the ethnographic subject Space

Temporal

Perspective

Realist Ethnography

(Relatively closed) community of shared values (culture)

“Western” metanarrative as a background story

Structure (social or semiotic)

Modernist Ethnography

Multi-locale, dispersed identity

Localized collective memory

Voice

Identity, Postmodernity, and Globalization Most political scientists and anthropologists who are sympathetic to Marcus’s theorizing or share his concerns accept at least some postmodern insights about the constructed and increasingly fluid makeup of identity. Yet many of them know that from time to time ethnographic studies reveal the emergence of pretty “solid” entities: dispersed and incongruous identities become communities, localized collective memories captivate us as metanarratives, and voice freezes into structure. They warn, however, that this needs to be empirically demonstrated rather than a priori theorized. It is therefore helpful to conceptualize politics in such a manner that the struggle for identity becomes as central to it as the struggle for scarce resources.24 This new concept

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of politics is most powerfully articulated by Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, quoted earlier, who posit, “If identity is decentered, politics is about the attempt to create a center” (1994: 32). Sometimes such a center is formed; sometimes it is not. It has also become clear that “resistance in the struggle to establish identity does not rest on some nostalgic bedrock of tradition or community, but arises inventively out of the same deconstructive conditions that threaten to pull it apart or destabilize what has been achieved” (Marcus 1998: 74). The postmodern turn makes the task of studying such processes of invention and stabilization even more demanding: the formation of identity needs to be caught in statu nascendi, as various flows intersect in a single locale and/or are traced down through several locations/ locales. Again, it is hard to imagine a method better suited for such a task than ethnography, perhaps pursued at multiple sites, as we discuss below.

Global and Multisited Ethnography In the increasingly globalized world, researchers face a methodological challenge: ethnography, designed to study the structuring of social life, power, and the formation of identity in “small” locations, has proved inadequate for studying the reality of (fast) global flows of goods, services, and information; migrating populations; and shifting meanings. As the Comaroffs observe: The economies of signs and practices have to be situated in the intimacy of the local contexts that gave them life. At the same time, they require to be inserted into the translocal processes of which they were part ab initio: processes—commodification, colonization, proletarianization, and the like—composed of a plethora of acts, facts and utterances whose very description demands that we frame them in terms of one or another Theory of History. (2003: 161)

The “terrain” ethnographers are supposed to investigate needs to be reconceptualized so they can situate the object of their study (a small community) within a translocal field of political, economic, and cultural forces. The work to address this need already began in the 1970s. Paradoxically, as some political scientists began moving their discipline from macro (structural historical studies) to micro (game-theoretical work on the individual calculation and the growing interest in the small-scale mechanisms of politics),25 anthropology in the hands of many of its leading practitioners was already traveling in the opposite direction.

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By and large, this movement from micro to macro in anthropology has had two major phases:26 (a) the world-system phase, inspired mostly by Wallerstein (1974) and Frank (1969), and arguably culminating with Eric Wolf (1982); and (b) the globalization/postmodern phase, epitomized most distinctly by the critical works of Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus (1998). The theoretical tenor of the first phase was decisively materialist, (neo-) Marxist, while the second wave was primarily culturalist, as its practitioners pushed the interpretive turn in the social sciences to its limits (and perhaps beyond). During this phase, anthropologists set out to demonstrate how local structures and cultures are influenced and shaped by larger structures, such as the states, class structures, and the world system of (mostly economic) interdependencies. The second phase was marked by the theoretical implosion of the whole repertoire of such “traditional” concepts as the binaries of micromacro, system-worldview, or center-periphery; and the concept of a clearly bound cultural whole. Accordingly, ethnography and fieldwork had to be reinvented again. In Trouillot’s words: “The problem is not fieldwork per se, but the taking for granted of localities upon which the fetishization of a certain kind of fieldwork was built and the relationship between … supposedly isolated localities and supposedly distinct cultures” (2003: 125). To answer this challenge, methodologists and practitioners propose ethnography that is postmodern, global, and multisited. Building on his earlier work on the extended case study method (Burawoy 1998),27 Burawoy (2000: 26–28) articulates four methodological guidelines of global ethnography: (1) “the extension of the observer to the world of the participant” (the essence of participant observation), (2) “extension of the observations over time and space” (following subjects through complex and increasingly global networks), (3) “extending from micro processes to macro forces” (relying on a theoretically informed model of the external forces whose contingent character needs to be grasped), and (4) “extension of theory” (avoiding the “straitjacketing” power of theory by the incessant, mutually correcting dialogue of theory and data).28 Globalized World: From Structures to Flows and Networks The image of structure in today’s social science has lost its once formidable luster as it has been challenged by the images of networks (Castells 1996), assemblages (Sassen 2006), flows, and scapes (Appadurai 1990). This has put a new set of demands on the methodology of empirical investigation. What should we do, for example, with a time-honored, grand

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binary opposition, system versus life-world (Habermas), that echoes Marx’s own distinction between the base and superstructure? Marcus astutely observes: The distinction between lifeworlds of subjects and the system does not hold, and the point of ethnography within the purview of its always local, close-up perspective is to discover new paths of connection and association by which traditional ethnographic concerns with agency, symbols, and everyday practices can continue to be expressed on a differently configured spatial canvas. (1998: 82)

Such a perspective produces an image of social reality as a flat plane, composed as a mosaic of pieces of various sizes, complexly interconnected, and subjected to increasingly rapid recombinations; the older, Marx-inspired, vision of a hierarchically ordered reality (a “causally” weighty base at the bottom and a somewhat less consequential superstructure at the top) is passé. One consequence of this remapping is a call for ethnography to focus on complex interactions of economic, social, political, and cultural processes, without a priori privileging causally any of them. Power in the Globalized World In a path-breaking formulation, Foucault proposed that the study of power needs to focus on its exercise or actualization(s) “in the complexities of everyday practice” (Herzfeld 2001: 122). This premise has long guided ethnographers and has produced eye-opening results; the postmodern situation has added a layer of complexity. Having been asked to look for power literally everywhere, ethnographers now face the task of tracking it down inside extensive, often hidden, networks that connect actors through increasingly globalized webs of influence, dependence, and assistance. As localities have become increasingly discourse based and “virtual,” actors can escape (at least partially) the exercise of power by their direct “local” superiors by engaging in Internet-empowered, transnational networks (see Tarrow 2005 for an overview). Ethnographic studies of such networks are not easy, but they are much needed. Multisited Ethnography For Trouillot, multisited ethnography is an improvement on earlier incarnations of the method, since it is “a partial answer to the ethnographic trilogy (one observer, one time, one place)” (2003: 125). But, how would one conduct a multisited ethnography? Marcus proposes seven strategies: (1) follow the people, (2) follow the thing, (3) follow the metaphor, (4) follow the plot, story, or allegory, (5) follow the life

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or biography, (6) follow the conflict, and (7) conduct a strategically situated (single-site) ethnography (1998: 89–99). There is no room here to characterize them all; instead we briefly illustrate their usefulness by reconsidering one of the key tasks of ethnography: tracking down power in unusual and marginal places (for example, among the subaltern). Echoing Scott (1985), Marcus suggests that the primary task of cultural/political anthropology is the reconstruction of a complex dialectic of resistance and accommodation as marginal or subaltern people try to come to terms with the pressures of political and/or economic globalization. This framework, in his mind, has served realist ethnography well, at least since the first “wave” of globalization of anthropology in the mid-1970s. The postmodern world, however, calls for its retooling. Most importantly, the multisited ethnography that traces multiple loci of action undermines the binary conceptualization of the dominant versus the marginal (subaltern). It not only calls for a more systematic focus on the powerful (and on ethnographic studies of what they actually do and think), but, more importantly, it prods the researcher to look for as many sites of power and counter-power exercise as possible (see also Gledhill 2000). As a result “questions of resistance, although not forgotten, are often subordinated to different sorts of questions about the shape of systemic processes themselves and complicities with these processes among variously positioned subjects” (Marcus 1998: 85). Studying politics in a world inhabited by increasingly mobile and globalized populations calls for new concepts and methods. Ethnography that is multisited, global, and sensitive to postmodern concerns is an intriguing new tool. But it seems that is particularly effective when it combines new research concerns with the tested techniques of traditional positivistic and interpretive ethnographies.

Paraethnography Holmes and Marcus (2005a, 2005b, 2006) try to formulate the rules of yet another form of ethnographic method: paraethnography. They study highly professionalized, “technical” environments in which “experts” need to comprehend instantaneously what is happening around them, now, in what Homes and Marcus call the “contemporary.” They also need to formulate effective strategies of action and implement them. In such situations the type of knowledge experts/professionals call “technical expertise” that relies on highly complex, processed, and usually numerical types of data, fails. The reason is simple: “precise,” technical, quantitative reports often arrive on the decision makers’ desks after

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the deadline by which the effective decision must be made. To wait for such data is often not an option. What is needed, therefore, is another kind of information, a specific vernacular knowledge that comes from long practice, extensive experience with specific types of situations (both formal and informal), and access to very “down-to-earth,” often qualitative information provided the practitioners “on the ground.” This kind of knowledge is often loosely articulated, does not have explicitly formulated rules, but nonetheless is concrete and practical. It is a kind of knowledge a “native” develops of his or her culture (2005a: 236).29 But it is also a kind of knowledge that the ethnographer seeks to develop. As the result, the distinction between the subject and the object of investigation disappears; rather the ethnographer and the “natives” become “intellectual partners, interlocutors with whom a critical conversation can unfold thus anticipating a collaborative engagement” (Holmes, personal communication). But paraethnography is more than that. The method is particularly useful in the studies of specific institutional settings in which “thin data” of existing accounts is available and in which the “subjects” themselves are involved in some form or “research.” This includes the locations of central importance in today’s increasingly globalized world. Holmes and Marcus argue that in the past such locations were usually located at the points where “encroachments” (2006: 35) of the West on local cultures were materializing. Focusing on such “interface” locations afforded an opportunity for the mutual reinforcement of two intellectual tasks: the scrutiny of the way people subjected to the encroachments of the West conceptualize their predicament (a long-standing ethnographic interest) and the “critically reflexive examination by anthropologists of their own discipline” (2006: 35). In today’s world of “fast capitalism” (2006: 34) the center of action has, however, shifted to the central institutions of the emerging global system (the IMF or the bureaucracies of the European Union).30 They have become, therefore, the “fieldwork sites” that need to be subjected to paraethnographic studies. So, how can one study the locations where people who are immersed in and defined by specific professional cultures make critical decisions that influence the lives of millions? How can we learn about the generation and impact of this kind of knowledge? It is often generated in institutional settings to which ethnographers have no direct access. Participant observation is impossible. Instead, the authors propose to rely on the existing accounts of the decision-making process. A careful, critical reading of such sources, “reviewing enormous volumes of this kind of austere technocratic data, scrutinizing precisely those artifacts

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that Bruno Latour … describes as ‘the most despised of all ethnographic subjects” (2006: 36), may reveal the “secrets” and nuances of the actual process. Holmes and Marcus describe their work as being “preoccupied with how highly refined, technical documents—thin data—can serve as the material out of which we can create contexts and preconditions for ‘thick’ description.” Thick description of the decision-making process reveals that decisions are often made in a “paraethnographic” manner,31 that is, “symbolic analysts” and decision makers swiftly develop and utilize complex, synthetic knowledge that can be seen as “a kind of social thought—expressed in genres such as ‘the anecdotal,’ ‘hype,’ and ‘intuition’—within institutions dominated by a technocratic ethos” (2005b: 1104, emphasis in original). As Holmes and Marcus explain: The para-ethnographer is an expert subject like the genetic engineer who is perplexed by the significance of his or her own cognitive practices and who, in the shadow of his or her formal knowledge work, creates intricate cultural narratives that might never be fully voiced but nonetheless mimic the form and the content of an ethnographic engagement with the world. (2005b: 1104)

Paraethnography is a research practice in which both the “ethnographer” and the “key informants” collaborate to the degree unknown in the earlier versions of ethnographic encounters. They are partners not just in generating mutually agreeable portrayals of reality, but, more fundamentally, in developing common standards determining what constitutes valid knowledge.

Five Ethnographies: Conclusions The usefulness of ethnography for comparative politics and political science in general cannot be assessed without realizing that there is no single ethnography, but several different types of ethnography. In this chapter we outline five such types: traditional/positivistic, interpretive, postmodern, global (including multisited), and paraethnography. Each is associated with a different ontology of the social, and each can help political scientists in different tasks. In reference to power, the central object of interest for both political scientists and political anthropologists, both positivistic and interpretive ethnographies are indispensable for studying: (a) overlooked (informal dimensions of) power (Abélès 2004), (b) hidden (faces of) power (Lukes 1974; Gaventa 1980), (c) inaccessible (mechanisms of) power, for example in early stages of protest mobilization (Bayard de Volo & Schatz 2004: 269), (d) ostensibly inconspicuous resistance to

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power (Scott 1990), (e) ambiguous (effects of) power exercise (Wedeen 1999), and (f) cultural construction of agents and subjects of power (Mahmood 2005). Additionally, interpretive ethnography is crucial for exposing the relations between power and meaning in concrete situations. In other words it is a powerful approach for studying the relationship between political and semiotic practices. Its significance for political analysis has become clearer as a growing number of political scientists—particularly in comparative politics—work within a constructivist paradigm and design their research programs around such principles as: (1) ontological realism,32 (2) constructivism/interpretivism, and (3) microfocus on “small-scale” mechanisms. Postmodern ethnography is central for capturing the dynamics of power and identity in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. Global and multisited ethnography, attentive to the novel (gradually more virtual) ways of constructing collective identities and focused, inter alia, on the increasingly transnational and translocal nature of political and economic transactions, is a promising addition to the methodological armamentarium of today’s social science. Paraethnography, continuing the self-critical, reflective tradition of postmodern ethnography, is designed to penetrate the decision-making processes in the centers of “fast capitalism” and other hardly accessible locations of power in the rapidly globalizing world.

Case Study While ethnography comes to political science from the outside, the case study method has belonged to the basic tools of political analysis since the inception of the discipline. In recent years there has been a remarkable intensification of methodological work that helped political scientists achieve an unprecedented level of sophistication both in the self-awareness of the method and the improvement in actual research practice. Our interest lies, however, not in all variants of the case study method, but only in those that rely on ethnography. Anthropologists— since Gluckman—call this method “the extended case study.” If we add to the mix Turner’s focus on the cultural (semiotic) elements of the studied situation and Burawoy’s reflexivity, we get a specific variant of the case study method in which we are particularly interested and which we employ. As David Snow and his collaborators argue, the case study is best seen not as a single method, but rather as a combination (triangulation)

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of methods, some of which can be quantitative, some qualitative. In this formulation, which we accept, ethnography is just one of several tools available to the case study scholars. Snow and his collaborators define the case study method as: A research strategy that seeks to generate richly detailed, thick, and holistic elaborations and understandings of instances or variants of bounded social phenomena through the triangulation of multiple methods that include but are not limited to qualitative procedures [particularly ethnography—MA & JK]. (Snow and Trom 2002: 151-2. See also Snow and Anderson 1991.)

Over the last several years several students of qualitative methods in political science have generated a sophisticated body of writing that dramatically improved the ability of qualitative scholars to understand the nature of their work and the value of their contributions to our understanding of politics.33 Before we discuss the extended case study method, we briefly review the recent advancements in the case study methodology in political science. In political science qualitative work is usually associated with the case study methodology whose features are most clearly delineated by setting a systematic comparison with the variable-oriented methodology. The former is related to the ontological stance that views the world as “a bowl of jelly” rather than a “bucket of shot,” indicating at least a mild emphasis on the “wholeness” and “systematicity” of social phenomena. Charles C. Ragin, in his seminal The Comparative Method (1987), provides a precise examination of both approaches and offers an original way of combining them in a single empirical study. For him, the case-oriented strategy in comparative studies is “evidence oriented,” while the variable-oriented approach is theory centered. It is less concerned with understanding specific outcomes or categories of outcomes and more concerned with assessing the correspondence between relationships discernible across many societies and countries on the one hand, and broad, theoretically based images of macrosocial phenomena, on the other (Ragin 1987: 53). The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed an explosion of sophisticated studies of the case study methodology in political science (George and Bennett 2004; Brady & Collier 2004; Gerring 2004). In Gerring’s view, “For methodological purposes a case study is best defined as an in-depth study of a single unit (a relatively bounded phenomenon) where the scholar’s aim is to elucidate features of a larger class of similar phenomena” (2004: 341, emphasis added). Importantly, he sees ethnography as one of the types of the broadly understood case study methodology (Gerring 2004: 342). His ontological stance is

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clearly positivistic as his focus is on the specification of cases construed as the smallest units of analysis (“bucket of shot”) and the reconstruction of causal relationships among them through the analysis of covariance, even within a single observable unit. While Gerring’s extremely useful analysis shows that case study can be “disciplined” by aligning it with the “positivistic” ideals of the variable-oriented methodology, others pushed the analysis of this method in two different directions: away from the language of “variables” toward the disciplined, albeit narrative reconstruction of “social dramas” and “situations” or, more radically, away from the positivistic ideals toward what Burawoy (1998) calls reflexive science. Before we briefly characterize Burawoy’s version of the extended case method that constitutes the methodological foundation of reflexive science, we review this method’s origins in anthropology, whose early practitioners offered its initial methodological examination and established its credentials as the major tool of holistic analysis of social phenomena. The method is associated with what is called situational analysis, whose tenor is decisively holistic and thus closer to the image of “a bowl of jelly” rather than “a bucket of shot.”34 A. L. Epstein noted in his editor’s preface to The Craft of Social Anthropology (1967: vii) the irony of the fact that while fieldwork (seen as the essence of extended case method) had become “a kind of rite de passage” through which anthropologists are initiated into the profession, there was at the time a “curious dearth of publications devoted specifically to the problems of fieldwork.” In his introduction to Epstein’s volume, Max Gluckman classifies the use of ethnographic data by Malinowski and the generation of anthropologists who followed him as “apt illustration” because it was selected “for its appropriateness at a particular point in the argument. … There was no regularly established connection between the series of incidents in cases cited at different points in the analysis” (1967: xiii).35 He contrasts this approach with the analysis of “social situations” in which “analysis treats each case as a stage in an on-going process of social relations between specific persons and groups in a social system and culture” (1967: xv). Gluckman baldly states that “many of the problems that are emerging, and that involve the basic problems of the endurance, stability, and different types of change in a social system existing in space-time, can only be tackled through the use of the extended-case method” (1967: xvii). In fact Gluckman is frequently credited with having launched the first extended case study in his “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand” (1940), in which he showed “how individuals in certain key positions could create and exploit social

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situations in terms of their power and their culture, and yet how certain other processes, arising from the larger society, led to standardized but unplanned relationships and associations” (Gluckman 1967: xx). The ceremonial opening of the first bridge built in Zululand by the Native Affairs Department under a new scheme of “Native” development became a means through which Gluckman analyzed much broader power and race relations in South Africa. J. Clyde Mitchell’s The Kalela Dance (1956, 1968 edition cited) extended and refined the approach developed by Gluckman. “By working outwards from a specific social situation on the Copperbelt the whole social fabric of the Territory is therefore taken in” (Mitchell 1968:1). Through his detailed analysis of competitive dance teams in what was then Northern Rhodesia, Mitchell demonstrated how prior tribal identities were transformed in new urban multi-tribal areas. He presented an “apparent paradox”: “The dance is clearly a tribal dance in which tribal differences are emphasized but the language and the idiom of the songs and dress of the dancers are drawn from an urban existence which tends to submerge tribal differences” (1968: 9). Mitchell artfully analyzed the transformation of rural “tribalism” into what we now term “ethnic” identities in a transient urban environment. In his contribution to the volume edited by Epstein, J. Van Velsen expresses a preference for the term “situational analysis” with an emphasis on “process,” which he contrasts with more static structural approaches (Epstein 1967: 129). For example, the process of “optation” is “selection by the individual in any one situation from a variety of possible relationships—which may themselves be governed by different norms—those relationships which they consider will serve their aims better” (Epstein 1967: 142–43). He suggests that situational analysis is particularly suited to analyze “the discrepancy between people’s beliefs and professed acceptance of certain norms on the one hand and their actual behaviour on the other” (1967: 143). Situational diachronic analysis stresses the study of norms in conflict. Van Velsen (among others) credited Mitchell (Gluckman’s colleague) and Victor Turner (his student) with having refined and elaborated the extended case method or situational analysis. In his early work on the Ndembu, Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957), Victor Witter Turner analyzed a series of extended cases, which he called “social dramas.” These were rituals of redress in situations of crisis. In the first chapter of Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1974) Turner elaborates and explicates his original conceptualization of situational or extended case analysis. Turner employs social drama as a root metaphor for processes that typically take place in political situations “when the interests and attitudes of groups and individu-

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als stood in obvious opposition” (1957: 33). While he recognizes the possible bias entailed in focusing on situations of conflict, he shares “Freud’s view that disturbances of the normal and regular often give us greater insight into the normal than does direct study” (Turner 1957: 34). Actors must choose between means and ends, conflicting loyalties and obligations, as well as self-interest in such situations. The analysis of sequences of social dramas reveals temporal structures or diachronic profiles. Turner suggests: “Social dramas, then, are units of aharmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations” (1957: 37). He outlines four typical phases or temporal structures:36 1. Breach of the peace or regular, norm-governed social relations. 2. A momentous juncture in relationships of power lead to conflict and a crisis revealing the revelation of the true state of affairs. 3. Redressive action is taken to limit the spread of the crisis. Turner suggests that in this phase the social unit is at its most “self-conscious” (1957: 41). Mechanisms of redress can be through trial, arbitration, or ritual, among others. The failure of such mechanisms can regress to crisis. 4. Reintegration (restoration of peace) of the social unit or “recognition and legitimization of irreparable schism between the contesting parties” (Turner 1957: 41). Even in the case of reintegration, analysis may reveal significant changes as well as continuities. “For each phase has its specific properties, and each leaves its special stamp on the metaphors and models in the heads of men involved with one another in the unending flow of social existence. … [E]ach phase has its own speech forms and styles, its own rhetoric, its own kinds of nonverbal languages and symbolism” (1957: 43). Aronoff (1974) adapted and applied Turner’s framework in the analysis of the fluid and dynamic relationships during the early stages of the settlement and development of a new town in the Judean desert in Israel. He analyzed a series of extended cases over the course of six years—from the initial planning in 1962, during which the planners lived on the site, through his fieldwork 1966–68. These social dramas included the initial formation of sociopolitical factions within the planning team and their mobilization of support among the first settlers, crises precipitated by economic issues, a local election, two national elections, and the war of June 1967. Central to his analysis was the relationship between actors in the local political field and representatives of the wider political arena dominated by national political parties.

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Kubik used Turner’s four-fold scheme of social drama to analyze the Polish extrication from state socialism in the late 1980s and the subsequent consolidation of democracy (Kubik 2000a; Kubik & Linch 2009). Turner’s categories allowed him to observe that while on one level (institutions) the post-1989 Polish political system was solidly consolidated (reintegrated), on the level of national political culture, Poland suffered from a powerful symbolic schism as late as 2012. The schism was generated inter alia by the unresolved conflict between two interpretations of the 1989 Round Table agreements that took place between the incumbent communists and the Solidarity movement. While some saw the Round Table as the most reasonable and successful method of peaceful power transfer, others construed it as the symbol of the “dirty” intraelite deal, unnecessary compromise, and treason of the Solidarity ideals. What generated this discrepancy was the botched social drama. Michael Burawoy (1998: 4), a former student of Van Velsen, is arguably the most important advocate of the method in today’s sociology.37 His work is also notable for an effort to add reflexivity to the arsenal of case study’s methodological precepts. For Burawoy, “The extended case method emulates a reflexive model of science that takes as its premise the intersubjectivity of scientist and subject of study. Reflexive science valorizes intervention, process, structuration, and theory reconstruction.” He considers it the Siamese twin of positive science— extracting the general from the specific by moving from the “micro” to the “macro.” Crediting the Manchester School of social anthropology for pioneering this “extending out” from the field, Burawoy (1998: 6) makes a significant contribution to the extended case method by bringing “reflective understanding” to the “level of explicit consciousness.” He boldly claims it is “an alternative model of social science” with “alternative explanatory and interpretive practices.” Burawoy examines its virtues, i.e., the ability to “discover multiple processes, interests, and identities” as well as its limits, e.g., the implication of its practitioners in colonial and postcolonial regimes of power (1998: 6–7). Reflexive science is based on dialogue between the social scientist and those whom he studies. It involves a dialogue between social theory and folk theory. In an attempt to gain objectivity, positive science calls for a disposition of detachment between observer and the object of study. Burawoy summarizes the four prescriptive tenets of positive science as “the injunction against reactivity,” the principles of “reliability,” “replicability,” and “representativeness.” He suggests that while the extended case method violates these principles, survey research fails to live up to them because of the “irrevocable gap between positive theory and its practice” (1998: 11). Burawoy (1998: 14) proposes “a method-

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ological duality, the coexistence and interdependence of two models of science—positive and reflexive.” Context effects pose impediments to positive science and constitute the basis of the principles of reflexive science. Intervention, a vice in positive science, becomes a virtue to be exploited in reflexive science. In fact it is prescribed. Multiple meanings attached to responses to survey questions undermine the reliability of this research. “Reflexive science commands the observer to unpack those situational experiences by moving with the participants through their space and time” (Burawoy 1998: 14). The “aggregation of situational knowledge into social process” is the second principle (1998: 15, emphasis in the original). “Structuration is constituted by the autonomous external field that shapes and is shaped by the ethnographic locale. Reconstruction of theory that leaves core postulates intact,” and “that absorb anomalies with parsimony, offering novel angles of vision” is the fourth context effect. “Dialogue is the unifying principle of reflexive science” (1998: 16). Burawoy codifies the extended case method as follows: (1) extending the observer to the participant, (2) extending observations over space and time, (3) extending out from process to force—“tracing the source of small difference to external forces” (1998: 19 emphasis in original), and (4) extending theory. “Theory is essential to each dimension of the extended case method. It guides interventions, it constitutes situated knowledge into social processes, and it locates those social processes in their wider context of determination” (1998: 21). Context effects and the effects of power limit the extended case method as well: 1. The researcher cannot avoid dominating or being dominated. Inevitably he becomes trapped in networks of power. 2. Silencing of marginalized groups by those who dominate requires the researcher to listen for repressed voices. 3. Objectification, “that is hypostatizing social forces as external and natural, is an inherent danger of this approach” (Burawoy 1998: 23). However, we do not find this unique to the extended case method. 4. Normalization or “reconstructing theory is itself a coercive process of double fitting” (Burawoy 1998: 24). Complexity is reduced to parsimonious theory, and theory is recomposed to account for the anomaly. In his discussion of the implications of the two models of science, Burawoy (1998: 25) suggests, “Positive science is limited by ‘context’

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which supplies the foundation of reflexive science, while reflexive science is limited by ‘power,’ the hidden premise of positive science.” He discusses variants of the relationship between techniques of research and models of science. Interviews can be through surveys and positivistic while clinical psychoanalytic interviews tend to be reflexive. Certain variants of participant observation framed by grounded theory are within the positive model of science while the extended case method is the paradigm for the reflexive model of science. Burawoy also compared contrasting approaches to history: “The regulatory principles of positive science—reactivity, reliability, replicability and representativeness—define procedural objectivity, a process of gathering knowledge. … The regulatory principles of reflexive science—intervention, process, structuration, and reconstruction—rely on an embedded objectivity, ‘dwelling in’ theory” (Burawoy 1998: 28). Burawoy’s elaboration of a binary view of science refocuses attention from technique toward the explication of methods tied to alternative scientific models. Counterintuitively, he suggests that our commitment to one or the other model shapes the problems we analyze rather than the other way around: Survey research most closely approximates positive goals the more the specifics of situations and localities are destroyed. It works best in a reified world that homogenizes all experience. … Reflexive science, on the other hand, takes context and situation as its points of departure. It thrives on context and seeks to reduce the effects of power—domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization. … Reflexive science valorizes context, challenges reification, and thereby establishes the limits of positive methods. (Burawoy 1998: 30)

The case study method has been recently worked on in at least three scholarly communities. Political scientists have engaged in a massive effort to firm up the method’s philosophical foundations, specify and codify its procedures, and delineate the area of its application, albeit within a general orientation Burawoy calls “positivistic” (George & Bennett 2004; Brady & Collier 2004; Gerring 2004). They see the method as a best tool for the nonstatistical study of covariance between separately conceptualized phenomena (Gerring 2004). In sociology, Burawoy and his collaborators proposed a “reflexive” reformulation of the method’s premises and its mechanics. In their hands, the method is related to an interactive approach to social research that calls for reflexivity, and ultimately becomes a tool of empowering both the researchers and their interlocutors. We rely in our work on the “classical” anthropological version of the case study method: the extended case study. In this specification

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the method’s essence is: (1) situational analysis (the Manchester School), (2) approach to social change that takes actors’ own cultural perspectives seriously (Victor Turner), and (3) sensitivity to the fact that data gathering via ethnography is based on a dialogue between the “researcher” and “respondent” (Michael Burawoy’s reflexivity). The ethnographic study of social dramas is the best exemplification of this take on the method. Applications of both methods discussed in this chapter, ethnography and the extended case study, are exemplified in the chapters that follow.

Notes 1. The part on ethnography is a revised and expanded version of the text published by Jan Kubik (2009). 2. Aronoff (1991), Chabal & Daloz (2006), Edles (1998), Johnson (2003), Wedeen (1999, 2002). For an innovative marriage of formal modeling and interpretive/symbolic analysis in the field of international relations see O’Neill (1999). 3. Geddes (2003: 23) puts it well: “Although multiple regression is an excellent tool for testing hypotheses, it is not always a good image to have in mind when trying to explain something complicated, because it focuses attention on the identification of causal factors rather than on how the causal factors work.” 4. Anthropologists Borneman and Hammoudi offer a sophisticated critique of textualism, whose practitioners often limit their ethnographic work to reading texts produced by the studied peoples/cultures. They call for the revival of ethnographic work based on actual living among the studied people, for intense “experiential encounters” whose essence is a “holistic” immersion in other people’s lives and focus on “registering of sensory impressions in a (temporal) process of mutual subjectdiscovery and critique, an engagement with persons, groups, and scenes that takes into account the dynamics of our interactions as well as the differences between our locations and those of out interlocutors” (2009: 19). For a similar approach in political science see several chapters in Schatz (2009b). 5. For excellent overviews of up-to-date conceptualizations of culture see Swidler (1986), Sewell (1999), and Wedeen (2002). 6. One might identify specific characteristics of at least four schools: German, French, British, and American (Barth et al. 2005). But even if such a nation-based typology is rejected as simplistic, the three distinct trajectories can be distinguished (Barnard 2000; Vincent 1990). Barnard proposes to isolate: (1) the French sociological tradition running from Montesquieu via Saint-Simon, Comte, and Spencer to Durkheim and Mauss; (2) the British tradition, founded by Ferguson and Smith and running, inter alia, via Maine, Morgan, Tylor, and Frazer to Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown and their students; and (3) the American tradition, also having its founding father in Montesquieu, but running through Humboldt, Grimm, and Bastian to Boas (the most influential thinker here), Kroeber, and Lowie (Barnard 2000). 7. Schatz (2009a) argues that some work that uses nonparticipant observation may nonetheless have an ethnographic sensibility, insofar as it focuses on “insider” perspectives. See, for example, our discussion of paraethnography below.

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8. Malinowski’s literary style was clearly influenced by the work of his compatriot, Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski) (Young 2004; Clifford 1988: 92–113). On earlier developments in the history of ethnographic monographs see Thornton 1988. 9. The table offers very preliminary, imprecise labels. The concept of ethnographic holism is critically discussed in Rumsey 2004. For a set of short, sharp remarks on this topic see also Leach 1976: 3. We take the notion of “messy text” from Marcus 1998 (see, in particular 187–89). 10. For a useful definition of semiotic practices see Wedeen 2002: 714. See also the section on interpretive ethnography below. 11. “A post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect” (Tyler 1986: 125). Tyler’s formulation is perhaps most extreme; other “postmodernists” are less inclined to see their written products as instruments for evoking “fantasies.” 12. Oushakine’s study (2004) in which he reconstructs and interprets early Soviet practices designed to “form” new “modern subjectivities” is an excellent example of (para)ethnographic genre, though the author does not use the term. 13. This is akin to what Schatz (2009a) calls an “ethnographic sensibility” and related to paraethnography discussed later. 14. The distinction between social structure and social organization has been most famously introduced and analyzed by Raymond Firth (1951). On Firth see Vincent (1990: 331) and Barnard (2000: 125). 15. A similar idea is formulated in the work of historical institutionalists (Thelen & Steinmo 1992: 2–3) and in some game-theoretical analyses (Fearon & Laitin 1996). 16. See Abbott (2001b); Ekiert & Hanson (2003); Mahoney & Rueschemeyer (2003); Pierson (2004). 17. Krzyzæanowski talks about discourse ethnographic approach (2011b: 2). 18. Yet, not long ago Wilson observed, “The dialogical relationships between the creation and re-creation of national and cultural identities and the same processes at local levels have too long escaped critical ethnographic investigation” (1990: 160). 19. Following Hall (2003), we understand realism as an ontological stance assuming that social reality is constructed out of actions of real people, not operations of variables. The attendant methodology requires that, as a minimum, values of variables are “translated” into actions of actual people in “real” contexts. 20. Moreover, ethnography is the best method to observe meaning production and meaning decoding via nonverbal mechanisms that are often employed to communicate and exercise power but also to challenge it through counterhegemonic displays and performances. As Trickett and Oliveri demonstrate, the “ethnographic approach can help discern the meaning of practices that people do not or cannot fully describe through verbal means” (1997: 149). 21. Consult, in particular, works of Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus and Fischer (1999). 22. As Tyler explains, “postmodern ethnography privileges ‘discourse’ over ‘text’: it foregrounds dialogue as opposed to monologue and emphasizes the cooperative and collaborative nature of the ethnographic situation in contrast to the ideology of the transcendental observer” (1986: 126). It is interesting to note that while the questions of textual representation of social reality have been seriously debated in history (White 1978), sociology, and anthropology (Clifford & Marcus 1986), political scientists seem far less preoccupied with studying the impact of the manner in which this reality is represented in their texts on their knowledge (though see Patterson & Monroe 1998).

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23. This call to rethink the relationship between history and memory has been recently heeded by sociology, history, and cultural studies; there has been a renaissance of writing on historical memory. 24. For an enlightening discussion on defining and measuring identity, see Brubaker and Cooper (2000) and Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, & McDermott 2009. 25. See for example, Geddes (2003); Laitin (2004); Little (1998). 26. Marcus (1998: 79–80); Trouillot (2003: 120–21); Vincent (1990: 388–402). 27. We review Burawoy’s contribution to the case study method below. 28. Global ethnography needs to be distinguished from “world anthropologies,” a term introduced by Ribeiro and Escobar (2006) to refer to the diversity of ethnographic and anthropological practices found around the world, particularly outside of the hegemonic academic institutions of the West. 29. Analyzing the work of Alan Greenspan, Holmes and Marcus discuss the difficulty of conducting and writing ethnography that needs to relate to both what “he experiences as much as a ‘pain in the stomach’” and his “thought out concepts” (2005a: 241). 30. Objects of study “are no longer on the border between the encroaching West and the transforming traditional, but are fully located within the shared, but differently situated and located, predicaments of contemporary life (Holmes and Marcus 2006: 35–36). 31. “Within the epistemic communities that we seek to explore, our subjects are fully capable of doing superb ethnography in their own idioms” (Holmes, personal communication). 32. By realism in this context we mean focusing on “real” people and their actions, not just variables. 33. Witness for example the emergence of the Qualitative and Multi-method Research Section in the American Political Science Association. 34. These metaphors come from Danto (1989) and are introduced in chapter 1. 35. Gluckman evaluates Malinowski as a fieldworker and theorist in the final chapter of his Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (1963). 36. In the introduction of Political Anthropology (1966: 32) coedited with Marc J. Swartz and Arthur Tuden (who credit Turner with this formulation) a preliminary phase of “Mobilization of Political Capital” is added. 37. In 2002 Burawoy “received a special award in recognition of 25 years devoted to teaching, practicing, and promoting ethnography at Berkeley. One could argue that he has single-handedly created a ‘Berkeley school’ of field research, with roots in Manchester by way of Lusaka, Chicago, Budapest and Syktyvkar in Northern Russia, mating the ‘extended case method’ of Jaap van Velsen and Max Gluckman to the theoretical agenda of an epistemologically astute and empirically aware Marxism” (Wacquant 2003: 7).

Chapter 3

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BEYOND POLITICAL CULTURE

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ulture is a dimension of all social interactions, since as humans we always traffic in meaning. Thus it should not be understood as a separate domain of human activity, contrasted for example with politics or economy (Norton 2004; Sewell 1999: 39). Social interactions, the basic units of society, have a strategic dimension and hence can be usefully modeled as political or economic games. But they also have a communicative dimension and thus can be studied as semiotic events or processes. Events are studied semiotically when the researcher focuses on actors’ actions as they generate, communicate, or interpret meaning. Political scientists and other students of politics are particularly interested in meanings of political events, objects, institutions, and personages. There are many definitions of culture. It is thus difficult to achieve a coherent understanding of what it is exactly that culture “does” in the individual and collective life of humans. Putting aside many important debates and distinctions, we will signal several basic issues of the relationship between politics and power on the one side, and culture on the other, and proceed to outline those that are of central importance to students. Since the authors of this volume are both trained and practicing anthropologists and political scientists, we illustrate the advantages of combining both fields through a comparative analysis of our own work that focuses on the relationship between politics and culture. Our primary concerns are with problems of legitimacy and with processes of identity construction and democratization. Ironically, although political science borrowed the concept of culture from anthropology, significant contemporary perspectives in an-

Notes for this section begin on page 83.

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thropology challenge the utility and integrity of the concept, and either avoid the term culture or bracket it with quotation marks to signal its problematic nature (Brightman 1995). Postmodern approaches deconstruct political culture by defining all cultural phenomena in terms of domination and contestation for power. Many practitioners of cultural studies use euphemisms for culture to explore the relationship between power and the imaginative expression of culture (Aronoff 2001). We believe, however, that the concept is still useful although, when it is used, it needs to be clearly defined. One of the key decisions that must be made by any student of culture and politics is the maximally clear delineation of the role of culture and its elements as causal factors (co)determining human behavior.1 There seem to exist two major options: humans are seen either as creatures driven by some universal, species-given (instrumental) rationality or as “prisoners” of their specific culture (or several cultures to which they are exposed), which provides them with cultural scenarios that dictate appropriate forms of behavior in a given situation or circumstance (Geertz 1973: 250). In the former case, cultural forms are merely tools that are employable according to the calculations driven by separate, acultural logic (the nature of this logic is, of course, a matter of debate). In the latter, the very logic that dictates choices and helps to rank preferences is culturally constructed, although a given actor may be unaware of its existence or unable to articulate its underlying rules. The actual attributes of culture, including such rules, are hotly debated. There exists therefore a sharp contrast between what James Coleman (1988: S95–96) and Jon Elster (1989: 99) call Homo economicus and Homo sociologicus. A major anthropological theorist, Marshall Sahlins, devoted much of his career to the analysis of this ostensibly unsurpassable dichotomy; it is the main topic of his Culture and Practical Reason (1976) and it still preoccupies him in one of his latest major works, With Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (2004). As is the case with other major dichotomies that emerged in the history of social sciences, this one is also a useful, albeit preliminary, classificatory device. It helps us to realize that the dominant trend in today’s political science (including comparative politics) is founded on the assumption of universal rationality, however minimally it is defined (Clark, Golder, & Golder 2009: 359; McCarthy & Meirowitz 2007: 6),2 while most cultural anthropologists these days subscribe to some version of cultural relativism, that is, they assume the existence of culturally transmitted scenarios that provide actors with models of behavior appropriate for specific (classes of) situations. In a useful overview of

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the history of comparative politics, Munck proposed to call the post1989 period as “the second scientific revolution” that brought to the fore game theory and rational choice theory. The latter “is seen as a unifying theory, which can integrate theories about action in different domains, precisely because it is not held to apply to any specific domain of action” (Munck 2007: 53). Nor does it apply exclusively to any specific society, we may add.3 There are, of course, comparativists, who either reject the universalizing claims of this “new science” or, at least, try to test the boundaries of rationality and investigate the relationship between the rational, normative, and/or semiotic regulation of human behavior (Chabal & Daloz 2006; Chong 2000; Cruz 2000; Laitin 1986; Rochon 1998; Ross 2007; Scott 1998; Wedeen 1999, 2008). The issues are complex and their exposition lies beyond the scope of this work, but we will return to some of them while briefly discussing the work of David Laitin, who proposed an ingenious solution to the dichotomy between rational instrumentalism and culturalism in his Hegemony and Culture (1986). Within political science, “cultural” approaches to the study of politics derive from the legacy of Montesquieu and de Tocqueville, who viewed politics and governance as cultural constructs. In this tradition the definition of the political and the location of its boundaries are provided in scripts of a specific culture. As Chabal and Daloz argue, culture is “the matrix within which that which we understand as political action takes place. In other words, the field of politics itself has to be examined within its appropriate cultural milieu, as it were” (2006: 21).4 By contrast, the political scientists who participate in the “second scientific revolution” are influenced by a tradition that views politics as a neutral adjudicator of conflicts, including those in the realm of culture. This approach is founded on an assumption that politics—including the politics discernible in the cultural realm—is basically governed by the same set of universal mechanisms (rules or laws) in all locations, regardless of the specific cultural or social context; it is perhaps best exemplified by Harold Lasswell, who famously defined the study of politics as an inquiry into who gets what, when, and how.5 Its most influential recent form is game theory. Students of the relationship between politics and culture are faced, therefore, with several choices. First, they have to stake a position in the debate between proponents of Homo economicus and Homo sociologicus. Second, they have to decide how they prefer to theorize the workings of cultural factors that can be seen either as constraints of human behavior or as resources that can be deployed in achieving behavior’s goals. Laitin (1986: 12) traces back the first option to Max Weber, the

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second to Jeremy Bentham. Third, they have to make a methodological decision concerning the nature of data they need to collect. Here they have, roughly, two choices: they can either collect information on attitudes via surveys or interviews or engage in the interpretation of actions and/or texts. The first approach, social psychological, is traditionally seen as the method of studying (political) culture in political science. Its most illustrious representatives are Almond and Verba (1963) and Ronald Inglehart with his World Values Survey. The second approach, semiotic, has been developed outside of political science, mostly in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, feminism, and history (Geertz 1973; Hall 1997; Hunt 1984, 1989; Kertzer 1988; Seidman and Alexander 2001; Sewell 1999). For most of the practitioners of this approach, it is the study of not just semiotic systems but primarily of semiotic practices, particularly those that contribute to the exercise of power, staking out authority, attempting to claim legitimacy, or establishing cultural hegemony. Not surprisingly, therefore, several political scientists have made a strong case that this kind of study is also indispensable in their discipline (Aronoff 1989; Chabal and Daloz 2006; Johnson 2003: 93; Wedeen 1999, 2002; Yanow & Schwartz-Shea 2006).

Homo sociologicus versus Homo economicus One key difference between Homo sociologicus and Homo economicus, derived from economic anthropology, was introduced in the opening chapter: while the latter is construed in a monolithic fashion as a creature of reason, the former is seen as a complex being driven by emotions, norms, and habits, but also as an actor enacting available cultural scenarios (rather than the dictates of a-cultural calculations). Here, we want to discuss various conceptualizations of Homo sociologicus, particularly the distinction between what we call Homo habilis (defined below) and Homo symbolicus. We will argue that the latter is compatible, at least in some of its versions, with Homo economicus. One conceptualization of Homo sociologicus, associated most clearly with Pierre Bourdieu, is founded on the observation that humans act in the world according to the rules of practical logic that they learn through observation and emulation, but also creatively adjust and develop according to the practical demands of life.6 Bourdieu uses many custom-made concepts, such as habitus, field, social capital, etc., that he designed to produce a model of the human being not as the overintellectualized, calculating individual, but rather as a historically specific “agent” who is “trapped … ‘within the limits of his brain,’ as Marx

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said, that is within the limits of the system of categories he owes to his upbringing and training” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 126). Older and simpler theories belonging to this school of thinking emphasize the orientation of human behavior toward values and focus on the fact that humans usually act according to norms enforced by sanctions. March and Olsen (1989) see here “a logic of appropriateness” that they contrast with the “logic of consequentiality” underlying game theory. From the point of view of the logic of appropriateness, “action is based more on identifying the normatively appropriate behavior than on calculating the return expected from alternative choices” (March & Olsen 1989: 22). The second version of sociological theory, not entirely divorced from the first, tends to construe Homo sociologicus’s actions as performances guided by cultural scenarios (scripts, models, schemas) encoded in symbols, discourses, texts, rituals, etc. The study of culture, conceptualized in this approach as a repository of scripts constituting together a massive regulatory mechanism, is seen as a necessary component of the study of causes of human behavior. We can call the model of human being prevalent in the first school of thinking as Homo habilis; in the latter—Homo symbolicus.7 These two conceptualizations share some assumptions (for example, a belief that human actions are poorly understood without taking into consideration cultural factors, conceptualized either as norms or as cultural scripts), but each is founded on a different set of concepts, employs different theoretical metaphors, invokes different images, and refers back to different intellectual traditions. Let’s analyze this distinction through a different set of concepts. It has been often remarked that all components of culture can be seen as having both cognitive and normative dimensions. The former refers to the description and explanation of phenomena, and the latter pertains to norms (cultural scripts) that instruct actors how and why they should behave. Whereas the analytical distinction between the two is the basis for various conceptual categories, in reality their appearance in the “ideal” forms is rare. Most manifestations of culture combine both dimensions in varying degrees. It is important to note that for some analysts, rational modes of thought are associated with the cognitive dimension of political culture and nonrational (for example, habitual) modes relate to the normative. Much depends, of course, on how “nonrationality” is conceptualized. In studying nonrational components of human behavior, scholars can emphasize emotions (Elster 1996; Petersen 2002), norms, or culture seen as a “tool kit” of cultural scenarios (Swidler 1986). Political scientists whose work represents the “second scientific revolution,” including some students of political culture, assume the rationality of political actors and essentially ignore the

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nonrational dimension, with notable and important exceptions (see, for example Dennis Chong’s (2000) analysis of human behavior as driven by both incentives and dispositions). The main point we want to make is simple: rationality and culture do not need to be seen as incompatible (Johnson 2002; O’Neill 1999).8 For example, game theory is built on an assumption that humans are rational in the sense that their actions are driven by the logic of calculation and strategizing. “Put simply, rational behavior means choosing the best means to gain a predetermined set of ends. It is an evaluation of the consistency of choices and not the thought process, of implementation of fixed goals and of the morality of those goals” (Morrow 1994: 17). There is no necessary connection between this assumption and the nature of means and goals actors choose (O’Neill 1999: 259–62). These means and goals can be defined “materialistically” or “economically” as is done when actors’ calculations are reconstructed in terms of (class) interests or economically meaningful preferences. But they can also be defined “culturally.” For example, faced with a set of cultural scripts (means) that are applicable in a given situation, actors may still consider strategically which particular script, out of the limited cultural repertoire available to them, can best serve their interests (goals) at the subsequent stages of the interaction modeled as a game. In other words it is perfectly feasible to see Homo rationalis (economicus) and Homo symbolicus as one; but it seems difficult if not impossible to think of humans simultaneously as Homo rationalis and Homo sociologicus. It is enough to invoke Bourdieu’s decisive rejection of rational choice theory as a useful analytical tool (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 122–28). We share the assumptions on which Bourdieu’s position seems to be based. First, legitimacy and collective identity – the phenomena we are most interested in – cannot be properly studied within a social theory that treats the human being exclusively or predominantly as a calculating machine. We need a theory that deals with an observation that culture controls individuals by shaping their goals and suggesting means of their realization, but does not give up on the possibility that under certain conditions culture is, strategically, manipulated by at least some actors. So, second, we need an approach that offers analytical tools to interpret the goals actors strive for and means they employ (in specific contexts) and to explain the mechanisms of their rise, evolution, persistence, and demise. The issues are complicated and we can only signal them here. Suffice it to note that human beings sometimes calculate, sometimes are driven by learned cultural scripts, and sometimes act by a hybrid logic in which the elements of both are mixed. No theory exists to tell us when and why a given actor will act according to March

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and Olsen’s logic of consequentiality over the logic of appropriateness or vice versa, but this does not mean that we need to rely on a model of reality that is built on only one of these logics.

Culture as a Constraint versus Culture as a Resource As we remarked above the vision of culture as merely a “tool kit” out of which actors can pull cultural scenarios at will is not entirely satisfactory. For every instance of culture’s malleability whereby its elements are strategically manipulated to fit the demands of the situation and provide an actor with strategic advantage, it is easy to invoke an example of cultural molding, a situation in which the actor’s action is not calculated but rather is based on a more or less unreflective repetition of a “time-honored,” culturally transmitted, and socially enforced “habit.” David Laitin addressed this dilemma head-on in his 1986 book Hegemony and Culture. Studying the role of Sharia law and the conflict between Christianity and Islam in the Yorubaland in Nigeria, Laitin realized that he needed to account for two seemingly contradictory cultural processes. On the one hand “culture orders political priorities” of individuals, but on the other politically motivated individuals can manipulate culture, for example when “cultural identity becomes a political resource” (Laitin 1986: 11). Some scholars focus on the first process and thus treat culture as a constraint (Weberian tradition most prominently represented by Geertz—according to Laitin), while others emphasize culture as a resource in what Laitin sees as a “neo-Benthamite” line of thinking propounded by game theorists. But after sharply delineating both dimensions of culture’s “Janus-faced” character, Laitin decides to look for a theoretical tool that would allow him to conceptualize the dialectical game of constraint and resource that seems to constitute the basic mechanism of culture’s workings. His solution is the Gramscian concept of hegemony that he amends and then masterfully applies to the Yoruba situation. We will discuss the concept of hegemony below. The dilemmas Laitin deals with, the oscillation of culture between being resource and constraint, is related to the time-honored debate in the social sciences between structure and agency. Social structures can be conceptualized as “slow processes of long duration” (Southall 1969 cited in Vincent 1986: 111). In sociology and anthropology the structureprocess or structure-action dichotomies have been replaced with new, more complex and “dialectical” conceptualizations of the social: critical realism (Archer 1995), theory of structuration (Giddens 1984), or the theory of practice (Bourdieu), to name just the most influential. It may prove to be productive, thus, to assume that “culture” behaves in the

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same way as “structure;” its principal mode of existence could then be called the process of culturation. The immutability and/or malleability of culture (or better: its components) should not be assumed a priori; it must be demonstrated empirically in each instance. Sometimes cultural elements change so slowly that they seem to be immutable; sometimes they change faster than their structural (institutional) context. Swidler’s 1986 essay on the role of cultural factors during unstable periods demonstrates in a very illuminating way the manner in which this phenomenon can be theorized. The phenomenon of culture as a primary causal force in history during specific periods has been emphasized within the “new cultural history” (Hunt 1989); “new cultural sociology” (Somers 1995); “new social movements” school (Larana, Johnston, and Gusfield 1994). It is critical to remember that the role of cultural factors in history fluctuates: sometimes they can be treated by actors as malleable resources and thus act as engines of social change, sometimes they “feel” like immutable constraints that either resist change or, at best, reluctantly “follow” other factors (Goldstone 1991: 446; Hall 1993: 48; Sider 1986; Szporluk 1990).9

Sociopsychological versus Semiotic Conceptualization of the Elements of Culture At least since the publication of Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963), the dominant approach to the study of the relationship between culture and politics in political science has not only been based on the assumption of acultural universality of political mechanisms; it has also relied heavily on the methodological tools associated with the behavioral revolution: surveys of attitudes. In this approach culture is defined as “psychological orientations toward social objects” (Almond & Verba 1963: 14) while its building blocks, “psychological orientations” or “attitudes” are seen as “propensities of individuals to perceive, interpret and act toward a particular subject in particular ways” (Almond & Verba 1963: 13). Accordingly “the term political culture … refers to the specifically political orientations—attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system” (1963: 14–15). Almond and Verba propose a distributive view of political culture: “Political culture of a nation is the particular distribution of patterns of orientations toward political objects among the members of the nation” (Almond & Verba 1963: 14–15). In this tradition, culture is usually construed as a set of “cultural variables” that either intervene between independent variables capturing, say, some elements of the

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economic situation and such dependent variables as political behavior or co-generate the studied result. Within the postbehavioral approaches, at the broadest level, political culture refers to the meanings attributed to politics, not to “political values” or attitudes toward political objects studied in surveys. It constitutes the socially constructed and tenuously shared meanings that pertain to political objects (leaders, political systems, governments, parliaments, etc.). Such approaches favor semiotic rather than distributive social psychological conceptualizations of culture a la Almond and Verba. According to Ann Swidler’s representative definition: Culture consists of … symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life. These symbolic forms are the means through which “social process of sharing modes of behavior and outlook within [a] community” (Hannerz 1969: 184) take place. (1986: 273)

A useful definition of political culture in this tradition is offered by Gamson, for whom “a nonredundant concept of political culture refers to the meaning systems that are culturally available for talking, writing, and thinking about political objects: the myths and metaphors, the language and idea elements, the frames, ideologies, values, and condensing symbols” (1988: 220).10 This line of thinking is associated with constructivism, according to which political objects are, at least partially, constituted by the meanings with which actors endow them. For example, a person cannot act as a “voter” until he or she has attributed a specific meaning to the practice of “electing” and is consequently able to engage in the required performance of a cultural script entailed in a complex social institution called “elections.” A person does not become a “subject” of royal authority until he or she has some notion of “kingship” and its prerogatives and is thus able to perform a social role of the “royal subject.” Without being able to participate in a network of meanings spawned around “royalty,” a person can obviously be a subject of royal power, but not royal authority (if we understand authority, following Weber, as legitimated power). Therefore, a subject can accept or grant “royal legitimacy” only after grasping (understanding, decoding), even if only at a rudimentary level, the “meaning” of this concept. The mechanisms whereby meanings endow or challenge legitimacy of political institutions, offices, and procedures of a polity are of particular interest to the students of politics. It is, therefore, obvious that the analysis of the relationship between culture and politics does not need to be limited to examining

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the continuity or discontinuity of certain syndromes of attitudes and their impact on other areas of social, economic, or political life, as, for example, in research programs developed by Inglehart (1988) or Harrison and Huntington (2000). Also, reconstructing and interpreting discourses as well as explaining their genealogies, logics, and functions is only a partial task. Our analytical and theoretical lenses should be focused on a dynamic interplay of attitudes (psychosocial dimension), discourses (semiotic dimension), and institutional settings within which this interplay transpires and where power is actualized (power dimension). Discourses developed by the elites are usually addressed to wider audiences; their explicit or implicit aim is to shape attitudes in order to achieve politically desired results (generate support, mask political failures, etc.). Their acceptance is, however, constrained or facilitated by the preexisting attitudes of the addressees. Both attitudes and discourses are therefore resources for or constraints of various power games. We have introduced three pairs of oppositions that help to organize our thinking about the relationship between culture and politics. Do these distinctions constitute historically meaningful clusters? They seem to do so. A combination that characterizes the older conceptualizations of political culture is (1) based on the model of Homo sociologicus (emphasis on habit) in which (2) culture is seen as a constraint on human behavior that is (3) studied mostly through surveys of attitudes or preferences (a social psychological model). The newer conceptualizations are founded on (1) the model of Homo symbolicus (sometimes combined with Homo rationalis), who (2) may treat culture as a resource or experience it as a constraint. Culture thus conceived (3) is best studied semiotically as a text or an ensemble of texts that need to be interpreted and socio-psychologically, for example as a set of attitudes (predispositions). Interpretation (of meaning) can be seen as the scholar’s only task, but at least since Max Weber most students of the relationship between politics and culture attempt to combine it with causal explanation.11 There are several concepts that are useful in conducting this double task of interpretation and explanations. We review them below.

Key Concepts of Political Culture after the Cultural Turn Symbols and Signs Following Max Weber, Clifford Geertz suggests “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun,” and proceeds to treat “culture to be those webs, and the analysis of

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it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning” (1973: 5). Symbols are the threads from which the web of culture is spun. It is usually posed that whereas signs are unambiguous, symbols lend themselves to a multiplicity of interpretations, their referents are less clearly separated from the symbolic vehicles, and they evoke strong emotional reactions. The meanings of symbols and texts are interpreted through reason and/ or intuition, but in most cases interpreters follow the rules that can be rationally reconstructed and whose results can be intersubjectively tested. Susanne Langer (1942) distinguishes between discursive and presentational symbols. Discursive symbols are more conscious and rational, relying on language. Presentational symbols are wordless, unconscious, and appeal to the senses through nonrational visual forms. They are grasped simultaneously as integral objects of total reference. Sherry Ortner’s (1973) distinction between elaborating and summarizing symbols is similar. The latter, deriving their power primarily from their emotional resonance, tend to be sacred (in the broad sense) and received as objects of reverence. The national flag is treated with such reverence as to constitute a fetish in American civil religion. The Western Wall in Jerusalem, a place of sacred centrality in Israeli political culture, and the Black Madonna of Czeçstochowa in Poland constitute powerful summarizing symbols. Elaborating symbols work in the opposite direction. They provide vehicles for sorting out complex and undifferentiated feelings and ideas, thereby making them comprehensible, communicable, and translatable into orderly action. Given their cognitive nature, they play a more dominant role in ideology. Root metaphors have conceptually elaborating power. Their value derives from providing categories for comprehending order in the world. “Exile” from and “return” to the “Holy Land” provide the root metaphor of Zionism—the dominant discourse (master narrative) of Israeli political culture (Aronoff 1989). Key scenarios are specific guides that provide maps for socially valued action. The Horatio Alger myth is such a guide to achieve the idealized American success story. Table 3.1. Types of symbols Author

Type of symbols Conscious, Rational, Cognitive

Nonrational, Visual, Emotional, Sacred

Langer

Discursive

Presentational Summarizing

Ortner

Elaborating: Root Metaphor Key Scenario

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Myths Myths are narratives that rely primarily on the nonrational for their emotive power. Ernst Cassirer (1946a) contrasts mythical thought (mythos) with rational thought (logos). He suggests that mythology precedes history. (Contemporary critical scholarship identifies mythical elements even in academic history.) The perspective of mythology as based more on intuition than analytic thought views it as a magical and mystical form used to create coherence in a chaotic world. Cassirer’s portrayal of myth in the Myth of State (1946a) as an expression of an irrational Manichaean struggle between the forces of light and darkness is strongly influenced by Hitler’s fascist Germany. In this context myth is seen to satisfy the need to immerse individuality in the whole as the social fabric appeared to unravel—an escape from freedom by immersion of self in a collective identity. But Cassirer also works with the idea that myth is a form of language, however “distorted.” He quotes with approval a great classical scholar of mythology, Max Muller, who wrote: Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the outward form and manifestation of thought; it is in fact the dark shadow which language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will. (Cassirer 1946b: 5)

Cassirer, writing after the Holocaust and other tragedies of World War II, is particularly sensitive to the dangerous tendency of language to serve as a tool for producing illusory fictions that can legitimize the most unsavory constellations of power. But others, writing about less “dangerous” topics, such as fashion, mass culture, or pulp fiction, also emphasize the close relation between myth and language. For example, Roland Barthes construes myth as “a type of speech” that has a tendency to subvert the language and prevent its users from achieving clarity. But he also points out perhaps the most important political function of myth: “giving a historical intention a natural justification and making contingency appear eternal” (Barthes 1982: 130–31). Bruce Kapferer (1988) stresses the destructive and dehumanizing potential of forms of nationalism based on religious myths in a comparative analysis of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australian nationalism. He argues that the reduction of the multiplicity of meanings inherent in myth to only “one truth” is what gives this type of nationalism its totalitarian ideological form. Myths present more lucid and compelling images than do more abstract principles. The more compelling the image, the more powerful the myth’s appeal. Ideas that

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first appear in fantastic, mythical form become real intellectual property only when discursive language rises to their expression. Langer (1942: 202) notes that “the first inquiry as to the literal truth of a myth marks the change from poetic to discursive thinking.” Table 3.2. Logos versus Mythos Characteristics of Logos contrasted with Mythos (Cassirer) Logos

Mythos

Rational, analytical, theoretical

Intuitive, emotional, magical, mystical

Joseph Campbell (1988) distinguishes four main functions of myth. The mystical provides for the realization of wonder and mystery. The cosmological reveals the nature of the mystery. The sociological (political) supports and validates the social order. The pedagogical guides individuals through life crises from childhood, through adulthood, and death. Gilbert Cuthbertson (1975) suggests three basic themes of political myths: (1) myths of order justify political authority and social stratification; (2) myths of obligation formulate an ethical order that delineates individual, group, and leadership responsibilities; and (3) myths of freedom seek liberation from tyranny, natural or social boundaries, or demonic forces. He divides political myths into five categories: (1) messianic myths fuse religion and politics; (2) myths of legitimacy and social establishment validate the established order, clarify legality and community, and transform power into authority; (3) iconoclastic myths challenge the social order by aiming to undermine authority and replace it with an alternative; (4) moral myths aim to give an ethical education of citizenship, as in the work of Plato and of Confucius; and (5) historical myths dissolve barriers of time and search for continuity by giving meaning to the present by linking it with the past or with the future (as in utopias). As Christopher G. Flood (1996: 33) observes: “Myth can disclose the meaning of a group’s spatial and temporal sense of itself.” In reality many myths contain elements of more than one of these characteristics. Henry Tudor (1972) stresses the dramatic narrative form of political myth that lends itself to the production of make-believe. He claims that the awareness of incoherence or absurdity endemic in practical existence inspires the demand for a morally coherent world, which is the stuff of which political myths are made. Despite the dramatic structure, political myth is used in practical argument. Political myths that endow power with legitimacy are constantly challenged by iconoclasts who call into question and undermine them,

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thereby tearing the hegemonic web of cultural meanings. Old truths are constantly reinterpreted as political realities change. New cultural traditions are invented by mythmakers who repair the web and drape emergent groups with the mantle of authority. Because a myth makes hidden connections between disparate ideas based on unspecified premises, public discourse in mythical form is relatively immune from rational criticism that points out its logical contradictions or evidence that disconfirms it. When such a pattern of discourse effectively dominates a polity, it is a powerful force constraining political change. Yet, political myths also play crucial roles in times of crisis and can be used—especially in rituals through which myths are enacted—to achieve even revolutionary change. Ritual Many influential scholars argue that ritual antedates the evolution of society, religion (Robertson Smith 1889; Bell 1997: 4), and language, and is their cradle (Langer 1942). Langer suggests that it is “primarily an articulation of feelings, a complex, permanent attitude … [it] yields a strong sense of tribal or congregational unity, or rightness and security” (1942: 153). Ritual’s primary achievements are moral, i.e., giving a sense of common purpose. “They are part of man’s ceaseless quest for conception and orientation. … Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit … of people’s imaginative insight into life” (Langer 1942: 165). Fustel de Coulanges argues in the Ancient City (1864) that modern institutions had sacred origins expressed through ritual. A. M. Hocart (1936, 1970) traces the origins of government to the organization for ritual in what he called the “quest for life.” Geertz (1973: 146) similarly argues for an “inherent sacredness of central authority.” In contemporary societies civil religion generally replaces more traditional religions in providing the mantle of legitimacy. However, as mentioned previously, even a purely civic symbol like the national flag can achieve the status of a holy relic, as witnessed by the reverence many Americans imbue in the stars and stripes. Moore and Myerhoff (1977b) distinguish between contemporary secular rituals and more traditional religious and/or mystically inspired ritual (Turner 1969). David Kertzer (1988) has effectively demonstrated the wide range of political rituals and their uses with a particularly incisive analysis of the role of mystification in converting the obligatory into the desirable. Max Gluckman’s (1954) pioneering analysis of rituals of rebellion in South East Africa was adapted by Aronoff (1977, 1993) to explain how the top leaders of the Israel Labor Party perpetuated themselves in power and maintained Labor’s dominance of the political system.

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He suggests that conditions that led to the breakdown of such rituals were a reflection of radical cultural and political changes transforming Israeli society. Kubik (1994a) demonstrated how the Catholic Church and independent groups of citizens effectively utilized the pope’s visit to Poland in 1979 to orchestrate public rites and political rituals that undermined the hegemony of the Polish People’s Republic and paved the way for radical transformation of the political system. Yet the application of concepts derived from the study of so-called simple or traditional societies to the understanding of contemporary so-called complex or modern societies, requires their refinement.12 One of the main questions in such an adaptation is how narrowly to restrict or widely to broaden the definition. Victor Turner’s restrictive definition of ritual as “formal behaviour for occasions not given over to technical routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers” (1967, cited in Moore & Myerhoff 1977b: 27) would exclude many secular rituals. On the other hand, Robert Bocock (1974) and H. L. Nieburg (1973) use “ritual” as a metaphor for so many social activities that it loses much explanatory value.13 We suggest a balanced definition that includes contemporary secular rituals while excluding other forms of ceremonial behavior. Rituals take place in controlled and bracketed social settings in which the actions of the performers are prescribed and constrained while the rules of everyday life are temporarily suspended. The actors are aware that performing these acts has serious implications for them and their communities although some consequences (such as generating or maintaining social cohesion) may not be consciously intended. One of the defining characteristics of all ritual (as opposed to other ceremonial forms and games with which they share some traits) is that the outcome is predetermined. Ritual performers converse in mutually understood symbols although they may attribute significantly different meanings to them. Ritual is an important means for dealing with ambivalent social roles, conflicting interests, cognitive dissonance between ideology and reality, and threats to the unity of the social unit in which they take place. Ritual represents reality symbolically in a selective and disguised manner, thereby allowing discourse on it to take place aimed at achieving conciliation, affirmation, or transformation of ideology. Given the necessity for the control of outcomes, rituals in contemporary democratic states with competitive party systems and open societies tend to take place among groups with subcultures. In such contexts, society-wide events sponsored by the state tend to be more ceremonial than ritual as we define it.14 The reason for this is the limited ability of rulers to define reality (achieve hegemony) and control the behavior

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of wide segments of pluralistic populations in complex societies. The existence of competing discourses and a multiplicity of alternative roles for political actors reduces the possibility of predictable outcomes in society-wide political spectacles. Table 3.3. Characteristics of traditional rituals, secular rituals, and ceremonies Traditional

Actions

Implications

Setting

Prescribed

Profound

Societal

Secular

Prescribed

Important

Ceremony

Optional

Marginal

Outcomes Predetermined 15

Group/State Variable

Predetermined Undetermined

Rhetoric Rhetoric, as in the case of the pope’s sermons during his visit to Poland, constitutes an important component of political culture that has been given insufficiently serious treatment in the study of politics. Too frequently, inappropriately used concepts such as charisma are applied to account for the effectiveness of politicians in communicating with, and mobilizing the support of, various constituencies. We need more careful and systematic analyses of the rhetorical techniques that enable politicians to mobilize shared sentiments having a high emotional charge. This important subject, while known to the ancient Greeks, has only recently begun to receive serious scholarly treatment. As Paine (1981: 10) observes, political legitimacy involves getting people to accept what is said, and “persuasion rests upon the ability to organize the experience of those who are persuaded.” Paine (1981: 21) suggests that beyond being a spur to action, “the role of rhetoric is that of agent in the ritualization of politics.” Bailey (1981: 25–40) outlines three major dimensions of rhetoric and the contexts in which they are likely to be used. Logical reasoning offers propositions about facts for empirical validation. Utilizing plain speech, the speaker appeals to the intellect of the listener. The context for this type is one of certainty in which there is consensus regarding the rules of discourse that ideally exist in the university and scientific community. The second type is characterized by deliberative rhetoric, which is designed to reach a decision on matters requiring action. It entails the consideration of at least two points of view. Such tempered speech encourages discussion, but not of all sides to the question, as in the first type. Therefore Bailey defines its appeal as pseudocerebral.

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The context of this type lacks consensus but is one in which there is a basic agreement on the political rules of the game. It is therefore the dominant form of political dialogue deemed desirable in democratic societies. The goal of the third type, hortatory rhetoric, is to inhibit free discussion and to exclude from public discussion all but one point of view. It aims to persuade the audience to endorse the position of the speaker by accepting his definition of reality. Bombastic, grandiloquent style is used to discourage or even eliminate discussion. Cardiac appeal to the heart (rather than the head) characterizes this type. The critical faculty is suspended through the excitement of emotions aroused through the use of sacred symbols, emotionally powerful metaphors, and metonyms. Contexts of high uncertainty, in which the rulers’ political authority to impose constraint has been eroded by social and economic conditions and/or threats to public security, can create public demand for meaningful order. Such conditions create a receptive climate for grandiloquent exhortation and the manipulation of the masses through the utilization of political rhetoric, myths, and ritual by demagogues. We graphically adapted Bailey’s schema in Table 3.4. J. L. Austin proposed another influential typology. In his seminal How To Do Things with Words (1962) he demonstrates that the adage “Sticks and stones may break my bones (but words will never hurt me)” is wide off the mark. A phrase “I condemn you to death” uttered under specific conditions is actually … deadly. Mindful of this, Austin proposed that all utterances could be divided into three major groups: locutionary acts (acts of saying something), illocutionary acts (acts performed in saying something), and perlocutionary acts (acts performed by saying something). Since by saying something actors engage in performances that influence the states of affairs in the world, Austin called them perfomatives. Among the performatives, illocutionary acts that include issuing decrees, giving orders, naming, or promising, are the subject of numerous studies as well as often arcane theoretical debates.16 Table 3.4. Dimensions of rhetoric Objective of the speaker

Style of speech

Object of appeal

Context

Logical reasoning (Discovery)

Plain

Intellect

Certainty

Deliberative rhetoric (persuasion)

Tempered

Pseudocerebal

Consensus

Hortatory rhetoric (manipulation)

Grandiloquent

Emotions

Uncertainty

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Legitimacy and Legitimating Discourses Although the notion of legitimacy dates from classical Greek political thought, the major modern theorist associated with refining the concept is Max Weber. Kubik (1994a: 8) defines legitimacy as “a state or process of valorization in which a given action, institution, regime, or social order is ‘sacralized’ or ‘dignified’ by being related to a system of shared values contained in root paradigms and dominant symbols of a given group. Legitimacy occurs when the ‘legitimized’ elements are linked to the ultimate domain of ‘the culturally postulated and the socially unquestionable’—to use a very apt phrase of Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff (1977: 2).” Importantly, legitimacy claims put forth by the rulers can be recognized as valid and thus legitimacy can be granted only when the ruled enjoy a minimum of freedom to make such a decision (Scott 1990). The degree of congruence between key, politically relevant values and principles shared by the rulers and the ruled (publicly expressed under at least minimal conditions of freedom) determines the extent of the legitimacy of the political institutions. The primary means of evaluating the degree of such congruence is through the analysis of the public discourses of the rulers and the ruled and by interpretation of their participation in public ceremonies and rituals. “The higher the degree of similarity the higher the degree of legitimacy” (Kubik 1994a: 9). Another way of phrasing it is that legitimation is the process that transforms power resting ultimately on coercion into authority based on a modicum of consent, if not consensus. We agree with Swartz, Turner, and Tuden (1966: 11) that “instead of trying to decide what kinds of support a whole political system may have, or whether the system as a whole is legitimate, increased analytical power can be gained by dividing the political system into a number of aspects or levels and examining each for the presence or absence of legitimacy, for, and other types of support.” The primary problem of legitimacy, according to Geertz, is to make sure that the ruled experience “what the state ‘does’ as proceeding naturally from a familiar and intelligible ‘we’” (1973: 317). For example, for someone like Sukarno, the former ruler of Indonesia, the primary role of the leader in postcolonial contexts is to dispel “the aura of alienness from the institutions of modern government” by making the “nation-state seem indigenous” (Geertz 1973: 317–18). He suggests that this “conceptual dislocation” is the most appropriate focus for cultural studies of state politics. Legitimating discourses, a weaker form of “cultural” control than dominant ideologies, are defined by Richard Merelman (2003: 9) as “any

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body of ideas, images, or practices that portrays a political regime to be functioning as its power holders claim it to be functioning, and, in so doing, provides support to those who exert power in the regime.” Intellectuals play a central role in the production of legitimating discourses. The case he examines is the pluralist theory of American politics and the role of the political science department of Yale University between 1955 and 1970. Merelman contrasts the concept of legitimating discourses with stronger forms like the theory of dominant ideologies. The former does not assume that the weak will adopt the ideas of the powerful. It asserts no determinate relationships between social position and beliefs. The concept of legitimating discourses neither presumes that reality will be distorted, that power holders are irrational, nor that reality will be mystified. Intellectuals are frequently allied with power holders, but may also oppose them. Whereas dominant ideologies explicitly support those in power, legitimating discourses are less explicit, which actually increases their effectiveness in providing cultural ammunition for political leaders. More subtle and indirect support is almost always more effective than overt political manipulation of cultural forms that calls attention to itself. A case in point is the manipulation of collective memory. Collective Memory Collective memory is never static and is never objective. The manner in which the past is interpreted shapes our understanding of the present and the future. The history that becomes part of the fund of shared knowledge of a movement, a people, or a state is not what has been “automatically” preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized, and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so. “Modern nations … generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so ‘natural’ as to require no definition other than self-assertion” (Hobsbawm 1983: 14). As George Orwell wrote in his classic 1984, “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.” To put it another way, in domestic politics as well as international conflicts, the victors write the history books. For example, during the period of perestroika, Soviet school authorities canceled final examinations in history courses because the teachers no longer knew the “correct” answers. An academic wag in Moscow claimed that the most unpredictable thing in the USSR is the past since every new leader rewrote it. Throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, history is being rewritten. Statues of Soviet “heroes” were toppled and others rein-

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stated and resurrected. The Committee for Historical Justice of Hungary ordered the reinternment of the remains of former premier Imre Nage and other former communist reformers who were hanged as traitors in 1958 from their unmarked graves. The rites were televised nationally as the new regime attempted to gain legitimacy from this symbolic rewriting of history. When he was prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin orchestrated an elaborate state funeral for 2,000-year-old bones reputedly associated with the second Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire in an attempt to gain legitimacy for his government’s policies and to gain political and ideological dominance of his party. In addition to the reburial of bones, archaeological sites and artifacts frequently play important roles in nationalist attempts to gain legitimacy from the past. We devote an entire chapter to the discussion of this topic. (Invented) Tradition Eric Hobsbawm (1983) distinguishes between the invented tradition of modern states and custom characteristic of so-called traditional societies. He suggests that the main differentiating characteristic of invented tradition is that the continuity with the past is “factitious,” i.e., produced by human rather than natural forces. He claims that invented traditions are characterized by invariance whereas custom does not preclude limited innovation as long as it appears compatible with precedent. He implies that the distinction rests on the extent to which innovation is consciously manipulated, thereby making invented traditions more artificial than custom. Hobsbawm claims that traditional practices were specific and strongly binding whereas modern ones are vague and compulsory. Since our approach assumes the humanly constructed nature of all culture, his claim that custom is more “authentic” than invented tradition appears exaggerated. The degree to which the custom or tradition appears to be manipulated, however, influences credibility since obvious manipulation calls attention to the socially constructed nature and thus “artificiality” of the claim. Clearly some claims are more credible than others, either because they are supported by culturally Table 3.5. Custom and invented tradition Features of custom and invented tradition according to Hobsbawm Continuity with the past

Innovation

Conscious manipulation

Specificity

Binding

Custom

Natural

Limited

Minimal

Specific

Strong

Invented tradition

Fictitious

Significant

Maximal

Vague

Compulsory

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accepted evidence or because they fulfill psychological, social, and/or political needs of those who believe them. Ideology and Utopia Ideology is a more concrete, rationalized, and systematized version of the general political culture articulated by groups and regimes to give legitimacy to their identities and to justify their goals. In his classic essay “Ideology as a Cultural System,” Geertz (1964, 1973) criticized interest theory, which views ideology as a mask and a weapon, and strain theory, which views it as a symptom and a remedy, as well as the cathartic (safety valve or scapegoat), morale, solidarity, and advocatory explanations of ideology as being inadequate. They all ignore the process of how “ideologies transform sentiment into significance and so make it socially available” (Geertz 1964: 56). By bypassing the question of how symbols symbolize, “they evade the problem of construing the import of ideological assertions by simply failing to recognize it as a problem” (1964: 57). He calls for a symbolic model that explains how the unfamiliar is made familiar. “The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped. … Whatever else ideologies may be—projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, phatic expressions of group solidarity—they are, most distinctively, maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience” (Geertz 1964: 63–64, emphasis added). The endurance of dominant ideologies and hegemonic political cultures at any point in time varies depending inter alia on their effectiveness in providing models for dealing with societal problems. In his excellent editor’s introduction to Paul Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986), George Taylor summarizes Ricoeur’s interpretation of Marx’s view of ideology as distortion—the opposite of praxis. Weber (1947) on the other hand, viewed ideology as legitimation, which combines the claim to authority by the rulers and the belief in their legitimacy by the ruled. Ricoeur emphasizes the role of ideology in bridging the discrepancy or gap between claim and belief. “The discrepancy between claim and belief is a permanent feature of political life,” Ricoeur maintains, “and it is ideology’s permanent role to provide the needed supplement to belief that will fill this gap” (1986: xvii).17 Following Karl Mannheim, Ricoeur contrasts ideology with utopia. The symbolic mediation between claims and beliefs of ideology is constitutive of social existence. It integrates and preserves individual and collective identities and begets order through reproductive imagination.

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The productive imagination of utopia, by contrast, explores the possible alternative orders. It thereby de-reifies, or calls into question existing social orders. It highlights the contingency of social order, thereby undermining the status quo. Utopia is a dream or vision intended to change the status quo. “Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics, confirms that we must maintain the dialectic and move back from a criticism of ideology by utopia to what we may call a criticism of utopia by ideology” (Taylor 1986: xxxiii). This dialectic, which typifies the social imagination, is according to Ricoeur “constitutive of social reality itself” (1986: 3). Hegemony Hegemony, associated with Antonio Gramsci, is a concept that has been refined and applied by a number of scholars.18 According to Kubik (1994a: 11) “hegemony refers to that aspect of power relationships which is not produced or guaranteed by coercion but by the acceptance (even if fragmentary and not fully conscious) of the rulers’ definitions of reality by the ruled.” Some scholars argue that hegemony is thus an extreme form of ideological domination in which the legitimation of power is so entrenched in the cultural definitions of reality that they become taken for granted as forms of everyday consciousness, habits, and customs. Bourdieu analyzes this phenomenon using the concept of “symbolic violence” (1991), whose end result is doxa. In Practical Reason, Bourdieu (1998: 56–57) reminds us that it should not be forgotten that such primordial political belief, this doxa, is an orthodoxy, a right, correct, dominant vision which has more often than not been imposed through struggles against competing visions. This means that the ‘natural attitude’… the primary experience of the world of common sense, is a politically produced relation, as are the categories of perception that sustain it. What appears today as self-evident, as beneath consciousness and choice, has quite often been the stake of struggles and instituted only as the result of dogged confrontations between dominant and dominated groups. … Doxa is a particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view—the point of view of those who dominate by dominating the state and who have constituted their point of view as universal by constituting the state.

Laitin defines hegemony as “the political forging—whether through coercion or elite bargaining—and institutionalization of a pattern of group activity in a state and the concurrent idealization of that schema into a dominant symbolic framework that reigns as common sense” (1986: 183). This analysis pivots on the understanding of “dominance” about which Laitin writes. Does dominance connote completeness of

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control? Total control? Complete hegemony seems to be obtainable only in situations of “the total abolition of any social realm of relative discursive freedom” (Scott 1990: 83). But as Scott convincingly argues, such situations are extremely rare, if not nonexistent (1990: 70–107). For him, the concept of hegemony is thus not very useful, unless it is meant to refer to relative dominance of the hegemonic model over counterhegemonic models of reality in a given social field. The latter can be formulated by the weak as “hidden transcripts” that are often difficult to detect. Hegemony should be seen, therefore, as a process that is always contested by counterdiscourses present in “hidden transcripts,” cultivated through countless acts of “everyday resistance,” or even displayed through “ceremonial revolutions” (Kubik 1994a: 247, 250). It is, therefore, imperative to analyze hegemony and counterhegemony together; it also seems useful to distinguish between semiotic and sociopsychological forms of hegemony. A group (government, class, elite) achieves (cultural) hegemony in a given sociopolitical field—in respect to a given “object” (government, regime, office)—(a) when its discourse and its interpretation become dominant or exclusive (rare occurrence) in this field, that is, when it saturates the public space, and/or (b) when this discourse resonates with the attitudes of the populace.19 The higher the saturation and resonance, the stronger is the hegemony. Hegemony has thus two aspects: semiotic (saturation) and psychological (resonance).20 Laitin investigates the significance of strongly polarized “schemas” for achieving hegemony. As he argues, an interpretive schema proposed by the rulers is rendered hegemonic through (1) “choosing one major strand of the culture making it the privileged aspect of culture” (1986: 92) and (2) defining the major divide of the society in terms of this “privileged aspect” or schema and (3) making sure that most of the “members of all social strata interpret politics and choose strategies of participation in terms of [this] divide” (1986: 107). The political culture of a given sociopolitical unit (e.g., a state) is never completely “hegemonized” by such a (di)vision, which usually has to compete against counterhegemonic visions. It seems, however, that competing political actors always try to create a hegemonic vision of the political order, saturate the public space with it, and make it resonate with peoples’ attitudes in such a way as to enhance their power. Sometimes bipolar hegemonic visions dominate the public sphere with unusual might and clarity, as has been determined by Aronoff (1991) for Israel; Laitin (1986) for Nigeria; Auda (1993) for Mubarak’s Egypt; Rakic (1998) for Serbia in the late 1980s and in the 1990s; and Kubik (1994a) for pre-1982 Poland.

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Conclusions The concept of political culture and related concepts reviewed in this chapter are critical if not indispensable for several research concerns central to political science, including legitimacy, consent, coordination, collective identity, conflict resolution, and even rebellion. It is undeniable that for a while this area of study was indeed “moribund” (Laitin 1986: 171), but subsequently political science began absorbing the lessons of the “cultural turn” by discovering the semiotic understanding of culture (Katzenstein 1996; Ross 1997; Johnson 2002; O’Neill 1999; Wedeen 2002) and employing at least some of the conceptual tools discussed above. As a result, the study of the relationship between politics and culture—always central for political anthropology (even when the term political culture is not used)—has become reinvigorated in political science (particularly in comparative politics) and begun producing important results. Some of them are discussed in the chapters that follow.

Notes 1. Discussion on how culture, or its elements, cause behavior is extensive. We are assuming here that such elements of culture as norms, values, scenarios, schemas, etc. cause human behavior. How this is happening is partially discussed below. There is a parallel discussion in political science on the role of ideas as causes of human behavior. See, for example, Hall 1989; Lieberman 2002; Berman 2001; Blyth 2002; McNamara 1998; Goldstein & Keohane 1993; Roy, Denzau, & Willett 2007. 2. “For almost all of our purposes, it is sufficient to define rationality on a basis of two simple ideas: (1) Confronted with any two options, denoted x and y, a person can determine whether he does not prefer option x to option y, does not prefer y to x, or does not prefer either. When preferences satisfy this property, they are complete. (2) Confronted with three options x, y, and z, if a person does not prefer y to x and does not prefer z to y then she must not prefer z to x. Preferences satisfying this property are transitive. Roughly speaking, our working definition of rational behavior is behavior consistent with complete and transitive preferences” (McCarthy and Meirowitz 2007: 6). 3. Gary Becker takes an extreme rationalist position: “All human behavior can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility from a stable set of preferences and accumulate an optimal amount of information and other inputs in a variety of markets” (1976: 14). 4. Wight asks the key question: “How can we explain political participation independent of the conceptual and semiotic space that constitutes the political and participation?” (2004: 296).

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5. Lasswell’s work is so original and extensive that it bridges both traditions. 6. Another influential conceptual clarification comes from Coleman, who writes: “There are two broad intellectual streams in the description and explanation of social action. One, characteristic of the work of most sociologists, sees the actor as socialized and action as governed by social norms, rules, and obligations. The principal virtues of this intellectual stream lie in its ability to describe action in social context and to explain the way action is shaped, constrained, and redirected by social context. The other intellectual stream, characteristic of the work of most economists, sees the actor as having goals independently arrived at, as acting independently, and as wholly self-interested. Its principal virtue lies in having a principle of action, that of maximizing utility” (1988: S95). Coleman proceeds to find a fruitful combination of both “streams” by developing an original conception of “social capital.” 7. We mean by this term a creature whose actions are to a large degree driven by habits, not a species of the genus Homo that lived in the early Pleistocene period. 8. This compatibility was a theme of an important yet somewhat forgotten debate in cultural anthropology (Hollis and Lukes 1982; Skorupski 1976). 9. Sider—in Joan Vincent’s words—“formulates a notion of culture as a particular active force at moments of formation and transformation” (1986: 115). 10. Baker (1990: 4–5) offers a similar definition. For him political culture is the “set of discourses or symbolic practices” by which “individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make upon each other.” Hirschman describes his goal in The Rhetorics of Reaction thus: “Hence my decision to attempt a ‘cool’ examination of surface: discourse, arguments, rhetoric, historically and analytically considered. In the process it would emerge that discourse is shaped, not so much by fundamental personality traits, but simply by the imperatives of argument, almost regardless of the desires, character or convictions of the participants” (1991: x). 11. For a careful analysis of the reasons and consequences of switching from the “old” (social psychological) to “new” (semiotic) concept of culture in political science see Johnson 2002, 2003. 12. Although this is a highly problematic heuristic distinction because it is too often reified, real differences necessitate conceptual refinement and the need to point out the differences as well as the similarities between comparable phenomena like ritual in different types of societies, e.g., those with low and high divisions of labor, as Aronoff did in his application of rituals of rebellion. “There is … no simple progression from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’; but a twisting, spasmodic, unmethodical movement which turns as often toward repossessing the emotions of the past as disowning them” (Geertz 1973: 319). 13. Bocock (1974) defines ritual as “the symbolic use of bodily movement and gesture in a social situation to express and articulate meaning.” Nieburg (1973) applies Gluckman’s (1954) aforementioned notion of “rituals of rebellion” to as disparate phenomena as rock concerts, obesity, and suicide without even attempting to justify his dramatic deviation from Gluckman’s explicitly restrictive insistence that such rituals cannot occur after the emergence of social class since actors can then opt for alternative social roles. 14. For the distinction see Gluckman and Gluckman 1977. 15. Statewide rituals (as opposed to ceremonies) are more common in authoritarian states with closed societies than in democratic states with open societies. 16. The above is the simplest possible sketch of the basic ideas, some of which were modified already by Austin himself. A useful brief introduction to this debate by a political scientist can be found in Wedeen 2008: 15 (including footnote 27). John

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18. 19.

20.

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Searle (1969) developed Austin’s ideas on speech acts. Dörge’s doctoral dissertation (2004) provides an exhaustive review of this field of study. This is what Max Gluckman (1956) called the inherent “frailty of authority.” Aronoff (1986) elaborates on this theme in his edited volume of essays that analyze this phenomenon in diverse cultural contexts. Gramsci (1971), Laitin (1986), Lustick (1993), Ortner (1989), Scott (1985), and Sider (1986). Resonance is defined in Snow & Benford (1988) in the following way: A discourse and an attitude resonate with each other when goals, values, ideas, etc. expressed (contained) in this discourse are congruent with the goals, values, ideas, etc. upon which this particular attitude is founded. In the view of this formulation, communists in many countries, for extensive periods of time achieved a high level of semiotic hegemony, although very rarely enjoyed (it seems, data is hard to obtain) psychological hegemony.

Chapter 4

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SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS OF POLITICS Political Ritual and Ceremonial

Is modern society as a whole becoming ‘deritualized’ … or does ritual reassert itself somehow in all politics…? … We do not know. —Mackenzie 1967

I

n this chapter we demonstrate the value of adapting “ritual,” a key concept developed by anthropologists in the study of so-called traditional societies, to understand the nature of political change (often nonlinear) in contemporary so-called modern societies. Before we illustrate the value of our convergent approach through the analysis of three cases of political ritual in Israel and Poland, we briefly review the intellectual history of the distinction between “traditional” and “modern” societies and explain why it is essential to elucidate the differences as well as the similarities between them when concepts developed for the analysis of one type of social order are used to explain phenomena characteristic of another type. With few exceptions (Edelman 1988; Edles 1998; Nieburg 1973; Wedeen 1999, 2008), political scientists—the academic experts on the politics of modern, complex societies—have not analyzed ritual, while it has always been one of the key objects of study for anthropologists. It could be argued, of course, that ritual has little to do with politics in modern societies and therefore political scientists’ lack of interest in it is not surprising. Such an argument has, however, been challenged by anthropologists (Kertzer 1988; Mach 1993; Moore & Myerhoff 1977b), historians (Wortman 1994, 2000; Hunt 1984), and sociologists (Berezin 1997; Lane 1981; Wagner-Pacifici 1986) who have produced an impres-

Notes for this section begin on page 108.

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sive body of evidence and theory that demonstrate ritual’s central role in politics not only in simpler societies but also in large, complex societies of modernity. David I. Kertzer (1988: 178), in his broad-ranging comparative analysis, states: “Political rites are important in all societies, because political power relations are everywhere expressed and modified through symbolic means of communication. Of course, certain kinds of political rites are more important in some political contexts than others.” It is important that these contexts be specified. The analysis of the politics of ritual requires a careful specification of the distinction between simpler and more complex societies. The next section is devoted to a brief discussion of this distinction and the consequences of either ignoring differences or reifying the typology when adapting concepts like ritual developed for the analysis of one type of society to understand another.

Intellectual Antecedents: “Traditional” and “Modern” Societies Contemporary understandings are profoundly influenced by early conceptualizations, frequently without recognition of this influence. As discussed in our introductory chapter, the reputed founders of modern political anthropology, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940), deliberately dismissed the relevance of classical political thought for their young field, thereby depriving themselves and those who followed their advice of valuable insights into the intellectual tradition from which their field emerged. Most political scientists are no less ignorant of the influence of earlier ideas on contemporary concepts, for example, the distinction between so-called traditional and modern societies. The ideas of the Enlightenment questioned the naturalness of the social order and made possible the conscious remaking of society in the American and the French revolutions, which is generally considered to have marked a historical turning point in the West identified with “modernity.”1 The distinction that first appeared in the writings of eighteenth-century thinkers2 was developed by three important nineteenth-century scholars and refined by three late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury theorists. In Ancient Law (1861), a study of Indo-European institutions, Sir Henry Maine argued that the two revolutions in the development of societies were: (1) the change from societies based on status to those based on contract, and (2) the change from social organizations centered on kinship to those in which local contiguity (territory) defines the basis

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of common political action. L. H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) built upon and modified Maine’s framework recognizing two fundamentally distinct types of government. The first type is founded upon personal relations, which he called societas. The second is founded upon territory and property, which he termed civitas. According to Morgan, political society is organized upon territories and deals with property and persons through territorial relations. In The Ancient City (1864) Fustel de Coulanges proposed a model to analyze change in ancient Greek and Roman society based on the role of religious beliefs. He related the progression of society from those based on ancestral cults through those based on Olympian religions, to those based on more universal religions. Since they lacked systematic ethnographic data, the contributions of these scholars were more valuable as analytical models than as accurate historical descriptions. Their successors Karl Marx (1818–1883), Emile Durkheim (1858– 1917), and Max Weber (1864–1920) refined the earlier models and had a greater influence on contemporary scholarship. Their influence can be particularly found in work dealing with issues of change. Although somewhat less recognized and influential, Ferdinand Tönnies (1887) contributed the important terms Gemeinschaft and Gesselschaft to the social science vocabulary. Volumes have been written by and about these thinkers. We must suffice here with an oversimplified summary of the essence of their distinctions between traditional and modern societies. Weber’s preconditions for the development of the modern state include the monopolization of the means of domination and administration based on the creation of a centrally directed and permanent system of taxation and a military force in the hands of the central government authority. The modern state is characterized by the monopolization of legal enactments and the legitimate use of force by the central authority and by the organization of a rationally oriented officialdom whose exercise of administrative functions is dependent upon the central authority. Whereas Weber explicitly stated that his distinctions were heuristic analytical ideal types, many later scholars forgot their utilitarian and contingent nature and labeled particular societies as traditional or modern. This was particularly true of the modernization (political development) approach that dominated comparative politics in the 1960s. This literature has been appropriately criticized for, among other things, its cultural bias and single-linear directionality. It assumed that the nonWestern world would (and implicitly should) follow the path of development set by the West and that modernization was an “upward ever, backward never” process.3 Contemporary scholarship has called into question such assumptions and has rejected the distinction between

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Table 4.1. Ideal type classical distinctions between traditional and modern societies Author

Traditional

Modern

Maine

Status/kinship (repetitive)

Contract/territory (innovative)

Morgan

Societas (personal relations)

Civitas (territory & property)

Coulange

Ancestral cults

Universal religion

Tocqueville

Aristocracy (inequality/ no individualism)

Democracy (equality, liberty, community, individualism, reason)

Tonnies

Gemeinschaft (natural volition, Gesellschaft (rational, unthinking choice, family, kin, calculated) neighborhood, intimate, spontaneous, private)

Durkheim

Mechanical solidarity based on similarity; Law based on custom, penal code; Collective conscience; Religion permeates all aspects of life

Organic solidarity (reciprocity, specialization, complexity, division of labor, mutual dependence); Restitutive law (civil, commercial, administrative, constitutional); Individual conscience; Religion and secular life differentiated

Weber

Authority based on custom, habit, conformity

Authority based on law, rational rules

types of society as a given. For example, John Gledhill (2000: 12), summarizing Pierre Clastres’s (1977) critique of traditional political anthropology, questions the value of viewing stateless societies as yetundeveloped politically, but rather as “societies that have resisted the emergence of the forms of political power which generates the state (and social inequalities)” (emphasis in the original). Problems arise, however, when scholars abandon any attempt to differentiate societies and polities and ignore important characteristics, such as degrees of complexity in the division of labor, and apply concepts derived from one type to analyze another without specifying differences as well as similarities in their societal characteristics. Other problems are created when rigidly dichotomous distinctions between types of society are retained. We try to avoid both types of problems as we employ the concepts of political ritual and ceremony in our analysis of societies with significantly different characteristics. The point is to show that rituals are central to social and political life in various types of societies, although in each type—due to its specific features—their functions may differ, at least partially.

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Political Ritual Anthropologists traditionally defined ritual so narrowly as to preclude use of the concept in the analysis of secular (including political) rituals in contemporary complex societies. For example, the Gluckmans identified all highly conventionalized symbolic forms of action or speech that define social status as ceremonial. But then they defined as “‘ceremonious’ those actions and words that do not involve beliefs in occult power, and defined as ‘ritual’ those which do involve such beliefs and which frequently also exhibit conflicts deep in the social structure” (1977: 233). This analysis led to them to an unequivocal conclusion: “To call all formality and ceremonial ‘ritual’ is to blur the distinction between formal activities that address and move the spirit world (which I call ‘ritual’) and formal activities that do not” (1977: 242).4 Moreover, other scholars argue that secular ceremonies and rituals are devoid of symbolic significance and causal power characteristic of religious rituals. Political scientist H. L. Nieburg (1969) and sociologist Robert Bocock (1974: 65), suggest that civic rituals “carry few implications for other aspects of life” and “neither the principal participants nor the onlookers need cultivate deep understanding of the ritual actions and symbols involved.” Murray Edelman (1998), who pioneered the study of political symbols, rhetoric, and the construction of meaning in American political science, uses the term political spectacle rather than ritual (presumably to avoid having to deal with such terminological and conceptual problems). We employ a different strategy: the concept has been so important in political anthropology that we choose to refine rather than abandon it in our work in comparative politics.5 In the introduction to their seminal edited volume on Secular Ritual Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (1977a: 3) suggest that “the sacred is a wider category than the religious. An essential quality of the sacred is its unquestionability. Unquestionable tenets exist in secular political ideologies that are as sacred in that sense as the tenets of any religion. Secular ceremonies can present unquestionable doctrines and can dramatize social/moral imperatives without invoking the spirits at all.” We develop this important insight when we adapt Gluckman’s concept of rituals of rebellion to illustrate how traditional anthropological concepts can be effectively applied to the analysis of contemporary politics when both similarities and differences in conditions are systematically compared. Too frequently, when only the similarities are highlighted, terms like ritual are used metaphorically rather than analytically.

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Rituals of Rebellion Gluckman analyzed local agricultural rituals among the Zulu in which— contrary to normal taboos—women and girls engaged in “obscene” behavior, wore men’s clothing, and herded and milked cattle. He compared these rites with a national first fruits ceremony among the Swazi staged by the king in which ambivalent feelings towards him are expressed through songs of hate and rejection by his kin, warriors, and subjects. The acting out of the powerful tensions that make up Swazi national life are expressed through the statements of rebellion and rivalry against the king as well as by ultimate affirmations of loyalty and unity. “Rebellious ritual occurs within an established and unchallenged social order” (Gluckman 1963: 126–27, emphasis added). In such contexts the participants openly challenge authority and dispute particular distributions of power, but not the structure of the system itself. “The acceptance of the established order as right and good, and even sacred, seems to allow unbridled excess, very rituals of rebellion, for order itself keeps this rebellion within bounds” (Gluckman 1963: 127). Gluckman concluded: “Modern political ceremonies may not take this form because our social order itself is questioned. … The individual under pressure has some scope for escape by altering his role or joining other types of social relationships. … ‘Ritual rebellion’ can be enjoyed by tradition … in repetitive social systems, but not in systems where revolution is possible” (1963: 135). Gluckman defines established and unchallenged social order as the prerequisite conditions for rituals of rebellion that occur in “situations where strong tensions are aroused by conflict between different structural principles, which are not controlled in distinct secular institutions.” (1963: 136). He clearly associates “established” order with the classic version of “repetitive” society, often called traditional. In such societies the division of labor is minimal, and social relationships are what he defines as “multiplex.” An “unchallenged” social order is one in which the principle of structural order is so sacred as to be beyond question. It is as if the imagination is incapable of constructing an alternative principle for societal organization. Gluckman gives African examples, such as the Lozi (in former Northern Rhodesia), whose governmental organization provided outlets for the tensions between components of the state and in which rituals of rebellion were absent. He felt that even the development of protoclasses in such preindustrial societies precluded the occurrence of rituals of rebellion, because rebels could potentially become revolutionaries.

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Since the Enlightenment we have increasingly come to perceive the socially constructed nature of society as more contingent, and forms of government as more fluid as manifested in the American, French, Russian, Chinese, the revolutions that brought down state socialism, the dramatic change in South Africa, and the Arab Spring of 2011. The often-ritualized dimension of such changes expands the social imagination of contemporary people as it provides them with enacted examples of alternative principles of societal organization. Most members of contemporary postcolonial and postindustrial societies—as benefactors of labor, civil rights, feminist, and other social movements—have ample alternative social roles from which to choose. Therefore, according to Gluckman, rituals of rebellion should be completely absent in contemporary society. Yet, we shall demonstrate that they do occur and will delineate the conditions that make them possible. Even Gluckman, reluctantly, acknowledged that the case we discuss below was an example of a contemporary ritual of rebellion.6 Case One: Ritual Rebellion in the Israel Labor Party The Israel Labor Party (in its various incarnations) dominated the Israeli political system for nearly five decades. It was the dominant party because its leaders succeeded in identifying themselves and their party with the pioneering epoch of the struggle for independence and the building of the new state. Although it never obtained a parliamentary majority, Labor monopolized the political center so that no coalition government could be formed without it, and thereby constituted the majority of the cabinet that monopolized the key ministerial positions and their budgets. Maurice Duverger (1964: 309) stressed: “A dominant party is that which the public opinion believes to be dominant.” Labor enjoyed this uncommon position of dominance from the mid-1930s until it was toppled from power in the 1977 election.7 The Israel Labor Party was formed in 1968 with the merger of three social democratic parties. In April 1970 a twenty-six-member constitutional committee was charged with submitting a new party constitution. The committee’s membership was expanded to 134 members when it was mandated to prepare and essentially stage-manage the first national conference of the united party held in April 1971. Renamed the standing committee, it determined the composition of the new central committee, which had a major impact on the distribution of power in the party.8 It also performed the vital function of preparing the platform for the national party conference, formulating policy statements on a wide range of issues, and suppressing controversial issues that the top party leaders feared would disrupt the conference or result in

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resolutions not to their liking.9 The most significant ritual functions performed in the committee involved the self-identification, assertion, and rebellion of a distinctive group of the secondary echelon of leaders of the party who had been carefully selected by the top leaders for their dependability and loyalty. The year April 1970 to April 1971, during which these ritual activities took place, was a critical juncture for the party as it attempted to maintain its dominant position through the consolidation of the newly expanded party. The election of the eighth Knesset was postponed until December because of the surprise attack on Israel in October 1973. Although Labor suffered a decline in Knesset representation in 1973, it managed to maintain its declining and decreasingly dominant position for a final four years. Ritual in the standing committee met Gluckman’s key criterion that the outcome was known in advance: the social unit must end united. Three major constraints limited the freedom of the participants and guaranteed this outcome. First, its chairman in consultation with the top party leaders formulated the agenda of the committee. Second, free and open debate on all resolutions had to culminate in consensual formulations without the possibility of the submission of minority reports to the conference. Third, controversial issues for which compromise could not be reached and/or the outcomes of which (votes in the conference) could not be predicted to support the policy of the top leadership were suppressed from the agenda of the conference after debates in the standing committee. Such was the fate of policy statements pertaining to the role of religion and the state and on economic issues with far-reaching implications relating to the powerful Histadrut, the party-dominated giant labor federation with its related industries and enterprises including a system of comprehensive health services with which over 80 percent of the population was affiliated. Normally, overt criticism of the top party leadership was taboo. However, in the ritual parts of the meetings of the standing committee, the participants freely criticized the party’s policies and elite—who were conspicuously absent from the ritual proceedings.10 Since the participants’ careers, authority, power, status, mobility, livelihood, and self -image (individual and collective) as party leaders were at stake, the prescribed absence of the elite from the ritual was essential for its success. The ritual actors were the trusted secondary echelon of leaders who were loyal to their respective patrons among the top leaders. Ninety percent were elected party and Histadrut officials, members of the Knesset (legislature), and mayors (especially of the major cities). Although the secondary echelon enjoyed much higher status and influence in national affairs than the third echelon of local leaders (who

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constituted the majority of delegates to the conference), they lacked the grassroots support enjoyed by the local leaders. Their dependence on the elite ensured that they followed the informal ritual rules. Finally, the secondary echelon of leaders came from families committed to the labor movement, had belonged to youth movements affiliated with it, had been active in the party their entire adult lives, and had generally internalized its norms. These constraints explain why, although theoretically they could have opted for alternative social roles, they only rebelled symbolically. Their rebellious, albeit ritualized, criticism of their patrons is more analogous to the Lozi priests of Barotseland (Gluckman 1954) and the chiefs designated by the king of the Baganda as his messengers (Mair 1962), than to the Swazi where the entire people participated. This more limited type of ritual of rebellion against the absent “king” takes place under special circumstances. Although multiple social roles among the participants in the Labor ritual were very intertwined, they were less extensive than the multiplex relationships described by Gluckman. Most importantly, the nature of the dominant party system and the dependent role of the participants created a situation in which the costs of their opting for alternative social roles, e.g., revolting or switching parties, was perceived to be prohibitive and, given their internalization of ideology and norms, for some unthinkable. Yet, as Aronoff (1993: 77) noted: “It is particularly relevant to the present analysis that whereas Labor’s dominant political position was still intact during the proceedings of the Standing Committee, its members seemed to recognize that the party’s position of ideological or moral dominance, which had identified it with the state in the initial post-Independence epoch, had been gradually eroded.” This shows the transformative nature of the ritual performance that was designed to create new meaning for the roles of the performers through the assertion of an idealized normative structure. The strong criticism of the lack of internal party democracy raised in the Standing Committee reaffirmed belief in a valued ideal that had been blatantly breached. In a similar way, symbolic references to the inequality of ethnic groups involved criticism of the breach of one of the most important norms in Israeli society and reaffirmed the importance of the ideal. Therefore, in addition to resolving the ambiguity of their own roles and mediating between competing groups with opposed interests and ideologies, these criticisms orchestrated a commentary on the major contradictions and paradoxes in Israeli society. (Aronoff 1993: 94)

The efficacy of the ritual was limited in both scope and time. It was most efficacious for those who participated actively in its performance and decreasingly salient for wider circles of the public: the delegates to

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the national conference, members and supporters of the party, Israeli voters, Jews overseas, Israel’s allies and its enemies. Although it helped the party to survive internal conflicts and maintain its position for a few more years, it failed to produce reforms and new policies that would have prepared the party to meet the new challenges Israel faced. The participants in the ritual, at the behest of their patrons, merely reaffirmed the validity of old norms without reinterpreting them in the context of new problems. A forum, the major function of which is to maintain a status quo composed of participants with considerable vested interests in it, is not one likely to produce imaginative new solutions. The suppression of controversial issues was a way of ignoring or denying problematic social reality, but it did not make the problems disappear. The failure of Labor to initiate more creative ways of dealing with these pressing problems was the primary reason for its loss of political dominance. There was an important lag between the erosion of ideological dominance (or hegemony) and its recognition by various levels of political leadership and the public. For example, the traumatic shock of the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), in October 1973 (known in the Arab world as the Ramadan war) was called an “earthquake” in Israel. It led to a widespread protest movement that eventually resulted in the unprecedented resignations of Labor’s top two leaders: Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and ultimately to Labor’s loss of dominance.11 However, the first meeting of the Labor Party’s central committee after the war was postponed for several hours so the top leaders could thrash out a compromise among themselves in order to avoid an open and divisive confrontation between them and their respective followers in the central committee: While the top leaders sat one floor below, I sat with a group of the secondary leaders in a room at party headquarters. They seriously discussed the need to change the top party and government leadership and drastically revise party policy. As if the reality of what was taking place below radiated upward to the floor above, the tone of the discussion between the secondary leaders began to change markedly. They gradually began to turn their previously serious discussion into a farcical mocking of what they thought was going on below. They satirically nominated the most unqualified party functionaries for the key cabinet posts. Their conduct reminded me of a scene in the film M*A*S*H in which a team of army doctors joked as they operated in a field hospital on men who they knew were likely to go back into combat and get killed after they recuperated from their operations. Both the doctors and the functionaries of the Labor Party resorted to satire and paradox to express feelings of helplessness in the absurdity of their situations. The functionaries of the Labor Party expressed symboli-

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cally through their behavior a perception of their own dependence on the top leaders and their own inability to change the order of things in spite of their sincerely felt need to do so. This is the stuff of which the type of political ritual I have described is made. (Aronoff 1993: 99)

Had they acted in unison, these secondary leaders would have likely succeeded in changing key top party leaders and party policy. Yet, they failed to perceive these new possibilities, and their sense of dependence on their patrons coupled with concern for their own careers prevented them from acting boldly. Instead, they engaged in ritualized behavior that may have been psychologically helpful to them and was certainly politically helpful to the elite; but it prevented them from taking what might have been history-changing decisions. This case clearly supports the suggestion by Jack Goody (1977: 34) that “the function of ‘ritual’ can be better elucidated under changing rather than static conditions.” On the other hand, the case suggests why the concept of ritual, carefully defined, need not be confined to the religious sphere as Goody suggested. It can be a valuable means of understanding the erosion of authority, legitimacy, and the loss of political power by a social democratic party in a contemporary complex society. Case Two: The State Funeral for the Remains of “Bar Kochba’s Fighters and People” The leader of the nationalist Likud Party Menachem Begin became prime minister in 1977 and set out to overcome the pariah image with which Labor had stigmatized him and his movement. He attempted to eradicate the last vestiges of Labor’s ideological legitimacy and to establish the Likud’s political dominance and ideological hegemony. Begin utilized the state agencies to reinterpret Israeli history, to elevate his movement’s ideological leader Vladimir Jabotinsky to the national political pantheon, to enshrine as heroes the martyrs of the dissident underground movements—particularly the one he commanded—and to incorporate their myths as authoritative. The Begin government made extensive use of ceremonies commemorating historical figures whose actions were used to attempt to lend legitimacy to Begin, his movement, and his government’s policies. The most elaborate of these ceremonies was a state funeral held on 11 May 1982 in the Judean desert for the reputed remains of the fighters and followers of Shimon Bar Koziba, popularly known as Bar Kochba, who led the second Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 132–135. The noted archaeologist Yigal Yadin discovered bones and artifacts in a cave in the Judean desert in 1960. Controversies related to the remains included whether they were even those of Jews, which govern-

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ment department had authority over them, and which site would be appropriate for their burial. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion appointed a committee chaired by Colonel Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, to resolve these questions. Ben Gurion, however, expressed reservations about its recommendation that they be buried according to Jewish law near the cave where they had been discovered and that a monument be erected to commemorate the “heroic” uprising. Ben Gurion consulted with Professor Yadin, and the committee’s recommendation was not implemented. Twenty-three years later Rabbi Goren, who had become the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel, accused the archaeologists of having “stolen” the bones.12 Rabbi Goren, who was embroiled in a conflict with the nation’s archaeologists over excavations taking place in Jerusalem, demanded the burial of the so-called Bar Kochba bones. Prime Minister Begin overruled the of the chairman of the Ministerial Committee on Symbols and Ceremonies who had rejected Rabbi Goren’s request to make the burial a state ceremony. The ministries of education and defense were instructed to hold educational activities stressing the tradition of heroism associated with Bar Kochba to tie in with the “year of heroism” that had been declared the theme of celebrations of Israel’s thirty-fifth year of independence. The prime minister’s office assumed authority for final decisions related to the state ceremony while Rabbi Goren, utilizing the Israel Defense Forces, was designated to implement them. One hundred fifty guests representing top state officials and leaders as well as the diplomatic representatives of foreign countries were brought by helicopter to the remote desert site at great expense and damage to the delicate desert ecology.13 The remains of the reputed fighters (men), women, and children were brought by helicopter in three identical caskets accompanied by honor guards. Military chaplains served as pallbearers. Prayers were recited by the chief Sephardi and Ashkenazi rabbis, and the chief cantor of the Israel Defense Forces chaplaincy for burials. State wreaths were placed, and the honor guard fired a salute. The central event was the prime minister’s eulogy. Premier Begin, frequently referring to the liberation and unification of Jerusalem, emphasized the historic link between the Bar Kochba revolt and the rise and expansion of the new “Third Jewish Commonwealth”: “He reminded the audience that it had been the Roman emperor Publius Aelius Hadrianus who had given Judea the name Palestine, ‘a name that still haunts us.’ He declared, ‘Our glorious fathers, we have a message for you: We have returned to the place from whence we came. The people of Israel lives, and will live in its homeland of Eretz Israel for generations upon generations. Glori-

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ous fathers, we are back and we will not budge from here” (Aronoff 1989: 59). The full ceremonies were covered by Israel’s only television channel (at the time) as well as by radio broadcasts, thereby reaching a wide section of the deeply divided population. A group of twenty-four young protestors wearing Roman-style togas and carrying spears parodied the official ceremony, chanting, “You are making a laughingstock out of history.” When Rabbi Goren emerged from his helicopter, they broke out in a song about chasing darkness from the land that is traditionally sung on Hanukkah. Although the police and soldiers eventually succeeded in destroying their signs and forcibly removing them from the ceremonies, their protest dramatized the opposition of a significant proportion of their fellow countrymen— including the majority of the educational and cultural elite, many of whom boycotted the ceremonies. A respected rabbi and Labor member of the Knesset claimed the ceremony perverted and carried to “grotesque extremes” the meaning of the custom of the reburial of bones in Jewish tradition.14 Opponents of the government’s expansive settlement policy in the territories Israel occupied during the war of June 1967 were particularly critical of the obvious political implications of the ceremony. Even a very senior member of the government (representing a religious party) avoided the ceremony, which he considered to be a “farce.”15 He noted that the prime minister’s exaggerated emphasis on Bar Kochba “can be very dangerous.” The minister of the treasury, who chaired the Ministerial Committee on Symbols and Ceremonies, criticized the government’s failure “to distinguish between state ceremonials and the personal feelings of leaders. They wanted to emphasize the historic connection with the hills of Judea. In my opinion this was not the correct instrument.”16 Whereas the Talmud and most other traditional Jewish texts treat Bar Kochba as a cruel, imperious leader and a false messiah, a contemporary Zionist religious and nationalistic stream views him as a heroic freedom fighter. Begin’s government, composed of parties that supported militantly nationalistic Zionism, attempted to impose on the entire nation its interpretation of the implications of history for solving contemporary problems. Israel became embroiled in a polarized national debate over the meaning of Bar Kochba’s revolt in general, but particularly for the contemporary quandary caused by Israel’s occupation of land on which two million Palestinians reside. For example, at an academic conference on the subject attended by hundreds of active participants, Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi (1982) argued that Bar Kochba represented an unrealistic policy that resulted in the decimation of the Jewish people. He concluded, “By admiring the Bar Kochba revolt, we

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are forced into the position of admiring our own destruction and rejoicing over a deed amounting to national suicide.”17 Harkabi, among many others, argued that the de facto annexation of the heavily populated Palestinian territories was unrealistic and potentially disastrous. The national debate arguing contradictory implications of the Bar Kochba revolt for contemporary political dilemmas facing Israel reflected deeply polarized ideological interpretations of the Zionist vision. Yet, the fact is that secular scholars and leading rabbinic figures engaged in public debate with one another and with the prime minister and other leading politicians over the implications of 2,000-year-old events for contemporary problems. This implies the sharing of an underlying Zionist/ Israeli worldview that made the debate over interpretations of this root cultural paradigm both possible and significant. In the decades since then, Zionism has been seriously challenged by various internal and external groups, and such challenges have loosened its hegemonic hold on the public, although it still retains considerable salience for the majority of Israeli Jews.18 Summary Implications of the Two Israeli Cases Ritual rebellion of the secondary echelon of leaders of the Labor Party was still possible in 1970 because the top leaders could rely on their abiding by the rules that constrained their political options and determined the outcome. This predictability of outcomes, a prerequisite for such rituals, was made possible through an unusual confluence of conditions: Labor’s dominance (albeit in decline) of the political system, the near absolute dependence of the participants in the ritual on their patrons for their careers (livelihoods, statuses, and self images), and their internalization of party norms. These circumstances, among others, prevented them from opting for alternate roles or revolting against the top leadership. The successful control of the agenda of the national conference was imperative because the more independent conference delegates could not be relied upon to unanimously endorse the elite’s policies. The top leaders also feared that free debate on controversial issues might lead to factional splits that had weakened the party in the past. However, the success of the ritual was limited in time as well as in scope. Eventually the disenchanted electorate punished Labor for not creatively dealing with the issues that had been successfully suppressed through ritual and sent it into the opposition for an extended period. The “ritual of rebellion” proved to be the last hurrah for Labor. The reliance on this “ritualistic” political mechanism designed to protect the power of the incumbents is one of the reasons for the party’s decline and defeat.

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As the second example illustrates, Prime Minister Begin (through the skillful use of rhetoric, symbol, myth, and ceremony) attempted to eliminate the last vestige of Labor’s legitimacy and to establish the dominance of his Likud Party. While he was more successful in some areas, the case of the burial of the so-called Bar Kochba bones vividly illustrated his failure to establish the hegemony of the Likud.19 Although the funeral ceremony itself was a traditional Jewish ritual, the entire political spectacle associated with it was ceremonial because (among other reasons) the outcome was unpredictable and it failed to achieve its objective—the acceptance by a large majority of the public of the meanings ascribed to it by Begin. Half of the polarized electorate—including most of the top cultural, educational, and media elite—held contradictory ideological interpretations of the meaning and significance of the central myth employed in the ceremonial pageant. As importantly, the blatant nature of the symbolic manipulation orchestrated by Begin called attention to the socially constructed and politically motivated nature of the ceremony, effectively dramatized by the toga-clad opponents of the government. The emperor was seen by too many as naked for the majority to admire his fine new clothes. Case Three: Pope John Paul II’s First Visit to Poland as Ceremonial Transformation The fall of state socialism in 1989 can be explained in several ways, depending on which factors—economic, political, or cultural—are emphasized as its dominant causes. Nonetheless, no matter which particular explanatory path is chosen, scholars dealing with this momentous historical event must explain and/or interpret the key factor that initiated the downfall of this formation: the emergence and enormous impact of the Polish Solidarity movement. In the second half of the 1970s, all state socialist countries coped with serious, particularly economic, problems, and yet a massive social movement that challenged the communist monopoly of power emerged only in Poland. Why? Trying to answer this question in his 1994 book, Kubik suggested that what prepared Poland for its role as the “first mover” in the final wave of rebellions against state socialism was the fact that a significant segment of the Polish population was united around a powerful counterhegemonic discourse developed by the Catholic Church and the organized opposition. This discourse provided the populace with cultural/symbolic tools that were eventually used to challenge and reject the regime’s claim to legitimacy and to unify a massive social movement. In brief, a cultural revolution preceded a political one; moreover, a clear and powerful articulation of a cultural frame of ascendant movement was the key

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component of its eventual dizzying political success. Among the principal vehicles of this successful cultural revolution were specific rituals Kubik called transformative rituals or ceremonial revolutions. The best example of such a ritual/ceremonial revolution was the visit the newly elected pope, John Paul II, paid to his home country in 1979. The meaning and political significance of this visit can be conveniently analyzed and interpreted in terms of Gluckman’s rituals of rebellion introduced earlier in this chapter and van Gennep’s concept of the rites of passage (later elaborated by Victor Turner and others). Van Gennep suggested that rituals of transition (and the pope’s visit to Poland in 1979 can be easily construed as such a ritual) consist of three phases: separation, transition, and incorporation. The middle, transitional (liminal) phase of ritual transformation is highly “political.” In this phase the rules of social game are publicly displayed and transformed or amplified.20 At the same time however, as the Turners observed, liminality is not only transition but also potentiality, not only “going to be,” but also “what may be,” a “domain in which all that is not manifest in the normal day-to-day operation of social structures (whether on account of social repression or because it is rendered cognitively ‘invisible’ …) can be studied objectively, despite the often bizarre and metaphorical character of its contents” (1978: 3). This is precisely what happened in Poland; the society was offered a possibility to rehearse an alternative social order founded on a different set of values than those propagated by the ruling party. The visit that amounted to a massive transformative ritual changed the rules of the social game in Poland. On the social level it produced changes in public discourse, by exposing the public to a set of ideas on freedom and human dignity, articulated with extraordinary rhetorical power by the pope. On the individual level, it affected people’s attitudes, by showing them that the system was vulnerable and could be challenged. It also changed the rules of interaction and modified the social standing of many public figures, for example those who undermined their public authority as they engaged in futile efforts to frame the pope’s visit not as a primarily religious event, but as a contribution to the secular celebrations of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the communist state—the Polish People’s Republic. A critical examination of Gluckman’s rituals of rebellion provides a useful starting point for a discussion of the relationship between ceremonies (rituals), legitimacy, and political power during the waning years of state socialism in Poland. As we have already observed, Gluckman often pointed out that rituals of rebellion usually occur in societies whose social orders and political systems enjoy full legitimacy,

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i.e., where the hegemonic discourse is unchallenged and the idea of some alternative arrangement of society is inconceivable for the decisive majority of the population.21 This situation is depicted in Figure 4.1, which illustrates what happens during the transformation phase of a celebration that serves as a classical ritual of rebellion, a kind of cultural “safety valve.” The immunity of the established sociopolitical order is suspended for a moment, so it can be mocked, reversed, and ridiculed, but within strictly prescribed limits of a “traditional” cultural form. Very often, the targets attacked are not public offices per se, but merely the people who temporarily occupy them. After the ceremony is over, the whole political and social order remains intact, even strengthened, since various hostile energies have been channeled and safely discharged in the performance. Such is also the social function of carnival role reversals (closely related to rituals of rebellion), whereby the powerful play the role of the powerless.22 For example, in California, the Doo Dah Parade functions as a ritual of rebellion against “the established order represented by the Rose Parade, as well as the dominant forces of contemporary American society” (Lawrence 1982: 155). Schematically (see Figure 4.1), in the ritual of rebellion, the ritual (ceremony) mocks the values upholding the social or political order, but at the same time it validates them, as it does not express a “serious” call for their destruction or permanent modification. After the performance of mock rebellion is over, the values continue to provide the legitimacy for the system. Rituals of rebellion rarely occur in communist states; power in these systems is either too insecure or too “serious” to allow mockery. The most common form of ritual practiced in these states is the ritual of confirmation. Rituals of confirmation, such as May Day parades, are either voluntary (when participants are free to institute them or not) or mandatory (when participants are obliged by the rulers to take part Validation RITUAL/ CEREMONY

VALUES Mock symbolic inversion

Legitimation

POLITICAL/SOCIAL ORDER

Figure 4.1. Rituals of rebellion

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in them). Such (hegemonic) ceremonies are designed to reaffirm the existing social order and legitimize the political system by linking them to what the rulers define as the ultimate values of a given culture; they should furnish political institutions with “spiritual aroma” (Firth 1981) however disingenuous it may be.23 All official ceremonies and rituals of the Polish People’s Republic belonged to the category of mandatory rituals of confirmation. Their intended function was to generate or validate, through “traditionalizing new material,”24 the authority and legitimacy of the official sociopolitical order and sustain the status quo. Formally, these ceremonies can be described as closed rituals. Their structures were strict, allowing for minimal changes, and each performance became a token of some general type of ceremony; a token which served only to repeat in the most accurate way the officially sanctioned scenario. In small pre-modern societies, the more precisely the performance conforms to the traditional pattern of ritual, the more effective the whole performance in settling the conflict. In other words, the more closed its structure and less informative its content, the more effective its unifying power. The social drama is translated into ceremonial categories and due to the rigidity of ceremonial structure, which pre-determines the outcome, the conflict is resolved, played out. Rituals of confirmation are graphically presented in Figure 4.2. There is, however, another possible type of relationship between ceremony, sociopolitical order, and the domain of ultimate values expressed in key symbols of a given culture. In situations in which it is conceivable that the sociopolitical order can be contested and could fall apart or be replaced—but is temporarily impossible due to the overwhelming power of the ruler(s)—ceremonies can directly challenge the status quo. They do this in two, often concurrent, ways. The first is by RITUALS OF CONFIRMATION Confirmation/validation RITUAL/ CEREMONY

VALUES

Legitimation POLITICAL/SOCIAL ORDER

Figure 4.2. Rituals of confirmation

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a symbolic rejection of the existing rules. In such situations ceremonies become revolutionary for they do not stay within the channels that are culturally prescribed and controlled by the rulers, as in the case of Gluckman’s rituals of rebellion. Instead, they directly attack and reject, albeit by symbolic means, the dominating rules of interaction or the prevailing interpretive frameworks (hegemonic discourse). Second, such (transformative) ceremonies often produce new (counterhegemonic) symbols that embody new or revive old cultural scenarios or conceptualizations. In this way the inevitability and universality of the hegemonic discourse are contested. In practice, both tactics of symbolic struggle usually go together and are hardly distinguishable. Figure 4.3 illustrates transformative ceremonies/ceremonial revolutions of which the pope’s visit to Poland in 1979 was a perfect example.

Conclusions Before we evaluate the different contributions of anthropology and political science to the understanding of contemporary political ritual and TRANSFORMATIVE CEREMONIES/CEREMONIAL REVOLUTIONS EXISTING POLITICAL/SOCIAL ORDER Legitimation Rejection

Status quo values

RITUAL/ CEREMONY

Generation and/or validation

Alternative values

Legitimation ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL/SOCIAL ORDER

Figure 4.3. Transformative ceremonies/ceremonial revolutions

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ceremonial, we note how striking it is that relatively few anthropological studies have dealt with the state-level political rituals in contemporary complex societies. With notable exceptions,25 most anthropologists still focus on the local level or relatively small groups that are more amenable to participant observation. Perhaps the assumption that ritual must involve mystical/religious beliefs has prevented many ethnographers from either looking for modern political rituals or recognizing them as such when they are observed. Political scientists, who primarily study the formal institutions of the state and interstate politics, tend not to analyze rituals at all. We hope the three cases discussed above illustrate the important insights that can be gained when contemporary secular rituals and ceremonies are studied. Perhaps the most significant difference between our cases and more traditional rituals analyzed by anthropologists is what they reveal about the mechanisms of cultural and political change as well as continuity, also in complex, modern societies. The main contribution from political science to our analyses is the introduction of two important factors (or variables): the state and the party system. The state and state elites are key actors in the production of (the hegemonic) culture,26 while the nature of the political party system heavily influences the way politics— including symbolic politics—is played. In each case the party system was a crucial variable in explaining the events. The success of the ritual of rebellion in the first case was dependent upon Labor’s dominance in a dominant party system of Israel. Although much symbolic behavior continues, there have been no rituals of rebellion in the Labor Party since the transformation of the party system to one in which the party dominating the government coalition has rotated. The major reason for the failure of the state funeral ceremony for the so-called Bar Kochba bones to help establish Likud political dominance and ideological hegemony was the polarization of the public, which gave nearly equal support to the two main rival parties in the competitive party system that had evolved. The role of educational, cultural, and media elites in the opposition was crucial in preventing the widespread public acceptance of the Likud’s more militantly nationalistic vision of Zionism essential for hegemonic consolidation. The Polish single party/party-state system offered no legal outlet for public political opposition except through the Catholic Church. The transformative nature of the pope’s visit, viewed by the populace both as a religious pilgrimage and a symbolic political event, ended the monopoly over public discourse in Poland by the partystate. As Kubik (1994: 142) observed, “He [the pope] confirmed the unbreakable link between the Polish nation and Catholicism, challenging the official secular definition of Polish statehood.”

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The main contribution of cultural anthropology to the analysis of these cases is the rejection of more conventional “political-scientific” conceptualizations of what is “political,” particularly the inclusion of the symbolic dimensions of politics into the analytical frame. Only by studying this dimension—for example, with the tools offered by cultural anthropology—we can reconstruct both the meanings actors attach to politics and semiotic practices (Wedeen 2002), that is, the actions through which such meanings are constituted in the public space. Of particular interest are those meanings that support or challenge the legitimacy of political institutions and those who dominate them. Ritual rebellion enabled the secondary echelon of leaders of Labor, whose public (and self-) images had become degraded from pioneers to party hacks, to assert themselves through their critique of the erosion of their status and of the breach of party norms and ideology. At the same time it enabled their patrons to retain their positions and policies, and to preserve party unity. While effective in the short run, the ritualization of politics proved to be counterproductive in the long run since it prevented the party from meeting new challenges. The second Israeli case shows that as in the case of the Polish Communist Party, “the hegemonic discourse had exhausted its potential” (Kubik 1994: 147). The failure of the ceremonial involving the burial of the Bar Kochba bones to catalyze the establishment of the hegemony of the Likud was a result of the contradictory meanings ascribed by the leaders of the major political parties and their respective supporters. Begin may have convinced his followers that Bar Kochba was a hero whose actions lent legitimacy to Likud policy, but the other half of the public interpreted the results of the historical rebellion as a disaster that portended grave consequences for his settlement policies and a hard line toward the Palestinians. The official state ceremony and the unofficial parody of it were metaphors of the divided nation. Our third case demonstrates the transformative power of ceremonial revolutions. By allowing John Paul II visit his native country in 1979, the communist authorities provided an opportunity for such a “revolution,” which broke the public hegemony of the Marxist-Leninist discourse and acted as a catalyst for a chain of events that led to the system’s collapse ten years later. These three cases illustrate a range of types of symbolic activity in significantly different political settings. The first closely approximated classic ritual rebellion in which the outcome is known and the social unit remains united. The dominant party system, in several important respects, replicated for the participants the conditions that Gluckman asserted were necessary for such rituals to take place. Yet, the ritual

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was a barometer from which forthcoming change—the loss of Labor dominance—was predicted. The second case dramatically illustrated the symbolic confrontation between the state-sponsored ceremony, the aim of which was to achieve hegemony, and the opposition ceremony that employed parody designed to undermine the efficacy of the former. Effective hegemony requires the reification of the official discourse. In this case, the obviousness of the symbolic manipulation on the part of the government made the calling into question of the official discourse by the opposition much easier. The symbolic confrontation mirrored the divided nation at this stage. In the third case, Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland was transformative. “Transformative ceremonies (ceremonial revolutions) do not serve to settle social conflicts but to articulate and amplify them; they are staged by the oppressed in situations in which other forms of rebellion do not seem viable” (Kubik 1994: 152). Whereas the ritual in the Labor Party was a harbinger of imminent political change in a democratic polity, the last hurrah of Labor dominance, the state funeral and the ritual parody of it reflected the deep political and cultural polarization of Israel at the time, the polarization that was soon to become a salient cleavage of Israeli party politics. The transformative ritual performed in Poland, a nondemocratic polity, had a different function: it actually became the (cultural) spark igniting the massive (political) revolution. The ritual in the Labor Party would not have been detected without traditional ethnography based on extended participant observation of the events. Analysis of ritual activity in this closed political forum was not a part of the initial research proposal. However, interpretive analysis of symbolic dimensions of the activity and rhetoric led to the application of the concept of ritual of rebellion despite Gluckman’s admonition that such rituals could not take place in a contemporary industrialized society. Interpretive analysis of the ritual state funeral for 2,000-yearold remains was based on a combination of archival research in the prime minister’s office and various media, as well as in-depth interviews of key actors and participants. This combined elements of traditional and paraethnography. Similarly the interpretive analysis of the Polish case—particularly of the pope’s visit—combined elements of traditional ethnography and paraethnography, e.g., the interpretation of memories of events through a more ethnographically tuned frame of mind supplemented by analysis of all available written and visual resources. Moreover, all three cases are examples of studies that employ the extended case study method. In this chapter we illustrate the utility of adapting concepts developed by anthropologists who have worked in so-called traditional so-

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cieties for the analysts of political rituals in so-called modern complex societies. At the same time we have shown why the elucidation of differences as well as similarities in the nature of different types of societies necessitates such adaptations if concepts like ritual are not to be used only metaphorically. Moreover, through the analysis of these cases we have demonstrated the important role of political ritual in understanding the nonlinear character of social change. This is in sharp contrast with the linearity implied in the grand theoretical schemes discussed in the introduction to this chapter. By combining the political science concern with the state, party systems, and social movements with the anthropological focus on the symbolic dimension of politics, a unique vantage point can be gained to understand the relationship between culture and political continuity and change in all types of societies. This “combined” (convergent) approach is employed to examine several other topics in the following chapters.

Notes 1. This is obviously a generalization. For a more nuanced brief discussion of this transition in France by a noted specialist who traces the precursors of modernity in the Old Regime see the interview by Sergei Glebov of Peter Sahlins in “Subjecthood That Happens to be Called ‘Citizenship,’ or Trying to Make Sense of the Old Regime on Its Own Terms,” Ab Imperio, April 2006. 2. Baron de Montesquieu (Charles Secondat), The Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Persian Letters (1721); Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourses (1755) and The Social Contract (1762); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). 3. The most eloquent criticisms of the modernization approach came from Immanuel Wallerstein and his world system theory (1974), Andre Gunder Frank and his “development of the underdevelopment” thesis (1966) and recently from Arturo Escobar (1995). A classic work in anthropology that utilizes a historically oriented political economy approach to analyse the agency of the common people is Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (1982). 4. Jack Goody (1977: 25–35) argues against the broadening of the concept beyond the religious context. 5. Sometimes concepts are abandoned because of political cultural connotations that become attached to them. For example, culture was avoided by many South African anthropologists because of its abuse by the former apartheid regime. Peter Sahlins (2006) reports a similar aversion to the concept of ethnicity by many French scholars because the recognition of strife in contemporary France as ethnic contradicts basic assumptions about French republicanism.

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6. Personal communication to Aronoff after Gluckman had previously suggested the need to qualify the use of “ritual” in this case by using quotation marks or by using the term ritual-like. 7. Pempel 1990. On the origins, maintenance, and loss of Labor’s dominance see Aronoff in ibid. or chapter 1 of Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions (1989). 8. Myron J. Aronoff, Power and Ritual in the Israel Labor Party (1993), chapter 3. 9. Aronoff 1993, chapter 4. 10 “Prescribed absence from a ritual is thus a form of participation in it: though it is not a protest, it states that there is a conflict present in the process” (Gluckman 1956: 130). 11. These resignations were unprecedented because they were caused primarily by the pressure of public opinion. 12. Interview with Rabbi Shlomo Goren on 26 July 1983 (Aronoff 1989: 55). 13. Helicopter landing pads were bulldozed, which brought protests from the Nature Reserve Authority because the government failed to obtain the proper permits and disregarded the ecological damage this caused. 14. Interview with Rabbi Menachem HaCohen on 7 June 1983 (Aronoff 1989: 57). 15. Interview with the late Dr. Joseph Burg (senior statesman of the National Religious Party) who was minister of the interior at the time and requested anonymity during the duration of the term of the government in which he was then serving (Aronoff 1989: 57–58). 16. Interview with Yitzhak Moda’i on 12 January 1983 (Aronoff 1989: 58). 17. Quoted in Aronoff (1989: 60). 18. See for example, Aronoff & Atlas 1998, Kimmerling 2001, Shafir & Peled 2002, Aronoff 2003. 19. Begin succeeded in gaining wide acceptance of the biblical names Judea and Samaria for the West Bank of the Jordan, or what many termed “occupied territories” or simply “the territories.” The wider acceptance of his terminology enhanced the legitimacy of his settlement policies. However, today his successors have accepted the principle of a two-state solution that will require the removal of Israeli settlements—a process begun by Ariel Sharon when he was prime minister. 20. According to Terrence Turner, “the effectiveness of ritual and ceremony as means of bringing about the reordering, or preventing the disordering, of a set of relations is a function of the ritual’s or ceremony’s character as an iconic model of that set of relations” (Turner 1978: 62). 21. Handelman comments that “such rituals were legitimated and validated by a social order which went unquestioned” (1976: 8–9). 22. See, for example, Da Matta 1977. 23. Lisa Wedeen (1999) argues that the spectacles that perpetuated the cult of Assad in Syria generated a politics of public dissimulation that, by forcing people to act as if they revered the leader, led to obedience, complicity, isolation, and constraining public discourse and actions. 24. A phrase coined by Moore and Myerhoff (1977a: 7). 25. See, for example, Abélès (1988); Cohen (1981); Da Matta (1977); Hegland (1983); Adler-Lomnitz, Salazar-Elena, and Adler (2010); Kapferer (1988); Kertzer (1988, 1996); Mach (1993); Verdery (1999); and Vogt and Abel (1977). As we have already noted, there are more studies of this kind in sociology and history. See, for example, Edles (1998), Lane (1981), Cannadine (1983), Wortman 1994 and 2000, Gillis (1994), Berezin (1997), or Wilentz (1985). 26. On this topic see Steinmetz (1999) and Scott (1998).

Chapter 5

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THE POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITY Contested Israeli Nationalisms

S

ince the collapse of the Soviet Union one of the most pervasive conflicts on the world stage is the contestation between ethnicity and stateness. Our convergent approach to the analysis of culture and politics is particularly well suited for the study of the tension between ethnic (including national) principles of identity and state building, and the intractable conflicts that result from it. In this chapter we demonstrate how analytical tools of cultural anthropology contribute to understanding the phenomenon of ethnicity, nationalism, and national identity. We move beyond the still used though increasingly discredited binary distinction between civic and ethnic models of nationalism. We contend that the many successful forms of nationalism—particularly in democratic polities—necessarily combine elements of both. Whereas the attributes of nationalism can be most accurately graphed along a continuum, for the sake of clarity in demonstrating the relationship between various types of nationalism, we introduce an intermediary, mixed category of “ethnic republican nationalism.” It is our third “ideal type.” We first outline our constructivist (also known as constructionist) approach. We then define a set of concepts and outline a model of the relationship between four variables: cultural perceptions of time and place, degrees of religiosity, perceptions of relative personal and collective security, and the three ideal types of nationalism. Finally, we focus on

Notes for this section begin on page 129.

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a case study of Israel that seems to be singularly suited for this kind of analysis due to the intense and complex intertwining of political and symbolic processes in this country.

Introduction: The Constructivist Approach The constructivist (or constructionist) approach is based on the assumption that human sociability and politics are expressed and facilitated through the cultural construction of bonds of collective identity. Collective identity is constructed through symbols, myths, rhetoric, ritual, and the creation of collective memory—discussed in chapter 3. This process takes place through political competition between and among groups that, while pursuing conflicting interests, negotiate their internal and external social boundaries. The outcome of this competition determines the relative social and political centrality or marginality of groups within the social-political unit. They thereby determine the included “us” and the excluded “them.” The making of such distinctions is fundamental to all processes of human cognition and social interaction. William Connolly (1991: 64) suggests: “An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. … Identity requires difference in order to be, and converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own selfcertainty.” The valuation of these differences in which “we” assert our superiority over “them” transforms the cognitive distinction into a normative one. The public assertion of social valuation is an important second stage in the construction of collective identity. It is particularly salient in the formation of national identity. The formation of national identity is a dynamic and fluid culturalpolitical process in which external identifications and “internal” selfdefinitions mutually constitute each other (Brubaker & Cooper 2000). Whereas anthropologists tend to focus on the cultural and political scientists on the political dimension of this process, a combined focus on the reciprocal interactions between the two dimensions is essential to achieve a more comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the phenomenon of collective identity (Cohen 1974; Laitin 1986; see Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, & McDermott 2009 for an excellent, state-of-the-art summary). Anthropologists and sociologists have been also pioneers in studying another duality, between “bottom-up” and “top-down” dynamics of nation building. They have done so by problematizing a complex dynamic of local and “central” articulations of the national (Brubaker

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et al. 2006; Herzfeld 1997). Recently, this emphasis on “microfoundations” has begun shaping the most influential work in comparative politics, including studies on national identity and nation building (Varshney 2002). Collective identities are neither natural nor static. Within certain constraints, they are socially constructed, politically negotiated, and dynamic. Ethnicity is claimed by groups who consider themselves, and are regarded by others, to be culturally distinctive. They share a collective name, tend to stress common descent, and rely frequently on myths of common origin (Appadurai 1981). They share collective historical memories, elements of common culture, association with a homeland, and a sense of solidarity. When cultural difference is assigned social relevance, the distinction is politicized and thereby becomes “ethnic.” Although some scholars consider ethnicity to be primordial or at least perennial, it is neither wholly chosen nor wholly assigned. Anthropologist Thomas H. Eriksen (1993: 57) has astutely observed: “Ethnic identities are neither ascribed nor achieved: they are both. They are wedged between situational selection and imperatives imposed from without.” As Eriksen (1993: 158) concludes, “Identity is elastic and negotiable, but not infinitely flexible.” External imperatives that are perceived as natural or supernaturally ordained become subjective forces of considerable power. We also assume that collective identity can only be meaningfully understood within specific sociopolitical, cultural, and historical contexts. Social identity becomes politically salient and often deliberately politicized when it is threatened by forces of domination and/or assimilation (like colonialism and globalization). The acquisition of ethnic identity is generally associated with the growing sense of self-consciousness linked with so-called modernity. As people deliberately reflect upon their way of life and develop a collective self-understanding of their past usually referred to as a “tradition,” they simultaneously create an abstract sense of community with a presumed shared history. Such constructed or “revitalized” identities can be differentiated from the premodern primordial ethnic groups identified by cultural historian and sociologist Anthony D. Smith (1986, 1991) as ethnie (using the French term). As so-called traditional peoples become integrated into states, they tend to reflect upon and more systematically organize their collective way of life. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) demonstrate how cultural revitalizations often produce the “invented” national traditions that claim contiguity with an imagined past. The Zionist linkage of the modern state of Israel with the biblical Land of Israel exemplifies how new nations claim legitimacy from such historic links.

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Regardless of one’s position on constructivism, it seems to be uncontroversial to claim that as societies become more pluralistic, all previously taken-for-granted definitions of reality (including shared collective identity) become easier to question. The more complex and plural a society is, the easier it becomes for groups to acquire greater consciousness of the differences between their identity and that of others. Transnational migrations, communications, economic and cultural transactions, and social networking tend to blur the boundaries of even national cultures, making collective identities more open to negotiation. This, in turn, generates new processes of ethnic revitalization. Paradoxically, it would appear that in order to save a culture, one must first lose it. Smith (1986: 7) perceptively concludes: “We are probably never so aware of phenomena and objects as when we are about to gain or lose them. Conversely, we never take them so much for granted as when we are assured in their possession.” It is from the past that modern states draw much of their claim to legitimacy. That “past” is, however, constructed according to rules that vary in time and location. Frequently, the process of nation formation exacerbates tensions between ethnic loyalties and attachments of citizenship to the state. Such tensions often become evident in contestation among groups over the definition of the nation. In chapter 8 we compare this phenomenon in three fissured societies: the Netherlands, India, and Israel. Smith (1986: 150) stresses “the inherent instability in the very concept of the nation, which appears to be driven … back and forth between the two poles of ethnie and state which it seeks to subsume and transcend.” Both Ernest Gellner (1983), for whom the modern state is victorious, and Walker Connor (1994), for whom ethnicity triumphs, fail to consider the problematic of this essentially dual attachment.1 Smith (1991: 14) defines a nation as “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.” He distinguishes between two models of nationalism. The civic model is based on the Western examples where the state historically created the nation. It emphasizes territory (homeland), patria (a community of laws and institutions), and citizenship (reciprocal rights and duties).2 The ethnic model is based on the historic process by which many Eastern European states emerged from existing ethnic groups whose members formed national movements. It emphasizes common descent, ethnicity, genealogy, native culture, and tribal myths. Smith (1991: 13) notes “the profound dualism at the heart of every expression of nationalism” because “every nationalism con-

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tains civic and ethnic elements in varying degrees and forms.” While analytically distinguishable, such competing cultural models invariably overlap in the real world, and what emerges are hybrids that evolve over time. As we shall see, different versions of a hybrid form of ethnic republican nationalism have dominated Zionist and Israeli political culture for eighty years. In the past couple of decades it has come under challenge from two ideologically opposite political fronts: a more inclusive liberal version of civic nationalism based on equal individual rights and the more exclusive secular and religious variants of ethnonationalism (Aronoff 2003). Similar competing forms of nationalism constitute salient political divisions in many, if not most, states.

Ideal Types of Nationalism: Ethnic Republican, Ethnonationalist, and Civic Three ideal types of nationalism frame this analysis: ethnic republican, ethnonational, and civic. A political movement espousing a liberal form of ethnic republicanism captured the political center and dominated the pre-state political system of the Jews in Palestine since 1930. Mapai, the major socialist-Zionist party that underwent various splits and mergers over the years, remained the dominant party in a dominant party system for five decades.3 Its version of ethnic republican nationalism evolved over the years and remained hegemonic in Israel until its later political incarnation, the Israel Labor Party, was defeated by Likud in 1977 (Aronoff 1993). A more conservative form of ethnic republican nationalism was the ideological foundation of the political formation created through mergers of center and more nationalist parties in 1973, the Likud. It acquired neither the political nor the ideological dominance previously held by Mapai/Labor in the new competitive party system that emerged after 1977. However, it maintained a leading political position, and its more militantly nationalist ideological version of ethnic republican Zionism articulated by its then leader Menachem Begin was ascendant for the next two decades (Aronoff 1991). Kadima, a centrist party that split from Likud under the leadership of then prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2006 attracted a few key Labor leaders. It occupies the middle ground between Labor and Likud. The party that best represents civic nationalism in Israel is the liberal/left New Movement-Meretz that strongly supports peace with the Palestinians and greater socioeconomic equality, human rights, and religious freedom in Israel. The National Union, combining religious and secular nationalists, carries the banner of ethnonationalism and is strongly supported by the settlers’ movement.

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Key Components of Nationalism: Time, Space, Religion, and Security The two primary components of national identity we examine are the politically relevant conceptualizations of time and space. In particular, we are looking at the contrasting ways Israelis perceive the relationship between the past, present, and future (time) and the differences in their attitudes toward the borders of the state (space). We also investigate two additional factors: the type and extent of religious identification and observance (secular, traditional, orthodox), and relative sense of personal and collective security. Each of the three types of Israeli national identity is defined by a specific combination (syndrome) of the specific “values” of these four variables or components (time, space, religion, and security). Each specific combination (syndrome) constitutes the basis for the construction of a concrete version of national identity. The examination of such syndromes is—in our view—indispensable for more accurate understanding and explanation of how legitimacy and support for a specific form of national identity is generated and sustained within specific subsections of the Israeli society. We claim that differing perceptions of history (time) and the land (borders, space) are attributes of competing models of Jewish and Israeli nationhood that is formed in the context of uncertain and changing state borders.4 We caution the reader that the three ideal types employed in this chapter are heuristic and analytical. They simplify a much more complex reality. The three models should not be reified. Although we associate different political groups with specific orientations to history and borders, there is considerable variation within each group. Individuals within groups can and do operate on different time frames and attribute different meanings to the boundaries of the nation and of the state in changing political contexts and historical circumstances. Time: Linear, Mixed, and Cyclical There are multiple ways of imagining the collective “we” that produce competing models of nationalism in every state. Important aspects of such political-cultural divisions can be understood in terms of divergent temporal and spatial perceptions. Various parties contest myths of origin by proposing competing interpretations. Different aspects of history are selectively forgotten or remembered to legitimize current political actions and economic as well as social policies. The cultural construction of past, the present, and future are framed by political sentiments and ideology, and reveal the link between contested collective memories and competing visions of nationhood.5

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Cultural conceptions of time frame the perceived relationship between past, present, and future. Although individual variation occurs within groups, temporal perceptions tend to vary more significantly across subcultures and cultures than among individuals within their group. Linear notions of time are contrasted with more traditional, religiously inspired, perceptions characterized as archaic or cyclical. Ole J. Thienhaus (1999: 442) distinguishes between the dynamic, phasic biblical Hebrew concept of time and Western concepts of time that are “rooted in Greek philosophy which presumes space is the primary dimension.” Continuity of action is the distinguishing feature of Hebrew verb forms. Thienhaus observes that “Hebrew tenses emphatically do not designate time segments along a line from the past through the future” (1999: 443). The characteristic repetition of phases in classical Hebrew time is similar to the refrains of melody in a fugue. Spatially anchored and measurable Hellenistic perception of time is the basis for our contemporary conception of time in the West, which is generally portrayed as linear, progressive, and/or evolutionary. Cyclical time conceives of events as recurring, repeated creations, or apocalypses. Frequently, they are mythically mediated. The American and French revolutions are considered to constitute major historical, temporal, and political turning points in the West.6 They are viewed as dramatic political expressions of the Enlightenment notion of progress in terms of linear time. As notions of sacred history as expressed in biblical Hebrew time and reinterpreted in Catholic Europe were undermined, creative imaginings of the future and the notion of progress came into play.7 The secular form of Zionism that became dominant during the establishment of the modern state of Israel was profoundly influenced by this revolutionary notion of progress. Don Handelman and Lea Shamgar-Handelman (1997: 115) note that the sequences in linear time connecting “before” and “after” an event facilitate the creation of modern narrative history. Zerubavel (1995: 7) and Aronoff (1989: 137–42) demonstrate that tension between linear and cyclical perceptions of history underlies the construction of Israeli collective memory and has been related to important divisions in Israeli political culture. A third heuristic type, mixed time, combines linear and cyclical elements.8 Linear time is (selectively) historical. The dominant Zionist master narrative connected ancient with modern Israel while conveniently forgetting the 2,000year-old sojourn of the Jews in the Diaspora (Zerubavel 1995). Cyclical time is predominantly mythical. The supporters of the settlers’ movement Gush Emunim believe the Messianic process is underway that

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will ultimately lead to the redemption of the Jewish people and through them the world. Mixed time combines elements of both and predominates in most nationalist discourses. Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s preoccupation with the Holocaust and his tendency to interpret contemporary events in terms framed through this traumatic experience exemplifies the influence of this mixed time frame. Space: Legal Rational Borders, Homeland (Ethnoscape), Religious Fetish The social constructionist approach (contructivism) recognizes that historical, cultural, and political constraints limit the freedom to invent national traditions. For example, early proposals by certain Zionist leaders for alternatives to Palestine as a temporary refuge for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe were roundly rejected. Their followers refused all alternatives to the ancient biblical homeland—Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel).9 Collective memory of attachment to Zion, reinforced by daily prayers, religious liturgy and texts, as well as a growing secular Hebrew literary intellectual movement known as the Haskala (Enlightenment) precluded popular support among Zionists for even a temporary alternative collective shelter, much less for a renewed homeland other than biblical Zion.10 For political leaders to be successful, they must express at least some aspirations and cultural beliefs of those whom they wish to lead. The resonance of the Land as the homeland of the Jews played an essential role in construction of modern Israel.11 The product of the territorialization of historical memory in which the land becomes perceived to be unique and indispensable to the members of a community as an important factor influencing their development, as a witness to their survival, and as the resting place of their ancestors is called an ethnoscape. This occurs when nature becomes historicized and history becomes naturalized through rituals and the creation of poetic spaces and sites of memory. Understanding self-sacrifice and martyrdom for land requires the analysis of core myths and collective memories through which “a sacred and extraordinary quality is invested in specific places, generating powerful feelings of antiquity, reverence, and belonging” (Smith 1999: 16–19). The “choice” of the biblical Israelites by, and their covenant with, the Lord inspired emulation by other peoples who identified themselves as “chosen” (e.g., American and Afrikaner settlers).12 Territory is made sacred through the holy deeds of heroic ancestors and as a result of a quest for liberation and utopia. Several forms of nationalism sought a metaphorical New Jerusalem;13 by contrast, Zionists sought a revitalized Jerusalem.

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Hegemonic Zionism perfectly exemplifies the successful production of an ethnoscape, a territory that becomes a historically constructed homeland for a specific ethnic group. Secular Zionists and religious Zionists construe the meaning of the Land and the return to it differently. The differences in meaning between them and the ultra-Orthodox, on one hand, and Israel’s Arab citizens on the other—both of whom have traditionally been either non-Zionists or anti-Zionist—is even greater. Within each of these four categories are significant differences in understandings of the appropriate geographic borders of the Land and what should constitute the modern state of Israel, of flexibility over the ability or willingness to make compromises regarding these borders, and of the type and intensity of meanings attributed to them. With isolated individual exceptions and one collective (the Druze), the indigenous Arab population of Palestine was vehemently and in many cases violently opposed to the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state. Their sense of place and identification with their land was no less intense than that of the Zionists. Their major dilemma today derives from the tension between their loyalties as citizens to the state—the Jewish identity of which alienates them—and their sense of belonging to the wider Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic worlds that are in varying degrees in conflict with their state.14 Secularism, Traditionalism, Orthodoxy, and Ultraorthodoxy The relationships among cultural conceptions of time, space, and nationalism are defined within a specific symbolic system. They are constructed differently in a secular system than in a religious one. The type of religious identity and observance plays a critical role in how exactly these “cultural objects” and their relationships are set up.15 The biblical narrative of exile of the Jewish people from their ancient homeland and the divinely promised collective redemption through a messianic return to Zion serves as the root metaphor for both the foundational story in traditional Judaism and master narrative of modern political Zionism.16 It is, however, a narrative that divides as much as it unites. Orthodox Jews literally believe it, while secular Zionists interpret it metaphorically as their political myth.17 For the Orthodox, the story and its promise are framed within an eschatological conception of messianic time (a variant of cyclical time), which is either already underway or awaiting divine intervention. For the secular Zionist it is viewed as unfolding in linear time constructed through a highly selective reading of history that glosses two thousand years to make a direct link between biblical and modern Israel.18

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The major division within Orthodox Jewry (for purposes of this chapter) is between Zionist (national religious) and the non-Zionist and anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox (haredim).19 The nationalists believe that the creation of the modern state of Israel is an expression of a divinely inspired process of the ingathering of the exiles as a prelude to redemption. The ultra-Orthodox consider Zionism a blasphemous usurpation of the Lord’s exclusive prerogative, which commits the serious sin of “pushing” the messianic process. Avruch (1998: 151) suggests that for the extreme anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox, the idea of a Jewish state explicitly not ruled by religious law is “anathema, apostasy, and abomination.” Paine (1992: 150–52) concludes that for them, the secular Zionist state is therefore “a profanation and a hindrance to the messianic redemption.” Thus only strict adherences to the Law (halacha) give legitimacy to possession of the Land. Return depends upon all Jews living strictly by the Torah. According to Gershom Scholem (1971: 35), their messianism compels “a life lived in deferment.” Thus, for them, messianic fulfillment takes place in an eternal time perspective in which future, present, and past mutually affect one another, while for the religious Zionists the messianic process has begun in the present. All religious Jews (and many secular Zionists) consider the Land of Israel to be their sacred heritage. Most Zionist Orthodox (as opposed to non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox), led by their ideological (irredentist) vanguard Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), believe that Jewish settlement of the land occupied by Israel during the 1967 war (particularly Judea and Samaria, the heart of the biblical Land) is essential for the successful messianic national redemption.20 According to Paine (1992: 157), Gush Emunim works “to transform the land into the Land, a metaphysical reality … Gush Emunim politicized a fusion of memory and experience.” Most ultra-Orthodox reject Gush Emunim’s determination to conquer time through space (by facilitation of redemption through settlement on the Land) as a form of idolatry not only through usurpation of the divine prerogative, but also by making a religious fetish of the Land. In fact, many ultra-Orthodox living in Israel feel they are in spiritual exile in a state that flaunts Jewish law.21 Yet, there has been a growing convergence in recent years between the national religious Orthodox and previously non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox. Younger generations of Orthodox graduates of the state religious institutions tend to be more religiously observant and more nationalistic than their parents. Among many of the ultra-Orthodox (particularly those born in Israel), nationalism has been developing. The convergence of belief and practice between the younger generations of the two groups has been labeled hardal, combining haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and

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leumi (national). The Ezra youth movement that defines its ideology as ultra-Orthodox–nationalist exemplifies this phenomenon. Aryeh Dayan (2001) notes: “Ezra operates 356 branches, with around 8,000 members and some 700 youth leaders. Most study at the more prestigious schools of the state-religious educational network.” Evidence from recent social surveys indicates that a militant nationalism has developed among them. Yuchtman-Ya’ar and Peres (2000: 122) conclude: “The anti-Zionist struggle has become an antisecular one [for some haredi Jews]. Jewish control of the historical Land of Israel and its Jewish shrines seems, under the terms of our times, consistent with a haredi worldview.” The pendular swing between exile and redemption represents a movement in both time and space. According to Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman (1986: 3–5), it represents a cycle that begins with a move away from the sacred center, its loss, and redemptive return. Ravitzky (1990: 13) suggests that the tension between the State of Israel and such messianic expectations are: “(1) that between the partial, contingent, uncertain historical present and the perfect, absolute, Utopian messianic future; and (2) the internal tensions and even contradictions within the messianic idea itself.” Like in the Balinese experience of “pure simultaneity,” for devout Orthodox Jews, “Then is now, and now then.”22 Paine (1992: 154), summarizing the work of several scholars on Jewish conceptions of temporality, concludes that “the present is prefigured by the past; nothing new can be learned except how to experience that past in the present.” Yet, he also recognizes that even the most devout contemporary Jews operate on both temporal notions of “meanwhileness” and “simultaneity”: “paradigms of modernity and premodernity, respectively.”23 Specific context determines which mode is relevant and therefore operative. For example, while immersed in prayer or religious study, a religious Jew would likely operate on a different time perspective than while working in a physics lab. For both the haredi ultra-Orthodox and the national religious Orthodox Jews, space and time are intertwined, mandating action. Yet the actions mandated, according to the interpretations of their rabbis, are radically different. Kopelowitz and Diamond (1998) explain how these theological differences translate into different policies regarding borders. In Israeli discourse the terms dati (religious) and chiloni (secular) force Jews into dichotomous categories, an opposition that is sociologically misleading and politically explosive. The perpetuation of this dichotomization contributes to a kulturkampf (cultural war) between the two.24 The term mesorti (traditional) is an important intermediary category between the two.25 Cohen and Susser (2000) suggest that the success of the embattled and crumbling consociational agreements be-

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tween the state and religious organizations depends upon the traditionalists. Traditionalists choose to selectively observe some, but not all “commandments” ascribed to orthodox Jewish practice. For example, one may attend the synagogue on the sabbath and then play soccer afterwards. Yadgar (2011) argues that they mediate between the “religious-secular” dichotomy, suggesting a model of modernity that does not result in secularization of all spheres of life. Secular, traditional, and religious Israeli Jews tend to have different temporal and spatial perceptions and support different forms of nationalism. The pre-state struggle between the choices of the designation “Hebrew” or “Jew” and the contemporary contestation between “Israeli” and “Jew” as the central identifier of collective identity reflect this division.26 Political Movements and Parties The socialist Zionists who founded Mapai in 1930 and the parties that merged with it to form the Israel Labor Party in 1968 secularized the eschatological myth of exile and redemption, creating an “ethnoscape,” legitimated by what Liebman and Don-Yehiya (1983, 1984b) defined as a civil religion. The Labor Party’s position regarding the borders of the state, while fluctuating over the years in response to the vagaries of leadership and factional competition, tended to be pragmatic, focusing primarily on security requirements in determining borders during years it dominated the political system (approximately 1935–1977). The Likud Party leader Menachem Begin attempted to fill the void between the biblical past and the Zionist present when he came to power in 1977. Begin added a patina of religious symbolism, rhetoric, and rite to the secular, martial, nationalistic version of Zionism of his ideological mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, which had become codified in the Herut Party (1948) dogma and practice, and was reflected in the platform of Likud when Herut and other parties merged in 1973 (Aronoff 1989: 129). Begin’s less secular version of a Zionist homeland was based on the biblical heritage that especially appealed to traditional (mesorti) Jews, mainly of Middle Eastern background, for whom it was a form of national identity through which they could gain acceptance without having to conform to Labor’s secular Zionism.27 Although Begin didn’t make a biblical claim on Lebanese territory during the war, in his letter to President Ronald Reagan (2 August 1982), he associated Arafat with Hitler and Beirut with Berlin. Begin’s obsession with the Holocaust (in which he lost his family) shaped his perceptions of present and future and influenced his policies. His views represent a vivid example of “mixed time frame” and “ethnic republicanism.” In Begin’s view, the

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contested Golan Heights was also within the Land of Israel (Numbers 34) as part of Jewish Galilee from Hasmonian times until the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Yet for Begin the biblical and historical claims to the Golan were less significant than was the Golan’s strategic importance. However, there is a difference between the positions of Likud and Labor. For Labor, security was the primary consideration and politics was secondary. Most of the settlements on the Golan—unlike those on the West Bank and Gaza—were affiliated with Labor. For Begin, security and history were inseparably intertwined on the Golan as well as the West Bank. The first government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu (1996–1999) in which Ariel Sharon was foreign minister reportedly secretly communicated a willingness to make territorial concessions on the Golan. Yet as the Likud Party leader in his campaign for prime minister (2009), Netanyahu made the rejection of withdrawal from the Golan Heights a major issue in his attacks on the Barak Labor government.28 After Sharon was elected prime minister, he took no initiative to conclude an agreement with Syria based on relinquishing the Golan. Former Likud defense minister and Knesset member Moshe Arens suggested that withdrawal from the Golan Heights would signal the end of Zionism: “The danger [of withdrawal] goes to the very future of Israel. It’s a moral threat” (Hirschberg 2000). Sharon has made similar statements. This is distinctly different from Labor’s more pragmatic position—which is all the more striking, because many of the Jewish settlements on the Golan are affiliated with the Labor Party. Religiously traditional, ethnic republican nationalists like Begin and secular ones like Sharon and Arens occupy intermediary positions between the predominantly religious ethnonationalists and the overwhelmingly secular civic nationalists. Ethnic republicans tend to operate most consistently on a mixed cyclical and linear time frame. Preoccupation with the past in understanding the present and a tendency to project the past, history treated as myth, into an understanding of the future is characteristic of the ethnic republican orientation.29 While making maximal territorial claims, when faced with sufficient domestic and international pressures, they reluctantly make compromises as exemplified by the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Yael Aronoff (2000, 2009) explains why an even more militant nationalist like Begin’s successor as premier, Yitzhak Shamir, pragmatically negotiated with surrogate representatives of the PLO, although he did not fundamentally alter his positions regarding territorial claims. After Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001, he insisted that “time is on our side. … There is no reason to hurry. … time is not working against us and therefore it is

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important to achieve solutions that will take place across a lengthy period.” Nevertheless Sharon initiated the unilateral evacuation of all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank in August 2005 based on a pragmatic calculation of demographic factors (the Palestinian birthrate constituting one of the highest in the world) that were working against Israel in the long run.30 Politically liberal Israelis (who are predominantly secular) tend to operate primarily on linear historical time and are the most willing to treat the borders of the state pragmatically, as something that may be exchanged for peace, which they view in terms of national security. During his brief tenure as prime minister, Ehud Barak demonstrated a clearly linear time orientation by repeatedly stressing the notion of a critical “window of opportunity” for peace. “We are required to decide: Do we await the future passively with our eyes shut [a stance he attributed to the previous Netanyahu government], or do we take an active stance vis-à-vis the reality and try to modify it to our advantage.”31 As a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force and his country’s most decorated soldier, Barak (like his mentor Yitzhak Rabin) was personally invested in the national security approach to borders.32 Consequences of Border Changes Changes in the territorial boundaries of a state create conditions in which basic assumptions upon which the legitimacy of the political system is based can be called into question. Israel has undergone several border changes—most dramatically following the 1967 war. The Sinai Peninsula, recaptured by Israel in 1967 (it had been previously occupied in 1956), was returned in the peace agreement with Egypt. Again, following the Camp David Accords and the interim agreement with the Palestinian Authority, the peace treaty with Jordan, and the unilateral evacuation of all settlements in the Gaza Strip and four on the northern West Bank, additional changes in Israel’s borders were made. A final settlement with the Palestinians and a peace treaty with Syria would result in even more significant and emotionally charged border changes. Acceptance or anticipation of these changes—reflected in the far-reaching concessions offered by Ehud Barak at Camp David and at the January 2001 Taba negotiations—called into question basic cultural assumptions, which led to an incipient crisis of political legitimacy for the Labor government.33 Uncertainties regarding the borders of the homeland, as Joel Migdal (1996: 196) suggests, open up a “Pandora’s box” questioning the outermost structure and inner essence of society: “When state boundaries are in flux, the reach of institutions—their space—is questioned, under-

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mining their efficacy. It is at this point that we see severe conflicts over what the new institutions will be.”34 Similarly, Ruth Gavison (1999a: 45–46) notes: “The reopening of the questions of borders, together with the long occupation, has legitimated the reopening of the original challenge of the very idea of a Jewish state and its legitimacy.” As David C. Rapoport (1996) observed: “New state boundaries create enormous uncertainties about the future of groups, uncertainties which can be cruelly aggravated if linked to memories of injustices and atrocities and to fears of how groups will exploit their new strength or protect new vulnerabilities.” In such uncertain conditions competing models of nationhood vie to provide meaning and the psychic need for certainty. In Israel, these models give very different emphasis to the state’s Jewish/religious/ethnic and democratic/secular components exemplified in the scholarly and public debate over the question of whether Israel constitutes an “ethnic democracy,” i.e., one that privileges one ethnic group over others.35 In sum, civic nationalism is associated with a pragmatic approach to borders. Republican nationalism relates to borders more romantically as a homeland or an ethnoscape. Ethnic nationalism is identified with mystical notions, which in the Israeli case are often messianic. Perceptions of Personal and Collective Security: Predispositions and Context In comparative analyses in different cultures (including Israel) a strong sense of security has been shown to positively correlate with political tolerance (Shamir and Sullivan 1983). Underlying social-psychological attributes, such as a sense of personal security, as well as more contextually variable perceptions of collective security, are related to citizens’ ideological sentiments and orientations. Wilson Carey McWilliams (1995) defined ideological temperament, as distinct from more codified ideological doctrines, as “dispositions of the soul.” For example, relatively high tolerance of ambiguity is a key attribute of the liberal temperament (Aronoff 1999a: 37–53). The extent to which the non-Jewish “outsider” is perceived to be hostile directly correlates with the type and degree of militancy of Israeli nationalism. Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya (1983) noted the different perceptions of anti-Semitism among the different variants of Israeli civil religion that roughly correspond to the typology of types of nationalism analyzed in this chapter. They found that due to the stress on Jewish isolation and Gentile hostility in Menachem Begin’s version of ethnic republicanism (which they termed the New Civil Religion), it was more ethnocentric than the more inclusive Labor version. The increasingly important role of the

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Holocaust in Begin’s interpretation of the Zionist narrative and such expressions as “Esau hates Jacob” and “a people that dwells alone”— expressions of traditional Jewish sensitivity to anti-Semitism and sense of isolation—became more prevalent as the discourse became more nationalistic. The biblical prophecy of Balaam, “Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations” (Numbers 23:9) was interpreted by liberal Rabbi Menachem Ha Cohen (who represented the Labor Party in the Knesset) as a curse that he claimed had been transformed by the rabbis of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful)—the settlers movement—into a blessing (Aronoff 1991: 135). The latter interpretation stresses the singularity of the Jewish people and the isolation of Israel. Citizens who feel personally more secure and who are confident about the security of the state tend to support the more liberal, inclusive form of civic nationalism. The most insecure members of society and the groups with which they affiliate—who sometimes border on paranoia—tend to be ethnonationalists. Even paranoids can have real enemies, and clearly Israel does not lack enemies. Aronoff (1991: 137) argues that “the more extreme form of national paranoia can become a self-fulfilling prophecy by producing the results it most fears.” In debates on national security, those who take the middle ground tend to associate with ethnic republicanism. Clearly the objective security situation directly influences one’s perception of relative security and insecurity, and consequently one’s choice of party articulates different policies based on divergent versions of nationalism. Evidence of this can be seen in public opinion polls and in the results of elections. At times of high levels of violence the nationalistic Likud tends to gain, and in times of greater calm Labor, with its more moderate ethnic republicanism that contains more elements of civic nationalism, tends to fare better at the polls. The most secure Israelis tend to support Meretz, the party most representative of civic nationalism, whereas the least secure are tied to the parties identified with ethnic nationalism like the National Union.

Conclusion In Israel, the tension created by the dual attachment to ethnicity (including national identity) and state is manifest and seeks resolution through competing civic, ethnic republican, and ethnonationalist forms of collective identity. Each of these three forms of Israeli national identity is associated with different configurations of the four variables we

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introduced in this chapter. Table 5.1 summarizes the relationship between the four variables and the three types of nationalism. The temporal perspective most closely associated with civic nationalism is linear and is grounded in selective narrative history. Civic nationalists emphasize the liberal democratic over the Jewish character of the state. Israeli ethnonationalism is associated with mystical notions of cyclical messianic time, and those who support it privilege the Jewish character of Israel over a secular democratic identity. The intermediary mixed time perspective combines linear historicity and cyclical mythology. Its adherents oscillate between the two, favoring one over the other in different contexts. Those Israelis who generally operate on the mixed time perspective tend to support ethnic republicanism. Different ideological versions of ethnic republican Zionism have been politically ascendant at different stages of Israeli history and have offered different compromises in an effort to balance the tension between Israel as a democratic and a Jewish state. The more liberal version articulated by Labor’s David Ben Gurion leaned in the direction of civic nationalism. Under the leadership of Likud’s Menachem Begin, the “New Zionist” version of republican nationalism tilted more toward ethnonationalism. While the Land of Israel constitutes an ethnoscape, an emotive poetic space, and a site of salient collective memory for most Jews and all Zionists, conflicting interpretations of its meaning divide them. Supporters of civic nationalism such as the Meretz Party tend to be the most pragmatic about the borders of the state, seeing them primarily in rational terms. Therefore, they are the most willing to bargain territory for peace with Israel’s neighbors. Their linear sense of history leads them to perceive an urgency to find a political compromise while it is still possible to do so. They conclude that time is running out for such compromises as was dramatically expressed by former prime minister Barak: “I compared our government to the people listening to the orchestra on the Titanic. We are sailing into an iceberg” (Aronoff 2009: Table 5.1. Types of nationalism: Time, space, religion, and security Factors/ variables

Types of nationalism Civic

Ethnic Republican

Ethnonationalist

Time

Linear/historical

Mixed

Cyclical/ mythical

Space

Borders

Ethnoscape (homeland)

Fetish

Religiosity

Secular

Traditional

Religious

Security

Secure

Secure/insecure

Insecure

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166). Adherents of the more conservative version of ethnic republicanism, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are much more convinced that time is on Israel’s side. However, as the evacuation of the Sinai by former prime minister Begin (as a condition for peace with Egypt) and former prime minister Sharon’s evacuation of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip indicate, demographic factors and outside political pressures can bring about policy changes. The demographic factor Sharon considered was the higher birth rate among Palestinians that meant they would become a majority if Israel incorporated more Palestinian territory. Politicians such as Begin and Sharon occupy a middle position in which the historic heritage of the ethnoscape is primary, but demonstrate greater flexibility than the ethnonationalists, for whom the biblical Land (Eretz Yisrael) is a religious fetish and therefore indivisible. They are republican nationalists who have compromised under pressure and withdrawn from previous borders. By contrast, the settler-supported National Union militantly opposes such compromise. As ethnonationalists who more than the ethnic republicans believe that time is on Israel’s side, many settlers are convinced that their actions constitute a part of a divinely ordained plan. The overwhelming majority of supporters of civic nationalism are secular. Among the minority of religious supporters of this liberal form of nationalism, many are intellectuals. Most traditional Jews (including the majority of those who emigrated from Arab lands) are ethnic republicans. Orthodox Jews are divided between those for whom Israel is exile as long as it is not based on Jewish law (halacha), and for whom messianic redemption is deferred until the deeds of pious Jews bring it about in the future; and those for whom settlement of the Land by Jews is imperative for the continuation of the redemptive process that they believe is underway. The latter (and increasing numbers of the former) are overwhelmingly ethnonationalist. For example, Gush Emunim’s conviction that time can be conquered through space makes territorial compromise extremely difficult, if not impossible, in the case of the most militant elements, since they believe that settlement of Jews in the biblical heartland (the Land) establishes the territory of the messianic kingdom and facilitates redemption. The relationship between temporal and spatial perspectives and competing visions of nationhood can be summarized as follows: The messianically oriented nationalists with the strongest religious identification with the Land as a sacred ethnoscape are ethnonationalists. Their religious messianism is linked to more xenophobic nationalism. Those most clearly identified with historic linear time have more pragmatic and flexible attitudes toward the boundaries of the state and are

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most supportive of civic (more liberal) forms of nationalism. The middle position of ethnic republicanism, identified with individuals and groups who espouse mixed temporal and spatial perceptions (oscillating between the two in different contexts) have historically constituted the dominant majority. This traditionally dominant central position is challenged by the competing alternatives, which it, in turn, critiques. Given the geopolitical position of the Jewish state in the heart of the predominantly Arab Muslim Middle East and the fact that Israel has engaged in sustained conflict with its neighbors (multiple wars and ongoing acts of terrorism), all Israelis are concerned with security. However, they differ profoundly over the most immediate threat to the state, the possibility of achieving peace, and the manner and price worth paying to achieve it. Supporters of civic nationalism believe in the possibility of peace with the Palestinians and Syria. They tend to believe the continued occupation of the West Bank is a greater threat to Israeli democracy than the risk of creating a Palestinian state is to their security. They support the policy of land for peace as the best means of achieving security and therefore strongly support the creation of a Palestinian state. Supporters of ethnonationalism do not believe peace is possible with either the Palestinians or Syria and do not trust the treaties with Egypt and Jordan. They perceive the military threat (including terrorism) as an immediate existential threat. Supporters of ethnic republican forms of nationalism hold intermediary positions on security. They are skeptical about the possibility of achieving peace, but do not think it impossible. They are unwilling to pay as high a price in territory as the civic nationalists. They are more concerned with the threat posed by Iran than by either the Palestinians or Syria. The confrontation over defining the national “we” is at the heart of many of the current political struggles taking place in the world today. Quite a few of them seem to be intractable and hardly explainable in terms of “pure” political science. We hope that our analysis of contested Israeli nationhood that is informed by anthropological sensitivities and concepts sheds some new light on the problem as it shows that often the intractability results from complex intertwining of political and cultural factors. The search for effective solutions must therefore address both sides of the issue. It is not just politics; it is also culture. Analyses in this chapter are based on fieldwork that combined elements of interpretive and postmodern ethnography. The mosaic-like portrayal of complex realities, the focus on the socially constructed, contested, and contingent nature of collective identity are influenced by the postmodern trend in anthropology.

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Notes 1. See Benedict Anderson (1983) who traces the relationship between the development of print capitalism, vernacular languages, and changing conceptions of time in modern nationalism. 2. Kohn (1951: 329–30 and 574) introduces almost an identical distinction. For a recent appraisal of the state of debate on the civic and ethnic nationalism, see Dogan (1997). 3. See Medding (1972) and Aronoff (1993). 4. Studies of space and place in Israeli discourse include Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu (1997), Itzchak Galnoor (1995), Baruch Kimmerling (1989), and Oren Yiftachel (2006). See also W. Davis (1982). David C. Rapoport (1996) analyzes “The Importance of Space in Violent Ethno-Religious Strife.” 5. On time see Samuel L. Macey (1991), Henry J. Rutz (1992), and Eviatar Zerubavel (1981, 1985, 1991). For analyses of collective memory, contested histories, and myth in Israel see Gulie Ne’eman Arad (1995), Maoz Azaryahu (1995, 1996, 1999), Nachman Ben-Yehuda (1995, 1999), Nurith Gertz (1988, 1998), Laurence Silberstein (1991), Zeev Sternhell (1988), Alex Weingrod (1997), Robert Wistrich and David Ohana (1995), and Yael Zerubavel (1995). 6. The radical break with the past was symbolically expressed by the abolition of the Christian calendar (which reflected deliberate breaks with earlier Hebrew and Greco-Roman calendars) and the inauguration of a new world era by the French National Convention in 1793. 7. Jozsef Borocz (1999) critically evaluates the legacy for social theory of the notion of progress as a secularized teleological component the Enlightenment inherited from the pre-Cartesian religious view of the world. 8. The link between a human being’s conception of what it is to be a person and his or her conception of the structure of history has been analyzed by Clifford Geertz (1973: 389). 9. Hereafter we use the term the Land (with a capital L) for the Land of Israel—synonymous with the “Holy Land” used more commonly by Christians. 10. Although, as Kevin Avruch (1998: 150) notes, “Herzl himself (after the Kishenev pogroms) accepted the idea of Uganda briefly and this indicates better than anything else the radical change in religious Zionism—so did the leaders of Mizrachi, in 1903!” It should be kept in mind that the Zionists were in the minority and that the masses of Jews in Eastern Europe chose to immigrate to the West, especially to the United States. 11. Martin Marty (1997) discusses in chapter 9 the importance of constructions of space and place in the American cultural imagination. 12. Steven Grosby (1993) argues that this covenant may have been the essential factor in the constitution of the very images of the land and the people in the nation of ancient Israel. P. J. Taylor (1985: 128) (cited by Itzhak Galnoor [1995:13]) notes, “There may well be only one deity, but he or she has certainly been generous in designating ‘chosen people’.” 13. David Gutterman’s 2005 analysis of prophetic politics in the United States reveals the implications of imagining America as a “promised land” and a “wilderness” derived from the Exodus narrative. 14. A discussion of the Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel is beyond the scope of the chapter’s limitations of space. For an excellent review essay of six recent books on the subject see Jonathan Mendilow (2012).

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15. For example, Ephraim Yuchtman-Ya’ar and Yochanon Peres (2000: 123) suggest that religiosity has a perceptible effect on democratic commitment as well as attitudes toward nationalism. 16. Sherry Ortner (1973) defines root metaphors as symbols with elaborating power— sources for conceptualizing the world. For Zionists it is also a key scenario, i.e., a guide for social action. 17. See Christopher G. Flood (1996) on myth and Henry Tudor (1972) on political myth. We employ here an anthropological understanding of the concept (see chapter 3), which attributes no truth value and has no derogatory connotation. There were also very pragmatic motivations, not the least of which was the need to provide a refuge from the persecution of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. 18. See Israel Bartal (1997, 2000) and Yael Zerubavel (1995) for analyses of this selective use of history in the Zionist master narrative. 19. Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya (1984a) distinguish between those who affirm modernity (modern Orthodox) and those who reject modernity (neotraditionalists). Most modernists in Israel are Zionist while most neo-traditionalists are non-Zionists. A minority of the latter are anti-Zionist. Menachem Friedman (1990) distinguishes between conservative and innovative fundamentalism. His terms are virtually synonymous with Liebman and Don-Yehiya’s categories of neo-traditionalist and modern Orthodox. There are divisions with both camps. 20. Gideon Aran (1990), Myron J. Aronoff (1984), Kevin Avruch (1998), and Ian Lustick (1988). 21. Aviezer Ravitzky (1989: 89) asks and answers the following question: “Who is a haredi? Whoever views and experiences life in the Jewish state in Eretz Israel as exile—the exile of Israel in the Holy Land.” 22. Geertz (1973: 391), Heilman (1984: 64). 23. See Robert Paine (1992) notes 14 and 16. 24. Baruch Kimmerling (1998) and Ilan Peleg (1998, 2008). 25. Yuchtman-Ya’ar and Peres (2000: 121) correctly state that “Jewish religiosity is a continuum and not three or four sharply distinct levels.” These categories, like the others used, are purely analytical distinctions made to reduce complex reality sufficiently to examine key relationships between variables. For reasons of clarity of presentation as well as to emphasize the point that individuals and groups oscillate between them in different contexts, I have chosen to present categories rather than continua. The most original and comprehensive analysis of the traditional Jew in Israel is Yadgar 2011. 26. Nurith Gertz (1998) explores this theme in Israeli cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. 27. Arnold Lewis (1984) analyzes Begin’s appeal to mizrachim in depth. Whereas the movement led by Jabotinsky claimed both sides of the Jordan River, only the claim to its West Bank was made by the party led by his self-proclaimed successor, Begin, after the June 1967 war. No less significant is the fact that when the government led by Begin launched the war in Lebanon in June 1982, it declared that it had no territorial claims. It could have claimed southern Lebanon as part of the historic Eretz Yisrael that was assigned to the tribe of Asher in Joshua 19:28. Adam Garfinkle (1998) notes the Palestine Jewish Colonization Society and early Zionist settlers purchased and worked land on the Golan Heights before 1920. 28. Isabel Kershner (2000: 24) quotes a “senior Washington source” who claims that Assad had “elicited from Netanyahu a commitment on a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, almost to the June 4, 1967 lines—though in the end the Israeli prime minister failed to come through with the maps.” 29. Yael Aronoff (2000, 2001, 2009, forthcoming), in explaining their shift from hawkish to more dovish positions, argues that Yitzhak Rabin was primarily focused on

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30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

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the present while his old party rival and successor Shimon Peres is much more future oriented. In response to the question posed by Leslie Susser (2001: 26), “Do you share the view Sharon has expressed that time is on Israel’s side, and there is no rush to agreements?” Peres replied: “No. It’s like having a sickness and saying time will heal it. You need doctors, medicine, and operations. You also need to understand the time we live in and the future.” Each eventually accepted the necessity of recognizing the PLO, but for different reasons. See also Myron J. Aronoff (1993). Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom, Ariel Sharon: A Life (2006), chapter 58. Ari Shavit’s (2000) lengthy, in-depth interview of Barak is most revealing on this point. Gideon Levy (2001), on Barak’s time perspective, concludes: “As in the past, time is only working against us. What was possible to achieve only a year or two ago appears now, after the second Intifada and Israel’s power-driven responses, after the hate for Israel that they ignited, to be much harder to achieve.” The three-hour interview of Barak on 28 June 2004 Yael Aronoff and Myron J. Aronoff conducted amply confirmed this point (Aronoff 2009). For an interesting debate between scholars of Israel on the time factor see the debate between Efraim Inbar (2008) and Ian S. Lustick (2008). Asher Cohen and Bernard Susser (2000: 38). See also Joel Migdal (2001, 2006) and Myron J. Aronoff (1999, 2000). “In the prevailing existential situation in Israel, its geopolitical borders play an important role, in the perception of self and for the mechanisms of internalization, externalization, and displacement,” Erel Shalit (1987: 36). Dov Waxman (2006) analyzes the relationship between Israeli identity and foreign policy. For discussions of ethnic democracy see: Alan Dowty (1998, 1999); Ruth Gavison (1999a, 1999b); As’ad Ghanem, Nadim Rouhana and Oren Yiftachel (1998); Ezra Kopelowitz (1999); Yoav Peled (1992); Yoav Peled and Doron Navot (2005); Ilan Peleg (1998, 2008); and Sammy Smooha (1990, 1997).

Chapter 6

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DEMOCRATIZATION IN DEEPLY DIVIDED SOCIETIES The Netherlands, India, and Israel

I

n this chapter we demonstrate the added value of our convergent approach in the analysis of the reciprocal relations between the political and the cultural dimensions of democratization in three deeply divided societies over a period of six decades. Although the selected political systems are routinely classified as “democratic,” closer inspection reveals that their democratic architectures are in a process of evolution in which political and cultural factors interact with each other in an often-surprising fashion. We trace the evolving patterns of conciliation and control among various sectors and political actors over several decades. In our analysis we emphasize the reciprocal relationship between changes in the political system that are due largely to the increased political power of previously marginal groups and changing cultural forms of legitimation influenced by the contest among various visions of national identity. Most of the literature on democratization deals with political and economic changes and often with their interdependence (see, for example, Acemoglu & Robinson 2006; Boix & Stokes 2003; Haggard & Kaufman 1995; Przeworski 1991; Przeworski et al., 2000). Sometimes, scholars engage in a systematic examination of the relationship between social and political factors (Linz & Stepan 1996; Tilly 2007). Much less attention has been given to the local/regional, cultural, social, and administrative dimensions of regime transformations. Yet we are not alone in sug-

Notes for this section begin on page 168.

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gesting that particularly the cultural dimension of regime transitions/ transformations deserves more scholarly attention than it has hitherto received. Bermeo has pointed out that one of the shortcomings of the existing studies on regime transitions was the insufficient attention given by analysts to political learning: “If O’Donnell and Schmitter are correct in asserting that the transitions to democracy are profoundly affected by the values and decisions of political leaders, we have to give more attention to how these values and decisions themselves are shaped” (1990: 373). Polish political scientist Wojciech Lamentowicz repeats this postulate: “For a regime breakthrough, the most important are changes in the broadly defined culture, values, domains of thinking” (1991). In general, we agree with Elizabeth Perry’s observation, “By providing ‘equal time’ for cultural practice and social structure, refusing to elevate either of them to the level of an ‘independent variable,’ the neoculturalist perspective strives for a comprehensive understanding of political change” (1994: 5). Moreover, the prolonged processes of democratization we focus on allow us to test Swidler’s (1986) and Goldstone’s postulate: “the role of culture may be quite different in particular concrete historical settings” (Goldstone 1991: 446). For Goldstone, “Cultural frameworks act with particular power at the times when states are rebuilt or revised in times of state breakdown or crisis. A more complete theory of culture … must recognize that cultural dynamics vary over time, becoming more fluid and more creative at some times, more rigid and more limiting at others” (1991: 447). Thus, following Swidler and Goldstone, we assume that the causal efficacy of cultural (or semiotic) practices as independent variables varies: it is higher during periods of change and lower during periods of stability. In what follows we suggest that the study of democratization can be considerably improved if it focuses explicitly on the interaction of political and cultural factors. Additionally, we do not treat culture merely as a syndrome of attitudes (as in “classical” political culture approaches); we are equally if not more interested in culture construed as a field of discourses (see chapter 2 for the exposition of our approach). To test our ideas we examine three cases where democracy is being built in deeply fissured societies.

Democratizations in Deeply Divided Societies: An Introduction Democratizations are protracted, dynamic, and rarely unidirectional processes. Framed through myriad cultural prisms, their utopian goals

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are never fully achieved, nor ever wholly attainable. In the classic ancient Athenian model of democracy, those endowed with the benefits of citizenship and entitled to full participation in the polity’s governance were a distinct minority. In contemporary democracies, the universality formally attributed to the notion of citizenship is often flawed by discrimination of varying subtlety and degrees against minorities, sometimes resulting in their virtual second-class status. But fissures do not merely separate majorities from minorities; they can also demarcate subsets within each category based on a wide range of criteria. For example, divisions within categories and crosscutting links between the categories discussed below: Israelis are divided between a Jewish majority and an Arab minority. These categories are in turn subdivided by ethnicity (e.g., Jews of European or Middle Eastern background), religion (Jewish, Muslim, or Christian), religious orientation (secular, religious, or fundamentalist/orthodox), class, and political affiliation. In some contexts the subdivisions may cut across the majority-minority divide and other subdivisions. Criteria for politically salient divisions include class, ethnicity, ideology, gender, caste, race, region, religion–religious/secular and inter-/ intrareligious (liberal/fundamentalist), language, generation, residence (rural/urban), status (civilian/military), power (elite/mass), and responses to external forces (traditional/modern, global/local). These fissures vary considerably in depth and intensity, and therefore in their destabilizing effect on the societies and political systems in which the contestation takes place. Social scientists unanimously agree that deep and extensive fissures within society present a serious challenge for developing a stable and viable democracy. One reason for this is that such divisions tend to engender distrust, especially when there is a disparity in power between the segments of the society. Since the end of the Cold War, the most prominent political fissures in our globalizing world revolve around issues of collective identity—often expressed through volatile combinations of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism—which present special problems for the consolidation of stable democracy. Theoretically, two pure methods of building democracy in fissured societies can be attempted. One aims at accommodation, the other emphasizes control. Furthermore, each of them can be constructed via political or cultural mechanisms. The cultural approach adopted in this book prompts us to examine whether political democratization must be preceded and/or accompanied by the acceptance by a large sector of the society of specific, “prodemocratic” cultural scripts designed to regulate public and political life. It is important to determine how these cultural scripts come to be accepted. Thus, we analyze scholarly mod-

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els of accommodation and control in order to assess different arrangements for peacefully reconciling conflicting identities and interests. Different political and cultural paths leading to varying forms of democratic practice are examined to determine arrangements that facilitate trust, which is essential for democratic governance (Fukuyama 1995; Putnam 1993; Rothstein 2000; Sztompka 1999; Warren 1999). Tolerance of diversity and the role of civility are analyzed in terms of competing forms of nationalism. How do fissures affect, and are in turn affected by, processes of democratization? At what level are they particularly salient? In exploration of these questions we compare selected aspects of the democratic experiences of the Netherlands, Israel, and India.

Democratic Prospects in Fissured Societies Ian Lustick (1997: 89) observed, “Few research programs in comparative politics have concentrated as much sustained effort on as distinct an array of questions as that centered on how democracy can stably operate in culturally plural, fragmented, or deeply divided societies.” For democracy to work, such divisions must be accommodated and/or controlled through cultural and/or political mechanisms. Scholars used to focus primarily, and frequently exclusively, on a single dimension. Anthropologists would study either cultural mechanisms of accommodation designed to achieve consensus or mechanisms of cultural control defined by notions of hegemony (obviously some of them look at means of politically coercive domination, but their disciplinary predilection is to study cultural mechanisms). Political scientists tend to focus more on political mechanisms of accommodation or control, often relying in their work on formal models inspired by microeconomic analyses. Political accommodation, both as political practice and a theoretical approach, is emphasized in the model of consensual politics associated with the pluralist paradigm that dominated American political science in the 1950s and 1960s and the consociational approach based on elite arrangements in the Netherlands (among other places). By contrast, the more coercive types of minority control in deeply divided societies, such as South Africa in the apartheid era, have been analyzed in terms of a theory of social and cultural pluralism dramatically different from the pluralist paradigm of American political science. The former emphasizes coercion much more than the latter. It is unfortunately confusing that both utilize the same term. For quite a while, pluralism was the most influential theoretical model used in the analysis of democratization in fissured societies. It

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was an expression of the behavioral approach that dominated American political science after World War II. Two major pluralist assumptions summarized by Richard Merelman (2003: 18) and pertinent to our analysis are “that political power is distributed in multiple, competing centers of power” and that “political leaders are tolerant coalition-builders.” The cultural model in which the politics of pluralism is thought to operate is one in which minority groups assimilate into the dominant culture in order to achieve social integration and political influence. Over time, however, this American “melting pot” metaphor of the dominant pluralist discourse was transformed into a “pressure cooker” in Israel. After the decline of pluralism as a legitimating discourse in both the United States and Israel and the emergence of identity politics, the melting pot model has given way to a multicultural paradigm, which has become dominant for example in the Netherlands during the past two decades although currently under challenge (see below). As indicated earlier, we want to emphasize that it is essential to analyze the interaction of cultural and political mechanisms in generating various combinations of accommodation and control. Rather than treating “political” and “cultural” mechanisms of accommodation and control as mutually exclusive alternatives, we think they need to be studied in combination to provide a more accurate account of both the changing relations among various groups in the fissured societies and the emergence of new fissures during various stages of democratization. Our study is designed to see how such combinations work, how they evolve, and at which levels of society and polity they are most salient. Table 6.1. Cultural and political forms of accommodation and control in fissured societies Political

Cultural

Control (Extreme case: coercion)

1. (Majoritarian) domination

3. Hegemony

Accommodation

2. Consociationalism

4. Consensus (acceptance of a legitimating discourse)

(Majoritarian) Domination The extreme forms of political control are, by definition, undemocratic. We do not deal with them here, but we want to introduce a theory of social and cultural pluralism that provides tools for analyzing control

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in deeply fissured societies in nondemocratic polities. It builds on J. S. Furnivall’s studies of colonial Burma and Java. He coined the term (culturally) plural society to characterize sharply fissured societies artificially created and held together by colonial power largely through coercion. This theory has been applied to societies characterized by persistent, sharply defined cultural cleavages within society based on race, ethnicity, and/or religion, e.g., Jamaica and Grenada, British Guiana, and South Africa.1 Political domination (frequently coercive) and economic interdependence are the mutually reinforcing bases of integration in societies lacking a minimally shared political culture. When dominance is by a minority segment, democratic forms and practice are even more severely limited. As the case of South Africa dramatically illustrates, however, even an extreme example of such a regime is capable of undergoing relatively peaceful transitions to more democratic forms. The majoritarian model is identified with the Anglo-American (Westminster) democracy. It is a system of free and fair electoral competition between competing elite-led political parties. Elections produce a governing party (or parties) and a loyal opposition. The major parties alternate in office. Unlike consociationalism, the majoritarian paradigm is based on an assumption that political elites will not always agree to cooperate. As such, majoritarianism contends that institutions need to be created to ensure moderation. “Political institutions found commonly in a majoritarian model include a unitary government, singlemember district electoral systems, and alternating opposition rule over time” (Arsenault 2009: 41).

Consociationalism (Political Accommodation) Although pluralism was most influential in the study of American politics, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, among others, applied the paradigm also in their influential comparative studies. This prompted Arend Lijphart (1969)) to formulate the model of consociational democracy, as he needed to refine pluralism in order to explain the “deviant cases” of fragmented but stable democracies in a few Western European states. Scholars working within this approach—an “incipient school” (Daalder 1974: 97)—aspired to apply the model, based on their studies of small European states, to evaluate the prospects for democratic stability in other fissured states. The model focuses on “vertical” cultural divides as opposed to “horizontal” class divisions that can either cut across or coincide with the cultural fissures.2

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Lijphart’s (1969: 212) explanation for the stability of democracy in societies with subcultures divided from each other by mutually reinforcing cleavages (the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria) emphasizes the central role of the political elites who “make deliberate efforts to counteract the immobilizing and unstabilizing effects of cultural fragmentation.” He defines four major characteristics of consociational democracy: “The two primary characteristics are the participation of the representatives of all significant ethnic groups in political decision-making and a high degree of autonomy for these groups to run their own internal affairs. The secondary characteristics are proportionality and the minority veto. The major aim of these four devices is to increase each group’s sense of security by maximizing its control of its own destiny, without the insecurity of other groups” (Lijphart 1995: 856). These four major characteristics of political accommodation (consociationalism) are discussed in the order of their importance.3 Power Sharing Participation of all major segments in the sharing of power can be accomplished by a variety of political mechanisms. Varieties of grand coalitions in which parties representing most of the segments are included in government and/or special governmental commissions are the classic models. Less conventionally, we suggest the dominant party in a dominant party democracy may incorporate representatives of major groups and thereby ensure their representation—as in India during the period of Congress Party dominance (1947–1977). Israel had both a dominant party system for nearly fifty years (counting the period in which it dominated the Jewish sector in Palestine prior to independence) and larger than minimal winning coalitions. Particularly during the lengthy period of Mapai/Labor dominance (1935–1977), party lists attempted (not always successfully or fairly) to balance various ethnic, immigrant, and interest groups. The dominant party paternalistically sponsored affiliated Arab parliamentary lists and included the major religious party in every government coalition. Toward the end of the dominant party system there was one grand coalition, and since the transition to a competitive party system there have been five more. Group Autonomy Similarly, group social and cultural autonomy can be achieved either through separate educational and cultural institutions within a unitary state as in the Netherlands and Israel, or, when the groups are geographically concentrated, through federalism exemplified by Switzerland,

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Canada, and India. Specific examples are elaborated in the discussion of the three cases below. Proportionality Proportionality generally pertains to the allocation of government portfolios and other forms of political representation and patronage—e.g., civil service appointments—and budgets. The justifications for such arrangements vary in different political cultures. In Israel the “party key,” system is accepted as a pragmatic arrangement, while the Dutch tend to associate proportionality with notions of fairness. They are not mutually exclusive. Minority Veto The minority veto, as Lijphart (1995: 857) notes, “is usually restricted to the most vital and fundamental matters, and it is usually based on informal understandings rather than formal or constitutional rules.” It involves the recognition that neither side can win a decisive victory on such core issues. A classic example of such an informal accord is the “status quo” agreement between religious and secular Jews in Israel that some scholars suggest started breaking down in the 1980s (see below). This agreement maintains the jurisdiction of the Orthodox religious establishment on matters of personal status, the supervision of dietary rules in public institutions including the Israel Defense Forces, and other religious matters. At least one religious party has been a member of every governing coalition since the establishment of the state except 1995–1996.

Major Criticisms of the Consociational Paradigm Before we analyze the interaction of political and cultural mechanisms, a brief review of the most influential critiques of the consociational model is in order. First, it has been noted that consociational mechanisms can intensify as well as accommodate divisions. Brian Barry (1975: 504–5) suggests this model is inappropriate for ethnically divided societies where the encouragement of politically antagonistic communities is likely to create conditions for “potential civil war or of civil war averted by effective oppression of one group by another.” Given ample empirical evidence of both successes and failures of such power-sharing arrangements, the challenge is to discover the conditions conducive to success. From the available evidence, it would appear that the best guarantor of success is the inability of any one segment to dominate

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the others. For example, M.P.C.M. van Schendelen (1984) argued that the extreme proportionality of the Dutch electoral system constitutes a sufficient incentive for elite cooperation and for larger than minimal winning coalitions. With so many parties gaining parliamentary representation, larger coalitions are required to govern, and this leads to gradual accommodation. The significant transformations in Dutch politics since the mid-1960s provide a test of this proposition that we discuss below. Second, the success of consociational arrangements depends upon the self-restraint of leaders. Ian Lustick (1997a 113) concludes his comprehensive critique of the consociational model: “First, scholars seem increasingly skeptical that cultural group leaders generally prefer selfrestraining accommodation to outbidding aggressiveness. … And finally, collapse or transformation of previously exemplary consociational countries and confusion over how deeply divided a society must or should be for consociational institutions to work have made it difficult to restore focus to the consociational program.” We argue, however, that rather than abandon an admittedly flawed model, we need to refine it by investigating the reasons why group leaders restrain themselves and the conditions in which they choose not to do so. For example, it has been suggested that the breakdown of Dutch consociationalism was due primarily to the loss of such restraint among the leaders of two political parties when they determined that they would gain more by forming narrower coalitions. The challenge for researchers is to discover the political and cultural conditions conducive to restraint and, for those interested in public policy, to recommend how such conditions can be created, strengthened, and sustained. The third major criticism is based on the “democratic deficit” of consociational democracy. Critics question whether a system based on an elite cartel qualifies as a democracy. Lustick notes that partisans of democracy have been dissatisfied with a notion of democracy requiring low levels of popular participation. Daalder even refers to the earlier Dutch political system as an oligarchy. There can be no doubt that consociational accommodation ameliorates the competition among elites that is central to American political science pluralist democratic theory. Clearly a system based on public political passivity hardly conforms to the ideals of the “minimal,” representative, let alone participatory, democracy. While low levels of popular participation weaken democracy, real-world practices must be evaluated in terms of the most likely alternatives under the circumstances of highly volatile cultural divisions. Lijphart (1975: 177) admits: “Deference, passivity, and lack of interest are the opposites of the traditional democratic civic virtues.” Yet, he

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concludes, “When fraternity is lacking, peaceful coexistence becomes the next highest objective” (1975: 179). Such limitations fall short of democratic ideals, yet may be preferable to all or nothing confrontations that threaten not only democracy, but also the integrity of the state— Iraq and Afghanistan in 2000s are good examples—especially when state disintegration is likely to result in massive “ethnic cleansing” as happened in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Less than ideal democratic arrangements may be acceptable compromises when they are the means of establishing stability, which may enable a more competitive and representative democracy to evolve. Viewed historically, the bridging and provisional nature of consociational arrangements becomes more apparent. They may be most properly seen as the best possible, albeit temporary, solutions under certain circumstances. It is, for example, clear that the three political systems examined below have become both more participatory and more representative over the past four decades. Paradoxically, however, undemocratic forces have also been empowered, endangering the stability of the whole system. But the opposite scenario is also possible. A history of concerted efforts to develop a “common” culture (for example, through public commemoration of “uniting” events and the development of “common” collective memory) and shared experience of pragmatic accommodation may lead to the acceptance of the common symbols, myths, and rituals and, ultimately, the unifying political frame. This appears to be the case for Protestant and Catholic segments of the Dutch society, though not yet for many members of the newer segment based on more recent immigration from Muslim countries. The longer historical view of the evolution of political cultures and political systems invariably reveals the emergence of hybrid forms combining democratic and undemocratic elements. The challenge for research is to determine the directions in which societies and polities are moving. Rarely is the movement unidirectional to democratization; usually democratization and de-democratization coexist, though in different areas of political and social life (Tilly 2007). It is also important to remember that greater representation of previously marginalized groups may empower undemocratic elements and strengthen exclusive and more chauvinistic forms of nationalism as in the cases discussed below. For accommodation to work in a democratic system, a degree of control of each segment by their leaders and control of the polity by the collective, legitimate leadership is necessary. And here our “cultural” approach begins to prove its usefulness: the construction of legitimacy is as much a political process as it is cultural (discussed in chapter 3).

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Models of democratic control, sensitive to the cultural dimension of this process, range from ones that emphasize the imposition of a single cultural script, which is the least compatible with democracy, to those that focus on continuous negotiation of cultural consensus, which—at its extreme—leads to the loss of governability. In brief, the top-down imposition of a single model of social and cultural pluralism (not to be confused with the pluralist approach in political science) is a coercive form of cultural control and may fall outside of the scope of democratic solutions. The approach based on the concept of hegemony relies on subtle, less overt forms of cultural manipulation (Lukes 1974; Gaventa 1980). Finally, the notion of legitimating discourse is associated with the most consensual forms of cultural accommodation.

Hegemony (Cultural Control) The hegemonic model of control is based on Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of domination through the cultural construction of reality, which legitimates a structure of political and economic power. As we noted in Chapter 3, where we present a more detailed discussion of the concept, the study of hegemony has been refined by a number of scholars including David Laitin (1986) and Ian Lustick (1993). Kubik (1994a: 11) defines cultural hegemony as “that aspect of power relationships which is not produced or guaranteed by coercion but by the acceptance (even if fragmentary and not fully conscious) of the ruler’s definitions of reality by the ruled.” The main idea behind the concept of hegemony we want to emphasize particularly in this chapter is that by taking for granted (as “natural”) cultural forms that endow the world with meaning people are subjected to a subtle yet powerful mechanism of power. This “natural” aura of facticity, that constitutes the essence of hegemony, is however often “contested (with varying intensity) by counterhegemonic symbolic systems (discourses) embedded in both the everyday practices of the ruled and the ceremonies and rituals they perform” (Kubik 1994a: 11). Spivak (1988), for example, discusses cultural forms produced and cultivated by the “subaltern” populations and Scott (1990) writes about everyday forms of resistance that often generate and/or are based on “hidden transcripts” of insubordination. Once a sufficient number of people subscribe to counterthegemonic discourses, the naturalness of the hegemonic discourse is undermined. In a truly democratic system the acceptance of a legitimating discourse is never subconscious, automatic (doxic – as Bourdieu calls it); nothing is taken for granted as “natural.” Rather, the institutions of the

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state are approved on the basis of conscious acceptance of legitimizing discourses.

Consensus through Legitimating Discourses (Cultural Accommodation) Conscious acceptance of legitimating discourses (defined in Chapter 3) by the populace generates the strongest form of cultural accommodation and the most effective form of political authority. In contrast with stronger forms of ideological control (hegemony), the power of legitimating discourses is based neither on consensus among the powerful nor the complete, universal or subconscious acceptance of their ideology by “the weak” (Scott 1990: 70–90).4 However, the more widely the legitimating discourses are accepted and/or believed by the populace, the more effective they are in legitimating regimes. The model does not assume that such discourses must mystify reality. Intellectuals, although frequently allied with power holders, are not assumed to be controlled by them (Bourdieu 1991: 168). Finally, legitimating discourses do not necessarily make explicit value statements. They provide politicians with a cultural base of legitimacy without the more coercive elements of the other models. To be effective, however, they must provide a cultural frame that at the minimum formulates the cultural rules of membership in a common polity, without undermining the identity of the participating communities.5 Asher Cohen and Bernard Susser (2000: 14–15) observe the paradox that “consociationalism is promoted when the cleavage lines dividing the political community into subcommunities are sharply defined rather than blurred.” But it helps when social and political conflicts do not coalesce around a single cleavage; as Lipset and Rokkan (1967) famously observed, crosscutting cleavages assuage the intensity of sociopolitical conflicts and promote democratization. But such cleavages encourage compromise “only in situations in which the various contending communities participate in the same political culture—when, whatever their differences, they agree about fundamental questions of identity and value” (Cohen & Susser 2000: 15). To summarize, the power and authority of the rulers in a deeply divided society is least likely to be effective and stable in conditions of purely political domination, by a minority or majority. Accommodation is likely to be strongest when achieved through the emergence and popular acceptance of consensual cultural forms, such as a common legitimating symbolic universe. It can also be achieved through hegemonic imposition of an interpretive system on the ruled by the rulers, but such

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a solution violates the principles of democracy. Finally, a political system can achieve a degree of stability even in the absence of a cohesive common culture if elites accept and play by the rules of the “pillarized” political game—when accommodative, power-sharing political forms of consociationalism and/or dominant party systems are adopted.

Forward to the Case Analysis We want to move away from models of politics in deeply divided societies that focus on only one mechanism in a given society or political system. Our guiding idea is that different mechanisms are applied by the actors depending on the type of fissures in a given polity, the level at which the conflict occurs, and the historical context. Accordingly, our task is to determine which forms of accommodation and/or control are operational in a given period, what mechanisms are responsible for their change, and what are the effects of such changes. We compare these different patterns in three cases. Israel is an example of a state in which the national minority, its Palestinian Arab citizens—particularly since 1967—identify with their ethnic (and in many cases literal) kin in the (thus far tragically divided and failed) Palestinian state in the making under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and currently under Hamas rule in Gaza. There are also significant divisions based on ethnicity, class, and religiosity among the Jewish majority. As a fissured society par excellence, which—despite highly adverse conditions—has had the only uninterrupted stable democracy among new states for over fifty years, Israel is a particularly appropriate case to examine. For this reason this country will serve as the comparative reference point for the discussions of the other two cases. The Dutch political system, particularly from the post-WWII era until 1967, was based on the institutionalized recognition of religious and ideological subcultures, although the state was not generally recognized as multiethnic. As the original exemplar of the accommodation approach, it is a uniquely suitable case for evaluating the model in the context of the major social, cultural, and political transformations that have taken place during the past four decades. The relationship between cultural divisions and the politics of accommodation (consociationalism) as a bridge to more participatory forms of democracy is the primary focus of analysis. India, as the world’s largest democracy, is a particularly appropriate case to examine. Since 1947, the only break in democratic rule was the State of Emergency from 1975–1977, when martial law was invoked,

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the opposition was banned, and other antidemocratic measures were taken. At that time Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party exercised an undemocratic form of political domination. India, therefore, ranks second only to Israel as the longest continuous successful democracy among the new states established after World War II. India identifies itself as multinational. Complex class, caste, linguistic, religious, and regional divisions characterize it. Given this complexity and limitations of space, we confine our analysis to a comparison of the roles of the dominant party system and, in the wake of its demise, the rise of parties espousing more militant and exclusive forms of nationalism in India and Israel. We evaluate these three states’ relative success in balancing demands to give adequate representation to diverse ideologies, interests, and identities and the need to maintain stable governance in rapidly changing circumstances over the past sixty years. We also consider the unintended albeit seemingly unavoidable consequences of recent wave of democratizations and accelerating globalization: the emergence of religiously inspired, popular, exclusive forms of ethnonationalism in India and Israel and anti-immigrant (particularly anti-Muslim) populism and unprecedented political assassinations and violence in the Netherlands. These more militant forms of ethnic nationalism compete with the more moderate, but paternalistic, versions of republican nationalism espoused by the parties that dominated Israel and India in the first three decades of independence. The populist nationalist challenge to the traditional Dutch political parties and their more liberal nationalism is similar in many respects to the other two cases. We observe how these newer nationalist movements, whose successes are made possible by the emergence of more inclusive democratic regimes, contest previously hegemonic notions of Indian and Israeli collective identity and democracy. Their Dutch counterparts challenge the traditional liberal policies of toleration and consensus building as they try to block the integration or even accommodation of what are perceived to be militant Islamic immigrants who reject the basic democratic rules of the game as well as the Enlightenment values that the majority hold so dear.

Israel Israel is a case in which all types of strategies for dealing with various fissures within the society have been attempted, generating several combinations of forms of accommodation and control; it is also a great case to study the mechanisms responsible for the emergence of these combinations.

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From Consensus to Confrontation: The Jewish Ethnic Divide Smooha (1978) observed several relationship patterns between the dominant group and different subordinate groups. He characterizes the relations between the politically dominant Jews of European background and those of Middle Eastern origin, mizrachim,6 during the first period of Israeli statehood (1948–1977), as a form of “dynamic paternalismcooptation.” In terms of our typology, this is a situation of consensus in which all major groups accept the dominant legitimating discourse—the Israeli “pressure cooker” version of the American “melting pot.” Success was facilitated through their shared Zionist political culture. Nonetheless, although Zionism as an overarching metanarrative achieved virtual hegemonic dominance for the vast majority of Israeli Jews, it failed to do so for both the Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish minorities. Socialist Zionism that evolved into statist Zionism achieved ideological dominance among the majority of the Jewish population during the dominant-party era that ended in 1977. At the same time the emergent political system had a strongly consociational component. In the post-1977 decades, when a competitive party system emerged, a more militant and religiously tinged Zionism associated with the Likud Party became preeminent but not hegemonic. Given the correlation between ethnicity and class and the paternalism of the parties dominated by Jews of European background, Shas, a political party that appealed to religious sentiments and ethnic pride of Jews of Middle Eastern origins emerged as the third largest in the parliament in 1999. Paradoxically, by making the politics of ethnicity more confrontational, it earned the consociational role as the representative religious party in the coalition governments, led by Labor since 1992. The emergence of this party to prominence heralded the newly dominant motif of multiculturalism that displaced the melting pot/pressure cooker metaphor. What needs to be determined is whether this motif was realized in practice and if so, whether it was counterbalanced by the acceptance of some unifying cultural frame. But to find out we need to look first at other cleavages. The Breakdown of Accommodation between Religious and Secular Jews Since the beginning of statehood, the second cleavage that threatened the Israeli system was between secular and religious Jews. Relations between the nonassimilating religious minority and nonreligious majority have been explained by Smooha in terms of a “contested accommodation” consociational model, necessitated by the significant gulf in identity and culture between them. The accommodation between the religious and secular, however, has been gradually eroding, particularly

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since the 1980s, as the Jewish character of the state has become a point of contention in the struggle over the very essence of Israeli collective identity. Cohen and Susser are concerned that consociational arrangements between secular and religious Jews in Israel have been breaking down in the last two to three decades without agreement on basic questions of common political and cultural identity. This is not unusual; political cultures are always contested. The central question is whether the contending camps share pragmatic rules of the game and/or symbols of sufficient salience to allow for stable, democratic contestation. In the case of Israel, the jury is still out. For example, the greater activism and militancy of religious parties has precipitated a backlash in which a new antireligious secular party won six seats in the 1999 Knesset, the first time it contested an election. Despite the threat to challenge democratic rules of the game by mostly religious, militant opponents of withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the northern West Bank, the evacuations went smoothly and with a minimum of violence. Control: The Arab Minority from Quiescence to Activism The third cleavage of concern in Israel is between Jews and Arabs. From 1948 until 1966, the relations between the Jewish majority and the minority “nonassimilating” Arab citizens can be conveniently described in terms of Smooha’s “exclusionary domination model”—based on the theory of social and cultural pluralism. For Lustick (1980), the quiescence of Israeli Arabs during this period is best explained by their dependence on and cooptation by Israel’s system of control. However, since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank during the 1967 war, which led to the greater political mobilization, activism, and independence among the Arab Israeli citizens, they have acquired an increasingly Palestinian sense of identity. Aronoff and Atlas (1998) employed the concept of hegemony to compare the relatively successful incorporation of the majority of Jews to the polity founded on the Zionist discourse with the limited incorporation of the ultra-Orthodox, and the relative failure to incorporate the Palestinian Arabs. The counterhegemonic challenges by the increasingly active and influential ultra-Orthodox and Arabs testify to the emergence of contradictory models of Israeli collective identity (Aronoff 2003). Over the last several years it has become increasingly clear that the continued stability and vibrancy of Israeli democracy require either the implementation of comprehensive equal individual rights for Israel’s Arab citizens following the liberal model of democracy, or the kind of accommodative arrangements that the Orthodox Jews have tradi-

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tionally enjoyed. This would mean the inclusion of an Arab party in coalition governments and a “status quo” agreement on core issues vital to them. The trend toward greater activism became clear by the 1990s. The leadership of Arab parties became more exclusively Arab, and citizenship issues were placed at the center of their platforms in the 1992 election. The Arab parties provided the narrow coalition led by Yitzhak Rabin with a blocking majority. In return, the office of Advisor to the Prime Minister on Arab Affairs (perceived by Palestinian Israelis as paternalistic) was abolished, and two Arab deputy ministers were appointed. For the first time, Arab parties received important Knesset committee assignments, and substantially increased resources were allocated to the Arab sector. For example, in 1994 the government provided child allowance payments to the Palestinian citizens at the same rate as had been already given to Jews. Knesset legislation has mandated representation of Arabs in the civil service, and precedent-setting Supreme Court decisions mandate affirmative action in all public bodies and organizations, including the council of the Israel Lands Authority. These have taken place, not coincidentally, in the context of violent clashes, in which a dozen Arab citizens lost their lives and which lead to investigation by a government-appointed judicial commission. Palestinian citizens of Israel in the twenty-first century demand cultural, religious, and educational autonomy, and the right to veto government decisions on national issues affecting them. The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee calls for Israel to become a binational state alongside an independent Palestinian state.7 The case of Israel illustrates that it may be impossible to find a single model of accommodation and control to capture the complexity of a modern, evolving society. It rather becomes apparent that different forms of political and cultural accommodation and control apply to various segments of the society at different times. For example, early on, ethnic relations between the dominant majority of Jews of European background and the subordinate minority of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (mizrachim) were characterized by common adherence to the Zionist master narrative. This narrative was organized around the evolving (socialist to statist) idea of social and cultural integration, i.e., the “absorption” of the immigrants in the culturally European Israeli “pressure cooker.” With the erosion of the ideological and political dominance of the Labor Party, the rise of the Likud—strongly supported by the second generation of mizrachim—led to emergence of a competitive party system and the shift within the country’s political culture to a multicultural paradigm. The newly self-confident mizrachi Jews formed and supported a political party that was based on ethnic

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appeal and religious orthodoxy. This took place in the context of the breakdown of the power-sharing status quo accommodation between the political parties representing the secular and Zionist orthodox sectors of society. It needs to be remembered, however, that even as these two sectors were culturally united by their acceptance of Zionism, they remained deeply divided over the meaning of Israel as a Jewish state. Yet another cultural and political challenge emerged from Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of whom accept the existence of the state of Israel but challenge its Jewish character. Despite their legal and civil rights, they have been politically controlled and culturally dominated by the Jewish majority since the establishment of the state. However, they too have eventually acquired political strength and cultural voice. Like other parties based on identity politics, they gained dramatically when the law was changed to allow the direct election of the prime minister. Over the last two decades, they have achieved a position of partial power sharing and presently demand greater consociational arrangements. It is hard if not impossible to predict the future, but some insights into the Israeli predicament come from a comparison of this country with the Netherlands.

Israel and the Netherlands: Comparing Consociationalism in Two Contexts In this section we compare and contrast the consociational characteristics of Israel and the Netherlands, examine changes in both societies in recent decades, and briefly evaluate the “accommodation” capabilities of both political systems and cultures. Lijphart (1977: 129–34) defines Israel as a “semiconsociational democracy.” From the crystallization of the pre-state society, culture, and political system until the mid-1960s, Israel shared with the Netherlands cultural divisions organized by political movements into autonomous camps and strong proportionality. From 1948 until the 1980s, religious Jews in Israel enjoyed the benefits of the “status quo,” but Arabs lacked a similar veto and collective representation in the cabinet (although they have always been represented in the Knesset—Israel’s parliamentary legislature). The Netherlands during the post-WWII era until 1967 was the prototype for the consociational model, possessing all of its key attributes discussed earlier. Power Sharing In earlier work Lijphart argued that Israel only “weakly approximated the primary consociational principle of grand coalition” (1977: 131).

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Until 1977 Israel, like India, had a dominant party system that, as Lijphart (1996) later recognized, serves power sharing functions analogous to consociational grand coalitions. National unity governments, that constitute consociational-type grand coalitions comprising both major parties and others, were formed several times: in 1967, during the emergency that culminated in the Six-Day War; in 1984, in response to the challenges of the war in Lebanon and runaway inflation; in 1988, with outbreak of the first Palestinian uprising; in 2001, in response to the second, more violent Palestinian uprising; in 2005, in response to plans to evacuate all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank; and in 2006, in the climate of crisis sparked by the medical incapacitation of Prime Minister Sharon. Using Lijphart’s (1984) categories of majoritarian and consensus (neoconsociational) models of democracy, Medding (1990) suggests that Israel is a hybrid combining four elements of each. It is strongly consensual in having a multiparty system, cabinets larger than the minimal needed, low average cabinet tenure, and multi-issue valences along which parties align. But the highly centralized government, unicameral legislature, and unwritten constitution are characteristic of the majoritarian or unitary model. Medding (1990: 210) concludes that during the founding period Israel was closer to the majoritarian-centralized model, but that the balance has been shifting toward the consensus-centralized model. How does this compare to the Dutch system that displays a wide range of power-sharing mechanisms? Segmental Autonomy Both the Netherlands and Israel were divided into fairly self-contained communities based on political ideology and religion from the 1930s to the mid-1960s. As we have already noted, Israel’s primary divisions were based on ideology (labor, liberal, and nationalist), religion (secular, traditional, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox), ethnicity (Western and Middle Eastern), and nationality (Jews and Arabs). In the Netherlands the fissures were based on religion (secular, Catholic, and Protestant— subdivided by denominations) and ideology (conservative, liberal, and socialist). At the height of their autonomy (during the 1950s), each camp had an almost self-contained existence, with interaction and accommodation taking place among leaders. These divisions were organized and represented by political parties/ movements and their affiliated networks of health services, schools, youth movements, women’s organizations, trade unions, sports associations, newspapers, publishing houses, and insurance companies. In the Netherlands, radio stations and the national television authority al-

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locate time to broadcasting networks affiliated with these movements, some of which even own radio stations. In Israel, paramilitary organizations were associated with the political camps prior to independence, and the largest nationwide system of health care was affiliated with the Labor-dominated Histadrut labor federation until recently.8 Both have undergone dramatic changes in the nature and salience of these divisions in the past four decades. Such changes called for new political and/or cultural strategies. One of the first to be tested was proportionality. Proportionality Israel and the Netherlands have two of the most proportional electoral systems of representation in the world, in which the entire country serves as a single electoral district.9 Electors cast their vote for a party list of parliamentary candidates. The percent of the vote each party receives above the minimal threshold determines the number of parliamentary mandates. The Dutch threshold, formed by dividing the number of votes cast at an election by the number of seats in parliament (1/150th of the total number of valid votes cast for parliamentary representation), is the lowest in the world. Until 1996, in Israel a parliamentary list required only 1 percent of the valid votes cast to receive a seat in parliament. This was raised to 1.5 percent in the 1996 election. The current threshold of 2 percent was adopted during the Sixteenth Knesset. Coalition building is the most important phase of both Dutch and Israeli politics. A peculiar weakness of the Dutch system is that elections “have little impact on which coalition is formed” (Andeweg & Irwin 1993: 116). Israel experimented with the direct election of the prime minister in 1996, 1999, and 2000 (Aronoff 2000; Doron & Harris 2000). The experiment had the opposite effect to the intended goals. It resulted in dramatic parliamentary losses for the two major mass parties and gains for several parties based on identity politics. The significant gains in the representation of groups that had traditionally been relatively marginal (Arabs, religious and Middle Eastern Jews, and “Russian” immigrants) strengthened the representativeness of Israeli democracy. Yet, it also created serious problems of governance. The Dutch pillars weakened with the decreasing importance of religious and prior ideological divisions. The liberalization of Catholic leadership played a crucial role in this process, as did the decline in the role of religion in Dutch society. In Israel the traditional ideological camps were weakened by the assumption by the state of social services previously provided by the movements and the failure of the political parties (especially Labor) to adapt

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ideology to changing conditions. With the erosion of previously salient ideological divisions, identity-based subcultures were strengthened. Changes in the electoral system (direct election of the prime minister) and political culture (multiculturalism) strengthened parties basing appeal on identity. Ultimately, rather than bolstering the prime minister and contributing to the stability of the government, electoral reform resulted in unstable coalitions and the premature termination of the terms of the first two directly elected premiers, Netanyahu and Barak. The third (and last) prime minister elected under the ill-fated “reform” was Ariel Sharon, who was incapacitated while in office by a stroke. In 2000 the Knesset voted to revert to the old electoral system. Changes in the Netherlands In the Netherlands, the era of the politics of accommodation appeared to end with the 1967 elections, when a large number of parliamentary seats changed political hands.10 The end of public political passivity was not only expressed in increased electoral volatility, but by high voter turnouts, despite the abolition of compulsory voting in 1970. Extraparliamentary political activity, such as widespread student demonstrations and even riots in the major cities, and the proliferation of ad hoc protests and interest groups were further indications of increased social mobilization and involvement by nonelites in politics.11 Lijphart (1975: 201) considers the frequent resort to civil disobedience and the higher turnover in cabinets, among other “revolutionary” changes such as the “convulsions of the party system,” as signs of political instability. Rudy B. Andeweg and Galen A. Irwin (1993: 44–49) characterize these changes as examples of greater democratization.12 In fact, they were both right, as the broadening and diversification of political participation led, at least temporarily, to a more active, broadly based, volatile, but not less democratic, political system. The role of the traditional ideological and religious subcultures declined as new ideological movements and organizations grew, resulting in splits and mergers of political parties and their affiliated organizations. There was a significant increase in the number of parties. The Democrats 66 (formed in 1966 in the Netherlands) and the Israeli Democratic Movement for Change (formed in 1977) were remarkably similar in their academic leadership, the social profile of their electoral support, and almost identical reformist political programs. The subcultures became much less cohesive and self-contained as social apartheid waned. Three Dutch health organizations merged, as did the Socialist and Catholic trade unions. Most dramatically, the three main Christian parties merged into the Christian Democratic Appeal in 1980. The

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elites, particularly in the Catholic Church, no longer encouraged separation. They appeared to have been “overtaken by the pressure of social change” (Gladdish 1991: 55). Changes were most dramatic among the Catholics. At the same time, Labor engaged in activities that constituted serious violations of the consociational “rules of the game” when they thought they might gain a parliamentary majority (Lijphart 1975: 198–99). The decline of pillarization has been interpreted as successful emancipation of minorities (like the Catholics) and their integration in Dutch society or, alternatively, as a failure of the elites to maintain social control. It has also been suggested that the Social Democrats and the Liberals tacitly agreed to accelerate the process through polarization since they hoped to gain from it. It was also the result of increasing democratization influenced by a new generation of students and other activist groups. Lijphart (1975: 212) posits that one of the main reasons Dutch politics was so unstable during this period was “the nervous, ambivalent, and, as a result, ineffective reaction of the political leaders to such unfamiliar phenomena as the breakdown of bloc cohesion, declining deference, demands for democratization, and political polarization.” All of these interpretations help to explain the dramatic changes. Samuel J. Eldersveld, Jan Kooiman, and Theo van der Tak (1981: 246) predicted that the transition period would lead “to the politics of a new pacification, including both elites and masses, based on new elite perspectives towards the political system, a new elite political culture responsive to a new, developing mass political culture.” Their predictions appear to have been remarkably prescient in the long term, except for their failure to predict the inability of Dutch society to assimilate a significant segment of Muslim immigrants. Hans Daalder (1987: 277) concluded that by “the mid-1980s, Dutch politics therefore wavered uneasily between a return to traditional forms of coalition politics and a deliberate policy of polarization from the right.” After a period of conflict, politicization, and polarization, which resulted in more open government, there appears to have been a return to the older style of elite-driven political decision making. However, there has not been a similar return to the old pillarization. Andeweg and Irwin (1993: 49) ask, “If it was pillarisation that necessitated the politics of accommodation, how may we explain the continuation of accommodationist practices now that the pillars have crumbled?” They suggest that it was the minority position of all political parties that “may have been the crucial incentive for the elites to cooperate instead of to compete.” They explain the return to accommodation, after the Social Democrats failed to gain a majority in the mid-1970s, by the fact that

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all parties fall far short of a parliamentary majority. This is primarily a consequence of the extreme proportionality of the electoral system emphasized by van Schendelen (1984). The above analysis focuses solely on changing social and demographic pressures and the significance of political mechanisms. What about culture? We return to this question below after a brief comparative excursus to Israel. Changes in Israel The year 1967 also portended significant change in Israel. The war in June 1967 left Israel in occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank of the Jordan River. National consensus on what constituted the greatest threat to Israeli security was thereby terminated. For many the challenge of the Arab states and terrorism continued to constitute the paramount danger, while for others the occupation and rule over the Palestinians was seen to endanger Israel by undermining its democracy. The nationalist Likud came to power in 1977, ending Labor’s historic dominance (Aronoff 1991, 1993). It was supported by working-class Jews of Middle Eastern background and allied with a newly nationalistic religious party, whose ideological vanguard was a messianic settlers’ movement. The ideological cleavage between “hawks” and “doves” became politically salient and was superimposed over, and correlated with, existing class, ethnic, and religious-secular divisions. Joel Migdal (2001: 5) astutely observed, “Unstable boundaries create a pervasive sense of insecurity that may push societies into ethnic self-definitions and increased ethnic conflict.” Economic liberalization and globalization contributed to both the peace process and to reactions against it that fed the fires of ethnic nationalism (Shafir & Peled 2000). The growing sense of insecurity increased the populace’s willingness to accept more militant discourses of national identity. What needs to be determined is how this new shape of political culture contributes to (or undermines) stability and democratization. Crises of Political Capability and the Emergence of New Political Cultures in the Netherlands and Israel Since the late 1960s further fragmentation in the Netherlands has resulted in reducing the capability of the political system. “Depillarisation has broken up these [traditional] segments into numerous smaller fragments, without replacing the former intrapillar integrating mechanisms with some functional equivalent” (Andeweg & Irwin 1993: 229). As in Israel, with increasing numbers of them articulating more narrow interests, Dutch political parties have lost much of their ability to aggregate interests. An additional form of functional fragmentation, frequently

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identified as neocorporatism, has resulted in the incorporation of interest groups into the Dutch decision-making process without, however, providing an effective mechanism for aggregating these interests in political parties. This further undercuts the authority of the parties and their leaders. Critics argue that stalemate and immobilism are the price paid for the lack of decision making that often characterizes accommodation politics. Yet, despite such “immobilization” plaguing at least some aspects of the political system, the foundations of the Dutch democracy are firmly founded on a commonly accepted and broadly shared set of cultural scripts and values based on a unique combination of Calvinism and the Enlightenment. Dutch humanism, as Schama (1987) has artfully shown, is a unique blend of elements drawn from these two cultural formations filtered through the democratic experience of a state built upon the values and interests of a predominantly middle-class (burger 13) mercantile society. Bargaining and compromise are at the heart of a code of tolerance that has evolved over centuries, allowing the Netherlands to successfully integrate (and benefit from) such diverse groups as Jewish refugees who escaped the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and members of former Dutch colonies in Indonesia and the Caribbean. The period following World War II ushered in prosperity reminiscent of, but not as consequential as, the Golden Age of the seventeenth century. Constitutional monarchy and its symbols and rituals, which served as a beacon from abroad and a symbol of resistance to the German occupation, have successfully provided a base of legitimacy over and above the consensual acceptance of pragmatic rules of the game during periods of significant socioeconomic and political change. The entrenchment of religious and ideological pillars during the postwar period—combined with the political culture of bargaining and compromise—produced the consociational system. Andeweg and Irwin (1993: 231–40) support our analysis that there is an underlying consensus in the Netherlands, symbolized by the exceptional popularity of the royal family. They also credit independent experts for their crucial role in creating consensus and the use of such “tie-breakers” as the judiciary to prevent political stalemate. Dutch governments also often blame “Brussels” (the European Community) in order to break deadlocks and justify unpopular policies. Through such techniques they manage to maintain capable governance and a very high level of legitimacy compared with their fellow European states, much less with similarly fissured societies elsewhere. Yet, as discussed below, a new crisis in Dutch politics has emerged. The assassination of the leader of an anti-immigrant party and the mur-

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der of a filmmaker critical of the impact of Islamic immigrants in the Netherlands raised questions about the limits of Dutch tolerance and whether significant minority sectors of society share a common political culture with the majority. Similarly, there exists a common cultural frame that unites large sectors of the Israeli society. External threats and a hegemonic Zionist political culture have traditionally provided centripetal force to counter the centrifugal pull of polarized Israeli politics. Therefore, when such threats subside, challenges to the hegemonic culture emerge. For example, the peace treaty with Jordan and the agreements with the Palestinians, including the Wye accords signed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led government, signaled the beginning a new security consensus in Israel. This facilitated the contestation over collective identity until the renewed outbreak of Palestinian violence (29 September 2000) following the failed Camp David talks (from 11 July to 25 July 2000) engendered insecurity that has brought Israelis together again—at least for as long as the violence and insecurity continue. The election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister in February 2001 signaled the emergence of a broad consensus in Israel regarding the need for separation from the Palestinians, exemplified by the security fence/wall (although there is significant division over where it should be built), and the need for unilateral actions such as withdrawal from Gaza. The death of Yasser Arafat and the election of a more moderate successor renewed divisions among Israelis regarding the possibility of a political settlement with the Palestinians until their parliamentary elections that brought Hamas to power. As everybody knows, the situation is highly volatile. In 2011– 12, uncertainties created by the Arab Spring, especially regime change in Egypt, the cooling of relations with Turkey, the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations, and civil war in Syria, as well as the growing threat of Iranian nuclear capability, have combined to increase Israeli insecurity. What are the mechanisms involved both in undermining and eventually eroding “old” consociational arrangements and the formulation of new political cultures? In the Netherlands, there was a significant generational shift from widespread public political passivity resulting in the acquiescence to the authority during the post-WWII era to the political activism of rebellious youth—particularly students—in the 1960s. The younger Dutch generation, sharing many values of a global student rebellion, found greater salience in new values of participatory democracy and the legitimacy of protest politics than in the traditional religious and ideological divisions of their parents. We stress that this generational change was not merely a demographic factor; rather, it

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also represented significant cultural change. For example, student protests led to the radical restructuring of the Dutch university system that had been in place for generations. As with the wider society, structural changes were directly related to changing values: from acquiescence to activism, from respect for authority to challenging it, from reliance on leaders to demands for direct influence in decision making. In Israel two main shifts occurred: from pioneering and struggling for independence to nation and state building, as well as from providing for the settlement and integration of refugees from the European displaced persons camps to providing for hundreds of thousands of refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, and, later, the Soviet Union and Russia. These shifts generated the pressure to redefine both the rules of political accommodations and the nature of cultural/ideological compromises. As Shelef (2010) convincingly demonstrates, and as we argue in chapter 5, the cultural map of the major Israeli nationalist movements evolved as the increasingly diversified population engaged in the “culture war” over redefining the territorial boundaries of the “homeland,” collective identity, and the role of religion in the state. Additionally, the services previously provided by the political movements were now provided by the state, thereby reducing the dependence of citizens on the parties. Direct election of the prime minister accelerated the decline of the two mass parties at the expense of parties appealing to identity. In both countries two contradictory cultural processes have been simultaneously at work. On the one hand, both societies have sufficiently rich reservoirs of cultural resources to construct effective frames for their polities. On the other, they have been subjected to powerful centrifugal forces—economic, political, but also cultural. Greater representation of previously subordinate groups created greater difficulty of governance. But issues of clashing identity politics are even more difficult to compromise than are the bread and butter issues of political patronage—although they are obviously not mutually exclusive. Where is it all going? A comparison with our third case, India, may provide some answers.

Israel and India as Dominant Party Democracies The final comparison we present in this section is designed to show the important role played by dominant parties in establishing the foundations for democracy in deeply divided societies and what happens when the power of such parties dissipates. Dominant parties were in-

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strumental in building democracy in emergent states of both Israel and India, by providing authoritative leadership, a generally consensual legitimating discourse in the form of dominant ideologies, and a form of power sharing that aggregated a wide range of interests within the dominant party. Israel and India were dominant party democracies since their successful liberation from Great Britain (India in 1947 and by Israel in 1948) until their national elections in 1977 (Aronoff 1993; Pempel 1990). After a decade-long decline, the defeat of Labor in the Israeli parliamentary election that year unambiguously signified the end of its dominance. Complicating factors, such as the federal political structure of India, make it more difficult to precisely pinpoint the end of Congress dominance. It appears to have happened in three stages. Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. (1980: 148) divides Congress rule into two periods: “The first, from 1947 to 1967, was that of the Congress ‘system’ of one-party dominance. The second period, 1967 to 1977, witnessed the breakdown of the Congress system and the loss of Congress dominance in the states.” Ayesha Jalal (1997: 91) suggests: “The 1977 elections seemed to mark the end of Congress domination in Indian politics.” Yet, according to her, the critical juncture came later: it was the 1989 election, “a watershed in India’s political development not only because of its implications for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the Congress but, more precisely, because it registered the most decisive success of regional political forces in exercising state power directly from the center” (1997: 97). Advantages of One-Party Dominance in Democratic Systems This unique form of democracy has decisive advantages in the early period of state formation and the consolidation of democracy, analogous to the elite accommodation of consociationalism.14 The lengthy period of dominance by Mapai/Labor in Israel and Congress in India provided continuity and stability during such critical periods in both countries. The continuity and predictability of leadership and policy was particularly important, since both new states were born in military conflict with their immediate neighbors. Both had to integrate vast numbers of refugees (proportionate to their populations) in the early years. Survivors of the Holocaust in Europe and refugees from hostile Arab states fled to Israel, and Hindu refugees from what became Pakistan took refuge in India. Israel’s raison d’être as a haven for Jews is illustrated by the integration of a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. In the 2000s, the so-called Russians constituted a fifth of the population and a significant political force. In brief, the dominant party system

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facilitated national mobilization and integration and the consolidation of democracies in both new states. Although Lijphart (1995: 862) initially suggested that “dominantparty systems are undemocratic,” a year later (1996: 260) he identified India as a consociational democracy in which “cabinets are produced by the broadly representative and inclusive nature of a single, dominant party, the Congress Party.” Eventually, he concluded that both Israel and India in the late 1990s were consensual democracies lacking consensual (legitimizing) cultures (1999: 307). Our conceptualization is different. We suggest that at their peak both dominant parties achieved what Scott terms “thin” hegemony that contributed to political stability during the formative period. For example, public opinion polls in Israel (including those conducted prior to the 1977 election) showed that more people declared their readiness to vote for Mapai/Labor than actually did so, because they thought that was the “correct” answer. The existence of the idea of “correct answers” among large sectors of the populace is an indicator of the hegemonic cultural syndrome at work. Disadvantages of One-Party Dominance in Democratic Systems The longer the dominant party system was perpetuated, however, the more the disadvantages began to outweigh the advantages. The centralized coordination of leadership selection and succession as well as decision making strengthened oligarchic tendencies in both parties. The breakdown in the responsiveness of leadership contributed to their growing arrogance, self-interested pursuit of power, and corruption (Jalal 1997: 39). In India this culminated in the state of emergency from 1975 to1977, during which democracy broke down and political domination became coercive. This shows that attempts at cultural manipulation proved largely unsuccessful. Recruitment and advancement through patron-client networks deprived the parties and the nations of potential leaders with greater independence, initiative, and originality. Lack of access to a share in national governance encouraged irresponsible behavior in leaders of opposition parties as well. In India some opposition parties gained experience at the state level. Jalal (1997: 165) concludes, “A closer scrutiny of the interplay between the structural rigidities and political fluidities of its federalism reveals why electoral democracy has proven to be a rudderless ship in the hard rocked sea of India’s cultural diversities.” Moreover, lack of access to national public office deprived opposition party leaders of valuable experience in governing and increased public anxiety during their ascension to office after the dominant par-

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ties were defeated. It also contributed to the polarization of politics, as the new ruling parties unsuccessfully attempted to establish their dominance. Since significant sectors remained loyal to the old dominant parties, competitiveness remains a feature of the new party systems that evolved after the collapse of party dominance (Aronoff 1989: 14–16, 1990: 279–81). In both India and Israel political forces competing against the dominant parties were more nationalistic and mobilized support through religious, and in Israel ethnic, appeals. They were the products of the greater participation and empowerment of previously marginal groups. In India there was a dramatic increase in the influence of the vernacular elite and a shift in the locus of power from upper castes to rising “backward” and lower castes.15 Whereas Hindu nationalism gains majority support from the expanding Indian middle class (Fernandes 2006), in Israel the working class—especially among Middle Eastern Jews—and religious Jews of all ethnic backgrounds have provided the main base for more militant forms of ethnonationalism. While the dominant party was attempting to achieve hegemony and perhaps even political control (in the sense introduced earlier) it eventually lost both legitimacy and power. It is noteworthy that in Israel, Labor achieved ideological dominance prior to gaining political dominance and it lost ideological dominance before losing political dominance. In both cases understanding the reciprocal (if not dialectical) relationship between culture and politics is essential in explaining the success and failure of the parties. Like power sharing in the previous case, dominant parties played an important role in creation of new states in deeply divided societies and their transition to more broadly representative democracies with competitive party systems. But the dominant party systems were unable to survive the surge of identity politics.

Contested Nationalisms in India and Israel The political ascendance of Hindu nationalism in India is the result of decades of painstaking organization and political strategy of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) drawing on historic reserves of deeply rooted religious nationalism. This opposition force contributed to the disintegration of the Congress system and its loss of dominance. The BJP dramatically increased its parliamentary representation from two seats in 1984 to 118 in 1991, emerging as the single largest party in 1996 and forming the government in 1998. Despite its loss to Congress in the

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2004 elections, it has profoundly influenced the political culture of the country. Hindu nationalism emerged, as Thomas Blom Hansen (1999: 4–5) explains, in the realm of “public culture—the public space in which a society and its constituent individuals and communities imagine, represent, and recognize themselves through political discourse, commercial and cultural expressions, and representations of state and civic organizations.” He demonstrates that this “conservative revolution” is part of democratic transformations of the political system and the public culture that used to appeal primarily to the privileged groups who now feel their dominant positions are being threatened and encroached upon. As is the case of competing Israeli nationalisms, Hindu nationalism’s competition with the more moderate and multiethnic vision of Indian identity promoted by Congress is a product of sustained democratic processes, including intensely contested election campaigns, but also “cultural” battles over religious sites, rituals in public spaces, and debates over the meaning of collective memory and identity. Although in both countries extremists have indulged in xenophobic excesses of rhetoric and actions, such as the destruction of the Babri mosque in India in 1992 and the massacre of twenty-nine Muslims praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron by an American-born Israeli settler in 1994, these movements have generally played by the democratic rules of the game. Just as the more militant ethno-Zionism tends to be exclusive and intolerant, Hindu nationalism underpins the limited tolerance of diversity among the privileged Indians who form the base of its support. Looking for an explanation of the antidemocratic consequences of democratic processes, Hansen questions the “depth” of the democratic discourse in India. “Was the political culture of the so-called liberal middle class, which provided the backbone of the nationalist movement and later the independent nation-state, ever liberal and democratic?” (1999: 6). He suggests that Hindu nationalism may actually reveal the dark side of the culture of the educated middle class, who dominated Indian public culture and the Indian state since independence. Hansen asks, does this reflect their “authoritarian longings” and the “fear of the ‘underdog,’ the ‘masses,’ and the Muslims?” Similarly, a few Israeli intellectuals question the strength of liberalism attributed to Labor (and statist) Zionism.16 Jalal reveals another paradox as she blames decentralization of power, and the consequent communalization of state institutions, which have “transformed what used to be periodic outbreaks of communal riots into vicious and organized pogroms against members of India’s religious

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minorities.” She contrasts the new situation with the relatively calmer former “formally democratic centre masking its application of increasing doses of overt authoritarianism in many regions” (1997: 99–100). The constructed nostalgia formulated in the discourses of national purity is typical for both movements and parties. In fact, Hindu nationalism deliberately imitates Zionism in this respect. “Just as Israel is the homeland for Jews all over the world, it was suggested, India should be made the ‘natural’ homeland for Hindus, where any Hindu could freely come and settle” (Hansen 1999: 220). Hindu nationalism and the messianic religious Zionism of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) are both forms of revitalization movements claiming to revive traditional cultural patterns.17 At the same time, both nationalisms claim to revitalize the spirit of reform characteristic of an earlier era. Another source of similarity comes from a shared vision of the chief enemy: globalization. The religious Zionism of the settlers’ movement is, in part, a reaction against forces of globalization associated by them with the historic assimilation of biblical Jews to Greek culture that most contemporary Israelis perceive as Americanization (Abramson & Troen 2000). Similarly, Hindu nationalism asserts India’s spiritual superiority as a corrective to Western materialism and excessive rationalism. Both Hindu and religious Jewish nationalists are convinced of the redemptive consequences of their projects for others as well as for themselves. Zionism sees itself as a moral “light unto the nations,” and Hindu nationalism as “lights onto themselves” (Hansen 1999: 234). Such “altruistic” goals are used to justify antidemocratic and sometimes extreme methods employed in the name of nationalism. But it needs to be stressed that both movements attempt to overcome their supporters’ long-standing sense of alienation in public spheres traditionally dominated by secular liberal discourses. This comparison of Indian and Israeli cases reveals a similar pattern of the central role of the dominant party system in aggregating competing interests and identities, providing stability of leadership and policy, and consolidating new institutions of the emergent state faced with challenges of large population exchanges and military conflicts. The cases also demonstrate that after a long period of single-party dominance coupled with the relatively hegemonic “civic” political culture, sometime in the late 1970s, such orders began unraveling as the new political and cultural constellations were emerging. Viewed from a longer perspective, we can see the critically important bridging function of dominant parties. This function, most clearly in the form of the previously discussed consociational arrangements, allowed these plural

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societies to build democratic institutions, practices, and cultures that became more open and representative.

Conclusion: Democratic Prospects in Three Fissured Societies In each of the polities investigated in this chapter a different combination of accommodation and control was employed to constrain the centrifugal forces that afflict their fissured societies. Elite accommodation played a crucial role, although it took different forms in each case. While grand councils and coalitions characterized the Netherlands, India and Israel balanced and accommodated competing cultural and political interests within dominant parties for their first thirty years of independence. Even when Mapai/Labor was at the peak of its dominance, it lacked a parliamentary majority. Therefore, it was forced to rely upon coalition partners, always creating larger than minimal winning coalitions. Nadav Shelef (2010) demonstrates how the successful pragmatic and tactical compromises struck by the three major nationalist movements for reasons of alliance in coalitions led to the modifications in their key ideological positions. What emerged were new reified positions on the borders of the Homeland, collective mission, relations with Arabs and Diaspora Jews, and the role of religion in national identity. This shows how pragmatic political moves may have (usually unintended) cultural consequences that, in turn, change the conditions for the next round of political maneuvers. Because Mapai/Labor was twice as large as its nearest competitor and, like Congress in India, captured the ideological center, it was both mathematically and ideologically impossible to form a coalition without it. Mapai/Labor resorted to a grand coalition only once in an extreme emergency as its dominance was waning. However, since the end of dominant party rule in response to different crises, several grand coalitions, containing both major and smaller parties, have been formed. With the change in the party system, a different form of elite political accommodation (power sharing) was adopted, as election results tended to be inconclusive. Shelef (2010) documents a correspondence between significant shifts in ideological positions on core cultural issues (borders, identity, and religion) and the evolution of political accommodations. We observe and analyze this process in chapter 5. Its essence seems to be the intensification of political and cultural challenges to the increasingly “thin” hegemonic Zionism, by both Jewish and Palestinian organizations.

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In India, since Congress had a comfortable majority in the Lok Sabha until 1977, coalitions were based on balancing internal party factions and religious, regional, caste, and linguistic interests. Territorial constituencies and the large number of competing opposition parties enabled Congress candidates to get elected with as little as 30 percent of the popular vote.18 The symbiotic relationship between the top Congress national leadership and the civil service, the police, and the army contributed to its covert authoritarian tendencies. On the cultural side, the political mobilization of a broader social base led to greater reliance on populism. The culmination of this process came with the imposition on the country of the state of emergency (1975–1977). It was the most coercive form of political control and the crudest effort at cultural manipulation in the post-1947 history of India. It was clearly attempted as a replacement for the eroded ideological and political dominance, and the Congress paid a high price, losing elections in 1977. Since then, coalition politics has become as critical as in Israel, although somewhat more chaotic. The previously consensual (bordering on hegemonic during the height of the Congress rule) dominant ideology has also given way to greater communal strife in the contestation over national identity.19 A key constant variable in all three situations, despite formidable changes in the Netherlands and Israel, is the fact that no single political party could command a majority in the main parliamentary institutions. Since no Dutch or Israeli party was able to impose its will, as long as their leaders were unwilling to undertake undemocratic means to gain power, they were obligated to form coalitions. Given cultural pluralism and proportional representation, a coalition of parties representing different segments was required to govern after every election. Periodic, at least, inclusion of parties representing all segments of the society in the ruling coalition, except the Arabs in Israel, enhanced stable democratic governance. Thus, the major structural political condition for stable democracy in each context has proved to be the absence of a majority in a proportional system of elections that necessitated coalitions to govern. The minimal cultural condition has been the commitment of the elite to democratic rules of the game that recognizes that all of the players must get a turn at bat. We call it thin hegemony of a civic consensus.20 This commitment may be the result of pragmatic and/or normative reasons—usually a combination of both. Arguably, the most interesting theoretical issue arising from this analysis is the regularity with which ideological shifts resulting from tactical political alliances and coalitions have lead (when there are institutionalized political payoffs) to long-term and more durable shifts

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on positions of key cultural relevance. This shows that to exclude any segment of the society permanently from governance attenuates the democratic nature of the system and threatens its long-term stability, as the alienation from the political process exacerbates the development of “rebellious” forms of collective identity and the rise of more confrontational cultural politics. This is a danger posed by continued exclusion of Arab parties in Israel from the governing coalitions. Excluded groups, through their cultural entrepreneurs, develop discourses of victimization, rage, and rejection of the existing political arrangement and their legitimating principles. While entrenchment of tolerance in the culture is ethically preferable (at least such is our position), at the very least the political elite should recognize the utility of this kind of inclusion and try to make the accommodations that ensure it. The Dutch case illustrates that as the general public became more tolerant of their traditional religious/cultural differences and more politically involved, some of its members challenged the accommodative rules of the ruling elite cartels. All three cases illustrate that, at least initially, democratization through the mobilization of larger segments of the public and the greater political representation and influence of previously peripheral groups can release intolerant and undemocratic forces. In essence, consensus promotes evolution toward more inclusive society, which, paradoxically, makes it easier for some newly incorporated groups to violate tenets on which consensus is based. Consequently new forms of power sharing are instituted with a growing sentiment among many to impose majority domination of the minority. Even in the Netherlands, despite its much longer history as an independent democratic state with a deeply entrenched culture of tolerance (Schama 1987), the difficulty of integrating significant segments of the million and a half first-generation immigrants (10 percent of the population)—nearly a million of whom are Muslim—has been dramatically illustrated by the consequences of politically motivated violence and murders. The personal party of populist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim (and openly gay) nationalist leader Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated one week before it became the second largest parliamentary party the first time it contested an election in 2002, was briefly part of the coalition government.21 Herzinger (2002: 79) suggests that “right wing” is the wrong adjective for the new European populists like Fortuyn who was no racist: “His anti-immigrant stance arose from a popular fear that conservative Islamic attitudes would dilute Dutch tolerance.” Rabinbach (2002: 3) described Fortuyn’s party as “a curious mix of antiimmigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment and racial and sexual tolerance

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that does not square with any traditional notions of Europe’s far right.”22 Although the party eventually self-destructed, another led by Geert Wilders23 continues to promote (as of 2012) anti-immigrant populism that was strengthened by the reaction of fear following the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh was brutally slain by a Dutchborn man of Moroccan parents, in protest against his provocative film, Submission, which is highly critical of the treatment of women in some Islamic cultures.24 A perception that Dutch culture is threatened, produced by the increasingly noisy right-wing discourse, is the dominant factor in generating a negative reaction to immigrant minorities. The central issue of contention is the policy of cultural integration. It is equally salient for those who consider it to be an essential pillar of Dutch culture, as well as those who see it as a threat to it. The debate over whether the integration of immigrants from Muslim countries is desirable or possible, and whether it threatens the humanist democratic culture, extends throughout Dutch society.25 Many expert observers note that such strains over immigration are rooted in a genuine conflict of values. For example, Ian Buruma (2005: 26–32) characterizes the Dutch creed of tolerance as being “under siege” and suggests their “naiveté” is “the wrong state of mind for defending one of the oldest and most liberal democracies against those who wish to destroy it.” The Economist (2005: 26) reports: “In a mood of confusion over national identity, there have been calls for a new canon of Dutch history, hitherto an unfashionable subject.”26 It quotes the liberal Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen who said the Netherlands “seems as if it has lost its anchor.” Our argument is different. We worry that the phrase “conflict of values” may be taken to mean the existence of enduring (if not “timeless”) and irreconcilably “essential” differences. We emphasize the processual and interactive character of social and political reality and assume that political processes, sometimes at least, generate unintended cultural consequences. If we had to couch our argument in the language of “conflict of values,” we would begin by stressing that such conflicts are neither “eternal” nor unavoidable. They emerge as the result of structural and/or political processes that pit against each other groups that might have lived earlier in relative harmony built on political accommodation and or/cultural consensus. But we would add to this, from our “culturalist” position, that cultural factors (such as discourses, ideologies, symbols, etc.) have their independent causal power. We would also emphasize that politics has both a demand and a supply side. Demographic changes and political processes always generate demand for new political solutions and innovative cultural frames

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that would allow the people to make sense of the changing reality. But this demand is not always met by the cultural supply of discourses that exacerbate the socially or politically induced tension. Such “hostile” discourses need to be provided by political-cultural entrepreneurs, who often offer them out of political or economic calculation. In Israel and India militant, exclusive, and even xenophobic forms of nationalism, developed by “nationalistic” politicians and other public figures, successfully challenged the milder and more inclusive forms of nationalism advocated by the older generation of paternalistic leaders of the formerly dominant parties. Even in the Netherlands, antiimmigrant (primarily anti-Muslim) populism has been on the rise in the past two decades. These three cases provide vivid verification of the fact that processes of democratization are dynamic and not necessarily unidirectional. The more exclusive nationalisms in Israel and India encourage greater militancy in the long-standing border disputes between them and their neighbors. They tend to induce not only increased domestic violence, but framed as “nationalist” ideologies, they also contribute to the increased levels of violence with their neighbors. Therefore, the prospects for both the stability of Israeli and Indian democracy as well as for the stability of their volatile regions depends on the strengthening of domestic accommodative practices and moderate and inclusive forms of collective identity. The Dutch case reflects similar challenges to liberal values and democratic stability in neighboring Belgium and, in varying degrees, throughout Europe.27 We have demonstrated through these case studies how different patterns of accommodation and control operated within different sectors of the societies simultaneously and how they evolved with the transition in the nature of the political systems and cultural forms of legitimation. Comparing the evolution of these three divided societies over a period of six decades documents the dynamic nature of processes of accommodation and control involved in democratization. The power sharing aspects of consociational arrangements, dominant parties and their dominant ideologies, legitimating discourses, thin hegemony, and civic consensus enabled Dutch democracy to accommodate a divided society and prosper in the post-WWII era and Israel and India to build strong, stable democracies in the face of enormous challenges of state building. As these arrangements failed to adapt to changing conditions, new ones replaced them. When the newly empowered segments of each society entered the public arena while the political-cultural entrepreneurs supplied more ethnocentric forms of nationalism, the traditional ethnic republican nationalism of each state has come under fire and the accommodationist (but also paternalistic) styles of poli-

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tics have become less popular. Our focus on the interrelations between political and cultural dynamics is key to understanding the complexities of these processes. We also insist that the best method to observe these interrelations is ethnography, particularly its interpretive variants as the primary object of investigation in the constantly changing field of discourses of collective identity. Our main theoretical finding may be phrased as a warning about the politically disastrous effects of neglecting cultural mechanisms while studying and practicing the politics of accommodation in deeply divided societies. The political order in such societies is not produced by a single mechanism. There are always several. Moreover, as the circumstances change, their combinations that may produce effective solutions to emerging problems (must) also change. Their effectiveness arises, therefore, from “proper” combinations of economic, political, and cultural mechanisms. Additionally, we emphasize the relative causal autonomy of the latter. It is enough to remember that culturalpolitical entrepreneurs can work to ameliorate conflicts generated within the economy or by distributive politics, but they may also exacerbate them, often with tragic consequences. Their power should not be underestimated.

Notes 1. Prominent proponents of the theory of social and cultural pluralism include Pierre van den Berghe, Leo Despres, Leo Kuper, Richard Schermerhorn, and Michael G. Smith. They are mostly anthropologists and sociologists. 2. In Dutch the term most commonly used to define the phenomenon is verzuiling (literally “pillarization”). This metaphorically conveys the notion of such vertical divisions. 3. Lijphart lists as many as eight features in his other publications (see, for example 1984: 21–45). We focus on the four key characteristics. 4. Scott introduces a concept of “thin hegemony.” What “ideological domination” accomplishes in such situations is “to define for subordinate groups what is realistic and what is not realistic and to drive certain aspirations and grievances into the realm of the impossible, of idle dreams” (1990: 74). 5. As with other “ideal type” distinctions, the variance from hegemony through legitimating discourses could be plotted along a continuum. We utilize the distinct categories for sake of clarity in graphically representing relationships and patterns over time. 6. Mizrachi Jews are an assimilating minority that, for a brief period prior to the mass immigration from the former Soviet Union, became a majority.

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7. The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, sponsored by the national council of heads of Arab local authorities, represents all Arab political factions in Israel. It adopted a “Vision for the Future” that included a demand for their recognition as a separate national minority with the right to establish separate institutions. (Stern 2006). Mendilow (2012) discusses six recent books analyzing these important developments. 8. Rudy B. Andeweg and Galen A. Irwin’s (1993: 27–29) characterization of a typical Dutchman’s life history encapsulated within his zuiling is remarkably similar to that of a typical Israeli’s enmeshment in her camp—especially in the period prior to independence and in the first decade of independence. 9. The Netherlands is treated as a single electoral district for determination of the size of the parliamentary delegations, but there are nineteen electoral districts. Lijphart (1975: 214) claims, “This extreme electoral system has greatly accelerated the breakdown of the politics of accommodation.” 10. Not all experts on Dutch politics employ the consociational model or find it appropriate. Among those who do there is a consensus that 1967 constituted a major turning point. See Lijphart (1975: 196–97), Eldersveld, Kooiman, and van der Tak (1981: 224), Ken Gladdish (1991: 50) and Andeweg and Irwin (1993: 44) among others. 11. Hanspeter Kriesi (1993) analyzes political mobilization and social change based on a survey conducted in 1987. 12. Ekiert and Kubik (1999) argue the same in reference to postcommunist democracies. 13. The origin of the Dutch burger differs from the typical ideological notion of the bourgeois, but this is beyond the scope of our case study. 14. We stress that we are only referring to competitive democratic dominant party systems and not nondemocratic one-party states. 15. Zoya Hasan (1998) analyzes opposition movements and post-Congress politics in Uttar Pradesh, arguably India’s most influential state. 16. See, for example, Sternhell 1988. 17. Aronoff (1989) and Lustick (1988). 18. From 1952 to 1971 Congress won a high of 75 percent and a low of 54.42 percent of the central parliamentary seats. It received a low of 48.59 percent of the seats in State Assemblies in 1967 and a high of 70.22 percent of the seats in the state assemblies in 1972. But it did so with only 40.73 to 47.78 percent of the electoral vote. (Hardgrave 1980: 204–7). 19. At the time our manuscript was being sent to press a book was published by Ayelet Harel-Shalev (2010). She compares democratization in India and Israel. 20. The concept of thin hegemony comes from Scott (1990: 83). 21. Fortuyn was assassinated by a militant animal rights activist. 22. In Flanders, in neighboring Belgium, the right-wing populist anti-immigrant (and anti- Muslim) Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) surged from 10 percent of the electorate in 1999 to nearly a quarter by 2005. Cas Mudde (2007) offers a comprehensive analysis of the European right-wing populism. 23. The current minority government in the Netherlands is dependent upon the parliamentary support of the party led by Wilders. 24. Wilders was temporarily forced to live in a high-security prison cell, and his fellow parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007), a Somali-born feminist who collaborated with Van Gogh on the controversial film, after being sent abroad for a period was forced to live on a military base for a period because of the many death threats they both received. 25. See Paul M. Sniderman, Louk Hagendoorn, and Markus Prior (2004: 47).

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26. A commission appointed by the Dutch minister of education presented a proposed canon of fifty major historical figures and events to be taught in Dutch schools to reflect and strengthen a sense of collective Dutch memory. The chair of the commission, historian Frits van Oostrom, stated that the goal was not to force a common identity on the diverse population: “I do not think that a national identity of a country exists.” He added, however, that “a cultural and historical legacy forms a base [onderdeel] of your identity” (Funnekotter 2006). 27. It is noteworthy, although beyond the scope of this chapter, to explore the critical period of 1967–1977 for major cultural and political transformations in all three states.

Chapter 7

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CAMP DAVID RASHOMON1 Contested Interpretations of the Israel/Palestine Peace Process

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ntil recently, the kind of research demanded for writing a chapter like this one has not been clearly recognized as having its own specific and properly labeled methodology. This has changed in recent years. Many social scientists now recognize the combination of ethnography and discourse analysis as a useful method (Adams 2009: 336). For international relations scholars our analysis will exemplify a constructivist approach with its attendant focus on the practices of meaning creation and manipulation. We also are engaging here in what Marcus and Holmes call paraethnography (chapter 2). We were not at Camp David, so Aronoff read carefully all available analyses of this event (in English and Hebrew) including the publications by the participants, interviews of them by others, and original interviews of key participants (as discussed in the Preface).2 What makes our account “ethnographic” is the sensitivity to the way the participants contested each other’s attempts to impose meanings on the events and focus on the minutiae of complex interactions. Additionally, following the precepts of the paraethnographic method, we treat the participants (several of whom earned PhDs) as “ethnographers,” that is, individuals who have to deal with complex situations demanding instant decisions and must, therefore, rely on the “ethnographically” built “intuitive,” “synthetic,” and deeply contextual knowledge. The influence of postmodern ethnography is reflected in the emphasis given to the voices of the actors as informants.

Notes for this section begin on page 195.

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The summit peace conference between Israel and the Palestinian Authority mediated by the United States at Camp David, Maryland, (from 11 July to 25 July 2000) was widely reported and analyzed. Yet accounts of the failure of these talks, of the subsequent violent Palestinian uprising that broke out on 29 September 2000, and of the controversial talks in Taba, Egypt, (from 21 January to 27 January 2001) diverge widely in their descriptions of what transpired and in the attribution of blame for their failure (Enderlin 2003).3 Conventional division of discourse about Camp David into dominant and revisionist narratives is inadequate and oversimplified. There is a tension between the goal of social science to reduce the complexity of social reality through the construction of parsimonious models and the need to refrain from oversimplification that significantly distorts reality. The interpretive approach applied in this chapter more closely approximates the complexity of reality by complicating the model at the price of parsimony (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea 2006). We employ a model that elucidates the differences between conflicting explanations for the failure of the summit negotiations at Camp David. No less important, we examine the internal divisions within the schools and areas of agreement between them—both of which have been insufficiently analyzed. In order to provide a fuller understanding of the breakdown of the peace process and the “Labor Party–Arafat axis” (Lustick 1997: 741–57), we propose a study of political positions that is informed by the analysis of cultural framing of negotiations, of actors’ self-perceptions, and of their perceptions of counterparts.

Schools of Interpretation The different interpretations of Camp David have been categorized in diverse ways. Mirroring the four discrepant testimonies in the film Rashomon, scholar-diplomat Itamar Rabinovich (2004) divides them into four schools. Despite limitations, these categories constitute a useful framework for this discussion. He calls the dominant narratives of the United States and Israel the “orthodox school.” Since President Bill Clinton, his chief negotiator Dennis Ross, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Minister for Internal Security and Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami articulated variants of these positions, they became viewed by many as an official, if not canonized, version of events. Although they primarily blame Arafat for the failure, there are significant differences in who else is blamed and in some details of their analyses. The books of Dennis Ross and Shlomo Ben-Ami in this “school” are the most comprehensive in their analysis of events.

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Robert Malley, Clinton’s National Security Council staffer in charge of Arab-Israeli affairs, and his coauthor Hussein Agha, an advisor to the Palestinian delegation, most succinctly articulate the “revisionist school.” They debunk the orthodox school’s narrative and place the blame for failure primarily on Barak’s style and policies and to a lesser extent on Ross and Clinton’s failure to act as honest brokers. They present the performance of the Palestinians in a much more favorable light. In the absence of an “official” Palestinian response, this narrative served as the de facto Palestinian position.4 Clayton Swisher presents a more forceful and elaborate version of this position. The Israeli revisionist version is articulated by central figures involved in the Oslo Accords. Rabinovich distinguishes between Israelis who are more critical, like Uri Savir and Ron Pundak whom he places in the “revisionist school,” and those to whom he attributes a more nuanced, balanced, and somewhat eclectic analysis. The “eclectic school” is represented by the initiator of the Oslo process, Yossi Beilin, and by Gilead Sher. Sher served as Barak’s chief of staff during part of his tenure and was the lead negotiator with the Palestinians during many negotiations. Sher, Barak’s former brother-inlaw and personal attorney, is his most trusted advisor. Barak headed a minority government by the time he arrived at Camp David. Therefore, the more nationalistic parties that rejected the Oslo Accords—whose position is characterized by Rabinovich as the “deterministic school”—were not represented in the delegation.5 The underlying premise of this school, most forthrightly articulated by Brigadier General Amos Gilead, head of the IDF Intelligence Research Division, is that Arafat would never make peace and that negotiations were therefore doomed to failure. Gilead’s evaluation was later publicly challenged by his boss Major General Amos Malka, the head of IDF military intelligence. Like the opponents of the peace negotiations on the Palestinian side, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, representatives of these views were not present during the negotiations at Camp David and Taba (or at back channel negotiations). We therefore do not systematically examine their positions in this essay. However, their political influence constrained the freedom of maneuverability of both leaders and their negotiators. In their extreme violent manifestations, e.g., the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and acts of Palestinian terrorism, they succeeded in interrupting the peace process at critical stages and ultimately in aborting it. Eventually the campaign to blame Arafat for the failure of Camp David and for the Al-Aksa intifada led to wide acceptance of Gilead’s premise in Israel. Ironically, this backfired on Barak. “Barak began to fall prey to his own spin, looking like a sucker for

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having made Arafat such a ‘generous offer’” (Swisher 2004: 343).6 This was a significant reason for his resounding defeat by Ariel Sharon and the shift of Israeli government policy to unilateralism during Sharon’s premiership and that of his successor, Ehud Olmert.

The Orthodox School Dennis Ross was the chief US negotiator and author of The Missing Peace (Ross 2005).7 This book is the most comprehensive statement of the dominant US position. With reference to his failure to accept the Clinton parameters of 23 December 2000, which came closer to the Palestinian position than any previous proposal, Ross (2005: 13) asserts: “Arafat could not do a deal that ended the conflict. … He was unable to accept an independent Palestinian state that was territorially viable and had East Jerusalem as its capital.” However, there were additional important “missing pieces,” generally ignored by his critics, that Ross suggests undermined the peace process. “The lack of public conditioning for peace, the reluctance to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other side’s grievance and needs, the inability to confront comfortable myths, the difficulty of transforming behavior and acknowledging mistakes, the inherent challenge of getting both sides to move at the same time, the unwillingness to make choices, and the absence of leadership, especially among the Palestinians, are all factors that have made peace difficult to achieve” (Ross 2005:14). Whereas for Ross all of these variables are important in explaining the lack of success at Camp David, his critics focus on his blaming Arafat. The main weakness of his analysis is the conspicuous absence of self-criticism. Ross (2005: 651) hints at the weaknesses of the role of the American delegation in a reference to President Clinton’s tendency “to play the ideas prematurely.” He pointedly criticizes Clinton’s abandonment—in deference to Barak’s game plan—of the parameters on core issues prepared by Ross and his team. “The President, though having agreed to my strategy, altered it as he faced opposition from Barak” (2005: 656). Despite his own reservations, Ross proceeded with the draft agreement rather than the principles paper. A careful reading of his eight-hundred-page book reveals considerable criticism of Barak. Yet he concludes that despite tactical mistakes by both Barak and Clinton, “Only one leader was unable or unwilling to confront history and mythology: Yasser Arafat” (2005: 758). Ross criticizes Barak’s Syria-first policy and lack of a clear policy toward the Palestinians that made the Palestinians suspicious of him.

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Barak chose to deal with Syria first, despite pressure from some of his most important and trusted advisors to deal with the Palestinians first. “He was riveted on the dangers of withdrawing from Lebanon without a deal with Syria, and determined to see if such a deal was possible before doing anything else” (Ross 2005: 593).8 Sher asserted: “In retrospect, it was a mistake to engage Syria at the expense of the Palestinians. I told Barak then [in 1999] that strategically our first priority was to disengage from the Palestinians.”9 Abed Rabbo also considered it a major political blunder from the Palestinians’ viewpoint: “There should have been at least simultaneous negotiations.”10 Rabinovich (2004: 179), who led earlier Israeli negotiations with Syria, concludes, “The United States and Israel spent too much time in a futile effort to come to terms with Hafez al-Assad and were too late to arrive at a crucial phase in the negotiation with the Palestinians.” Ross criticizes Barak for having sought an end-of-conflict deal without dealing with Jerusalem and points out the logical inconsistency in his approach. Barak wanted to justify his concessions on ending the conflict, but he did not want to touch Jerusalem. Ross also criticizes Barak’s lack of a strategy toward the Palestinians. He contends that tension between official and unofficial negotiations—especially on the Palestinian side, undercut the best chance for success. Arafat’s exploitation of internal Palestinian divisions undermined secret negotiations in Israel and in Sweden. Abed Rabbo (a member of the Palestinian inner cabinet and minister of information at the time of the interview) told us that he resigned as head of the official delegation when he learned about the back channel Swedish track. He was furious that this was done without his knowledge.11 Barak was concerned that a leak from the secret talks could devastate him politically. Most analysts agree with Ross that Arafat’s use or tolerance of violence as a lever on negotiations significantly contributed to the breakdown of the peace process. Abed Rabbo confirmed: “Many advised him [Arafat] to reign in the violence, but he was sure he could control it. But the violence got out of control and now he may be too weak to regain control.”12 Ross (2005: 40) concludes: “Arafat’s greatest travesty as a leader is that he did nothing to delegitimize those who used violence against the Israelis.” In a meeting with Tanzim leaders Marwan Bargouti and Qadoura Fares, Yossi Beilin says Bargouti warned that the “days of rage” in the territories could escalate, but when Beilin expressed concern that increasing violence would cause great damage to the peace process, he was told: “The instructions for tomorrow have already been given. But in the future it will be possible to steer things in a different direction” (Beilin 2004: 142). Nakba Day was even bloodier

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and resulted in Barak recalling his negotiator from the secret talks in Stockholm. Ross (2005: 40) characterizes Arafat’s maneuvering: “Never erase an option, never close a door, and never commit to anything that was irrevocable—indeed, never regard any commitment as binding.” This assessment was corroborated by several of our Palestinian and Israeli interviewees as well as in various publications.13 His critics frequently ignore the fact that Ross attributes the failure of Oslo to the failure of both sides to undergo internal transformation. Although he credits the Israeli political leadership with having made the greater psychological leap, he also criticizes the failure of such transformations to be reflected in the behavior of Israelis who dealt with the Palestinians on a daily basis, which gave the Palestinians the impression that Oslo consolidated Israeli control. The frustration resulting from this was a major contributor to the outbreak of violence. He contrasts the historic strategic choices made by Rabin and Barak with the tactical transactions of Arafat who not only failed to prepare his public for painful compromises for peace but also retained violence as an option. Ross (2005: 767) concludes, “Oslo might not have failed if Arafat had been prepared to be a leader and not just a symbol.” Below we critically evaluate his analysis of political cultures and the role of cultural misunderstanding in the failure at Camp David. Ehud Barak Interviewed by Benny Morris (2002) This 2002 essay was a response to the criticisms of him made by the revisionists Agha and Malley (see below) and others. Barak makes the following main points. Arafat failed to negotiate in good faith. He rejected every offer without making counterproposals. Arafat believes that Israel “has no right to exist, and he seeks its demise” (Morris 2002: 42). Barak makes the following generalization referring to Palestinian, especially Arafat’s, mendacity: “They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie … creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category.” Barak cites as evidence of this that when he told Arafat he had proof that Marwan Bargouti and Hussein al-Sheikh orchestrated the violence, Arafat pretended not to know who they were. Barak insists (despite conflicting evaluations within his own security services) that the intifada was preplanned. He refutes the charge that the Palestinians were dragooned prematurely and unprepared into coming to Camp David. He insists that they had eight years since 1993 to prepare and a full year since Barak was elected and announced his intention to seek a final settlement. “Before the summit, there were

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months of discussions and contacts, in Stockholm, Israel, the Gaza Strip” (Morris 2002: 43). Barak admits that the expansion of the existing settlements during his term appeared to the Palestinians to be an Israeli land grab. He calls the revisionist charge that he offered noncontiguous Bantustans “one of the most embarrassing lies to have emerged from Camp David” (Morris 2002: 43). Barak charges that the revisionists’ focus on Camp David almost completely ignores the more generous Clinton proposals that the Israeli government endorsed and the Taba talks thereafter. Barak holds firm against the right of return. He denies Israeli historical responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem. Malley and Agha point out the irony that while Barak categorically rejects Israeli responsibility, the revisionist historian Benny Morris documents through his original research how Israeli military attacks and expulsions were one of the main causes for the Palestinian exodus during the 1948 war. In response to charges that he snubbed Arafat, Barak claimed, “I am the Israeli leader who met most with Arafat” (Morris 2002: 44).14 His defense ignores the lack of substantive conversations between the two top leaders despite the repeated pleas by his top advisors that he should meet more frequently and substantively with Arafat at Camp David. In his “Rejoinder” to Malley and Agha’s “Reply” to the above essay, Barak associates their critique with the “Palestinian Weltanschauung, that someone else, always, is to blame for their misfortunes … anyone but themselves” (Morris 2002: 47). He claims the principal failing of the Palestinians was their inability to say yes to the proposals presented or to offer a specific counterproposal. “The demand for the right of return, in the deepest sense, is a demographic mechanism to achieve Israel’s destruction, says Barak” (Morris 2002: 47). Barak sees this demand as “the core of the problem,” which he sarcastically notes doesn’t seem to concern Malley and Agha. In an attempt to clarify (and indirectly retract) his characterization of Arab/Palestinian culture, Barak portrays Arafat “and some (not all) of his entourage” as “serial liars” (Morris 2002: 47). Shlomo Ben-Ami: Bridging Orthodox and Eclectic Schools Ben-Ami has one foot solidly in the orthodox school because he concludes that Arafat was incapable of signing a final stage agreement. Because Arafat could not or would not abandon the tools of incitement and terror, he is deemed not a real partner. Arafat’s lack of courage and creativity, his passivity and inability to make decisions are sharply criticized. However, Ben-Ami also recognizes the conflicting expectations of the two sides and their different understanding of the significance of

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the peace process. Although he concludes that the conflict can only be resolved through an American-led mediation, paradoxically Ben-Ami condemns American mediation at Camp David as a colossal failure. He harshly criticizes Clinton’s weakness as a lame duck president who lacked the strength to pressure or twist arms. Ben-Ami’s equal-opportunity critique and more nuanced understanding of cultural differences put his other foot in the eclectic school. Ben-Ami criticizes Barak for focusing on Syria first and thus going against the advice of his top security advisors, most of his cabinet, and the mood of the country. Among others, he also accuses Barak of having gotten “cold feet” at the “moment of truth and decision” and of having used tactics that “ended up humiliating the Syrian President and eroded beyond repair his trust in Barak’s leadership” (Ben-Ami 2006: 243). He calls Barak “clueless” in his inability to make senior staff comprehend his own peace policy. Barak is taken to task for failing to follow BenAmi’s advice to make his red lines clear to the Americans, which made mediation more difficult for them. He disagrees with Barak’s reluctance to discuss Jerusalem earlier and his failure to utilize experienced negotiators such as Peres and Beilin, which he calls a political failure. “Barak was an expert in creating enemies unnecessarily” (2004: 41). Ben-Ami (2004: 42) describes a meeting between Arafat and Barak as “surrealistic” in “the complete and eventually tragic absence of chemistry between them. It was like a conversation conducted by deaf men.” The title of Ben-Ami’s Hebrew book, Front Without a Rearguard,15 refers to the fact that the Israeli negotiating team lacked stable political, parliamentary, and public backing. Barak had lost his parliamentary majority by the time he arrived at Camp David. Arafat also lacked the support of the Arab world. Ben-Ami suggests that, paradoxically, the Israeli negotiators had greater latitude without the need to satisfy a broad coalition. However, this point is contradicted by his criticism of Barak’s retreating from concessions to both the Syrians and the Palestinians for fear of domestic political recriminations. Ben-Ami (2004: 131) seems more sympathetic to the Palestinian paralysis resulting from their need to balance the demands of moderates and extremists, which left Arafat “close to no room for concessions.” He concludes that this situation demanded exceptional leadership abilities, such as those exemplified by David Ben Gurion and Anwar Sadat that Arafat (and by implication, Barak) tragically lacked. Ben-Ami contributes important insights into his role in negotiations when he crossed Barak’s red line on Jerusalem. Whereas he felt the urgent need to “thrust forward,” “Barak preferred a tactical retreat. He had the tendency of becoming stiff during the crucial moment, to curl

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up in the warm arms of the right wing among us, out of fear of being blamed for giving up too much” (2004: 181). Barak was very displeased with Ben-Ami and substantially revised his position paper withdrawing concessions on Jerusalem his foreign minister had made. Ben-Ami urged Barak to confide in Clinton his most comprehensive offer on Jerusalem. This did not happen, but in Ben-Ami’s story Arafat is even less forthcoming. Ben-Ami (2004: 185) recounts: “Barak was perhaps caught up in his convoluted and tactical thoughts, but Arafat was captivated by myths from which he could not break free. … If Barak did not give President Clinton enough rope on the issue of Jerusalem, then Arafat did not give any.” Barak, under American pressure, made additional concessions that fell short of Ben-Ami’s proposals. “Here lies the inconsistent jitteriness of Ehud which signaled his stress to the other side and that his red lines are too flexible.” Ben-Ami (2004:186) concludes this undermined Barak’s credibility with the Americans and “caused Arafat to lock himself in his positions and made him think he could squeeze more and more out of Barak.” According to Ben-Ami’s account, Barak eventually accepted the American proposal that Arafat rejected. He concedes Israeli mistakes—particularly in negotiating tactics, but he is convinced that they reached the limits of the concessions they could make in accepting the Clinton parameters. Although belatedly, the Palestinians under Arafat’s leadership gave a very qualified acceptance, both Clinton and Ross interpreted the response as a rejection.

The Revisionist School Hussein Agha and Robert Malley were the first authoritative critics of the emerging orthodoxy that credited Barak for his “unprecedented offer” and condemned Arafat for his uncompromising “no.” They called this orthodoxy dangerous, shallow, and simplistic (Agha & Malley 2001).16 They note Barak’s antipathy toward the gradualism of the 1993 Oslo agreement and his estimation that the Palestinian leadership would make a historic compromise—if at all—only after it had explored and found unappealing all other possibilities. They criticize Barak’s discarding of interim steps previously agreed upon as “cost-benefit analysis” and a “hedge against failure,” which resulted in an “all-or-nothing approach.” In addition to his failure to redeploy, Barak’s decision to focus on negotiation with Syria to the exclusion of the Palestinians aroused the suspicion of Arafat, who seems to have assumed that Barak was trying to dupe him—especially since he saw no reason not to implement the interim agreements. “Barak’s actions led to a classic case of misad-

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dressed messages. … Everything Barak saw as evidence that he was serious, the Palestinians considered to be evidence that he was not.” Sensing a US-Israeli conspiracy, Arafat went to Camp David intent more on surviving than on benefiting from it. Agha and Malley contrast Clinton’s tactical flexibility with Barak’s rigidity and yet characterize the two men as “genuine intimates.” President Clinton agreed with Arafat’s depiction of Barak as “politically maladroit, frustrating, lacking a personal touch. But he differed with Arafat on a crucial point: he was convinced that Barak genuinely wanted a historic deal.” They explain why the promise made by Clinton to Arafat that he would not be blamed if the summit failed was not kept. “Barak’s reasoning—and his timetable—had an irresistible logic to them.” A final deal would trump interim issues. US leverage therefore needed to be expended on permanent agreement issues. Finally, Clinton sought to boost much-needed domestic support for Barak in the midst of the election campaign at the expense of his promise to Arafat. The key question the authors address is: “Was there a generous Israeli offer and, if so, was it peremptorily rejected by Arafat?” Their answer is ambiguous. Whereas they recognize the significance of concessions made by Barak, they conclude that “strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer.” Their rationale is highly formalistic since the ideas were conveyed orally as American concepts. The clarifications requested by the Barak government when it accepted the Clinton parameters were considered by both Clinton and Ross to be within the accepted terms of the proposed framework. The revisionists reject this interpretation, charging that the Israeli reservations were no less substantial than those of the Palestinians. The revisionists claim further that Clinton and especially Ross were not impartial in their determination that the Israeli reservations were within the parameters and Arafat’s were not. The Palestinians feel they made the principal concessions in the historic compromise at Oslo by conceding 78 percent of mandatory Palestine to Israel. Most Palestinians “were prepared to accept Israel’s existence, but not its moral legitimacy.” Indeed, this is the essence of the problem since Israel expected Palestinian recognition of its legitimacy in a final settlement, which the Palestinians were incapable of granting. Barak and many others concluded that they were therefore intent on Israel’s destruction. While true for Palestinian militants, it does not reflect the view of the moderates. Hard-line Israelis also reject this distinction. Barak’s adoption of their position, Palestinian violence, the election of Ariel Sharon as the Israeli prime minister, and the election of a Hamas majority to the Palestinian legislature and government

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terminated negotiations and resulted in the policy of unilateralism by ensuing Israeli governments. The authors agree with a point made by the orthodox school that the Palestinians’ “principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own.” They explain that the political climate within Palestinian society lacked a coalition of powerful constituencies committed to success at Camp David that produced caution rather than creativity among the negotiators. Domestic hostility toward the summit exacerbated tensions among a divided Palestinian team. “Lacking internal cohesion, Palestinian negotiators were unable to treat Camp David as a decisive, let alone a historic, gathering.” Beilin, Ben-Ami, and Sher (as well as Ross) agree with Agha and Malley that Barak’s negotiating style contributed to the failure as well. “By presenting early positions as bottom lines, the Israelis provoked the Palestinian’ mistrust; by subsequently shifting them, they whetted the Palestinians’ appetite. By the end of the process, it was hard to tell which bottom lines were for real, and which were not.” Their analysis of the complex and contradictory roles played by the United States as principal broker, guardian of the peace process, Israel’s strategic ally, and its cultural and political partner is particularly adroit. Among other debilitating effects, this complex US role obscured the real differences between the United States and Israel. Arafat’s inability to grasp the complexity of the relationship between the United States and Israel cost him dearly. Arafat’s obsession with Barak’s tactics prevented him from realizing the significance of the concessions he was willing to make, the willingness of the United States to pressure him, and “how strong a hand he had been dealt.” They criticize the US team (of which Malley was a member) for never fully taking control of the negotiations. “Pulled in various and inconsistent directions, it never quite figured out which way to go, too often allowing itself to be used.” Agha and Malley sympathetically explain Arafat’s ambiguous response to the Clinton parameters, which they admit had evolved since Camp David almost completely in the Palestinian’s direction. Arafat concluded that they “were warmed-over Israeli positions and that a better proposal may still be forthcoming.” Arafat preferred to continue negotiating “under the comforting umbrella of international resolutions rather than within the confines of America’s uncertain proposals.” They make only a single passing reference the “violence” and to Taba. They fail to answer the question raised in the introduction whether there had been a generous Israeli offer. Yet, the strongest evidence to

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support their implication that there had not been is that at each stage after Camp David—the Clinton parameters and at the later negotiations in Taba, Egypt—the terms were more favorable to the Palestinians. This may appear to justify Arafat’s refusal to agree to the earlier offers. However, if his reluctance to reach an agreement was merely tactical, he clearly overplayed his hand since he and his people lost a historic opportunity for achieving internationally recognized statehood under the best terms likely to be offered for many years to come. In their reply to Barak, Malley and Agha list his political failures. He failed to implement the agreement on withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank signed by Netanyahu. He intensified construction of settlements. He delayed talks with the Palestinians while he negotiated with Syria. He failed to release prisoners detained for acts committed prior to the Oslo accords. He failed to implement the third territorial redeployment of troops and the transfer of three Jerusalem villages. He didn’t hold substantive talks with Arafat at Camp David. The timing of the talks was premature from the Palestinian perspective. Barak’s brusque style offended the Palestinians. Continued settlement construction, repeated territorial closings, and humiliation and harassment at checkpoints eroded Palestinian confidence and narrowed the leaders’ room for maneuver. Finally, Barak is criticized for insensitivity and derogatory depiction of Arab culture (Malley & Agha 2002: 46). Agha and Malley also deny that the Palestinians rejected the Clinton parameters and cite the Taba talks as proof that the Palestinians are not out to achieve the destruction of Israel and that Arafat was willing to negotiate a settlement. They admit that “the Palestinian Authority did not do what it could to stop the uprising, which some of its leaders felt might well serve its interests. It is equally true that Palestinians initiated many acts of violence” (Malley & Agha 2002: 48). They also cite the Mitchell report on the excessive and deadly use of force by the IDF to balance the blame. They conclude that the Camp David process was the victim of the failings by the Palestinians, Israel and the United States—equally. The authors strongly condemn Barak for helping set in motion the process of “deligitimizing the Palestinians and the peace process” (Malley & Agha 2002: 48).

The Eclectic School: Yossi Beilin, the Architect of the Oslo Process Beilin was deputy foreign minister under Shimon Peres in the government led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin elected in 1992. He initi-

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ated secret negotiations first in London and later in Oslo without prior approval of either Peres or Rabin. After significant progress had been made, he informed Peres and Rabin of his initiative in Oslo. Beilin accepted Rabin’s guidelines to follow the interim arrangement outlined at the Madrid Conference in 1991 and not attempt to negotiate a final settlement of core issues. “I came to believe this was a mistake, and tried to convince Rabin and Peres to aim directly for the permanent solution” (Beilin 2004: 47). They feared the public would not support such an ambitious agenda. Beilin stated, “I lobbied for the permanent solution from day one.”17 Just as he had done with the Oslo initiative, Beilin initiated meetings with Abu Mazen to discuss final status issues without the knowledge of Foreign Minister Peres and Prime Minister Rabin. “I knew that had I asked them to start such an operation they would have said, ‘no way.’” Because he was trying to “psych out Rabin,” he “kept Jerusalem open-ended to fit his [Rabin’s] needs.”18 The concluding negotiations on the draft framework agreement took place on 31 October 1995. Beilin told us that he had been scheduled to meet with Rabin to discuss the Beilin–Abu Mazen Understandings shortly after Rabin was assassinated on 4 November 1995. After Rabin’s assassination Peres became premier and Beilin became a minister in charge of peace negotiations. Not for the first time, Beilin expressed his conviction that Rabin would have supported the agreement, whereas, ironically, Peres (Beilin’s political mentor) felt the time was not right and vetoed it.19 Beilin’s report of his personal conversation with Arafat about the agreement he had reached with Abu Mazen is instructive, as it provides yet another view on Arafat’s willingness and/or ability to reach a final stage settlement with Israel: “He did not embrace it. He did not say this is the solution. He said it was one of the solutions.”20 It was exactly the same with the Geneva Accord of 12 October 2003: “Basically it is difficult to know with him [Arafat]. He’s playing games and keeps big room to maneuver.”21 When asked if he thinks Arafat is capable of signing a final stage agreement, Beilin responded that only if he got East Jerusalem, sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the 1967 borders, and Israeli recognition of the right of return, which Beilin defined as “a symbolic entrance of Palestinian refugees to Israel” as opposed to an unlimited return.22 Beilin felt that the Camp David summit would have been the appropriate forum to table his proposals. “I believed this was the exact moment to put the Beilin-Abu Mazen Understandings on the table as a basis for negotiations” (Beilin 2004: 153). He gave it to Barak and learned later that a copy had also been passed on to President Clinton (not by Barak). Clinton is reported to have said: “This is it. This is simply the whole framework agreement. It is exactly this paper that has to

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be signed” (Beilin 2004: 154). Neither this paper, nor any other, was submitted to the sides at Camp David. Barak instructed Beilin (2004: 154): “It must not exist. If I come out with a partial alternative, the Palestinians will prefer it to the painful permanent settlement. I do not need it; you can take it back.” Beilin (2004: 155) informed his colleagues who had helped write the paper that “Ehud Barak is about to swing on the trapeze without a safety net, because I was still holding his safety net in my hand. They had difficulty understanding Barak’s decision. I did too.” Gilead Sher (2006: 124) agrees: “It is a shame, in hindsight, that the Beilin-Abu Mazen Understandings did not serve the American team as a point of reference for the Camp David summit.” After the talks at Camp David ended without an agreement, the White House proposed the Beilin–Abu Mazen Understandings be used as the basis for negotiations between Ben-Ami, Beilin, Abu Mazen, and Abu Ala. Sher (2006: 147) explains why this idea was a nonstarter: “Barak and Ben-Ami were not prepared to actually incorporate Beilin in the negotiations, concerned by his alleged tendency to go beyond his principal’s guidelines. Abu Mazen refused anyhow to be publicly and personally identified with Beilin with regard to the Understandings.” Beilin (2004: 28) condemns as “dangerous” Barak’s “all-or-nothing” approach in which his readiness to “expose the true face” of the other side was considered to be nearly as valuable as an agreement. He suggests that this and the undercurrent of the threat of violence on the Palestinian side largely contributed to the failure of Camp David. There is another reason of failure, according to Beilin (2004: 158): “Because Barak chose not to employ an existing paper as a starting point, the negotiations had no agreed basis. Instead, they were conducted according to the method of the bazaar.” The Palestinians demanded prior agreement to their principles before negotiating specifics. Beilin (2004: 159) contrasts these competing approaches as “the Bazaar on one hand, and principles before particulars on the other.” Beilin would have reversed the order of events by starting with Taba to establish areas of agreement and determine the major gaps, then have Clinton submit his parameters to attempt to bridge the gaps, and finally hold the summit at Camp David when the leaders would know in advance the compromises they would be required to make in order to reach a final stage agreement.23 He criticizes the amateurish way in which the Camp David talks were run and Clinton for being enchanted with the mere fact that Barak was ready to compromise. Arafat was not a negotiator, presented a very defensive mood, and waited for the others to suggest something good for him, which frustrated the Israeli

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negotiators. Beilin is particularly critical of Barak’s failure to meet more often and substantively with Arafat. “If you need a summit, you need it only for the leaders” (Beilin 2004: 159). He also criticizes Barak for not involving the most experienced Israeli negotiators with the Palestinians (among whom he was the most experienced). The effect of Barak’s personality on the process has been discussed extensively. Beilin (2004: 126) quotes Abu Ala, “Even if it is not his intention, Barak exudes contempt and arrogance, and to be sure, attitude plays an important part in negotiations.” According to Beilin, “Barak’s moves were characterized most of all by his suspicion. He never believed anyone, from either side” (2004: 166). Beilin (2004: 251) describes Barak’s complex character: “He is very direct—lacking in diplomacy and manners—but ready to embrace the most difficult tasks without fanfare.” During our interview with Barak on 28 June 2004, he was very gracious in granting us three hours of his time. However, we rarely had an opportunity to ask questions because Barak wanted to answer the criticism that had been leveled against him. He followed his agenda and was not interested in ours. His near monologue indicated that he felt that he knew better than we did the questions that we should ask. It confirmed Gilead Sher’s evaluation: “Ehud is brilliant, but has zero social intelligence.”24 In an interview with Charlie Rose, Barak responded to the question about his biggest mistake in office: “I made many mistakes, especially with regard to people’s sensitivities. I didn’t realize how important gestures of sensitivity were.”25 Beilin (2004: 229) reports the disagreement at Taba between Abu Ala, who claimed, “We are not committed to the Clinton Plan,” and Saeb Erekat, who corrected him stating, “‘We accepted the Clinton Plan as the basis, but submitted reservations.’ Who could be sure?” This incident clearly demonstrates the lack of clarity of positions even at this relatively advanced stage of negotiations. Even among the most sympathetic negotiators there remained sharp differences within and between delegations. “We asked why the Intifada had started, they asked back, why did you not respond with more restraint at the beginning? Every interlocutor had his own answer” (Beilin 2004: 229). Shades of Rashomon! When every interlocutor in each team has his own answer, the nuanced differences are obscured by overly reductive typologies. Beilin (2004: 230) states: “We were still attempting to analyze exactly what went wrong and how not to repeat the mistakes that we had not yet identified.” This is, indeed the challenge facing Israeli and Palestinian leaders and negotiators. In his relatively optimistic summary of the accomplishments of Taba, Beilin’s frustration is most clear on the issue for which he was the

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principal Israeli negotiator. “On the refugee issue—which was the only one on which drafts had been exchanged … almost full agreement was reached with respect to principles for resolving the problem” (2004: 247). However, Abu Ala insisted, despite protests from Nabil Sha’ath and Beilin, that they report that the Palestinians demanded the right of return and the Israelis rejected it.26 “Thus, the issue on which there had been the greatest consensus became a symbol of the inability to reach a solution, even with Israel governed by a ‘dovish’ administration” (Beilin 2004: 248). As this analysis of various accounts shows, there is no consensus on the progress made at Taba. Gilead Sher: Barak’s Right-Hand Man27 Sher first participated in peace talks as head of the Palestinian Negotiation Project in the Planning Division of the Israel Defense Force and as a delegate under Prime Minister Rabin from 1994 to 1995. He became the chief negotiator to the peace talks in June 1999. In October 2000 he became bureau chief and policy coordinator for Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Sher states that their main strategic goal of ending the conflict, including the finality of claims, was premised on the realization that time was not working in Israel’s favor. Sher (2006: 4) speculates: “Had Barak discussed his vision for the peace process with Chairman Arafat without media attention, Arafat might have responded favorably.” From the outset Saeb Erekat expressed the willingness of the Palestinians to engage in Permanent Status negotiations, “but not as an alternative to the implementation of the Wye Memorandum” (Sher 2006: 6).28 This was the single most important issue that initially planted the seeds of Palestinian distrust of Barak. An issue that precipitated a crisis and the ire of even moderates like Dahlan and Erekat was the refusal of Barak’s government to alter its criteria for the release of Palestinian security prisoners. During the secret channel discussions Sher (2006: 23) acknowledges: “The essence of Barak’s approach was to ‘unmask’ the Palestinian’s intentions in case their involvement in the process was not to negotiate in good faith but to ultimately lead to confrontation.” Prior to the summit Sher estimated the chances for success at Camp David to be less than 50 percent. Sher, like Ben-Ami, is highly critical of the lack of American effort in preparing working papers, and insufficient supervision, management, control, and follow-up that had a critically negative impact on the summit. Some members of the American team appeared to be less knowledgeable than the president in details and implications of the process. “The process was mismanaged, unclear and disorganized, leaving the delegations without a map, so to speak” (Sher 2006: 115).

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Sher heard from the Americans that the Israeli concession on Jerusalem, i.e., breaking the Israeli taboo on its indivisibility, was the most significant factor that led Clinton and Ross to blame the Palestinians for failure to reach agreement at Camp David. They gained a realistic assessment of the remaining gap between their evolving position and the Palestinian position. Sher (2004: 77), sensing an impasse that would prevent a final-stage settlement, proposed the consolidation of “an agreed list of issues that remain disputed, and conclude a mechanism for resolving other issues, including timetables, as well as the level of continued negotiations. Jerusalem is the main part of the comprehensive package that ‘seals’ the agreement, and it would be a tactical mistake to discuss and conclude it separately.” His suggestion appears to have been ignored, with tragic consequences. Sher criticizes Barak for appearing to have retreated from his new position on Jerusalem and thereby squandering personal capital and precious time. Sher reports repeated criticism of Barak by various members of the Israeli delegation; one even accused Barak of dictating terms to the Palestinians. Ben-Ami emphasized to Barak the problematic cultural gap dividing the Israelis and the Palestinians and criticized his disrespectful treatment of Arafat. All of his top advisors urged him to have substantive meetings with the Palestinian leader. However, Barak refused to meet with Arafat unless a certain condition was met regarding a proposal on Jerusalem. Arafat refused, and the meeting never took place. Barak was offended by the fact that Arafat “was treating us like ‘suckers’ and did not even bother to react to the ideas of the president” (Sher 2006: 94). Sher reports that the Israeli team was divided. Some felt that the failure of the Palestinians to acknowledge the importance of the Temple Mount to the Jews had become the make-or-break issue of the negotiations. Others were convinced that the Right of Return was the key issue. Sher’s (2006: 101) position on the latter issue is that “Israel did not bear the sole moral, legal or political responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem, but our aim was to participate in the resolution of this issue as part of the permanent peace arrangement.” Unlike Barak, Sher (2006: 103) recognizes that “Abu Mazen and Nabil Sha’ath differentiated between the right itself, as a principle, and the mechanisms for its realization.” On 25 July the Israeli delegation met in Barak’s cabin, and Barak declared, “We do not have a partner. The process stopped with the other side’s demand to transfer sovereignty over the Temple Mount” (Sher 2006: 115). Barak was urged by leading members of the delegation to meet with Arafat to avoid a violent confrontation and to keep the dia-

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logue alive. The meeting never took place. Sher (2006: 120) condemns Arafat for acting irresponsibly and asserts that Barak’s faulty personal behavior and management skills “had little influence on Arafat’s positions and strategy.” Yet Sher concludes that Barak’s absolute confidence in his political strategy left him removed from political reality. “Equally damaging was his failure to create a mechanism that would ensure continued political process in case the negotiations fail” (Sher 2006: 120). Barak failed to take advantage of the most experienced Labor Party politicians like Peres and Beilin who may have convinced him to adopt another strategy. “Barak did not often receive this kind of advice, ultimately becoming a prisoner of his own approach and actions” (Sher 2006: 121). This was written by the man who knows Barak best and who loyally served him throughout these difficult events. With regard to President Clinton’s proposal at the end of December, Sher speculates, “If such a plan had been presented to the two sides at Camp David, or shortly thereafter in August/September, things could have been substantially different” (Sher 2006: 191). When Aronoff asked Dennis Ross why it took so long for Clinton to present his parameters, he replied: “While both sides asked us to produce something, they wanted one more go around of their back channel negotiations which ended on the day Sharon visited the Temple Mount. My recommendation was to make the proposal within the next few days. Danny Yatom reported to me that the Palestinians were preparing widespread demonstrations and they couldn’t accept the proposals during violence.”29 We found this explanation unconvincing because it failed to account for an extended period during which the United States took no initiative. Sher (2006: 201) speculates: “It is difficult to assess how Camp David would have ended if these proposals had been presented to the two sides at that time, with the two leaders present at this isolated location, with Clinton president for another five months. If only the Americans would have used those conditions to pressure the sides into closing a deal. … This did not happen, and I could not easily dismiss the feeling of a missed opportunity.” Sher comments ruefully on the growing consensus within the military that the Palestinians were deceitful and were preparing for armed conflict. Postulating the inevitability of violence encouraged an aggressive approach where force replaced negotiations and “set the atmosphere and conditions for a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Sher 2006: 190). Ranking military officers made overtly political statements, intelligence analysis (including reservations about the Clinton Parameters) was leaked to the press before it was presented to the cabinet, and operations diverged from the political directives producing a self-imposed siege. This was an

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unprecedented military intervention in domestic politics and diplomacy in Israel (Peri 2006). Despite Sher’s skepticism, Barak agreed to Peres’s pressure to conduct intensive negotiations in Taba, Egypt, until six days before the Israeli elections. Moreover, it was assumed that such negotiations would be resumed after the elections. Some opposed the last-minute effort given the proximity of the Israeli elections. Sher claimed, “Those of us who were intensely involved in the entire negotiations process regarded Taba as little more than a theoretical ploy, designed to pass a political reality based on Clinton’s ideas on to the incoming Republican administration” (Sher 2006: 222). Clearly, this was not the position of Beilin or of Peres. On 24 January 2001 the Egyptians arranged a dramatic, secret meeting. Sher and two other Israelis met with Abu Ala and Dahlan. Sher (2006: 227) suggested: “We will arrange a plane for you. Fly to Abu Amar [Arafat] in Gaza and convince him to close a deal. ‘Our boss does not want an agreement,’ was their response.” If Sher’s report is accurate (we find him a highly credible witness), this is very significant testimony to Arafat’s reluctance to conclude an agreement on the most favorable terms yet offered. Sher indicates that, Barak, who was a lame duck and trailing at the polls, would not likely sign an agreement under the circumstances, and the agreement was unlikely to be implemented by a government led by Ariel Sharon. It is also likely that Arafat anticipated more sympathetic treatment by President George W. Bush, given his experience with Bush senior’s administration.

The Cultural Dimension Dennis Ross’s analysis of Israeli and Palestinian narratives is couched in terms of an anachronistic national character approach that treats culture as if it is homogeneous for all groups within society—whereas it is always contested—and as static, rather than as dynamic (Aronoff 2001). His claim that for Israel security is a way of life that dominates perceptions of reality is true as far as it goes; yet, it ignores historical context and internal Israeli divisions (discussed in chapters 5 and 6). Any characterization of “the Israeli mindset” is doomed to failure. Resolve to not surrender land that has a sacred quality is something militant religious Israeli and Palestinian nationalists share. Ross fails to differentiate between various types of Israeli and Palestinian nationalists and nationalisms. There is a significant range of views from supporters of civic nationalism, for whom borders are pragmatic and to

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be bargained for peace, and ethnonationalists like Gush Emunim, for whom the Land (Eretz Yisrael) is sacred and settling it is a part of a messianic redemptive process. Ross is more expansive in his treatment of the Palestinian narrative. He suggests that for Palestinians, victimization fosters a sense of entitlement and the need for dignity. An abiding sense of injustice leads to the need to end victimization and to be accorded dignity, respect, and genuine independence. As victims, the Palestinians emphasized throughout negotiations that it was the Israelis who were always required to take the first step or make the first concessions. “Responsibility was not part of the Palestinian political culture” (Ross 2005: 44). His depiction of the Palestinian mind is a manifestation of what Edward Said called Orientalism. Ross fails to differentiate between a range of Palestinian views that reflect different experiences, e.g. refugee status, ideologies, party affiliation, religion, and religiosity. Ehud Barak’s Orientalism is manifested in several ways. Barak insists that no other Israeli prime minister was fluent in Arabic, had studied Arab history, had read the Koran, and prayed in a mosque. He claims his experience as head of military intelligence gave him a nuanced understanding of the Palestinians. “I know them better than any other Israeli prime minister.”30 He also insists that no other Israeli prime minister when in power had met as often with Arafat. Yet, when he first met the Palestinian leader he used such exaggerated flattery that it immediately aroused Arafat’s suspicion. Yasser Abed Rabbo reports that Arafat told him afterwards, “Hell, this man is trying to play games with us.”31 We have cited above Barak’s accusation that Arabs are serial liars who place the blame for their situation on others. His deliberate use of a bazaar approach was premised on his belief that it was appropriate given the “nature of Arab negotiations” in order to “let them enjoy the negotiations.”32 Ross is on firmer ground in comparing Palestinian and Israeli notions of peace. He characterizes the Palestinian concept of peace as “the absence of conflict; it was not acceptance, not reconciliation … in keeping with the basic belief that Israel was not entitled to be there … the land was theirs, they were doing the Israelis a favor by ending the conflict and agreeing to live with Israel’s presence. … The Israeli concept of peace demands acceptance. They wanted proof of the commitment to living in peace … concrete signs of peace and normalization” (Ross 2005: 44). This point is supported by considerable available evidence.33 Ross intuits the role time played without specifically framing it in cultural terms.34 Arafat and Barak had radically different temporal per-

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ceptions. “Arafat was in no hurry. Barak, however, was a man in a hurry” (Ross 2005: 622). Barak stressed the short window of opportunity to conclude peace in order to avoid impending violence. “I compared our government to the people listening to the orchestra on the Titanic. We are sailing into an iceberg.”35 Arafat expressed the view that the Palestinians had all the time in the world: he was willing to wait another twenty years. Aside from different culturally based temporal perceptions, both leaders calculated that in the long run, demographics worked to the disadvantage of Israel and to the advantage of the Palestinians. We have cited many examples of cultural blindness and misunderstandings that contributed to the failure of the peace talks. Perhaps the two most crucial ones were Arafat’s failure to recognize the importance of the Temple Mount to the Jews and Barak’s failure to recognize Israel’s share of the moral responsibility for the plight of the Palestinian refugees. Barak’s perception that he was being played for a “sucker” by Arafat and Arafat’s view that Barak was trying to “play games” with the Palestinians were largely cultural misunderstandings that had tragic consequences. Camp David did not likely fail primarily because of cultural misunderstandings. However, they played an important role that has been thus far insufficiently analyzed. In the final section of this chapter, as an extension of our analysis of the role of cultural differences, we relate this “cultural” approach to the analysis of internal divisions within the three teams at Camp David.36

Internal Divisions within the Negotiating Teams The Israeli Delegation Arie Kacowicz (2005; alluding to Akira Kurasawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon in the title) analyzes the range of positions expressed in interviews with twenty Israeli negotiators. He concludes that length of participation in the peace process—particularly in implementation—is positively correlated with commitment to eventual success and empathy with the Palestinian partners. Given this finding, it is significant that Ehud Barak kept the most experienced Oslo negotiators (e.g., Peres and Beilin) away from Camp David and most other back channel negotiations. The single exception was at Taba where the greatest breakthrough was made on the most difficult issue of the Palestinian Right of Return, according to Yossi Beilin (2004) who negotiated with his Palestinian counterpart Nabil Shaath. Charles Enderlin (2003: 114) claims that these veteran negotiators were excluded because in Barak’s mind,

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“they made too many concessions to the Palestinians when the interim accord was drawn up.”37 We discuss above additional reasons why they were excluded. Kacowicz finds that greater seniority in the political echelons or the closer identification with the political leader in one’s entourage correlated positively with attribution of responsibility to the Palestinians and the Americans and with lower empathy for the Palestinian partners. Contrary to his findings, the senior negotiator closest to Barak, Gilead Sher, as well as Minister of Justice Yossi Beilin (a member of the peace cabinet who claimed to have been Barak’s “best ally”38) were both highly critical of Barak, were candidly self-critical about Israeli mistakes, and were both very empathetic with the Palestinians. Even Minister of Foreign Affairs Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is identified by most scholars as sharing Barak’s position, is critical of him. Ben-Ami’s books reveal considerable empathy and genuine cultural understanding of the Palestinians that, despite his claims, Barak conspicuously lacked. BenAmi mused that Barak “doesn’t understand cultures and doesn’t understand people.”39 Kacowicz found that positions were also related to organizational role, i.e., diplomat, civil servant, military, or internal security and intelligence. Aharon Klieman (2005) provides an insightful analysis of the role of the ongoing struggle between the security-oriented and the diplomatic-oriented subcultures in Israel as a major contributing factor in the setback at Camp David—particularly since Barak appeared to be almost schizophrenically torn between the two. In addition to the variables discussed by Kacowicz and Klieman, there were other significant differences among the Israeli negotiators that influenced their different positions. They were based on political party affiliation, political and personal rivalries, ideology, and personality. For example, Yasser Abbed Rabbo (a leading Palestinian negotiator) observes, “Shlomo BenAmi didn’t like [Shimon] Peres and Gilead Sher didn’t like Ben-Ami.”40 Enderlin notes that the personal relationship between “Barak and Peres was dreadful” (Enderlin 2003: 114). During back channel negotiations at Bolling Air Force Base starting 19 December 2000, there was a sharp internal division between BenAmi and the rest of the delegation when he exceeded the guidelines set forth by the prime minister and the peace cabinet. “On the Temple Mount, Ben-Ami suggested far-reaching language that did not mention Israeli sovereignty at all” (Sher 2006: 194).41 As in Kurasawa’s film, reconstruction of the same story from contrasting viewpoints yields pieces of the evasive “truth,” opening a window on a very complex reality.

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The US Mediators There were significant institutional divisions within the US delegation between the State Department team led by Madeleine Albright and the National Security Council team led by Samuel (Sandy) Berger. White House Chief of Staff John Podesta represented the president’s domestic political considerations and interests. Clayton Swisher (2004: 291) reports that the “State team members were frustrated at what they saw as the White House/NSC team’s usurping of the negotiations.” Chief Israeli negotiator Gilead Sher (Sher 2006: 123) claims that the chief US negotiator Dennis Ross “had lost the Palestinians’ trust and was no longer a welcome guest among them. Any idea he proposed was automatically rejected. As a result, the center of gravity shifted from the State Department to the White House.” Swisher (2004: 291) quotes US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk who observes that the “political jockeying” created a “dysfunctional situation” of a “cacophony of voices” advising President Clinton. For this reason Shlomo Ben-Ami condemns the “colossal failure of the American government’s role as the mediator” (2004: 14) and concludes: “None of the delegations at Camp David could claim to be free of blame for the collapse of the summit. But the deficiencies in the performance of the United States obviously had an extraordinarily negative effect” (2006: 263). He identifies the American tactics as “insecure and erratic” in which negotiating patterns were adapted to the whims of the parties (2006: 263). Ben-Ami (2006: 264) claims that from the first day the violent reactions of both Barak and Arafat caused the American team to withdraw the working paper that established the premises and guidelines for negotiations, which “left the summit to run itself without direction, without a compass, without leadership.” The Palestinian Delegation According to Sher, “The Palestinian negotiating team had no real decision-making authority.” Abu Mazen “did not act as a leader, let alone as a strong ‘number two’” (2006: 125). Generational differences within the Palestinian delegation between the old guard expatriate leadership (Abu Mazen, Abu Ala, and Akram Haniya) and the younger generation who had never left the West Bank and Gaza (Mohammad Rashid, Mohammed Dahlan, Hassan Asfour) influenced the dynamics. Sher (2006: 116) claims that the old guard “encouraged Arafat to adopt uncompromising positions that proved unrealistic.” American and Israeli negotiators attempted to exploit these divisions. Intense personal rivalries and competition were pervasive. Sher (2006: 44) notes: “Within

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the divided Palestinian leadership Abu Ala was the strongest opponent to the summit. He had been de-legitimized by his political rivals and subsequently marginalized. The Palestinian leadership was without a leader—impractical, fractured, conflicted and weak.” Such divisions had a negative impact on the negotiation process. For example, Sher (2006: 52) reports that one of the most serious consequences was that the “Palestinian negotiators had not relayed back the actual positions, progress in the negotiations, or our [Israeli] openness on many issues, back to Arafat.” Sher (2006: 82) also witnessed a loud exchange between Abu Mazen and Dahlan that “nearly developed into a fist fight.” Sher reports both Abu Mazen and Abu Ala took more extreme positions that represented a withdrawal from more moderate stands they had each previously taken. Omar M. Dajani (2005: 39–80) concludes the Palestinians were “undermined by their own political disorganization, fierce internal competition, and lack of domestic legitimacy.”

Conclusion Despite significant differences, there is a surprising degree of agreement across the available accounts. And many differences are a matter of emphasis. Most fault Arafat and the Palestinians for failing to agree to proposals and to offer their own counterproposals. There is also a consensus that Arafat chose to ride the tiger of Palestinian violence rather than attempt to quell it. The differences are substantial, however. Whereas the revisionists downplay the significance of the intifada, Barak interprets it as evidence that the Palestinians do not want peace. Neither position is supported by the weight of the available evidence. All, except Barak, are critical of his negotiating style and the negative impact of his personality at Camp David. Ross mildly criticizes Clinton for catering to Barak and abandoning the game plan that he and his team had prepared. All others are highly critical of the manner in which the Americans mismanaged Camp David. As in the film Rashomon, each “witness” has his own “truth.” We must sort out the contradictory accounts, factoring in their interests and prejudices, in order to attempt to understand the events. The eclectic school offers the most balanced and nuanced analysis. Beilin and Sher, and to a lesser extent Ben-Ami, were self-critical and were more empathetic to the other side. Beilin and Ben-Ami are trained scholars as well as seasoned politicians and negotiators. They and Sher, who had extensive experience with the Palestinians, were ideal paraethnographic “participant observers.” Despite Beilin’s vast experience

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with the Palestinians, he was not a member of the Israeli delegation at Camp David. Perhaps this gave him even greater detachment to engage in a more critical analysis. Whereas some might suggest that this gave him an ax to grind, which might have prejudiced his evaluations, we do not find this to be the case.42 Sher and Ben-Ami, Barak’s top negotiators, were uniquely positioned and their insights have greater credibility given their self-criticism, empathy for their Palestinian counterparts, and understanding of their culture. Their accounts afford rare paraethnographic insight. That is why we have accorded them so much attention.43 Moving beyond the dichotomy of official and revisionist explanations allows greater appreciation of the internal divisions within each delegation and the rich diversity of explanations provided by the participants themselves. It highlights the complexity of the phenomenon. For example, the close reading of Ben-Ami’s interpretations shows that neither the orthodox nor the revisionist accounts are adequate or accurate; a hybrid (eclectic) interpretation provides more insight into the extremely complex process. We hope to have shown how much can be gained from employing paraethnography relying on “thick description” (Geertz 1973) and from heeding the postmodern call to give greater voice to the contested interpretations of events. It is, however, clear that such a strategy is less parsimonious and consequently less amenable to the kind of causal explanations favored by traditional political science. The gain is, we contend, a more accurate picture of the inevitably politicized account of what “actually happened.”

Notes 1. Rashomon alludes to Akira Kurasawa’s classic 1950 film. 2. Yael and Myron Aronoff interviewed twenty-six Israeli and Palestinian leaders and negotiators in the summer of 2004. They conducted additional interviews during the summer of 2007. Cited interviews are identified by date. 3. All italicized passages within quotation marks are emphasis we have added. 4. It received much greater attention than did Akram Hanieh (2001). 5. Dan Meridor (Center Party) and Attorney-General Elyakim Rubenstein, the two most conservative Israeli delegates, are more moderate than the “determinist school.” 6. The term sucker fails to capture the significance of the Hebrew term frier that is one of the most derogatory and demeaning terms in contemporary Israeli culture. 7. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright published books that discuss Camp David, but not as extensively as does Ross. Lack of space prevents a discussion of them in this chapter.

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8. In our interview on 28 June 2004, Barak confirmed that this was his primary motive. 9. Interview with Sher on 20 June 2004. 10. Interview with Abbed Rabbo on 3 July 2004. 11. Ibid. 12. This was confirmed by Qadoura Fares in an interview on 3 July 2004. 13. Among others, similar observations were made in an interview with Qadoura Fares on 3 July 2004 and with Shlomo Ben-Ami on 31 July 2007. 14. He repeated this claim in an interview on 28 June 2004. 15. We are grateful to Annat Katz for her excellent translation of passages from the Hebrew. 16. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (9 August 9, 2001). Accessed on the website of the New York Review of Books at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14380. All quotations in this section unless otherwise indicated are from this article. Therefore we cannot cite page numbers. 17. Interview with Beilin on 29 June 2004. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. Beilin told Aronoff this as well in several earlier conversations. 20. Ibid. The complete texts of the Beilin-Abu Mazen Understandings and of the Geneva Accord appear in appendixes of Beilin, The Path to Geneva. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. There is a significant difference between recognizing the “right” of return and granting “unlimited” return to Israel of all Palestinian refugees and their descendents. Arafat was consistently ambiguous (as indicated previously). Beilin had the impression that if he was granted all his other demands, Arafat might accept a more restricted number of returnees providing that Israel recognized their “right” of return. There are important legal as well as political reasons why Israel is reluctant to do so. 23. Ibid. 24. Interview with Gilead Sher on 20 June 2004. 25. Interview of Barak by Charlie Rose on “The Charlie Rose Show,” 25 January 2005. 26. It is unclear whether Sha’ath was acting on his own authority or, as is more likely, given Sher’s revelations below, he anticipated that Arafat would oppose signaling agreement on this very sensitive issue. 27. Within Reach was first published in Hebrew in 2001. Quotations are from the revised and updated 2006 English edition. The lengthy interview of Sher on 20 June 2004 was conducted in his Jerusalem office and during the drive to his Tel Aviv office. 28. The product of negotiations mediated by President Clinton in October 1998 that led to an agreement by the government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu to a partial Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and a promise of additional withdrawals. 29. Dennis Ross, in response to Aronoff’s question after his public lecture “What’s Next in the Middle East” at the Woodrow Wilson School of International Public Policy, Princeton University, 22 February 2006. 30. Interview with Barak on 28 June 2004. 31. Interview with Abbed Rabbo on 3 July 2004. 32. Interview with Barak on 28 June 2004. 33. For example, Omar M. Dajani (2005: 39–80) provides a sophisticated cultural analysis of Palestinian negotiating patterns premised on the cultural assumptions outlined above. 34. We offer our analysis of the Israeli notions of time in chapter 5.

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35. Interview with Barak on 28 June 2004. Barak made similar statements at a symposium at Tel Aviv University on 4 July 2004 and in his interview with Benny Morris, 43. 36. Jeremy Pressman acknowledges, his analysis “does not capture the internal disagreements among officials who worked together on the same team” (Pressman 2003: 6). 37. Barak (who was minister of the interior at the time) abstained on the vote in the government on September 1995—much to the displeasure of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. 38. Interview with Beilin on 29 June 2004. 39. Interview with Shlomo Ben-Ami on 12 July 2007. 40. Interview with Abbed Rabbo on 3 July 2004. Statements by Ben-Ami and by Sher in our interviews on 12 July 2007 and on 20 June 2004 (respectively) appeared to confirm this assessment. 41. Ben-Ami (2004) gives a full account from his perspective. 42. Since Aronoff supervised Beilin’s PhD dissertation, his objectivity in evaluating his analysis might be questioned. Aronoff is, however, confident that this personal relationship has not influenced his professional judgment. 43. Aaron David Miller (2008) is another excellent example of an academically trained participant whose balanced analysis fits in our definition of the eclectic school and is an example of paraethnography.

Chapter 8

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WHAT CAN POLITICAL SCIENTISTS LEARN ABOUT CIVIL SOCIETY FROM ANTHROPOLOGISTS?

D

uring the last quarter of the twentieth century, civil society became one of the most celebrated and debated concepts in the social sciences. Since the late 1960s, the concept has been used to discuss the fall of state socialism and the emergence of postcommunist politics, postcolonial power struggles in Africa, the “democratic deficit” in the Western world, and postauthoritarian politics in South and Central America. It has been constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed by the whole army of philosophers, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists and yet there is no consensus either on its intension (what it means) or its extension (which real life phenomena are denoted by it). The connotations and denotations of the concept are manifold and evolving; its meaning is therefore rather difficult to pinpoint (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999: 3–8; Keane 1988; Kumar 1993). But, as with many other complex concepts, there are two dominant strategies of its application. Some researchers, mostly in political science, propose a fixed definition of civil society and then they scan the changing historical realities to see where, when, and how various social arrangements merit to be subsumed under this concept. Others, usually found among anthropologists, sociologists, feminists, or critical scholars of culture, attempt to reconstruct the changing content of the concept, its ideological power, and the political consequences of its usage. The former want to stabilize and fix the concept’s meaning within an “objective scientific dis-

Notes for this section begin on page 237.

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course” and detach it from the everyday usage by the “natives” in order to conduct comparative studies, often employing quantitative methods. The latter want to reconstruct the ever-changing and often tensionridden interaction between the concept and the realities within which it emerged (the modern West) and to which it is sometimes employed (non-Western contexts), in order to reveal its ideological functions as a—potential at least—tool of Western domination/superiority. The first, definitional, part of this essay is driven by the positivistic logic of political scientists and systematic philosophers (comparativists), while in the second we will rely more on the critical logic (and ethnographic attention to detail) espoused by most anthropologists, although we will not engage in a full-fledged critical deconstruction of the concept (see Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Hann 1996; Keane 1988; Kumar 1993). To illustrate these preliminary distinctions, we begin with taking stock of the concept’s usage in the debates on the fall of communism and the subsequent emergence of the quite volatile postcommunist politics. Consider civil society as a mode of social organization as it is conceptualized within the mainstream comparative social science. Some analysts believe civil society brought the downfall of communism, but disintegrated or weakened in the aftermath of the communism’s collapse (Bernhard 1996; Howard 2003). Others diagnose a revival of civil society after 1989 (Ekiert & Kubik 1999). More generally, some writers construe civil society as a necessary precondition or companion of democracy in every context (Alexander 1999; Bernhard and Karakoc 2007; Diamond 1999; Gellner 1994; Putnam 1993; Schmitter 1997), and would agree with what is “called by Michael Walzer simply the ‘civil society argument,’ the neo-Tocquevillian belief … that the strength and stability of liberal democracy depends on a vibrant and healthy sphere of associational participation” (Chambers & Kymlicka 2002: 2). Yet others view it as a specifically Western institutional pattern that is irrelevant and strangely out of place in non-Western cultural contexts. Similarly, there is no agreement among the “natives” and the ethnographers/sociologists on the usefulness of “civil society” as a category of discourse, both vernacular and “scientific,” that might improve our grasp of postcommunist realities. Some anthropologists are skeptical whether the concept itself is “a helpful one in understanding social realities, particularly in circumstances that are radically altered from those in which it was first used” (Hann 1996: 17). Hann ventures a strong opinion: “It seems to me that the discourse of civil society, particularly when linked to an extreme model of market economy, is an ideological product alien to most citizens” (1992: 152). On the other hand, many political theorists and sociologists find the concept almost

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indispensable for their analytical work on postcommunism. Michael Kennedy, a critical sociologist, writes, “I … consider the way in which civil society remains an important emancipatory concept in postcommunism, and argue that one ought to work through it, rather than with disdain for it (1996: 2). It would take a book-length essay to untangle this complex knot of descriptive, theoretical, and normative strands in the thinking about civil society in postcommunist Europe or elsewhere (see, for example, Edwards 2009). Our goal here is different. First, proceeding modo sociologico, we offer a “positivistic” definition of civil society as a specific form of social organization and briefly examine its role within the original context of its emergence: the modern West. Second, we review several social arrangements social scientists (mostly anthropologists) have identified as civil society’s functional equivalents, analogues, or substitutes. We argue that in order to assess the portability of civil society it is imperative that researchers identify, conceptualize, and analyze actual institutional and organizational arrangements that emerge in non-Western sites that are subjected to various civil society-building or democracy-building projects. What needs to be determined is how well these non-Western analogues of civil society: (a) allow people to organize themselves through or above the level of kinship to procure public goods, (b) maintain (a modicum of) transparency in the public arena, (c) mediate between families/kinship networks and the state, and (d) constitute a counterbalance to the state’s monopolistic tendencies to dominate the public life. This chapter thus reviews several recent ethnographic attempts to identify and describe civil society analogues that have emerged in non-Western contexts and assess their usability in democracy-building projects. Third, we will describe and analyze how and why a form of civil society developed after 1989 in a Polish region Kubik came to know through his ethnographic studies. We end the chapter with brief conclusions from this largely conceptual exercise.

Definitions There seem to exist three basic types of definitions of civil society: one normative and two analytical. Civil society as a normative idea(l). The concept of “civil society” is frequently used in reference to an arrangement of social relationships in a modern society, historically evolved and normatively privileged in the West. It is used in (philosophical) discussions to depict and analyze an

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ideal self-organization of society outside of the state’s control. Perhaps the most controversial issue is whether civil society can be conceived of as a domain separate from the domain of market economy (socialdemocratic option) or is necessarily intertwined with this domain (liberal option). Many influential Western writers opt for the former solution (Cohen & Arato 1992: ix; Habermas 1992: 454), while many East Europeans argue for the latter (Gellner 1994: 87–92; Ogrodzinski 1991: 53–56; Rau 1991: 4–5; see also Krygier 1997). The concept has tremendous emotional and intellectual appeal to the people living under authoritarian and (post-) totalitarian regimes that programmatically attempt to destroy or limit the sphere of independent associations (Keane 1988; Kideckel 1994: 137–43; Hall 1995: 2–3). In the writings utilizing this version of the concept, normative and descriptive as well as sociological and philosophical strands of reasoning are usually closely intertwined, limiting its analytical usefulness. Civil society as a public space institutionally protected from the state’s arbitrary encroachment, within which individuals can freely form their associations. This understanding of civil society is perhaps most eloquently developed by Jurgen Habermas, who defines a public sphere as “a sphere which mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion” (Eley 1992: 290). Geoff Eley writes about “the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place.”1 “Civil society” and “public sphere” are concepts that belong to different discourses, yet the phenomena denoted by them share many common attributes (Edwards 2009). It is useful to redefine civil society as a public space in order to emphasize two of their common features: public accountability and the rule of law.2 Civil society as a set of organized groups/associations, whose members deliberate or act collectively to accomplish common goals.3 Additionally, those organizations share several characteristics, usually including the following: 1. Civil society’s groups and/or associations are secondary, not primary (e.g., family). Moreover, their members are able to dissociate themselves from influences exerted by their primary (e.g., familial) associations (Gellner’s modular man). 2. They are open and inclusive and their activities are transparent (not hidden from public scrutiny; they are publicly accountable). 3. They are tolerant and moderate in their claims and methods. They are willing to protect the independent public space and tend to be antiradical, reformist, moderate.4

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4. They produce dense networks of relationships based on trust and reciprocity often referred to as social capital. (Putnam & Goss 2002; Woolcock 1998; Woolcock & Narayan 2000) Utilizing the basic insights of these three approaches, we propose a more precise definition of an ideal type of civil society. First, let us assume—as is routinely done—that civil society is composed of secondary groups. Individuals join such groups voluntarily on the basis of a (written or not) social contract. By introducing this distinction we want to preserve an opposition of “ascribed” and “attained” group membership. This operation produces what may be called a secondary society (a set of secondary associations), which may include both a modern NGO and a (semi-) clandestine patron-client network.5 The latter differs from the former in two dimensions: (1) the internal structural characteristics of the group and (2) transparency. It is important to note that many groups that are “horizontal,” internally democratic, and tolerant may be at the same time secretive and clandestine. Most analysts would not include such groups in “civil society.”6 Second, it is advisable to investigate the phenomenon of transparency. An efficient way to accomplish this task is to examine the nature of public space. It has been observed that this space can be divided into two general domains: the official, characterized by transparency, formal rules, and public accountability, and the unofficial, characterized by secrecy and informality. The usefulness of this basic distinction was confirmed during Kubik’s 1990–91 fieldwork in Poland, where he observed that social groups, constituting the newly emerging civil society, operated on at least three levels, each characterized by a different set of rules. They can be called private domain, unofficial public domain, and official public domain. Politics occurred in each domain, although most often in the latter two. A brief example illustrates this point. The town council sessions in the city Kubik studied were held in the main conference room of the town hall. During these sessions, the councilors, the mayor, and some key members of his administration would engage in spirited exchanges, discuss various issues, vote on various motions, and listen to representatives of community organizations (civil society) and individuals. All this took place within the official public domain. The social space of this domain was open and inclusive, although the rules of conduct were highly codified by formal (mostly written) rules. By contrast, during intermissions individuals drifted to separate rooms or gathered in tightly knit circles to discuss various public issues. Patterns governing these interactions were easy to discern: people were often grouped according to their party affiliation or common membership

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in various organizations, although much interparty or intergroup business transpired as well. The rules governing conduct within this unofficial public domain were different from the rules of the official public domain. People were more relaxed; arguments were couched in more colloquial idioms; discussions were often more heated than in the official conference room. Of particular interests were those gatherings that physically separated themselves from all the other (e.g., in separate rooms). They were no doubt public, yet “informal,” i.e., exclusive and secretive (what transpires behind closed doors is by definition inaccessible to the wider public). Such informal discussions in proverbial smoke-filled back rooms have been long recognized as a routine mode of programmatic deliberations, policy formation, personnel selection, and decision making in all political systems. It seems that most, if not all, secondary associations engage in such actions. The critical question is whether such informal gatherings serve as the most important platform for policy formation, recommendation, and implementation, or, rather, that they represent merely a fraction of the group’s actions, which—as far as they influence the wider public—take place in the “public square,” i.e., are transparent and may be subjected to public scrutiny by other groups (the press), individuals, or some authorized public or governmental agency. We propose the following definition: There exists a subset of groups belonging to secondary society (operating within the public domain) whose: (a) internal activities, as a matter of routine, are available for some form of external “inspection” in order to determine its compliance with existing laws and regulations; (b) policy recommendations, which may influence people outside of the group, are accessible to “outsiders” for discussion and scrutiny; and (c) proposed policy changes that will influence others are publicly announced so they can be (dis)approved through a process of public deliberation.

The public space where such scrutiny can be conducted and where such approval can be obtained (or denied) is the official public domain, the Habermas’s public sphere.7 In other words this is transparent secondary society, “inhabiting” the official public space. In the third analytical move we isolate a subset of groups belonging to the transparent secondary society characterized by: 1. Espousing a discourse that emphasizes tolerance for other similar groups and readiness to collaborate or compete with them according to a specified set of rules and on the basis of mutual respect (pluralism and (market) competition); 2. Horizontal rather than vertical interpersonal network;

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3. Democratic, deliberative rather than authoritarian style of decision making. This operation weeds out both hidden and transparent autocratic patron-client networks as well as Fuhrer-type cults;8 we call the resulting subset (transparent) civil society. We suspect most analysts proposing a positive correlation between civil society and democracy have this meaning of civil society in mind.9 The fourth and final distinction needed to produce an effective definition of groups aspiring to the name civil society, deals with the legal status of relationship between civil society and the state (government, rulers, etc.). There are three variants of this relationship: 1. Illegality, i.e., a situation whereby the government defines the state in such a way that there is no room for any independent organizations or groups (totalitarian solution); 2. Selective legality, whereby the government selectively (arbitrarily) authorizes (legalizes) certain groups (authoritarian solution); and 3. Full legality (rule of law), whereby the government creates and protects a social space within which any group fulfilling required legal criteria may operate (democratic-liberal solution). The full-fledged, “classic” civil society emerges only when transparent civil society and the legally protected social space coexist; we call it legal transparent civil society (LTCS). Table 8.1 summarizes the definitional work outlined above. Through these four analytical moves we have introduced a narrow definition of civil society: LTCS. LTCS is a rare form of social organization; most social arrangements that are called “civil society” are deficient when compared with this rarely achieved ideal type. They lack one or more of the four definitional features of LTCS. For those who study civil society from the “West-centric” point of view, the task is therefore threefold: (1) to identify actually existing forms of social organization in each specific case, (2) to compare them to the ideal type and locate their “shortcomings,” and (3) to assess the evolutionary potential of a historically given form of social organization. Some of the existing forms may be on a trajectory toward LTCS and thus are helpful in democracy-building projects (“democratization,” in Tilly’s parlance, 2006); others may be locked in a “vicious” spiral toward increasingly nondemocratic situation (Tilly’s “dedemocratization”). What needs to be defined next is the place of LTCS within the context of other domains of the democratic polity, such as the economic

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Table 8.1. Legal transparent civil society (ideal type of civil society) and “incomplete” civil societies (secondary groups) Nontransparent secondary groups (unofficial public domain)

Transparent secondary groups (official public domain)

Illegal

Selectively legalized

Legally protected (rule of law)

Illegal religious cults; illegal paramilitary organizations

Officially authorized religious cults

Legalized paramilitary clubs

Horizontal, “Democratic” underITCS: democratic, ground dissident/ “Democratic” (usually) oppositional dissident tolerant organizations groups

TCS: Officially authorized associations

LTCS: “classic” civil society

Vertical, autocratic, often intolerant, closed

Clientelistic networks; paramilitary clandestine oppositional organizations

Key: ITCS: Illegal Transparent Civil Society TCS: Transparent Civil Society LTCS: Legal Transparent Civil Society

system, the state, and the political society. It is usually assumed that a combination of civil society’s autonomy with a functioning set of linkages to those other domains constitutes an institutional arrangement that is most conducive to the development of democracy. Figure 8.1 illustrates the ideal arrangement of civil society, domestic society, political society, economic domain, the state, and the international context in a full-fledged democratic polity: In each domain, collective action is structured by different sets of institutions, social networks, and principles of authority. Additionally, each realm tends to have its specific public discourses that define collective identities, collective action frames, and legitimate modes of public participation. Although the boundaries between the three realms are constantly renegotiated and changed, many writers see their relative autonomy as a necessary condition of democracy.10 Moreover, the struggle over these boundaries is a critical element of democratic consolidation. As Migdal noted, “the meeting grounds between states and other social forces have been ones in which conflict and complicity, opposition and coalition, corruption and co-optation have resolved the shape of countrywide social and political changes” (1994: 23).11 Yet, the relative autonomy of each domain is not sufficient for the “proper” functioning of the democratic architecture. Ideally, all do-

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Figure 8.1. Civil society and other domains of the democratic polity

mains should be interconnected via a robust system of linkages. Bermeo (2000) argues that the connectedness of civil society with other domains may be the most important feature scholars should observe. When such connections work properly they enhance the working of the whole democratic polity; when they degenerate into one of the flawed forms (identified below) the democratic architecture weakens (Berman 1997). The relationship with the international scene (donor organizations, foreign governments, international bodies) is often plagued either by indifference or by excessive paternalism and the imposition of “foreign” concerns, methods, and solutions. It is important to note, however, that the international domain is composed of two distinct subdomains:

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transnational networks of global (Keane 2003) or international civil society and the supranational organizations (WTO, UN, EU, etc.). In general, the first subdomain is composed of the allies of domestic civil societies, while some of their adversaries belong to the second group. The relationship between the state and civil society is particularly critical and extensively discussed in the existing literature. The most distinct characteristic of the state is its (legitimate) control of coercive resources, its monopoly of rule making, and capability to implement its decisions within a defined territory, despite public opposition or resistance.12 Civil society can be thus seen either as the state’s necessary counterbalance13 or as its equally necessary complement (Keane 1988: 15). Those two roles sometimes coexist though usually one of them is dominant; the key issue is that in order to secure “proper” arrangement of the polity, the state and civil society should be kept as separate as possible (Gellner 1994). The dangers are that the state does “too much” when it acts as a bully attempting to subdue or destroy the domain of autonomous associations or “too little” when it fails as the provider and guarantor of the rule of law (legality), without which the fullyfledged civil society (LTCS) cannot exist. There is no consensus on how the optimal relationship between the economic system and civil society should be institutionalized. For some authors, civil society is inconceivable unless it is anchored in a market economy based on private (or at least nonstate) property (Gellner 1994: 87; Grabowska 1995: 192; Rau 1991: 4–5; Wnuk-Lipinski 1996: 100). Yet others argue that this formulation is too restrictive: civil society must have some independent (from the state) economic base, but this base does not need to be limited to independent (private) enterprises operating in a market economy. Other agents, independent from the state, may provide civil associations with the necessary funds and material base. Various churches and informal networks of “friends” often provide such support, as was the case in communist Eastern Europe. In some cases, civil society organizations may even access state resources, thus becoming “parasites” of sorts. In their quest for necessary resources, civil society actors must expect to encounter two sets of problems: civil society may be either deemed irrelevant by dogmatic neoliberalism that sees “markets” as panacea for all societal problems or its organizations may be starved to extinction in a culture that does not promote altruistic giving.14 Political parties are sometimes seen as parts of civil society. There are, however, good analytical reasons to allocate them to a separate domain of the polity—the political society. It can be construed as an intermediate realm within which the double process of translation and

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mediation takes place. It is comprised of political parties and other explicitly political organizations, such as lobbying groups that provide institutional channels through which various societal interests and claims are aggregated and translated into generalized policy recommendations. In a nutshell, political parties are organized in order to compete for political power within the polity, whereas civil society organizations do not have such a goal. Historically, political parties have proved to be dangerous for civil society in two ways: they either tried to turn associations into their impotent extensions (Lenin’s transmission belts) or they isolated themselves from bottom-up pressures of civil society, disrupting thereby the give and take of participatory politics (the Weimar curse).15 Table 8.2 illustrates the links between civil society and other domains. For each link, it identifies the two extreme “dangers” that often derail the “proper” functioning of a given link. Table 8.2. Extreme flaws undermining linkages among civil society and other polity domains Polity domains

(Extreme) architectural flaws

International arena

(a) Indifference: weak external support (b) Paternalism (with or without imperial ambitions): overbearing, monopolistic external support undermining long-term sustainability

State

(a) Authoritarianism/(Post-)Totalitarianism:16 state too strong (no sufficient autonomy for civil society); (b) Breakdown of law and order: weak/no protection of the public sphere

Economy

(a) Dogmatic Neoliberalism: excessive reliance on the market (“market” as a solution to all/most problems) (b) Market selfishness: weak altruism, weak culture of charitable giving and “donations”

Political society

(a) The Weimar curse: underdeveloped links between civil society and the party system (weak aggregation of electoral preferences). (b) Lenin’s curse: civil society organizations (labor unions in Lenin’s case) treated as “transmission belts” of the party orders and policies

Domestic society

(a) Personalization/corruption excessive interpenetration: particularism/amoral familism (b) Depersonalization/bureaucratization: excessive separation from everyday life/concerns

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Preconditions for the Emergence of Civil Society in the West: A Fresh Look It has been often asserted and argued that the development of civil society (particularly its full-fledged form—LTCS) is a significant, if not necessary, component of modernization a la West.17 In a nutshell, many observers see the Westernization/modernization of civil society and its growth as simply progressing hand in hand. Given the analytical model of civil society developed earlier, the argument would be that what transpired in the West and contributed to the rise of modern democracy was the emergence of a specific form of social organization—called civil society. This form is characterized by the simultaneous presence of all four conditions outlined above (secondariness, transparency, tolerance, and legality) and the existence of five well-functioning critical linkages with other domains (summarized in Table 8.2). Importantly, we know that the emergence of such a system has been long, tortuous, and uneven (Bermeo & Nord 2000) and even the most democratic countries have problems with the flawless performance of all nine elements (Poggi 1978: 79–85; Seligman 1992). According to the conventional view, the formation of the civil society/democracy pattern, seen either as an essential component or a synonym of modernization, was possible in Europe due to the emergence of and mutual reinforcement among four conditions: 1. High density of associational life 2. Timing and extension of voting rights 3. High level of urbanization (a crucial dimension of economic modernization) 4. Extension of education Yet, as the detailed analyses of eight European cases from the nineteenth century (this was the age of civil society’s emergence in its “native” context) reveal, the formation, maintenance, and growth of civil society does not necessarily depend on the existence of these conditions (Bermeo & Nord 2000). Consider the following facts: 1. Density: throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Germany had arguably the densest civil society in Europe. Yet, by the 1930s this country experienced the catastrophic collapse of both civil society and democracy. 2. Franchise laws: in 1886 in Great Britain, a civil society success story, only 12.1 percent of the population had the franchise, while

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Germany—a distinctly unsuccessful case—“had a universal manhood suffrage as early as 1871” (Bermeo 2000: 239). 3. Urbanization: in 1850, Portugal (a failure) was nearly as urbanized as the Netherlands (a great success story). 4. Literacy: the ratio of population to pupil was 249:1 in Prussia, 570:1 in France, 1,058:1 in Italy, and a whopping 1,300:1 in England, the latter commonly seen, of course, as one of the birthplaces of civil society. Bermeo (2000) concludes that the four factors that are conventionally invoked to account for the strength/weakness of civil society do not work in an easily generalizable (in a form of some sociopolitical law), accumulative, “linear way.” Civil societies in each country are very much products of highly specific combinations of factors; they are “shaped in each country by ‘conflicting trends’” (Bermeo 2000: 242). After analyzing these factors and trends Bermeo is nonetheless able to identify two conditions that are particularly conducive for the development and maintenance of a vibrant civil society: the climate of toleration, created particularly by the rulers (dominant political elites) and the well-defined and developed system of linkages with the other domains of the polity.18 Of particular importance is “parliament’s ability to connect with civil society” (Bermeo 2000: 244, emphasis in original). Such conclusions are encouraging: it is possible to begin constructing civil society without a sufficiently developed infrastructure of such “modern” preconditions as high levels of literacy, urbanization, or the well-functioning electoral system. Most importantly, what matters is not necessarily the quantity of civil society organizations, but rather their quality.

Prolegomena to the Conceptualization of Civil Society outside of the West It is often asserted that both democracy and civil society can be transplanted into new social and cultural contexts and that the only obstacle is the lack of sufficient resources. Such views, often based on a belief in the possibility of successful institutional engineering ab nihilo, are controversial. Some social scientists espouse an optimistic faith in “democratic engineering”; others remain skeptical. Many critical observers (particularly anthropologists) point out that as an idealized product of a specific phase in the development of Western civilization, civil society may not offer a usable institutional blueprint for non-Western societies.

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The same goes for democracy. Boehm, for example, argues that “democracy, as we know it in the West, is an idealized reality, which cannot be replicated in other parts of the world, because it has developed under particular political and historical circumstances, and because it can only function in a particular societal context” (1999: 46). Others criticize the arrogant ethnocentrism of the assumption that the creation of a more equitable social order and a more democratic polity is impossible without a wholesale borrowing of the quintessentially Western institutional form called “civil society.”19 To combat the dangers of such ethnocentric partiality, some anthropologists and sociologists, working mostly in non-Western societies, have attempted to identify a number of institutional arrangements that function as civil society’s analogues, yet do not possess all features of the “canonical” Western model (Hann & Dunn 1996). Varshney, a political scientist, argues, “We should look for the alternative civic sites that perform the same role as the more standard civic organizations do” (2003: 46). Researchers are thus encouraged to identify, conceptualize, and analyze actual institutional and organizational arrangements that emerge both in West and in non-Western sites subjected to various civil society–building or democracy-building projects. In the West, the quality of civil society can be measured on four dimensions identified in Table 8.1: (1) “secondariness,” (2) transparency, (3) tolerance, and (4) legality. The trick is to identify, conceptualize, analyze, and evaluate the non-Western equivalents of those four features. Taken together they should amount to social arrangements that: (a) allow people to organize themselves “above” the level of kinship, (b) maintain (a modicum of) transparency in the public arena, (c) champion and practice the climate of toleration within and between various organizations (including the state), and (d) constitute at least a tolerated (if not legally sanctioned) counterbalance to the state’s monopolistic tendencies to dominate the public life. Normatively speaking, from a Eurocentric perspective, “imperfect” forms of civil society are seen either as obstacles to full-fledged democratization (Gellner 1994) or as a specific institutional endowment, predisposing a given society to develop its own version of the “decent” polity (Hann 1996: 24). This normative dilemma should be adjudicated, if at all possible, through a relentless empirical pursuit. Without denying the possibility of creating LTCS in non-Western contexts and even believing that such a creation would be beneficial to the people whose voices are usually stifled, we need to try to examine—as rigorously as possible—actual situations. And we need to identify—as precisely as possible—similarities and differences between various civil society–like

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arrangements and the LTCS, a quintessential Western formation. This is urgent: in the worst-case scenario, poor conceptualizations, plagued by conceptual stretching and sloppy logic, produce faulty policy prescriptions and sometimes result in political quagmires, as seems to be the case of Iraq after the American invasion. In the next section we present several case studies that have the concept of “civil society” as their conceptual center. This will allow us to catalogue various criticisms of this concept articulated by social scientists (usually anthropologists) working in non-Western locations and take stock of several forms of social organization that can be construed as functional equivalents or analogues of civil society. We also review several works (mostly by political scientists) that identify various ills suffered by social arrangements that are labeled “civil society.” In particular, we concentrate on such features of LTCS as secondariness and transparency and their non-Western functional equivalents.

Civil Society as a Collection of Secondary Groups and a Site of Transparent Associationalism For Gellner, the main danger facing civil society comes from its imperfect separation from the domestic society, i.e., real or fictive kinship networks. Since in most, if not all, non-Western contexts such separation is difficult, if not impossible, Gellner remained skeptical as to the prospects of civil society and, by extension, Western-type democracy in many parts of the world. To prove Gellner wrong, one needs to identify institutions that replace or complement kinship networks as a dominant or exclusive social mode of people’s participation in public affairs. Alternatively, one needs to identify social mechanisms that render kinship networks more transparent by making them open to public scrutiny. The debate on the “corrupting” influence of kinship (actual or fictive) on the development of “decent” polities and well-functioning civil societies is plagued by the interpenetration of normative and empirical concerns. Scholars bothered by the ethnocentric naiveté, let alone bad intentions, of Western democracy promoters, tend to emphasize the benefits of local/domestic social structures as sites of “genuine,” and often creative, social/political action. The problem is that such scholars rarely address what more Eurocentric observers identify as corruptive dangers of excessively “familiarized” politics and civics. A curious division of labor seems to plague the field. Anthropologists often expose the ethnocentric naiveté or arrogance of Western social engineers who

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try to install Western-like civil society in non-Western contexts, and produce detailed accounts of the emancipatory power of various (usually informal) forms of social mobilization and organizing (Diamond 1974; Escobar 1995; Gledhill 2000). They tend to neglect, however, the second and equally important dimension of social organizing: the construction and sustenance of accountability. It seems that political scientists tend to be myopic in a reverse fashion: they tend to focus on transparent arrangements and mechanisms of accountability while they tend to neglect the task of identifying and analyzing mechanisms (particularly informal) of emancipation. There exist, of course, notable exceptions, James Scott’s work being the most celebrated example (but see also Berman 2003; Fernandes 1997; Varshney 2000). A solution may be offered by focusing on the studies that deal with various hybrid forms of civic and political life. For example, Victor Adebola Adetula reviews several works dealing with civil society in West Africa. He quotes Claude Ake, who rightly notes that civil society is ideally a phenomenon of industrial capitalism and its application to developing countries with limited penetration of capitalism is problematic. However, he admits that there is the sense in which the concept of civil society can be applied to societies in which the development of commodity relations is still at the rudimentary stage. In such societies “the elements of civil society are a mixture of secondary and primary groups.” He explains further that primary groups “specifically, ethnicities, nationalities, kinship groups, communal groups, language groups and religious sects tend to be very influential in such societies.” (1997: 6, emphasis added)

A mixture of secondary and primary groups, seen by Ake as the hallmark of civil society outside of the West (at least in Africa), is bothersome to those who worry about accountability and the enforcement of transparency. On the other hand, however, the pervasive presence of such a mixture or hybrid in almost all societies (for obviously it exists also in the West; on Italy see Ginsborg 2003: 97–102) indicates that an expectation that civil society should be composed exclusively of secondary groups may be ill conceived. “Secondary” civil society emerged in the West at the end of a long and tortuous process that simultaneously produced capitalism, market economy, and democracy. Moreover, as Ekiert and Kubik argued elsewhere (1999: 84–85; see also Kubik 2000b: 189), even in “Western” nondemocratic contexts (imperfect) civil societies (for example, dissident organizations) cannot survive without immersion in both kinship (family) structures and informal networks. Ekiert and Kubik wrote, “Civil society cannot exist without a base in domestic society: [in nondemocratic contexts] Gellnerian ‘cousins’ are

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not civil society’s greatest enemies, but rather its necessary benefactors” (1999: 84). In such contexts, the secondary-primary hybridity is not only unavoidable; it is necessary for the development of innovative forms of political organization. What are the functions of such hybrids? How does their presence influence the relationship between individuals/families and the state? How do they influence the forms of organization used by individuals to defend themselves against the state and extranational influences and against each other’s particular interests? How do they contribute to the expansion of political participation? When it comes to hybrids, cultural hybridity is perhaps its most studied form. As an effective strategy of emancipation, it provides at least a modicum of local control over the terms on which non-Western (also small-scale) societies are engaged by the (economically and politically) dominant West. It has been described, analyzed, and found promising by several writers, perhaps most prominently by anthropologist Arturo Escobar (1995) and the whole host of authors who write about subalternity.20 Escobar observes: “The analysis in terms of hybrid cultures leads to a reconceptualization of a number of established views. Rather than being eliminated by development, many ‘traditional cultures’ survive through their transformative engagement with modernity. … If we continue to speak of tradition and modernity, it is because we continually fall into the trap of not saying anything new because the language does not permit it. The concept of hybrid cultures provides an opening toward the invention of new languages” (1995: 219). Such new language, centered on the concept of hybridity, is also necessary to revitalize empirical work on the evolution of civil society and its various forms. The existence of social/organizational hybrids is well documented; today’s world is not neatly divided into two separate subworlds: modern, with civil societies and democracies, and traditional, with kinship networks and autocracies. In many societies researchers encounter complex hybrids that allow people to organize themselves, obtain a degree of power, and retain some of their dignity as they are forced to interact with powerful states and international actors. What is needed is a marriage of two literatures: on civil society and on organizational hybrids/informality/subalternity/resistance. There are many studies that propel our thinking in the right direction. For example, the concept of hybridity underlies several important analyses of postcommunist transformations. Stark and Bruszt write about recombinant property, restructuring networks, and extended accountability (1998). All three concepts allow them to analyze complex postsocialist hybrids that combine the elements of the new emergent

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system with some selected features of the old system. They argue that such hybrid structures are not only prevalent during the transition, but—most importantly—they constitute creative and effective strategies of dealing with the transitory uncertainties. Borocz (2000) argues that informality has been the dominant feature of both socialist and postsocialist socioeconomic systems and offers a sophisticated analysis of complex hybrids that emerge at the intersection of two continua: formality/informality and the state sector/private sector. Anthropologist David Nugent (1999) studied a hybridity of both democracy and civil society in Latin America. He describes and analyzes the formation of new politics (NP) in several Latin American countries, particularly Peru. What is strikingly relevant for our analysis is his demonstration that this innovative form of politics does not reject the classical liberal Western blueprint, but rather it builds on it, adjusting it to the realities of Latin American context. New politics is based on the preservation of several key features of Western liberal, representative democracy (LRD), such as the rejection of the revolutionary change, the clear separation of the state and civil society, or the emphasis on elections as an important mechanism of representative democracy. But NP goes well beyond the institutional solutions of LRD in its classical variant. In NP, for example: Civil society must be composed of, and must act as the meeting place for, groups marginalized and disenfranchised under the existing order. Indigenous groups, women, peasants, workers, and others must be able to become actively involved in civil society, and find in it an effective means of advancing their interests as groups. They must be able to meet as equals with all other social groups, privileged and not, in a social arena in which the identity and autonomy of the marginal will be respected. Within this arena, they must be allowed direct input into the most important issues that affect their lives. (Nugent 1999)

The concept and practice of new politics—as analyzed by Nugent—offer a solution to the problem of secondariness in a society organized primarily around primary (or at least noncontractual) groups. As we argued earlier, within the Western tradition, civil society (LTCS) is construed as a section of the public space formed predominantly if not exclusively out of associations constructed as secondary groups. Secondariness is a component of the liberal project: secondary groups are constituted by freely contracting sovereign individuals. Yet as anthropologists have amply demonstrated, the sovereign “individual” of the liberal project is not universal (Diamond 1974; Gledhill 2000: 31); as a highly specific construct of personhood, it emerged and is dominant only in a subset of Western cultures. In a very profound sense,

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the successful creation of classic civil society (LTCS) depends on the supply of sovereign individuals and thus on the prior destruction (or at least suspension) of the strong ties that bind people in primary groups. New politics proposes an innovative hybrid that “embraces the spirit of liberal rights. Where [it] diverges from LRD, however, is in extending liberal rights and protections to social groups, and by emphasizing group over individual rights. The state-free topography envisioned by the NP is one dominated by collective political actors with inalienable rights and protections, negotiating relations among themselves. Such a social terrain would represent a significant departure from the highly individualized public sphere of LRD” (Nugent 1999). New politics allows preexisting collectives (often primary groups) as building blocks of civil society. Varshney (2003) analyzes a structurally similar solution in India where secondary associations provide bridges between Hindu and Muslim communities and in some situations actually contribute to the creation of interethnic peace in the zones of potential conflict.21 In Nugent’s reconstruction, such an expanded notion of civil society is linked with an expanded concept of citizenship and rights. In NP, there is no fixed set of “universal rights of citizenship.” Such rights (and duties) need to be established “bottom-up” on the basis of the preexisting, specific cultural solutions of a given society: The new citizenship thus transcends the liberal notion of achieving access to and membership within an already given political system with previously defined rights and entitlements. Instead, the new notion of citizenship asserts the right to participate in the very definition of rights, entitlements, and even the political system itself. In the words of one of the NP’s most eloquent advocates, the “new democracy” must be based on active social subjects … defining what they consider to be their rights … [I]t is a strategy of the non-citizens, of the excluded, to secure citizenship “from below.” (Dagnino 1998: 51)

NP also advocates the decentralization of state power and asks for a careful reconsideration of the “delineation of spheres” or the polity domains (see Figure 8.1) that is so pronounced in the classical liberal model. The separation of the state and civil society is still postulated as a time-tested protection against the abuses of governmental power. Also, the ideologues of NP want to retain a clear separation between the state and the economic domain; as in classical liberal doctrines, they see this boundary as a crucial weapon in containing the imperial tendencies of the state. They seem to be, however, most outspoken when it comes to arguing the necessity of abolishing the state’s monopoly or predominance in the domain of cultural production. Effective citizenship calls for the retention of cultural heterogeneity and the cultivation

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of the multitude of subcultures. States have always a tendency to homogenize the sphere of cultural production (Gellner 1983; Scott 1998) as such homogenization makes the task of ruling/governing easier. By contrast, “the NP argues that the entire realm of national culture must be understood as highly charged in political terms, and that steps must be taken to open this realm to the concerns of all groups implicated in it” (Nugent 1999). Another example comes from Niger, where a modernizing, anti-Sufi Islamic movement, Izala, introduced into the public domain an intense competition that challenges not only the state, but also more traditional and patriarchal forms of community organization. “Moreover, despite its seemingly egalitarian ethos and its valorization of women’s roles, Izala is not all enlightenment and emancipation; it is contradictory, simultaneously practical and hopelessly utopian, democratic yet also despotic” (Masquelier 1999: 242). Izala seems to be a perfect example of a complex, hybridized social form that functions as an “imperfect” civil society and thus might become an early harbinger of more “Western-like” participatory political practice. Karlstrom provides yet another example of creative social hybridity. He shows that in most African societies, such as the Baganda people of Uganda, “the enduring centrality of kinship relations … renders the direct application of the modern Western conception of civil society highly problematic” (1999: 109). But he also demonstrates that the kinship-based system of clans, organized as “the orderly ascending hierarchy of raked lineages and clan heads (bataka), which culminates in the king” (1999: 107), served both as an institution channeling political conflicts and as a system “checking the excesses of royal power” (1999: 108, emphasis added). Karlstrom claims to discover a situation in which “the idiom of kinship … [is] being used and reformulated in an effort to develop new and more satisfactory ways to conceive and enact relations between local populations and the state” (1999: 117, emphasis added). Since examples of civil society–like hybrids abound, it is advisable to return to the analytical scheme proposed earlier and systematize the emerging body of knowledge. Researchers identified potential civil society–generating hybrids in all four dimensions we used to define civil society. Thus, there exist hybrid networks that function somehow between secondary and primary structures. Ekiert and Kubik identified them in post-totalitarian Eastern Europe (1999); Varshney analyzed “everyday forms of civic engagement in India” (2003). There are semitransparent institutional solutions: Fox writes about semiclientelism in Mexico (1994); Nugent sees semitransparency in New Politics in Peru.

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There are many forms of social organization that are neither purely democratic-deliberative, nor wholly hierarchical: Stark and Bruszt studied them in postcommunist Europe (1998). Finally, selective legalization, empirically hardly distinguishable from Bermeo’s climate of toleration, is a well-studied feature of many authoritarian and post-totalitarian regimes and is construed as a key systemic feature that contributes to the liberalization and democratization. Table 8.3 contains a schematic presentation of our findings on hybrids. Let’s assume, in a summarizing fashion, that civil society or its non-Western equivalents are expected to assist people in accomplishing two goals. They should: 1. Offer an institutional platform that allows people to address, and communicate in an collective fashion, various problems directly influencing the quality of their lives (the emancipatory dimension). 2. Provide a powerful tool for enhancing the system of “checks and balances” within the polity (the accountability dimension). Table 8.3. Civil society attributes, their “noncivil” counterparts, and hybrid solutions Civil society: internal institutional features

Noncivil society institutions (often seen as impediment to democratization)

Hybrid, intermediate institutions

Component groups are secondary (associations)

Primary groups dominant: amoral familism

Semipublic/semiprivate networks (of dissidents in authoritarian systems) (Kubik 2000b; Ekiert & Kubik 2000); Varshney: everyday forms of civic engagement (2002)

Transparent

Secret associations, clientelistic networks

Transitory semiclientelism (Fox 1994, 1997: 396; Roniger 1998) Nugent: APRA (the Popular American Revolutionary Alliance) and NP (new politics) in Peru

Democratic, Antidemocratic, intolerant deliberative, hierarchies tolerant discourse and practice

Multidimensional give-andtake of patron-client networks (Stark and Bruszt’s recombinant networks)

Legally protected public space

Selectively legalized organizations (authoritarian arbitrariness) (Ekiert & Kubik 1999)

Illegality: clandestine (persecuted) organizations

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And, as an earlier analysis indicates, these goals can be achieved when a social arrangement emerges that allows people to: (1) organize themselves “above” the level of kinship, (b) maintain (a modicum of) transparency in the public arena, (c) mediate between families/kinship networks and the state, and (d) constitute a counterbalance to the state’s monopolistic tendencies to dominate the public life. Several of the works discussed above reveal the existence of innovative political forms, including a hybridized civil society, that constitute effective means of emancipation. One could also argue that the selective retention of several boundaries (particularly between the state and the economic domain or between the local communities and the royal power), debated in these studies, shows efforts to generate and maintain accountability. Such analyses may, however, lead to a conclusion that in non-Western contexts civil society is always an alien institutional arrangement and therefore must always be tamed or hybridized to be of any use. Let us investigate the soundness of such a conclusion, drawing on our own fieldwork.

Three Types of Relationships between Western Institutional Blueprints and Postcommunism Anthropologists are a contrarian bunch; with their focus on the local political and cultural detail they are particularly well equipped to poke holes in the generalizations offered by other social scientists. In Eastern Europe they have distinguished themselves by exposing ethnocentric biases and faulty execution of many Western projects, designed to bring about the dual, political-economic, transition to “capitalism and democracy” (Burawoy & Verdery 1999; Dunn 2004; Hann & Dunn 1996; Kideckel 2008; Verdery & Humphrey 2004; Wedel 2001). While this anthropological skepticism concerning the transportability of civil society to postcommunist East European contexts is well advised and theoretically productive, it sometimes produces faulty generalizations. Postcommunist Europe is tremendously diversified, and among its many regions and communities there are bound to be some in which the adoption of Western-like social, political, and economic models should be relatively painless due to elective affinity between specific local cultures and the requirements of civil society architecture. To be sure, there are regions where Western models seem to be completely out of sync with local social and cultural practices, developed both before and during the communist period (Anderson 1996; Humphrey 2002). In such regions, a sense of alienation from the West may be-

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come quite pervasive and the frame of neocolonial arrogance of the “West” is quite appropriate. The situation of the regions, where, as a result of complex “cultural negotiations,” peculiar Eastern-Western hybrids emerge, seems to be most common (Buchowski 1996). In such locations, the recently intensified interactions with the “West” are perceived as a mixed blessing. Finally, there are regions where the adoption of Western models or the development of Western-like institutional solutions—such as the classical civil society—proceeds without major obstacles. In what follows, we will attempt to identify a series of social and cultural features that make such regions highly compatible with the West. The main analytical tool is Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacy.

Herzfeld’s Concept of Cultural Intimacy If Gellner, Putnam, and many others are right that democracy can hardly survive without civil society, determining what constitutes the latter’s necessary preconditions is of crucial importance for social scientists. Anthropologists can contribute to such a task by developing detailed analyses of local mechanisms—particularly local discourses and forms of social organization—that expedite or impede civil society’s formation. We choose to focus on local discourses and practices that contribute to the development of civil society–friendly forms of local/regional identity. Herzfeld (1997) offers an original set of conceptual tools that facilitate an analysis of the identity formation process at the local or regional level. He demonstrates how people construct their localized identities through a complex dialogue with such allegedly external/immutable identities as nationalism or statism. His project is founded on the concept of cultural intimacy, which he defines as “the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality, the familiarity with the bases of power that may at one moment assure the disenfranchised a degree of creative irreverence and at the next moment reinforce the effectiveness of intimidation” (Herzfeld 1997: 3). Herzfeld dissects the complicated interplay among several levels of the individual’s identity in which such powerful external idioms as “nationhood” or “state-belonging” are often simultaneously domesticated or accepted in one context and rejected or deliberately mocked in another. It is a dialectical process through which external identities (nationality, state membership) are rearticu-

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lated in local idioms, while at the same time local identities are symbolically embedded within more comprehensive, “general” narratives of belonging. In the case of national identity this process of simultaneous internalization/externalization is carried out with the help of idioms of “domesticity” and (usually patrilineal or agnatic) kinship (Herzfeld 1997: 74–88; Verdery 1996: 61–82). The symbols of “common blood,” “common roots,” “family,” “ancient common ancestry,” “patriarchy,” etc. are invoked and mediate, naturally—in an individual’s subjective experience, between local and general levels of identity. The champions of civil society do not have such ready-made cultural tools at their disposal. It is not easy to lock a person’s individual identity in a permanent dialogue with a “civic” identity. The available idioms of civility are short on intimacy and do not provide such convincing “assurances of common sociality” as idioms of nationalism. As Kennedy observes: “Nationalist discourse, of whatever variety, establishes through the construction of a past of sacred acts and profane deeds the moral lens through which individuals evaluate the appropriateness of contemporary acts. This is where nationalism really outdoes civil society. Nationalism has an appearance of moral depth that civil society does not because nationalism has a rich complex history or mythology, which justifies its moral superiority. Civil society can only appeal to a universality that resonates almost as poorly with everyday life as communism once did” (1993: 10). There exist, of course, highly articulate narratives and rich vocabularies of civil society, explicated at the level of professional political philosophies, but they are rare at the level of “folk cultures.” The task, therefore, is to determine which discourses and institutional environments facilitate or obstruct the formation of civil society. As Herzfeld’s work suggests, such determination must be based on a study of the interplay of local cultures/identities and “larger” (for example, “nationalistic,” “religious,” or “civic”) discourses.22

Cultural Intimacy of Civil Society in Cieszyn Silesia Cieszyn Silesia is a typical Central European borderland where the meeting of various social and cultural influences culminated interchangeably in cross-fertilization or violent clashes. It is the only region of Poland where Protestants (Lutherans) constitute a significant portion of the population, exceeding 50 percent in several towns and villages. Protestantism arrived in this region almost immediately after Luther’s Wit-

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tenberg “revolution.” During his reign, Duke Waclaw (Wenceslaus) III Adam (1524–1579) accepted Lutheranism and according to the rule cuius regio eius religio, most of his subjects became Protestant. When his son, Adam Waclaw (Wenceslaus), converted back to Catholicism in 1610, many inhabitants of the duchy did not follow. Since that period a large part of the region’s population has been Lutheran. The region was politically separated from the lands united under the Polish crown in 1327.23 After World War I, its eastern part was incorporated in the resurrected Polish state; the western part became a province of the new Czechoslovak state. Thus, for nearly six hundred years its population lived, conducted public affairs, and practiced politics within “non-Polish” institutional frameworks, mostly that of the Habsburg (and later Austro-Hungarian) empire. Importantly, at least since 1848, subjects of the empire enjoyed civil and political liberties practically nonexistent in the German and, particularly, Russian empires. The questions of territorial (e.g., Germany versus the Habsburg Empire [Austro-Hungary] or Poland versus Czechoslovakia), ethnic (Polish versus German versus Silesian), and religious (Catholic versus Protestant) identity have been salient and politicized there at least since 1848. Communism managed to impose strict controls (of censorship) on the public articulation of identity questions and defined any independent search for answers as an illegal activity; in general, the local-territorial identity was kept alive in public discourse either through a highly sanitized and officially monitored folklorization (“fakelorization,” as someone labeled it) or within the confines of the informal, semiprivate discourse. Religious identity was dissociated from other forms of identity and depoliticized (at least within the official public arena). But as soon as communism collapsed, religious, local, and regional identities reemerged as vital elements of the political landscape. An analysis of their interplay should help to determine why, in this region, civil society developed with a strength and depth hard to find in other regions of postcommunist Poland. Long Tradition of Civil Engagement and Activism There exists rich literature on the robust public and political life in Cieszyn Silesia in the second half of the nineteenth century and during the interwar period (1918–1939). It was during that period that a complex system of overlapping political, religious, and cultural cleavages crystallized; but it was also during that period that the local population learned to coexist and collaborate across those cleavages in a largely “civilized,” institutionalized, and peaceful manner.

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Under communism, associational life was permitted almost exclusively within the confines of officially sanctioned organizations. As Ekiert and Kubik argued (1999; see also Kubik 2000b), three types of organizations were allowed in Poland (particularly after 1956): (1) pseudoautonomous (for example, official trade unions), (2) semiautonomous (for example, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland), and (3) “illegally” autonomous (for example, dissident groups, black-market networks). Ekiert and Kubik wrote: The dependent status of these organizations, initially created as the de facto state agencies and instruments of control, changed over time. Since the 1950s, some of them were able to wrestle a degree of autonomy from the party-state bureaucracy, accumulate considerable resources, and secure ever-expanding benefits for their members. They also acquired various degrees of influence and power, which allowed them to represent corporate interests and to shape or even occasionally defy party-state policies. During political crises some of these organizations achieved full autonomy and were consequently purged or even dissolved and banned by the communist authorities. They were, however, always replaced or restored under tighter supervision of the party-state authorities. Replacing old organizations often implied granting some autonomy in order to provide a modicum of credibility to new organizations. During the final years of communist rule, some of these organizations (at least in certain countries) achieved considerable autonomy and thus the process of the internal pluralization and general liberalization was initiated. The collapse of state socialist regimes in 1989 left these organizations free and entirely responsible to fend for themselves. Some were significantly compromised by years of political servility and ideological rigidity while others enjoyed limited credibility due to their long-standing tradition of promoting specific groups’ interests. Thus, there were those that disappeared almost instantaneously (e.g., the Society for the Polish-Soviet Friendship) whereas others swiftly adopted to the new situation. In fact, those that did adopt had distinct advantages over the newly emerging organizations and movements: they controlled sometimes sizable resources accumulated over the years, had legally defined functions, monopolized certain services, and had cadres of bureaucrats, organizers and activists. As a result, they were important building blocks of the newly emerging organization of society. (1999: 100–101)

In a Cieszyn Silesian town (from now on: my town) where Kubik did his fieldwork during the early 1990s, in addition to various “communist front organizations,” two “classical” associations of civil society achieved public prominence several years before 1989: The Association of my town Admirers and a local chapter of the Polish Ecological Club. The former was founded in 1969, but only during the 1980s became publicly active and truly visible. The goal of this association was the cultivation of local culture, traditions, and, first of all, recording and dis-

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semination of local history. The later was formed on the wave of limited liberalization of Polish public life in the mid-1980s. It grouped several vocal exponents of environmental protection and nature conservancy. Revival of Civic Activism and an Ethos of Pluralism after 1989 In 1989, the communists agreed to hold semifree elections to the parliament. In order to overcome the state’s tremendous advantage in resources and media access, Solidarity facilitated the creation of Citizens’ Committees (CCs). Earlier, on 18 December 1988, Walesa officially convened the Citizens’ Committee of the Chairman of Solidarity. It was an elite group of intellectuals and activists conceived mostly as an advisory board to the chairman, but also as a shadow cabinet of sorts. On 8 April, after deciding to form a united electoral front, Solidarity leaders called for the formation of regional and local Citizens’ Committees. Thousands of such committees sprang up throughout the country, and during the next two months they organized Solidarity’s electoral campaign with the help of primitive, homemade propaganda materials. The elections of 4 June were the stunning success of the just relegalized movement and the unanticipated, thorough defeat of the communist bloc: Solidarity/CCs candidates won all of the mandates they were allowed to contest, except for one. In my town, the Citizens’ Committee was formed on 11 September 1989, although its activists had campaigned vigorously for the Solidarity camp before the 4 June parliamentary elections. Around the country, local CCs were often formed with the help of Catholic clergy and espoused Roman Catholicism as part of their identity. In Cieszyn Silesia, this identity, taken for granted and “natural” in most of the country, became problematic. In addition, whereas Solidarity, as a massive movement organized according to the “place of work” principle, could safely ignore the issue of religious identity as irrelevant, CCs, organized according to the “place of residence” principle, had no choice but to face this issue head on. Protestants who constituted a large section of the population were well organized and eager to play the game of democratic politics. Thus, the CCs’ activists had to take positions on at least three issues, absent elsewhere in Poland: 1. Cieszyn Silesia identity, definable with the use of such cultural capitals as “localness,” “Germanness,” “Polishness,” “Silesianness,” or “Czechism”; 2. Religious identity, “denaturalized” by the presence of a substantial and organized Protestant community; and

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3. The feasibility of forming a political alliance with Lutherans and other denominations against the local communist establishment. My town’s CC activists decided to form a comprehensive coalition, built above the religious boundaries and including representatives of all major local associations. On 30 March 1990—two months before the local self-government elections scheduled for 27 May—representatives of seven civil society organizations, led by the local CC activists, formed the Citizens’ Committees’ Electoral Convent. In addition, to the CC, the convent’s members represented: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The Roman Catholic Parish The Lutheran Parish Two chapters of Solidarity from the major local enterprises Polish Evangelical (Lutheran) Association Polish Ecological Club Association of My Town Admirers

This move not only assured their decisive victory over the candidates of the communist ancient regime; it also reemphasized the spirit of pluralism and interdenominational cooperation that energized the local elites for the next few years. It is important to note that all activists had been “trained” for new, democratic public life in such pre-1989 associations as clandestine Solidarity cells, the Polish Ecological Society, or the Association of My Town Admirers. However, the CC began losing its ecumenical character within a few months after its victory and began drifting toward purely Catholic identity. We analyze this process, its cultural context, and its political repercussions below. It is hard to know whether my town had a more robust civil society than other municipalities or communities during the 1990s; our calculations indicate, however, that Cieszyn Silesia in the early 1990s had a more vibrant civil society than did other parts of the Bielsko voivodship where the town is located (see below and Kubik 1994c). We do know that at the beginning of the post-1989 era, associational life in my town was (a) vibrant, (b) pluralistic, (c) founded on the principles of mutual tolerance and openness, and—as much as Kubik could determine—(d) encouraging public accountability. Such an environment was not conducive to the growth of homogenizing nationalism. By contrast, local culture displayed elective affinity for such features associated with the liberal “Western” model of civil society as pluralism and capacity for intercultural dialogues and cooperation. Undoubtedly, the roots of such

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features come from the region’s multidenominational religious culture, multilingualism, extensive and long-term links to non-Polish areas, and their cultures. It should be emphasized, however, that this robust (proto-)liberal public life was mainly limited to the local elite and Kubik often encountered expressions of the sense of exclusion on the part of “average” citizens. Feebleness of Nationalism By their very nature, most organizations of civil society are local. They are formed on the basis of preexisting local bonds and arise out of usually localized needs. Therefore, they often need to compete with another form of social organization—kinship/friendship/patronage networks that lack such basic features of civil society as transparency and public accountability. Moreover, the social imagery such networks invoke as their ideology is often built on the vocabulary of “blood and kinship,” utilized also by nationalism. At least since 1848, nationalism has become the dominant discursive means for embedding people’s local identities within a more encompassing identity of a “national community.” However, when some types of nationalism assume a strongly collectivistic and exclusive format and together with other incarnations of radical collectivism, such as radical socialism or religious fundamentalism (Bozoki 1997; Gowin 1995; Król 1996; Szacki 1994; see also chapter 5 in this volume), they become the main ideological/discursive adversary of liberalism. The latter, founded on the ideas of individualism, pluralism, market (Gellner 1994; Szacki 1994; Rau 1991), and the “rights to privacy, property, publicity (free speech and association), and equality before the law”24 is, of course, the reigning ideology of civil society. Gellner, hardly a relativist, maintains that civil society cannot be based on “a single faith” and its institutionalization calls for “a high level admission that truth was no one’s monopoly” (1994: 96). This ease with which a link between local networks and national community can be forged, so aptly analyzed by Herzfeld, spells serious trouble for civil society’s advocates. There exist, however, regions whose cultures predispose them to resist the (fatal) attractions of more radical versions of nationalism and to accept more cosmopolitan, inclusive, and liberal ways of civil society. Such cultures usually develop in borderland regions, exposed for prolonged periods to a multitude of cultural and linguistic influences. Cieszyn Silesia is such a region. Its elites during the last two to three centuries developed a powerful discourse of regional identity, which is founded on a mild, open, and nonthreatening vision of Polish patriotism. For natives (people “from

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here”), their regional identity seems to be stronger than their Polishness, which, nonetheless is never totally repudiated, but rather cultivated with a slightly ironic and calculated distance. In the most unusual twist of events, most natives, separated from the evolving polity known as “Poland” for almost six centuries, cultivated their Polish language and attachment to the vaguely defined entity, called “Polish culture.” At the same time, many of them seemed to have been perfectly happy citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose legacy they tend to invoke more readily then a rather tenuous (in their minds) connection between their culture and “Polishness” represented by Warsaw.25 The sense of a separate historical trajectory, exacerbated during the partitions era (1795–1918), is pervasive. Kubik heard this motif in countless conversations and interviews. A leader of the Association of My Town Admirers put it this way: Those territories of the old state, the old noble Poland, which ended up as parts of a normal western state, as parts of the state institutions developing in normal historical conditions of the old Prussia or Austria, and participated in all these transformations in those states … those territories achieved a certain level of the civilizational development.. … By contrast, where there was a caricature of the state, the Russian partition, you know what I mean, right? Everybody who comes to Poland will find a common denominator for the Poznan region and Silesia. And will decisively separate those two from Central Poland.

Two elements of this statement need to be emphasized. First, it expresses a common Cieszynian view, that the Western model of political and economic development is normal. Second, those territories of the prepartition Poland that became parts of Western empires were able to partake in this normal development, whereas the lands controlled by the Russian Empire deviated from normalcy and continue to be different even today. The feebleness of the radical nationalistic discourse in that region has been further weakened by the strong though complex and flexible regional identity. The natives have historically defined themselves using interchangeably such cultural capitals as “localness,” “Germanness,” “Polishness,” “Silesianness,” and even “Czechness.” Many of them learned the art of “cultural opportunism,” which allows them to invoke skillfully the identity (or a mixture of identities) that is most convenient in a given situation. This highly situational logic of identity building precludes the formation of an exclusive attachment to a single formative idiom, but it does increase the attractiveness of all-encompassing identities that are built on flexibility and inclusiveness. Perhaps this helps to explain why

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after 1989 many municipalities of Cieszyn Silesia developed networks of multilateral and bilateral links with pan-European institutions and municipalities in other parts of the continent. In the center of my town a replica of the European flag had been raised shortly after the fall of communism and has stayed there until today. More importantly, one of the first “Europe Houses” in the whole postcommunist world was formed there, while the explicitly nationalistic party (KPN, or the Confederacy of Independent Poland) has been relegated to the margins of public life. The “Europe House,” a member of the continent-wide network, was formed even before the fall of the old regime, but officially registered in September 1990. It immediately became a sort of the social club for the local elite. During Kubik’s 1990–1991 fieldwork, almost everybody who was anybody in the town attended its meetings and participated in special events. The Europe House organized international conferences and special trips to several European countries for the local youth and activists. It promoted the European integration and the maximal intensification of links between the region and “Europe.” It was led by an academic teacher from the Silesian University of Katowice, who was not born in the region but was definitely a “Silesian.” Among the most prominent and active members were the key personages of the local chapter of the Polish Ecological Club, the Association of My Town Admirers, and the Citizens’ Committee. The mayor and his son were very active, as were several members of the town council. By contrast, the local chapter of the nationalistic KPN was led by a young miner “from there” (nonnative). He did not have any ties to the local cultural-political elite and drew some support only (it seems) from several young men “from there.” Their actions, designed to “intensify patriotism among the local population,” were not treated seriously by anybody Kubik knew. Most young people Kubik had contacts with seem to have shared their elders’ conviction that in post-1989 Europe, their chameleon-like “Cieszynian” identity has become a tremendous asset. Most of them would be very reluctant to trade this flexibility, which opened many economic, political, and cultural opportunities, for the dubious—in their eyes—benefits of mononationalism. Over the several centuries, people of Cieszyn Silesia developed a distinct regional identity, linked to certain aspects (language, literature, the common “glorious” past) of Polish identity, but fundamentally anational in the political sense of the term. Among the influential cultural centers, Vienna and Krakow have become meaningful reference points; Warsaw has not. Their collective memory, cultivated with a neverdiminishing zeal through oral accounts and published histories, situated

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their region in the post-Habsburg Central Europe and thus separated them clearly from the “Poland” that emerged from the Russian Empire. They have also developed a clear sense of belonging to “Europe,” via their culture’s proximity to such perceived virtues of “Germanness,” as order, punctuality, high social discipline, sense of duty, devotion to one’s calling, and the elevated value of work. Several local intellectuals emphasized in our conversations that postcommunism meant for the region the long-awaited return to European normalcy, in which they were lucky to participate during the partitions and which they were eager to reclaim as rightfully theirs. As a result of these historical processes, the decoupling of national cultural identification and nationalistic political ideology has become thinkable and thus doable in practice. As a matter of fact, this decoupling was consistently cultivated by the natives in the 1990s and constituted a powerful weapon against radical nationalism, which, by contrast, is founded on the denial of the very possibility of such a separation. Cieszynian Protoliberalism: Commitment to Moderation, the Rule of Law and Procedural Justice Early during the postcommunist period, already in 1990, a political cleavage emerged within the Solidarity camp. It was noticeable at various levels of the political discourse, from everyday conversations Kubik had in my town to televised debates featuring the country’s top politicians. This cleavage can be best conceptualized as an opposition between the logic of the rule of law and the revolutionary logic. The former was based on an axiom that social (political) life during the transition should be regulated, as much as possible, by the existing (though obviously evolving) system of laws. Otherwise, it was argued, the peaceful and gradual revolution would inevitably enter its Jacobin/Robespierreian phase and will “devour its children.” The latter was founded on the belief that it was impossible to carry on meaningful reforms without a prior “cleansing” of the political realm of all the remnants or vestiges of the previous system (for example, former communists still occupying positions of influence). Over time, politics based on the rule of law (above other principles) and on the principle of civil society came to be associated with: (1) a conviction that the post-1989 Poland is discontinuous with the Polish People’s Republic and (2) an emphasis on (democratic) procedures over (any) political substance. Politics based on revolutionary logic were associated with a different set of convictions, among which the most prominent were: (1) a belief that a decisive break with the Polish People’s Republic did not occur, and (2) a tendency to define politics

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more in terms of cultural/political substance than procedures. Thus, often at their heart were the questions of “substantive” identity: “Who is the majority?” and “Who is not a legitimate participant in the political community?” In contrast to the logic of the rule of law that tends to be inclusive and formalistic in its definition of citizens, the revolutionary logic tends to be exclusive and substantive in its definition of the true members. In Poland, there is the hegemonic manner of defining true members of the majority: “Poles-Catholics.”26 When “Polishness” is defined as a specific cultural (rather than political or civic) identity, the task of building an inclusive civil society, particularly in multicultural regions, becomes difficult. Differences between “revolutionary” and “reformist” political identities are summarized in Table 8.4. On the national level the reformist-revolutionary cleavage emerged in May 1990 and as of December 2010 remains the most powerful cultural device structuring Polish politics.27 Kubik observed its presence in local political deliberations for the first time during a CC meeting on 11 November 1990. One activist complained that “enthusiasm and social initiative crumbled” allowing “certain people” (a clear allusion to former communists) to take advantage (unfairly) of the existing chaos. He expressed his support for Lech Walesa who was then emerging as the leader of the “revolutionary” option, increasingly critical of both the former communists and their alleged allies: the Solidarity “reformists.” As elsewhere in Poland, also in Cieszyn Silesia, the reformist-revolutionary cleavage proved to be attractive for many political entrepreneurs. Yet, as it got refracted through the prism of regional culture, its content was modified. Kubik’s conversations with local Lutherans Table 8.4. Early split within Solidarity: Revolutionaries versus reformists Revolutionary option

Reformist option

(1) Diagnosed relation of the post-1989 political order to state socialism

Continuity (at least partial) Discontinuity (considerable)

(2) Postulated regulation of transition

Revolutionary logic

Rule of law

(3) Postulated logic of transition

Clean cut (“ruptura”)

Gradual (“reforma”)

(4) Postulated basic prin- Substantivist (rule of ciple of the new regime majority)

Formalist (rule of law)

(5) Principal cause of economic problems

Post-1989 policies

Pre-1989 policies

(6) Principal political objective

Completion of state socialism’s deconstruction

Acceleration of the new order’s consolidation

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revealed that for them, most, if not all, CC activists—regardless of their “true” political leanings—were militant revolutionaries. Thus, a stereotype of the local Lutheran culture was activated: “Catholics tend to be impatient and impulsive, whereas Lutherans are patient, slow, thorough, and consequently, more effective.” Conversely, Catholics began complaining that Lutherans were again excessively deliberate and cautious, thus for example, prone to ponder over “simple” things too much and find positive aspects even in communism. It was increasingly apparent that the local Lutheran ethos articulated easily with the reformist emphasis on the rule of law and prudent deliberation, whereas the revolutionary discourse (particularly its idea of revolutionary justice) found eager adherents among some Catholic activists, most of whom, however, were not born in the region. As a result, Lutherans tended to evaluate new local administrators in terms of their “administrative fitness,” whereas the Catholics would rather test their “political correctness.” Clearly, each side valued different types of cultural capital. In addition to this religious division, the line separating people “from here” from the people “from there” was activated. The CC was decisively dominated by Catholics “from there,” outsiders, and many natives (who were more likely to be Lutheran) would question their cultural competence as local administrators and politicians. This rearticulation of the reformist-revolutionary split through the prism of local culture demonstrates that the susceptibility of a local population to an “outside” political discourse depends on the configuration of local political culture. We tested this proposition and discovered that in Cieszyn Silesia, people were less receptive to the radical ideologies and discourses than in other parts of the Bielsko voivodship: they voted for “reformist” politicians in much higher numbers than the people in other parts of the region (Kubik 1994c and chapter 9 of this volume). It seems that local Protestants were virtually impregnable to the “revolutionary” discourse; they were rejecting its radical formulations and implications, because it did not resonate with pragmatic moderation encoded both in the historically shaped traditions of their families and cultivated in their leader’s proclamations. In another example from Kubik’s fieldwork, the “reformist” mayor,28 representing the predominantly Catholic Citizens’ Committee, lost the support of most of his former allies, who were gradually drifting toward the “revolutionary option.” At the same time, the Protestants, low-key adherents of the “reformist” discourse, became the mayor’s solid supporters. Most Protestants construed the mayor’s pragmatism as a sign of his moderation; for the increasingly radical Catholic activists it was a sign of weakness.

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The latter were also increasingly irritated by what they perceived as the apolitical characteristic of Protestants. By contrast, for Protestants and at least some Catholics “from here,” being apolitical was a social virtue: “politicking [politics]29 is not our business. Politics was the emperor’s business in Vienna, he should worry about it. … our business is plowing, sowing, living a regular, human existence.” Participation in public affairs was recognized in the local culture as a duty, but it was supposed to be conducted with measured moderation and not to interfere with more basic duties of every “serious” person: hard work, reliability, and respect for others. Those virtues were epitomized by the term coined in local dialect and later adopted by the influential Polish philosopher, Tadeusz Kotarbinski, to become a cornerstone of his ethical system: spolegliwos;c;. This term can be roughly translated as reliability combined with trustworthiness. One cannot boast about it, however; it has to be exercised in a low-key manner. Our sense is that it is intricately interwoven with another key value of the local culture: hard work. A fragment of Kubik’s interview with a Catholic activist “from here” illustrates this link: “Protestantism has played an important role in shaping people’s mentality here. Luther’s famous words ‘If I knew that I was going to die tomorrow I would plant a tree today’ are very telling, you see, it means that you cannot waste a day in vain. … But, also, people from here do not strive for high honors; do not try to reach the top. They are modest.” This moderation of a region’s culture, encoded in several prominent narratives incessantly told and retold by the “natives,” is also linked to the cultural scenario of exceptional social discipline. “Discipline,” usually associated with “Germanness,” is expected in the decorum of interpersonal relations but also in the spatial arrangements of households, farms, and villages. What is particularly striking is the fact that this strongly valued “social discipline” characterizes, or at least used to characterize, a culture that was, by virtue of its economic base and basic socioeconomic activities, peasant rather than bourgeois. This of course defies a regularity suggested by Frykman and Lofgren (1987); for them social discipline and “cleanliness” are quintessential bourgeois or middle-class virtues. The people “from here” often mentioned the moderation of Cieszyn culture. They took pride in it and, as with any other cherished possession, they were keen on taking good care of it. It seems to be a solid foundation for building a “civic” public sphere. The sources of “Cieszyn moderation” and the subsequent success of the “reformist” politics in this region are most likely to be found in certain features of Protestant culture and in religious heterogeneity. It seems to work in three ways:

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1. The Protestant ethos fosters a pragmatic, level-headed, and disciplined approach to public life and politics (historically formed attitudes). 2. Protestants have no choice but to opt for reformism that in opposition to revolutionary nationalism or populism, emphasizes and protects their rights as a minority (rational choice). 3. The “old” religious divide cuts across “new” political divisions. Moreover, religious identities and regional identities are not coterminous (there are both Catholic and Protestant Cieszyn Silesians). This prevents or delays the articulation of a single hegemonic cleavage and fosters pluralism of local public/political life (historically formed institutional arrangements). It would be naïve to claim that in the 1990s there were no problems with the development of civil society in the region. As elsewhere, there was a temptation to form and cultivate clientelistic (and thus nontransparent) networks. For example, some local Catholics complained that at least some Protestants have had too many links to the communist establishment and that some of these links continued after the fall of state socialism in 1989. Among the people “from here” there was a degree of distrust directed toward the “newcomers from there,” though this seemed to have been counterbalanced by the region’s culture’s high tolerance for diversity and pluralism. There was a degree of mutual distrust between the two major denominations, Roman Catholics and Lutherans. And, finally, some Catholics were prone to condone at least some precepts of “revolutionary justice,” which contributed to such polarization. But by and large, the cultural elements conducive to the development of LTCS seem to have been dominant. The arguments developed in the last section are summarized in Table 8.5. A Test: Are Cultural Scenarios Reflected in Social Practice? One of the thorniest issues in social sciences is the empirical demonstration of the link between cultural scenarios, encoded in cultural narratives, and people’s actual behavior. If Cieszyn Silesia has a culture that articulates very strongly with liberalism and reformism of civil society, are Cieszyn Silesians more prone to pro–civil society ways than other Poles? In order to measure objectively the density of civil society, we collected necessary data and assessed whether the region has more associations per capita than other regions of the Bielsko voivodship province. We obtained the number of voluntary associations for each commune of this province and divided it by each commune’s population. The result of this calculation is called the index of civil society’s

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Table 8.5. Cultural affinity between civil society and the Cieszyn culture Civil society: internal institutional features

Elements conducive to the development of civil society

Elements detrimental to the development of civil society

Secondary

Tradition of civil engagement Tradition of activism Tradition of “rationalized” individualism (Protestantism)

Clientelistic ties between (some) Protestants and the local/regional communist establishment

Transparent

(Bourgeois) virtue of transparency of public affairs

Distrust of “other” denomination and people not from here

Democratic, deliberative, tolerant discourse and practice

Liberal and moderate leanings of local culture; Tradition of interdenominational dialogue Moderate nationalism Social discipline

Tradition of mutual distrust and cultural separation

Legally protected public space

Commitment to the rule of law and procedural justice (strong)

Commitment to “revolutionary justice” (weak)

density. For the whole voivodship the index was 68 (68 associations per one hundred thousand people or 1,773 persons per association). For Cieszyn Silesia it was 82 (1,318 persons per association); for the “non-Cieszyn Silesia” part of the voivodship, 60 (1,907 persons per association). This indicates that the Cieszynian reformism and culturally encoded commitment to the ordered, yet active, public life correlated positively with predicted actual behavior: higher civic activism of the region’s populace. A Weberian link between culturally emphasized value of work and the actual commitment to work was also confirmed.30 The unemployment rate reported by the Cieszyn Labor Office for its jurisdiction was 6.82 percent (June 1993). In an average Cieszyn Silesian commune (the mean calculated for all thirteen historical communes of the region) it stood at 6.39 percent. At the same time an average “non-Cieszyn Silesian” commune of the Bielsko voivodship had unemployment rate of 9.57 percent. The average unemployment rate for the whole voivodship was 8.93 percent and for the whole country, 14.2 percent. In other words, in the whole Bielsko-Biala voivodship there were only eleven communes were unemployment was lower than 6 percent (19 percent of all fifty-seven communes); but in Cieszyn Silesia, seven out of thirteen communes (54 percent) had unemployment lower than 6 percent (Table 8.6).

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Table 8.6. Unemployment in the Bielsko Voivodship, June 199331 Communes and municipalities of the Bielsko Voivodship by unemployment, June 1993 Rate of unemployment < 6.0 percent

6.0–9.0 percent

> 9.0

Row totals

Cieszyn

7 53.8 percent

6 46.2 percent

0

13

Non-Cieszyn

4 9.1 percent

14 31.8 percent

26 59.1 percent

44

Bielsko Voivodship

11 19.3 percent

20 35.1 percent

26 45.6 percent

57

Type of commune

Economically, during the first years of postcommunist consolidation (1989–1993) the Bielsko voivodship was one of the seven most dynamic areas of the country, which explains its relatively low unemployment. It is therefore striking that in this dynamic economy, Cieszyn Silesia stood out by having unemployment rates even lower than the already low voivodship average. As if to confirm Kubik’s observations and calculations, in a public speech and during several informal conversations, the voivod referred to Cieszyn Silesia as an “engine” of the economic development for the whole province. It is very tempting to invoke the Weberian link between “the Protestant ethic” and “the spirit of capitalism.”

Brief Conclusions and Future Directions of Study: Islands of Civility, Hybrids, and Their Evolutionary Potential In the first part of the chapter we offered a rigorous definition of civil society. It is extracted from the writings of political philosophers, but mostly from the work of political scientists. We do not focus on “civil society” as a discourse, but rather analyze it as a form of social organization. The main conclusion from this exercise is that while civil society, in its complete, ideal-typical “Western” ideal form (LTSC) has been historically rare (also in the West), its “incomplete” realizations are abundant. Some scholars (mostly in political science) construe such hybridized forms of civil society as obstacles to democratization, while others see them as “virtuous” harbingers or anchors of a potentially democratic trajectory. Second, we observe that social scientists’ ability to discern prodemocratic and antidemocratic potential of the hybrid social arrangements is

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in its infancy, as the either/or logic of many analyses closes the conceptual space and makes it difficult to study hybrids and their evolutionary “prodemocratic potential.” Such potential can be detected only when the “incomplete” civil societies are observed for the prolonged periods of time. This is not an easy task. For example, among the students of democratization in the Islamic world, there is no agreement whether the present developments in their societies are increasing or decreasing their “civil” potential. Wedeen detects a “democratic” potential in qat chews (specific gatherings) she studies in Yemen (2004, 2008), while Berman sees antidemocratic danger in the “infiltration” of what she calls “civil society” by the Islamist movement: “In the Egyptian case, a critical component of Islamist success has been the movement’s infiltration of civil society. This civil society–based strategy, in turn, has enabled the movement to begin transforming life from the bottom up. Islamic values and norms have permeated almost all sectors of society, affecting everything from gender roles to consumption habits, entertainment to education. Even governance has not been exempt” (2003: 19). Third, the formation of the type of social organization that is close to the ideal-typical “complete” civil society (LTCS) is not always incompatible with non-Western cultures, as is sometimes suggested. We demonstrate that civil society, as a form of social organization, is easier to build and maintain when the public discourse is saturated with pro– civil society ideologies or discourses. In Poland, at the national level, there exists one ideology/discourse that is unabashedly “civil”; we call it reformism. There exist also two (sometimes overlapping) discourses, most of whose features are inimical to the project of civil-society building: revolutionism and (radical) nationalism. The culture of the region of Cieszyn Silesia contains many elements that predispose its inhabitants to develop cultural intimacy with (or elective affinity for) such tenets of reformism closely associated with liberalism: (a) an ethos of pluralism and tolerance, (b) anti- or anationalism, and (c) moderation and social discipline. This region also seems to have a civil society that is among the strongest in the whole country. We found a place where civil-society-like or proto-civil-social arrangements are by no means construed as alien or difficult to implement. This indicates that such Western discourses or forms of social organization as civil society are not uniformly alien to the people living outside of the traditionally delineated “West.” All these findings would have been difficult if not impossible had we not relied on the kinds of data that are collected through the application of ethnographic methods and extended case studies (as we defined these methods in chapter 2). Among the five types of ethnog-

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raphy identified in chapter 2, the type that proved most useful for the analyses presented here is the oldest one: what we called traditional ethnography that focuses on forms of social organization rather than discourses and symbols.

Notes 1. Nancy Frazer (1992) brings out an important issue of the multiplicity of public spaces in the context of her discussion on women’s exclusion from many of them. Her analysis helps in developing a more nuanced understanding of both public spaces and civil society, which, on many occasions, should be reconceptualized as the multiplicity of civil societies. 2. See Habermas and the discussion of these concepts in Calhoun 1992. For the most recent analysis see Edwards 2009, chapter 4. 3. For a similar distinction between “space” and “mode of organizing secondary groups” see Weigle and Butterfield’s conceptualization (1992). 4. In Plattner’s words: “A diverse and faction-ridden civil society thus is transformed into an ally of individual rights and popular government. But the latter clearly remain the key goals, while the former is simply a means of attaining them” (1995: 172–73). 5. Patron-client relations are usually multistranded, i.e., involve many interests and engage several dimensions of clients’ (and patrons’) lives, but under state socialism some (many?) of them were single stranded (one dimensional, businesslike, and task oriented). See Tarkowski on nonfamilial, elitist type of political patronage (1995). 6. Perfect examples of such groups are secretive, informal business associations, whose members shun governmental regulations, avoid paying taxes, and carefully hide their transactions from public scrutiny. Yet their internal dealings are democratic and deliberative; they subscribe to the value of “pluralism,” i.e., they do not aspire to eliminate their competitors, and thus they definitely believe in the free market. 7. We believe what is essential here is not exclusiveness or closeness, but transparency, that is, the willingness to submit internal operations (particularly finances) of the group to public scrutiny. According to our definition, a club based on highly exclusive criteria of admission belongs to transparent civil society as long as it allows for such scrutiny. 8. Putnam observes that the basic difference in Italy has not been between the atomized, asocial South and the civic, organizationally rich North. “The relevant distinction is not between the presence and absence of social bonds, but rather between horizontal bonds of mutual solidarity and vertical bonds of dependency and exploitation” (1993: 144). 9. Tester and Schmitter define civil society in a similar, narrower manner. The former talks about “formal, voluntary associations” (Tester 1992: 8), the latter about groups that “agree to act within pre-established rules of ‘civil’ or legal nature” (Schmitter 1995: 4–5). By contrast Cohen and Arato, Keane, and Habermas offer much more

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12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

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general definitions, comprising several different “societies” we enumerated. Keane writes about “an aggregation of institutions whose members are engaged primarily in a complex of non-state activities—economic and cultural production, household life and voluntary associations” (1988: 14). Habermas includes in his definition all “voluntary unions outside of the realm of the state and the economy” (1992: 454). Cohen and Arato include in civil society “above all the intimate sphere (especially the family)” (1992: ix). Such general definitions make a distinction between transparent and democratic civil society and the hidden, hierarchical networks of “amoral familism” (Tarkowska & Tarkowski 1991) impossible. See also Krygier’s comments (1997: 67–72). See Cohen & Arato 1992: 489–91; Gellner 1994; Lewis 1992: 3–4; Stepan 1988. Similarly, Skocpol argues, “The meanings of public life and the collective forms through which groups become aware of political goals and work to attain them arise, not from society alone, but at the meeting points of states and societies” (1985: 27). The state is the realm of authoritative and bureaucratic politics. It should be considered, following Stepan, “as something more than the ‘government.’ It is a continuous administrative, legal, bureaucratic and coercive system that attempts not only to manage the state apparatus but to structure the relationship between civil and public power and to structure many crucial relationships within civil and political society” (1988: 4). Gouldner writes: “No emancipation is possible in the modern world … without a strong civil society that can strengthen the public sphere and can provide a haven from and a center of resistance to the Behemoth state” (1980: 356; see Kumar 1993: 380–81). It should be also noted that several authors object to reducing civil society to economic relations alone. We follow here a tradition of distinguishing between civil society and political society. Stepan, for example, argues that “it is conceptually and politically useful to distinguish three important arenas of the polity: civil society, political society, and the state. Obviously, in any given polity these three arenas expand and shrink at different rates, interpenetrate or even dominate each other, and constantly change” (1988: 3). For similar conceptualizations see Chalmers, Martin, & Piester 1997: 569; Gellner 1994; Lewis 1992: 2–3; Myant & Waller 1994: 162; Oxhorn 1995: 27–34. For Dryzek, civil society organizations “do not pursue power as interest groups or through electorally oriented parties; yet, they are, of course, concerned with public affairs” (1996: 481). On the continuing significance of this dimension see Brouwer (2000: 26) who writes: “The Egyptian state has long been paranoid about civil society and has sought to control it.” Bermeo & Nord 2000; Bernhard & Karakoc 2007; Chalmers, Martin, & Piester 1997; Diamond 1999; Gellner 1994; Putnam 1993, 2000; Schmitter 1997; Shils 1991; Skocpol 2003; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995. We show the significance of “climates of toleration” for democracy in chapter 6. We limit our analyses to those situations where democracy building is a salient project at least for some members of the society. A discussion of civil society’s relevance for those situations where democracy building is not contemplated or attempted will have to take a different path. See also Aihwa Ong (1999) and Gledhill (2000). We deal with a similar mechanism in our discussion of consociationalism and accommodation of group rights as an important bridge to more representative democracies. See chapter 6.

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22. As is well documented, the mobilizational efficacy of another important category, class, cannot be determined without examining its complex relationships with other identities, such as gender, religion, or local community. Fernandes 1997 is an important recent ethnographic-political study of this topic. 23. In 1327 Duke Kazimierz I paid homage to the Czech king, Jan Luxemburg, and thus became his vassal. The Hapsburgs became the rulers of the Czech Kingdom in 1526. 24. Cohen & Arato 1992: 346. For an opposing view see Hall (1995). 25. Gellner analyzes the cosmopolitanism of the empire as he compares the formative years of Malinowski and Wittgenstein, both of whom grew up in Austro-Hungary— the former in Krakow, the latter in Vienna. 26. This substantive definition of majority threatens members of religious and ethnic minorities, who are concerned that they may become second-class citizens. Assessments of the size of various minority groups vary. According to The Warsaw Voice (15 September 1991), in Poland there are about 350,000 Germans, 350,000 Ukrainians, 200,000–250,000 Byelorussians, 30,000 Slovaks and Czechs, 25,000 Lithuanians, 25,000 Gypsies, and 15,000 Jews. All the minorities total about one million, which is about 2.5 percent of Poland’s population. According to minority associations, in the early 1990s there were 250,000 Byelorussians, 250,000–300,000 Ukrainians, 700,000 Germans, 25,000–30,000 Slovaks, 15,000–20,000 Lithuanians, and about 10,000 Gypsies. See Klosinska 1992. 27. Since the mid-2010s, the Civic Platform (PO) has represented the reformist option and the Law and Order (PiS) the revolutionary one. 28. In 1999, this man was one of the key regional politicians of the Union of Freedom, the biggest and most influential “reformist” party. 29. The Polish word politykowanie covers both meanings. The quote comes from Kubik’s fieldnotes (September 1990–June 1991). 30. It is of course possible to argue that the lower level of unemployment in the Cieszyn region has other than the “work ethos” causes. We are unable to adjudicate between competing explanations with sufficient precision. At this point we note that the strong, positive correlation between the “work ethos” and lower unemployment is not contradicted by the ethnographic data Kubik gathered. 31. Chi-square test was run. Chi-square value is 18.69. With 2 degrees of freedom, p < 0.0001. The null hypothesis (belonging or not belonging to the Cieszyn region is unrelated to the level of unemployment) is therefore strongly rejected. However, given the constraints on the chi-square test that 80 percent of the cells must have expected frequencies of 5 or greater (and this condition is not met by the data), we also run the Fisher Exact Probability Test. It strongly confirmed the very low probability that the data are distributed this way randomly.

Chapter 9

_

HOMO

SOVIETICUS AND

VERNACULAR KNOWLEDGE

W

hen state socialism collapsed in 1989 in East Central Europe and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the world changed dramatically. Almost overnight, the seemingly durable political bipolarity was replaced by a new arrangement whose nature is not easy to diagnose. For some, the new world-without-communism has become multipolar; for others, it is monopolar with the American hegemony. For Huntington the political cleavage was replaced by a cultural/civilizational one, and Fukuyama announced the end of history under the banner of triumphant culture of liberalism. Both diagnosed a tectonic cultural shift in the world, yet the cultural dimension of the post-1989 transformations attracted far less sustained analytical attention than the political or economic changes. This is a serious oversight, for as some influential analysts argue, it has been the remodeling of culture, and particularly political culture, that is the key to successful consolidation of new regimes. Claus Offe observed, for example, that “the unique and unprecedented nature of the Eastern European process of transformation” results to a large degree from the fact that “at the most fundamental level a ‘decision’ must be made as to who ‘we’ are, i.e., a decision on identity, citizenship, and the territorial as well as social and cultural boundaries of the nation-state” (1991: 869). Michael Kennedy introduced a fascinating volume, writing: “All of [the essays] show that the cultural landscape matters in the construction of communism’s successor, and that the formation of ideologies and identities is more complicated than most discourses of transition or revolution allow” (1994: 1). Notes for this section begin on page 275.

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There are basically three main, sometimes overlapping, phases of regime transition: deconstruction (or disintegration) of the old regime, the actual transfer of power, and consolidation of the new regime (“emergence of democratic institutions,” Przeworski 1986: 56). It is reasonable to assume that in each phase different cultural mechanisms will be dominant and that in each phase actors will need to rely on somewhat different cultural capitals. In this chapter we focus only on the phase of democratic consolidation.1 The discussion on the role of cultural factors during the consolidation of a new regime is inconclusive. Many authors believe that democracy is not possible or at least very difficult to sustain without certain social or cultural preconditions. Diamond, for example, points out: “Prominent theories of democracy, both classical and modern, have asserted that democracy requires a distinctive set of political values and orientations from its citizens: moderation, tolerance, civility, efficacy, knowledge, participation. Beliefs and perceptions about regime legitimacy have long been recognized as a critical factor in regime change, bearing particularly on the persistence or breakdown of democracy” (1993: 1). According to this group of scholars, certain attitudes and orientations are correlated (although the establishment of causal arrows may be difficult) with the successes, or their lack, of liberal-democratic reforms (Kubik 1994c; Pollack et al. 2003; Vainshtein 1994). Other authors conclude, however, that cultural traditions are inconsequential for the establishment of liberal democracy and ascribe causal import only or predominantly to economic and political factors (Reisinger et al. 1994). The type of explanation offered to account for the success/failure of postcommunist transformations, and particularly the place of culture in it, depends obviously on the theoretical lenses the researcher employs. Students of postcommunism come from all areas of social science and predictably offer different and sometimes contradictory pictures of what they claim they see. They do not agree as to what caused the involution and eventual collapse of Soviet-type systems, what mechanisms have been most important in driving the transformative changes, and what explains the intriguing variety of postcommunist paths and their outcomes. Some, found mostly among political scientists, tend to privilege quantitative (large-n) studies). Others rely on the case study methodology. In this approach generalizations are produced by drawing conclusions from the systematic comparison of a small number of cases, increasingly conducted according to the exacting standards of today’s “small-n” qualitative comparative social science. Still others prefer to use a combination of qualitative and interpretive methods; they are found mostly among cultural anthropologists. Some of them prac-

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tice critical, postmodern, and/or postcolonial types of anthropological analysis; others engage more “traditional” studies. Scholars from each “school” try to explain why the course of postcommunist transformations has been so uneven, often slow, and certainly costly. Why in some places (Central Asia, Russia, Belarus) it has stalled or careened away from the “ideal course” onto the path of authoritarian reversal. And why, even in the most successful countries, there are persistent “problems,” including, for example, underperforming sectors of the economy, unstable party systems, and weak civil societies. There is no agreement as to the sources and explanations of these problems. Most disagreements stem from the choice of data, concepts, and explanatory strategies. But regardless of the specific theoretical school, there seems to exist a more basic level of disagreement: the difference in the diagnosis of what constitutes the general source of “troubles” engendered by the transformations. This diagnosis, more or less explicitly formulated, comes as an answer to yet another question: why are the postcommunist societies, with their own norms and routines, somehow out of sync with the institutional measures envisioned and implemented by the “reformers,” foreign and domestic? Scholars trying to analyze and explain this incongruity offer many theories, yet in much of what they argue one can detect two broad “metatheoretical” stances. For the lack of better terms, we propose a distinction between two (ideal) types of theories, social adjustment and institutional adjustment. Proponents of both views offer diagnoses (What is wrong?) and policy prescriptions (What is to be done?). The champions of social adjustment tend to locate the source of troubles in the postcommunist societies, in the civilization incompetence of at least some of their segments, incompetence that is captured by a controversial concept of Homo sovieticus.2 The advocates of institutional adjustment see the principal source of problems in the reform programs, in their design or implementation, or both. Accordingly, while the former seek to formulate programs of social renewal that are aimed at changing the people so they can “fit” the indispensable institutions, the latter would rather redesign the incoming institutions so they can “fit” the people. A clear articulation of the doctrine of social adjustment, associated with the concept of Homo sovieticus, comes from the Polish liberal economist Jan Winiecki. In an interview with two journalists from a popular weekly, Wprost, he offered the following analysis: Q: And, indeed nobody lost in the recent transformations? A: The former workers of liquidated state farms are the only group that lost in absolute terms (not only in relation to the other groups). They are

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really doing badly because they haven’t learned how to work and after the dissolution of these deficient creations they have no place now from where they can steal. Q: Who has benefited the most? A: People who want and can work to succeed. Now it is entrepreneurship and knowledge that counts—those who have understood this first have become the biggest beneficiaries of the system. Q: Who has proved to benefit the least? A: The problem of Poland is the Poles themselves who wait for a manna from heaven and think that they deserve everything without work and commitment. It is the passive part of society that is at fault. These people are demoralized by the previous system and by those they vote for. (Cielemecki & Trabski 1999: 46, quoted in Buchowski 2006, emphases added)

Anthropologists are very critical of the theories based on the concept of Homo sovieticus and the philosophy of social adjustment. For them, this philosophy offers an unrealistic portrait of the human being, devoid of agency and creativity. In general, anthropologists are far more critical of the postcommunist transformations than political scientists. The sources of this discrepancy are not only ideological, although anthropologists seem to be more on the “left;” the differences have their roots in the basic conceptual, philosophical, and methodological foundations of both disciplines and in their different techniques of data gathering. Thus, the resulting divergence of empirical pictures of reality can be attributed to two sets of factors: theoretical (basic assumptions about the nature of social reality) and methodological (techniques of empirical investigations). Anthropologists assume that social life “happens” at several levels, but small communities (localities) hold special significance for them as they assume that the study of this level is indispensable for building solid knowledge. Accordingly, they cannot do without relying on some kind of ethnographic work (reviewed in chapter 2). For many anthropologists, this intense commitment to ethnographies of local phenomena is combined with the focus on the central concept of their discipline: culture (reviewed in chapter 3). This tripartite combination of methodological and ontological commitments (ethnographic study of culture in small locations) comes together nicely in the study of a celebrated anthropological “object,” vernacular knowledge. Two types of ethnography are particularly suitable to study this “object”: interpretive and postmodern ethnography. Both were used in the field studies that produced data for this chapter. In the next segment we examine the concept of vernacular knowledge. Later it will help us to reinterpret the debate on Homo sovieticus, formulate our own position on civilization incompetence, and propose

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an approach, derived from anthropological analyses, that goes beyond the dichotomy between two extreme philosophies of social and institutional adjustment.

Vernacular Knowledge: Conceptual Preliminaries At first sight, the phrase “vernacular knowledge” has a rather clear connotation, though the search for its denotation promises to be more challenging.3 The definitions of vernacular found in the Merriam Webster Dictionary indicate a phenomenon that is “internal,” “native,” and “authentic.” It is enough to consider these adjectives’ most common antonyms (“external,” “alien,” and “fake”) to see the logic behind the construction of the concept. It is based on three assumptions: 1. “Internal” and “external” cultural models of the world or its elements (situation) can be isolated. 2. They are juxtaposed to each other (by the “natives,” the researcher(s), or both). 3. The juxtaposition has some permanence (it may be difficult to establish a precise definition of durability, but the distinction must be applicable to more than one occurrence or event). It seems, however, that social scientists usually include additional attributes in the concept’s intension (connotation). We want to single out for scrutiny five characteristics of vernacular phenomena. They are: 1. Related to common sense/direct knowledge (versus elaborate, theoretical, ideological types of knowledge); 2. Internal to a given culture in a given situation (versus external). Thus always contextual, established through contrast between “inside” and “outside;” 3. Usually “weaker” in an unsymmetrical pair of contrasts (internal versus external); 4. Local (versus global/cosmopolitan); and 5. Evolving, but at a pace that is usually slower and more gradual than in other areas, such as politics or economy that from time to time experience revolutionary changes. Common Sense Common sense is a type of knowledge that is close to practice, to what people do routinely, usually in an unreflective fashion. It orients people

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in everyday life without much self-consciousness. It is immediate, untheorized, taken for granted, and “unproblematic until further notice” (Schutz & Luckmann 1973: 4). Geertz captures the nature of this immediacy with his typical flair: “Religion rests its case on revelation, science on method, ideology on moral passion; but commons sense rests its on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority” (1983: 75). At the first sight, then, it seems difficult to record “common sense,” for its content, produced and reproduced in the incessant flow of daily conversations, gestures, and performances, is rarely systematically reconstructed by the actors and its “rules” are almost never articulated. Yet both ethnographers and philosophers produced many intriguing and relatively systematic accounts of “common sense.”4 Most of the former seem to agree with Geertz for whom common sense is “as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myths, painting, epistemology, or whatever, than it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected to historically defined standards of judgment” (1983: 76). For some of the latter, “common sense” became the principal object of investigation and/or the source of sound precepts on “how to think.” Wittgenstein, Austin, and Ryle developed the philosophy of ordinary language; Husserl and his collaborators and followers (among the most illustrious are Scheler, Heidegger, MarleauPonty, Schutz, and Sartre) proposed to rebuild the foundations of valid knowledge on the systematic investigations of the rules guiding human thinking in everyday life, in “natural predisposition.” Phenomenology, a distinct philosophical school they created, continues to influence theorizing in sociology, anthropology, and history (Berger & Luckmann 1966; Chakrabarty 2007; Geertz 1983; Schutz & Luckmann 1973).5 Common sense is contrasted with more elaborate, systematized, and codified forms of knowledge, such as symbolic systems, ideologies, or religious doctrines. For example, for Fischer, “the two most interesting portions of culture are symbolic structures and common sense” (1980: 4). He finds symbolic structures of Shi’ism embodied in such cultural forms as “preachments, passion plays, and the curricula and debates of the madrasa” (1980: 4). And he continues: More subtle than symbolic structures but just as important is common sense, often thought of as underlying assumptions of everyday life. The rhetoricians of classical times defined common sense as the right way of talking about things: one feels satisfaction, competence, and aesthetic closure from saying things right. But that satisfaction is bought at the price of constraint on individual creativity: the individual may make some statements or assertions, or propose some ideas, that the culture or commu-

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nity finds ill-formed, repugnant, ugly, or untrue; and the individual either yields or is perceived as deviant. (1980: 4–5)

Fischer points out two crucial albeit potentially contradictory features of common sense: relying on it may be a source of personal satisfaction and an important element of building the sense of community. But it is also a mechanism of social control; it ensures conformity. While Fischer detects danger in common sense (unreflective conformism?), Bloch sees it as a defensive mechanism against external ideological imposition: “The pre-requirement for the establishment of ideology turns out, in fact, to be a systematic and furious assault on non-ideological cognition. This assault is marked by the second stage of the ritual, an assault which seems particularly directed against the most fundamental categories of cognition … [and might be] called anticognition” (1985: 40). If we assume that “fundamental categories of cognition” reside in or are coterminous with common sense, Bloch seems to be articulating a default anthropological position: external forms of knowledge—including those associated with modernity, colonialism, and conquest—threaten or destroy local, commonsensical knowledge that, at the same time, constitutes a powerful weapon of resistance (Scott 1990). Common sense appears to be, therefore, a potential source of (undesired) conformity or (welcomed) empowerment. Which of these options is actualized seems to depend on the context (presence or absence of other factors). Internal (Native, Authentic) People construe as authentic those elements of culture that they assume are “organically” internal to it. Authenticity is related to the takenfor-grantedness of common sense knowledge. People tend to take such knowledge as “authentic,” while they often remain skeptical of the claims made by the purveyors of knowledge coming form the “outside.” It is difficult to ascertain “scientifically” the authenticity of any cultural form; in fact this category is rarely employed by today’s social scientists. But it is not difficult to determine whether the “natives,” the producers and users of a given culture, deem a given cultural form authentic. Authenticity, therefore, seems to be best construed as a metaclaim of a given culture that is often used by the “natives.” It is not, however, a useful analytical category of social science. Defensive Power Obviously, the internal needs its external. This binary opposition emerges only in contact and through contrast. It is an elemental part of conflict.

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Through contrast, often agonistic, one’s culture/knowledge becomes internal while the adversaries’ is external. The game of external-internal is therefore situational. An individual or a group subjected to an “attack” construes its own culture or knowledge as “authentic” juxtaposed to “inauthentic” external forms of knowledge (culture, ideology, worldview, etc.). The aggressor’s point of view is based on symmetrical claims: aggression is justified in the name of “superior” knowledge. In countless contexts throughout history, local knowledge has become an object of attack and has been depicted by the powerful as obsolete and inferior.6 Seen as “obsolete tradition” or “superstition,” local knowledge was one of the primary targets of the Enlightenment’s “reason” and “rationalism.” Some critics of the Enlightenment (particularly during the postmodern turn) saw in the return to or restoration of local knowledge an engine of intellectual and even political emancipation. Some of them have become deeply suspicious if not contemptuous of the Enlightenment and the modern (social) science associated with it. Why is local knowledge so controversial? Because rulers, conquerors, and regulators perceive it to be an obstacle to achieving hegemony over subject populations. By attempting to erase it, the powerful confirm what many theorists have observed and analyzed: power is always exercised not only through political or economic but also cultural means. It is enough to recall that Foucault studies the power of knowledge; Gramsci, Williams, Laitin, and Scott—cultural hegemony; Bourdieu— symbolic violence; and Lukes and Gaventa—the third dimension of power. Power comes, for example, from a successful establishment and defense of the claim that one’s form of knowledge is superior to its rivals. The study of the grounds on which such a claim is made and the conditions under which it is accepted is the study of legitimacy.7 But local knowledge is not only an inertia-inducing mechanism delaying a “hostile takeover”; it can also become a subversive and/or emancipatory force. In the hands of “local” intellectuals, local forms of knowledge become weapons in the struggle for recognition and influence waged against the power on behalf of the “subaltern,” “conquered,” or “dispossessed.” Many theorists argue that the subversive potential of local knowledge comes from its hybrid nature. The content of vernacular knowledge, a product of multigenerational sedimentation, is complex. It is composed of sometimes contradictory, not always clearly articulated motifs, having their origins in (many different) ideological discourses as well as in (various) local/ regional (folk)lores, often transmitted orally within kin or friendship networks. The archeology of local knowledge will therefore always reveal its hybridity that, in turn, is often construed as a source of creative

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ferment. The exploration of the intellectual and institutional potential of hybridity is central to both the decolonial project and postcolonial theory: “De-colonial projects dwell in the borders, are anchored in double consciousness, in mestiza consciousness (racial and sexual)” (Mignolo 2007: 165).8 Such double consciousness is theorized to be a potent source from which a skillful cultural entrepreneur may fashion an empowering anticolonial or—more generally—an antihegemonic macronarrative, Mignolo suggests. There are many others who develop similar lines of thinking, Chakrabarty (2007) perhaps most spectacularly. But the search for the truly “alternative” theory is not over, for as Mignolo observes, “My point is that events and political processes that attempt to counter the control of the State or of global forces are in need of macro-narratives from the perspective of coloniality” (Delgado & Romero 2000: 9, emphasis added). Local As we discussed in chapter 2, locality is among the several concepts that have recently been subjected to relentless critical scrutiny. Trouillot argues that the postmodern sensitivity demands that location be construed not as a relatively bounded and separate whole, but as a place where various flows intersect. To be able to grasp the “nature” of such a place, Trouillot (and many others) propose to engage in multisited ethnography (discussed in chapter 2). He offers this as “a partial answer to the ethnographic trilogy (one observer, one time, one place) (2003: 125). This trilogy served anthropology well in its attempt to become “empirical,” but eventually contributed to serious theoretical problems.9 Theoretical improvement needed the reformulation of the idea of locality as the key site of observation. To facilitate such an improvement, Trouillot introduces a useful triad of concepts: location, locale, and locality. Location is “a place that has been situated, localized, if not always located” (Trouillot 2003: 122). It is an actual, “physical,” geographical space, located somewhere on a “map.” Locale is defined as a venue, “place defined primarily by what happens there” (Trouillot 2003: 122); it is determined by the type of the activity that takes place there (ritual, game, meeting, etc.). Locality “is better perceived as a site defined by its human content, most likely a discrete population. A fishing locality is one thought to be populated by fisherman … a culture area is a locality populated by people who are said to share similar cultures” (Trouillot 2003: 123, emphasis added). Trouillot claims that ethnographers have been primarily (and for too long) focused on locales and localities, while neglecting the task

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of carefully conceptualizing locations and their relations to other locations and broader (economic, political, social, and cultural) contexts. This leads to a serious theoretical problem. By conflating location (a physical, geographical, or special phenomenon) with locality (a cultural phenomenon), social scientists made it difficult for themselves to distinguish and theorize the relationship between the physical (and political) location of the people engaged in generating and communicating cultural material and the degree of “wholeness” and “boundedness” of the material itself.10 Location, particularly in the rapidly globalizing world, can be a relatively self-contained village, but it may also be a worldwide virtual network of antiglobalization activists. A culture area or simply a vernacular culture (as a form of nonterritorial locality) can be tightly interwoven and bounded according to the rules of single cultural logic, but it may be also a syncretic, hybridized, loosely bound mosaic. It constitutes, at the minimum, “the socially most significant context” (Chabal & Daloz 2006: 124). The concept of (traditional) community may be reserved only for such situations when the location and locality tightly overlap.11 Moreover, the concept of community “in the classic sense of shared values, shared identity, and thus shared culture” (Marcus 1998: 62) needs to be counterbalanced with the concept of “multi-locale, dispersed identity” (Marcus 1998: 63) constructed, often simultaneously, by often mutually independent flows of cultural materials, complex political dependencies, and economic relations. “It is the burden of the modernist ethnography to capture distinctive identity formations in all their migrations and dispersions” (Marcus 1998: 63). In other words, the double conceptualization (location versus locality) of the actual site of ethnographic work allows for a consideration of their mutual relations and the examination of their constitution and reproduction. Moreover, today’s methodological sensitivity demands that the researcher remains open to the possibility that each of them is not a relatively bounded and separate whole, but rather as a site where various flows intersect, where increasingly itinerant individuals pause, sometimes just for a moment, attracted by memory of once-shared cultural commonality. It is important to recognize that such flows are often incongruous with each other, an idea expressed, for example, in Appadurai’s influential conceptualization of several types of “scapes.”12 Evolution/Change (Multiple Times, Asynchronous Rhythms) Vernacular knowledge evolves, though the pace of this evolution may be so slow that it gives rise to the perception of permanence anchored in timeless essence. It is thus imperative for its students to be aware of two conceptual dangers. Essentialism is an assumption that a vernacu-

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lar phenomenon is like an artichoke: once the surface-layer contaminants resulting from external influences are peeled off, the pure and essential core can be revealed. Anachronism is an assumption that the vernacular is given once and for all and does not change over time. Both assumptions are proven to be false by empirical projects that show vernacular knowledge as formed through usually long processes of gradual sedimentation of various influences. An important debate concerns how fast local/vernacular knowledge changes compared with other domains or dimensions of the society and its culture(s). It is generally assumed in most theories that culture, at least its vernacular level, tends to change slowly.13 Anthropologist Anthony Cohen observes that “cultures, ways of thinking, attachments to community, are much more resilient than many scholars of society have supposed” (1985: 75). Historian Michael Gismondi echoes this thought: “Annalistes place mentalities in the long durée and, because these structures move so gradually, they distinguish them from other factors which change more quickly (i.e., economic fluctuations, demographic swings and political events)” (1999: 421). Moreover, he suggests, following Le Goff, that this slow rate of change is particularly clearly visible when, “at the level of the quotidian,” historians focus on “the fragments of these slow-moving mentalities” (1999: 421, emphasis added). The idea that mentalities (cultural forms, ideas, etc.) at the level of the quotidian change slowly has been accepted as a rarely questioned axiom of social science, though today most scholars agree that globalization contributes to the acceleration of this process. Ralph Dahrendorf, for example, famously observed at the beginning of postcommunist transformations: “The formal process of constitutional reform takes at least six months; a general sense that things are looking up as a result of economic reform is unlikely to spread before six years have passed; the third condition of the road to freedom is to provide the social foundations which transform the constitution and the economy from fair-weather into all-weather institutions capable of withstanding the storms generated within and without, and sixty years are barely enough to lay these foundations” (1990: 99–100).14 Dahrendorf’s opinion has been echoed throughout the postcommunist region. A Czech scholar wrote: “The slowest, most complex, most elusive, but in my view most crucial part of any process of transformation is the necessary metamorphosis of the rules of human conduct. The rules of human conduct consist of the very concrete norms that exist in the minds of the people and are the basis for their day-to-day behavior patterns and their shared values” (Cepl 1997: 230).

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Vernacular knowledge has been shown to be: (1) anchored in common sense, (2) internal, (3) defensive rather then offensive, (4) local, and (5) slowly changing (all of these attributes, but particularly [1], [2], and [4], are particularly suitable for ethnographic studies). We use this concept in the remainder of the chapter as we examine a controversy surrounding the concept of civilizational incompetence that is attributed to the people who lived under state socialism. As we noted earlier, people suffering from this affliction are sometimes labeled as Homo sovieticus.

In the search for Homo sovieticus Piotr Sztompka, an internationally renowned Polish sociologist, advances an elaborate analysis of cultural mechanisms that contribute to the formation of people “who wait for a manna from heaven.” In a 1993 article, he offered a model of a specific culture, developed under state socialism, that has been responsible, at least partially, for turning (some) members of Homo sapiens into Homo sovieticus. Representatives of this subspecie have difficulties with becoming “proper” participants in a system based on democracy and market economy because they are held down by civilizational incompetence. Sztompka begins his analysis of “the anatomy of civilizational incompetence” by observing: “For a developed, democratic and market society to operate, several resources seem indispensable. Capital, technology, infrastructure, skilled labor force, robust middle class, efficient civil service, professional political elite—would be obvious examples. But there is also a less obvious, underlying cultural resources which may be called ‘civilizational competence’” (1993: 87). Assuming further that civilizational competence must develop in four areas of “modern, developed society,” such as economy, polity, social consciousness, and everyday life, Sztompka identifies its four subcategories. First, proper functioning of market economy calls for the development of enterprise culture. Among its key elements are “innovative push, achievement orientation, individualistic competitiveness, rational calculation” (Sztompka 1993: 89). Second, civic culture needs to emerge, including “political activism, readiness to participate, concern with public issues, rule of law, discipline, respect for opponents, compliance with the majority” (Sztompka 1993: 89).15 Third, the robustness of democracy improves when it is accompanied by a discursive culture built around “tolerance, open-mindedness, acceptance of diversity and pluralism, skepticism, criticisms” (1993: 89). Finally, “there is the everyday culture, indispens-

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able for daily existence in advanced, urbanized, technologically saturated and consumer-oriented society. Some of its components include: neatness, cleanliness, orderliness, punctuality, body care, fitness, facility to handle mechanical devices and the like” (Sztompka 1993: 89, emphasis added) Sztompka argues that the fourfold complex of what might be called the culture of modernity has been gradually achieved in many societies of the West, although pockets of “alterative” cultures have survived in quite a few locations and there have been long periods of gross violations of the ideals, particularly under the oppressive regimes of the twentieth century. “But in peripheric societies of Eastern and Central Europe the civilizational competence has never had the chance to evolve” (Sztompka 1993: 89). There was little of such competence before the imposition of state socialism, and during its reign the situation became even worse, as this system contributed to the shaping of the “contrary cultural syndrome—civilizational incompetence” (Sztompka 1993: 89). The Polish sociologist theorizes that the “vicious process” that produced this civilizational incompetence was working in all domains of life under state socialism: a planned economy “effectively paralyzed entrepreneurship,” political autocracy made citizenship impossible, Soviet imperial dominance “constrained sovereignty and national identification,” and finally “shortages and poverty preempted any concern with everyday virtues of civility, aesthetics and comforts of everyday life” (Sztompka 1993: 89). Three causal mechanisms were responsible for such a result: direct indoctrination, totalitarian control, and defensive patterns, including “lack of respect for law, institutionalized evasions of rules, distrust of authorities, double standards of talk and conduct, glorification of tradition, idealization of the West” (1993: 89). Even the participation in oppositional activities did not help much as people were developing a strongly polarized “we” versus “them” consciousness that is not conducive to cultivating moderation and compromise, the quintessential “democratic” virtues. After the fall of state socialism, civilizational incompetence has been, paradoxically, strengthened by the rapid emergence of social anomie and “axiological chaos,” brutal competition unconstrained by the underdeveloped “rules of the game,” dramatic loosening of social controls (particularly the lack of respect for law), and unintended consequences of the opening toward the Western world (“pornography and drugs, brutality and mysticism, organized crime and deviant ways of life” brought together with “consumer mass culture”) (Sztompka 1993: 90).

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Reaching back to Durkheim and Levi-Strauss for analytical tools, Sztompka proceeds to identify seven basic binary oppositions that help him analyze the emerging postsocialist culture. We will list them with brief comments: 1. Private (personal) versus public (official). In a society in which a “private” culture dominates, people tend to organize their lives within closely knit networks of trust (Tilly’s term, not used by Sztompka). The only other significant element of the polity is state/public institutions that are not trusted. “Power centers are perceived as alien and hostile; the government is seen as the arena of conspiracy, deceit, cynicism, or at least stupidity and inefficiency” (Sztompka 1993: 90). Engagement in the intermediary social structures (civil society) is weak.16 2. The past versus the present. People who tend to idealize the past do not engage sufficiently in developing innovative, new institutional solutions. 3. Fate versus human agency. People focused on “fate” tend to assume that the world is always controlled and run by more or less specific forces that are beyond their control. Sztompka quotes a well-known study by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky, who write: “A fatalistic orientation … is thus a learned (and rational) response to a distant, capricious and unresponsive power imposed from without” (1990: 3). 4. Negative freedom (freedom from) versus positive freedom (freedom to). When people favor the latter, they also emphasize independence and autonomy, while the former is associated with susceptibility to influence, control, and impotence. If negative freedom is stronger, the whole culture can easily degenerate “into anarchy, contempt for and evasion of all rules, disrespect for law and morality, widespread permissiveness” (Sztompka 1993: 91). 5. Mythology versus realism. Mythical and magical thinking is widespread, as people tend to believe in miracles, magical solutions, supernatural interventions, and harbor utopian hopes. Pragmatism and rationality are in short supply, while explanations invoking supernatural forces are privileged. 6. The West and the East. People who glorify all things Western often show no respect for things Eastern, including politicians. For them, the West is stereotyped as the world of freedom, wealth, and happiness.

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7. Usefulness versus truth. Among the people who privilege usefulness over truth, opportunism and instrumentality trump “truth, faithfulness, straightforwardness” (Sztompka 1993: 91). Hypocrisy, dogmatism and intolerance are accompanied by the proclivity to think in “useful” stereotypes and to rely on double standards both in talking and acting. The cultural syndrome, captured by the first terms of the seven binaries, needs to be overcome, suggests Sztompka, if the Eastern Europeans want to catch up with the Western part of the continent. He actually claimed (in 1993) that getting rid of it was the central task of postcommunist societies in the 1990s. “It is prerequisite, a necessary condition for attaining true modernity: authentic democracy, functioning market and open society (Sztompka 1993: 91). It would be easy to dismiss this analysis as an ideological harangue of an uncritical champion of the most simplistic version of neoliberal doctrine, founded on the obsolete precepts of “developmentalism”17 and “internal Orientalism,”18 had it not been produced by a broadly trained and sophisticated sociologist, a consummate practitioner of modern sociological theory.19 What is going on here? We begin our reexamination of Sztompka’s thesis by reviewing its “total” critique offered by a Polish anthropologist. Then we try to determine if a cultural syndrome that Sztompka labeled “civilizational incompetence” exists in two regions of Poland Kubik and others have studied using ethnographic methods.

Anthropologists to the Rescue: Agentic Theories of Change and Localized Empirical Evidence Michał Buchowski, the Polish anthropologist, offers a six-pronged critique of Sztompka’s thesis from an ethnographically based theory. He begins by observing that Sztompka’s bipolar categorization of people into winners and losers of the postcommunist transformations resembles other binary constructs that bedevil social sciences. Such simplified theoretical accounts often offer a picture of the society in which some category or class of people is simply unable to cope with or are unprepared for new situations due to their culture. The picture tends to be elitist and “culturally deterministic,” founded on a specific version of Orientalism that contrasts the (internal) Occident with the (internal) Orient. How come, asks Buchowski, so many members of the communist nomenclature managed to become extremely competent capitalists almost overnight, while it is exactly them, the purveyors of the old

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doctrine and the rulers of the system built on it, who should be most habituated to the ways of culturally incompetent Homo sovieticus? Second, Sztompka’s black and white logic is criticized for neatly allocating civilizational incompetence to one group or category of people, while there are others who are blessed with the required competence that allows them to become, rather effortlessly, the citizens of a democratic state equipped with a market economy. Buchowski offers an intriguing correction when he suggests that the “socialist” habitus20 diagnosed by Sztompka is not a dysfunctional relic reproduced by inertia, but rather a useful adaptive strategy to the shock caused by yet another “modernizing” project that shares with state socialism certain “logical and structural similarities,” at least in the experience of some actors. Third, Buchowski, the anthropologist, emphasizes human capacity for agency adjustment. He sees Winiecki’s and Sztompka’s portrayals of the transformational period as “anti-sociological.” In their views, society is composed of individuals who are merely responding to the technological and economic changes inflicted on them. Actors’ strategies are portrayed as reactive responses to processes that are largely beyond their control; the idea that social reproduction is a complex process in which economic, political-social, and cultural stands are intertwined is forgone. Buchowski sketches a different view based on the assumption that “social forms emerge at the interface of the hardware of systemic circumstances and the software of human beings acting within them and upon them, by which they constantly restructure these imminent forms. The actor’s images and deeds constantly modify the reproduction of social practice that should not be evaluated in terms of its correspondence with the assumed ideals of democracy and the free market. It takes on a myriad of forms one cannot simply define as wrong and repeating past wrongdoings” (2006: 471). Fourth, according to Buchowski, Sztompka’s theory is teleological as it construes the postcommunist transition only as a period of temporary “cultural ambivalence” on the way to a rather clearly defined and understood goal. Fifth, the theory is idealistic as it places hope in the new, unspoiled generation. Buchowski asks how is it going to be possible for a “spoiled” generation to raise an “unspoiled” one? Sixth, the picture is ideological as it presupposes “the prosperous future shining on the horizon” that “recalls the promised land often described by communist propaganda that interestingly enough also mentioned the necessity of getting rid of bad bourgeois habits and ‘post-capitalist modes of thought’” (Buchowski 2006: 472). Buchowski’s critique is founded on a theoretical approach that emphasizes the creative agency of the people living through postcommu-

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nist transformations. Burawoy and Verdery offer arguably the clearest articulation of this approach’s basic premises. They “challenge those analyses that account for the confusion and shortcomings of the transition process as ‘socialist legacies’ or ‘culture.’” And they find, repeatedly, “that what may appear as ‘restorations’ of patterns familiar from socialism are something quite different: direct responses to the new market initiatives, produced by them, rather than remnants of an older mentality” (Burawoy & Verdery 1999: 1–2). But while people respond creatively to the rapidly emerging new challenges, their discursive responses (“symbols and words”) “are not created de novo but develop using the forms already known, even if with new senses and to new ends” (Burawoy & Verdery 1999: 2). Burawoy and Verdery reiterate a basic point made by many postcolonial scholars that when people try to control (cognitively, discursively) the world around them, they often have no choice but utilize “materials” originating in the oppressors’ culture to fashion their (hybrid) cultures of resistance. While the employment of such materials may be interpreted as a symptom of passivity and destroyed or diminished capacity to be independent, the deliberate and often creative fashioning of new hybrids evinces person(s) who are not only active but also shrewdly strategic. While those points are well taken, the researcher needs to be cautious for two reasons. First, actors’ ability to be strategic varies and some of them may be more “inertial” than others, for example as a result of the subordinate location in a present or past power hierarchy. Second, cultural scenarios, more or less deliberately developed by actors, have both intended and unintended consequences for people’s effectiveness in political or economic fields. The issue is delicate, as it is easy to fall into the trap of “blaming the victim.” Nonetheless, if we are serious about postulating the causal import of cultural scenarios people produce and subscribe to, we need to investigate the relationship between cultural models and their “functionality” in specific political or economic environments. In a nuanced discussion of Lewis’s controversial culture of poverty thesis, Day, Paptaxiarchis, and Stewart observe that: Another insight of Lewis’ was to show that the very behaviours which enabled survival in a hostile world could have unintended effects, which themselves helped reproduce the relationships through which these people were disadvantaged. Paul Willis later provided an ethnography, better grounded in theoretical terms, showing “how working class kids get working class jobs” as a result of the very defensive strategies that they developed to cope with a school system from which they are excluded (Willis 1977). (1999: 6–7)

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Lewis (1968) and Willis (1977) point out that people sometimes develop strategies of action, derived from specific subcultures and applied in specific situations, which may disadvantage them in other circumstances. There are sociological and ethnographic studies documenting the existence of some “dysfunctional” predispositions in this or that subculture of postcommunist Europe. Is Sztompka right? How should we think about such evidence? It is easy to argue that Sztompka’s original thesis, as formulated in the 1993 article, is simply too general, for it reifies civilizational incompetence as a more or less coherent cultural syndrome attributable—as a whole—to a whole category (class?) of people. The social “carrier” of a specific cultural syndrome is construed as a curiously unstructured “society.” This seems to be the main gist of Buchowski’s criticism. But we want to go further and examine Sztompka’s argument again, relying on an anthropological critique of his sociological theorizing that builds on Buchowski’s work but relies also on (a) a more complex theory of cultural causation, and (b) empirical data from specific, closely observed regions/locations. A good place to begin the theoretical recalibration is to reflect on the fact that cultural scenarios’ influence on people’s behavior is codetermined by the whole host of other factors. In a word, what is needed is a more sophisticated theory of cultural causation. Such a theory must include, at a minimum, an analysis of the relationship among cultural scenarios (narratives, discourses, etc.), power constellations, institutional settings, and individual predispositions (Somers 1994). For example, one can argue that some (particularly younger) former party bosses fare better in postcommunism not because of a specific cultural endowment (or its lack), but because they managed to utilize their privileged positions of political power in the old system to acquire economic power in the new one.21 To study them, one could rely on Bourdieu’s theory of various capitals and argue that their cultural capital (say, some elements of “civilizational competence” in this case) alone does not explain their actions. Young party apparatchiks tend to be economically successful in postcommunism not only because their cultural capital was different (although it might have been), but because their privileged political position gave them timely access to institutional and material resources that, in turn, allowed them to unlearn “civilizational incompetence” and acquire expediently the necessary “competence.” Cultural capital is not immutable, and when it is employed in practice it evolves under the impact of various factors, among which power may be central. The analysis needs to be organized within a richer conceptual net. In addition to cultural capital we may want to

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study educational capital, social capital, and political capital (power), and see how the three of them interact with cultural capital during the period of rapid transformations. An additional benefit comes from utilizing the ethnographic method. While political scientists tend to focus on institutional designs and the “macro” conditions of their viability, albeit usually without any systematic scrutiny of specific local conditions, sociologists by definition focus on “societies” and look for typical, median responses of large groups of people (nations, classes, age cohorts, etc.). Anthropologists’ lenses are focused differently. They want to understand specific groups, communities, localities, networks, etc. that constitute the actual social worlds of actors acting in real time. People develop their strategies out of cultural scenarios offered within specific cultures and engage in action from within the social networks in which they are immersed.22 For example, an ethnographic approach allows us to see electorates not as aggregates of “statistical” characteristics or as sets composed of individuals who share similar positions determined by an external system of parameters (gender, age, education, income, etc.) and who calculate their choices according to the rules of some universal logic. As ethnographers we have access to localities formed by people who develop common world-views embedded in practical knowledge. We can, therefore, observe how ensembles of discourses coalesce, climates of opinion solidify, and patterns of choices emerge. We can study how such patterns, which are ex post facto detected by public opinion or exit polls, are created, reproduced, and changed within specifically located trust networks, as Tilly calls them (2005, 2007).

Sztompka’s Seven Features of Civilization Incompetence: An Ethnographic Test in Two Regions A short study cannot portray exhaustively complex fields of causation that influence people’s actions. We focus instead on specific discourses that constitute vernacular knowledge. In order to reconstruct this knowledge we interrogate the ethnographic data to determine whether, how, and to what degree Sztompka’s seven features of civilizational incompetence show up in two local/regional cultures.23 We propose a comparative analysis of two vernacular cultural syndromes shaping people’s coping with and engagement in postcommunist transformations (for example, their visions of the political or the normative bases of their trust in authorities). Like Sztompka, we do not study actual

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actions/behavior but rather cultural scenarios that serve as models of or for actions/behavior (Geertz 1973: 93). The empirical evidence (discussed in more detail in the Preface) comes from several ethnographic and sociological works, but mostly from the studies conducted by Frances Pine (1997, 1999) and Anna Malewska-Szałygin (2008) in the Podhale region, and from the works of Grazæyna Kubica (1986, 1995, 2001, 2002, 2011), Marian Kempny (2005), and Kubik’s own fieldwork in the Cieszyn Silesia region.24 Both regions are located in or near the mountains of southern Poland, and in both the natives and outsiders designate at least segments of their populations as Górale (highlanders, mountaineers).25 The cultures of both regions are crisply articulated and forcefully “defended” at all levels of discourse, ranging from everyday conversations, to popular “folklore,” “high” art, and even social scientific studies. The Górale Culture of Podhale (Nowy Targ and the Surrounding Villages) The discourses of cultural uniqueness are extremely well developed in both regions and articulated in various contexts. There is also a strong sense of cultural resilience and continuity. Malewska-Szałygin describes the region as having “a considerable continuity of settlement, strong attachment to property transferred from generation to generation, and inhabited by the people who are not afraid to express their political views” (2008: 41). Podhale was settled in the thirteenth century, as a land controlled by the Polish crown. Since 1772 (the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) it became a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was reincorporated to Poland after World War I, in 1918. The region, initially poor and neglected, became a popular tourist destination in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Podhale attracted many artists, writers, and intellectuals, who began developing a complex narrative portraying the region’s culture as a depository of the national “spirit.” Its specific architecture, music, dialect, and colorful costumes became broadly known as cultural markers of “Polishness,” an effective strategy of nation building in a country that still did not exist as a sovereign political entity. At the same time, a dialogue developed between the “high culture” elaboration of the myth of Góralszczyzna (the Podhale Górale culture) and the locals’ own vernacular culture. Both cultures (sets of discourses) began reinforcing each other in a process that eventually produced a distinct image of one of the most recognizable Polish re-

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gions, both in the country and abroad. A very important element in this regional mythology has always been the spirit of fierce independence of its people. Some historians note that the Górale were never subjected to serfdom (Kroh in Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 44); others observe that communist collectivization failed here miserably as 95.2 percent of land holdings remained in private hands (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 47). The Silesian/Lutheran Culture of Cieszyn Silesia A brief description of this region is to be found in chapter 8 while Kubik’s method is presented in the preface. In the reminder of this chapter we test whether the existence of Sztompka’s syndrome of civilizational incompetence is confirmed in the two studied regions. We examine the features of the syndrome one by one. Private versus Public The private-public distinction can be conveniently reconceptualized as the relationship between “private” networks of trust and the state, including the public spaces created and controlled by it. In a series of publications, Charles Tilly (2005, 2007) offered a novel, intriguing theory of democracy, organized around the analysis of democratization and de-democratization, two processes that often work simultaneously in a single sociopolitical field. The former is facilitated by the inclusion of preexisting trust networks into the structures of the democratic or democratizing state. The inclusion should not be complete, however; only a partial inclusion preserves some degree of separation that generates enough distrust to create an effective mechanism of checks and balances. In Tilly’s words: “If the basic trust networks that citizens deploy as they pursue their major collective enterprises remain segregated from public politics, then citizens have few incentives to participate in politics and very strong incentives to shield their social relations from political intervention. These conditions make effective, sustained translation of citizens’ expressed collective will into state action almost impossible, at least outside revolution. But the total integration in the style of theocracies, lineage-connected oligarchs, and fascism also squeezes out the possibility of democracy” (2007: 88–89). Trying to determine the “proper” level of inclusion of trust networks into the structures of a democratic state is beyond the scope of this essay. We will briefly discuss only three cultural factors that influence such inclusion: (1) the relative strength of the (discursively declared) attachment to a community, locality, or region; (2) the dominant image of the state; and (3) the discourse on trust in the state and its authorities.26 It is reasonable to hypothesize the following: If the regional or local loyalty is stronger

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than the loyalty to the nation-state, secessionist tendencies are going to be substantial. If the image of the state is highly negative, its legitimacy is low. If people distrust the state and its organs, they tend to shirk their duties as citizens (for example, paying taxes). In both Podhale and Cieszyn Silesia, regional identities have been robustly articulated in various media, including everyday conversations, artistic performances, local newspapers, books and brochures, rituals and festivals, ceremonial costumes, etc. Local populations are immensely proud of their heritage and support its cultivation. As a result, the discourses that embody Polish patriotism cannot be taken for granted as they vie for attention in a crowded cultural field, rejuvenated by the abolition of preventive censorship in 1989. It seems, however, that the Polish “patriotism” in Podhale is stronger than in Cieszyn Silesia, whose culture is more hybrid and cosmopolitan. “To be a Pole is an honor”—declares one respondent from Podhale (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 125). “Poland—that is this land, people, love, well, perhaps also that Catholicism, as we go to church, perhaps that community, raising children also, good neighbor, well, I do not know, well, all of this that surrounds us” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 126). Moreover, for the Podhale Górale the state and the nation can be easily, it seems, amalgamated into a single image: “The state is Poland or the Motherland” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 69). There is some ambivalence in the cultural model of the state predominant in the region: as in most peasant cultures the state is viewed with wary distance,27 but it is also seen as a “natural” and necessary component of the world order: “The world is divided into specific parts, states, somewhat given. Everybody feels differently in one’s state. And all those races, nations, all of this needs to be separated” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 63). This sometimes leads to an opinion that the Polish accession to the European Union is fraught with dangers, for open borders will produce an “unpredictable mess” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 63). While the assessment of the state is complex and mixed, the image of the authorities seems to be almost uniformly negative: “There is no gospodarz in Poland these days! There is some kind of drifting! There is no gospodarz in Poland” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 82). Gospodarz is a complex concept, difficult to translate. Its English equivalents, including “farmer,” “homesteader,” “landlord,” “householder,” “host,” “manager,” and “master” cover some of the semantic field of the Polish term, but not all of it. The concept and its derivatives (verbs: gopodarzyc;, gospodarowac;, and the adjective gospodarny) are central to the understanding of a popular Polish cultural model of the “proper” social order, particularly its economic dimension. The basic referent of

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the word is a person who is in charge of a household, particularly the one who is engaged in agricultural production. Such a person is older, experienced, savvy, and definitely possesses both leadership skills and practical economic knowledge. A good gospodarz is demanding, economically prudent, and protective of his gospodarstwo and the people who live and work there. He28 rules in an authoritative fashion and is also a guardian of traditions, including the regional or national ones.29 When Górale affirm that they expect their politician to be a gospodarz, they do not mind that such a position comes with power that may be nondemocratic. In conversations, they often make it clear that they prefer authoritative efficiency to democratic accountability (MalewskaSzałygin 2008: 88–98). Since inept and corrupt politicians are not gospodarze, they are untrustworthy. Even worse, politics not only attracts corrupt individuals, it corrupts honest ones: “There is no human being who gains power and retains his characteristics intact. [He] loses his identity, honor, loses a lot. Becomes like a horse with blinders. He has power and that is all. There is no person who has power who would not be guilty of something” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 99). In Cieszyn Silesia all three entities—“nation,” “state,” and “authorities”—are construed somewhat differently. On several occasions Kubik’s Cieszynian interlocutors told him that “Poland” was located outside of the region’s boundaries: “Oh, look there, behind that stone. Poland begins there.” As the conversation took place within the boundaries of today’s Polish state, the listener had to be befuddled by such declarations and would ask for clarifications. Kubik found out that it was hard to receive a clear answer, but invariably sensed a complex understanding of the sociopolitical space in which Cieszyn Silesia was not construed as a seamlessly incorporated “section” of larger “Poland.” Many locals had no problem with a symbolic construct of the political space in which their region was inside of Poland and yet retained a strong, separate identity. “It is closer to Vienna from here, than to Warsaw”—they would often proclaim. Second, most Lutherans, but also some Catholic “locals” are inclined to respect the state more than the nation. For them the latter’s symbolic structure is imbued with the elements of “alien” or “excessive” Catholicism. Kubik often heard a maxim that one’s duty is to be an obedient citizen, regardless of the source of authority. Several students of Protestantism have noted this respect for authority and the high regard for discipline among its practitioners. Colas, for example, observes: “Luther’s political message may be interpreted as proposing an exchange in which the Christian’s internal freedom would be acknowledged and the political authorities cease intervening in that

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sphere, while the Christian would abdicate even the will to contest the political authority” (1997: 131, emphasis added). Gorski, whose work focuses on “the ethic of self-discipline” associated with Calvinism, concludes that this denomination’s “revolutionary potential” (at least in Prussia and the Netherlands) came from conjoining “(1) an ethic of self-discipline with (2) potent organizational strategies and (3) a worldchanging vision of a godly commonwealth” (1993: 274). Protestants of Cieszyn Silesia are Lutherans, but the spirit of religious instruction may be quite “Calvinist,”30 with the emphasis on the unknowability of God, individual ethical responsibility, and social discipline. This “Calvinized” Lutheranism underpins a culture in which participation in public affairs is easily construed as a duty, but “service” is supposed to be conducted with measured moderation and not to interfere with more basic duties of every “serious” person: hard work, reliability, and respect for others. Within such a culture, being apolitical can be seen as a virtue. As Kubik was once told: “Politicking is not our business. Politics was the emperor’s business in Vienna, he should worry about it. … our business is plowing, sowing, living a regular, human existence.” Those virtues were epitomized by the term, coined in local dialect and later adopted by the influential Polish philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbinski to become a cornerstone of his ethical system: spolegliwos;c;. This term can be roughly translated as “reliability combined with trustworthiness.” The cultural discourse of respect for authority does not, of course, stop people from expressing criticism of the political figures at all levels, but it tames such criticisms and makes it considerably more difficult to communicate a complete disdain for the whole authority structure, a disdain that is so prevalent in the Podhale conversations. Past versus Present In both regions, discourses on the past contain a strong ambiguity, glossed over in Sztompka’s model in which the orientation toward the past is associated with the lack of engagement in the present and weak innovativeness. The past may be of course remembered as a paradise lost and the subsequent decline construed as a justification for escapism, fatalism, and pessimism. This vision underpins many (conservative) ideologies. On the other hand, however, the commemoration of the past and spirited cultivation of local or regional “historical traditions” may help to reinvigorate social, political, and even economic activity (Petro 2004). Such strategic employment of narratives reconstructing the “positive” past to benefit the present and future is evident in both regions. After the fall of state socialism, their elites, strongly

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supported—as much as this could be determined—by local populations, devoted considerable resources to the revitalization of regional arts and crafts and the promotion of their regions as picturesque and culturally rich tourist destinations (Pine 1999: 59). In both regions, after the fall of state socialism the past has been idealized, often contentiously, but this idealization has not led to passivity. It rather has served both as a charter for focusing people’s energy, a reminder of their historically established collective agency, and as a foundation for the very profitable development of tourism as their basic economic strategy (Sen 2004). Fate versus Agency While the regional culture provides Górale with some sense of control over their regional or local affairs, their feeling of political efficacy on the broader, national, scene is weak. They often talk about being mere pawns on the board controlled by the more powerful individuals and forces, often construed as “Jews.”31 “They [the politicians] get together, every day they sit down and deliberate how to screw up someone! And they always screw up a worker or a farmer! They are not going to screw up themselves, right?” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 102). “They say one thing, and do another” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 107). This effect of alienation is discursively amplified by invoking the omnipotent “Jews”: “They always controlled everything. They still do today. Simply, the largest capital in the world is held by the Jews” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 112). Quite a few respondents seem to be believe that “The government today [2000] is Jews! People not from our country! People who care only about the interest of their own nationality. This is such a greedy nationality that they would not allow others to develop, gospodarzyc!” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 112).32 In the dominant regional discourse of the Cieszyn Silesia region agency seems to trump fate, but this may be a result of the elite bias in Kubik’s research. There is little doubt, however, that the local culture is built around a motif of control over one’s environment achieved through disciplined, hard work. Additionally, it has been observed in other contexts that one way of severing the link with the incapacitating influence of fate is the development of the ethos of individualism and self-reliance. And one of the most effective cultural resources to develop individualism is Protestantism. Jan Szczepanski, a distinguished Polish sociologist and a Protestant born in the town that was the site of Kubik’s fieldwork, wrote in his Social Reality of Protestantism: “Protestant religions emphasize one creative factor that is able to transform the world, namely human individuality. … Individuality thus defined may radiate original creativity, inimitable, even if it is small-scale creativity

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in everyday matters, since there is no other person that could create ideas, inventions, or works that have been already developed or will be developed in the future” (1997: 14). Individualism does not mean necessarily the complete rejection of collectivism or communalism. But it may mean a more balanced approach to building a community, including a reserved distance to such imagined communities as nations. Such a distance is more prevalent in Cieszyn Silesia than in Podhale. Negative versus Positive Freedom Weber argues that the doctrine of predestination does not need to lead to passivity. The requirement to demonstrate both to oneself and to a community that the individual is “called” and “chosen” generates frantic, albeit quite systematic, activity. And the desire to shape one’s destiny and environment generates activism that is associated with the notion of positive freedom. In this sense, Protestant cultures are well equipped to model individuals with “agency.” Not surprisingly, therefore, models and scenarios that easily generate “can-do” and “take your future into your hands” attitudes permeate the culture of Cieszyn Silesia. A local Catholic activist offered an analysis of his region: “Protestantism has played an important role in shaping people’s mentality here. Luther’s famous words, ‘If I knew that I was going to die tomorrow I would plant a tree today,’ are very telling, you see, it means that you cannot waste a day in vain. … But, also, people from here do not strive for high honors, do not try to reach the top. They are modest.” Górale’s sense of agency construed within “their” world is also powerful. Pine (1997, 1999) studies its embodiment in the “trickster” mentality, the influential brigand myth and the self-stereotype of shrewd entrepreneur. In fact, her analysis is built around a contrast between the Górale culture and the culture of “proper peasants,” studied in a classical Eastern European monograph (Fel & Hofer 1969), who were Protestant! The cultural models available in the Górale culture emphasize fierce independence and distrust of the external world that needs to be kept at a distance; the intrusions of which must/can be responded to with any tools available. The concept of freedom, consistent with such a cultural constellation, is of a “negative” rather than “positive” kind; it serves to protect “our” vernacular world from the external world rather than to engage it. Mythology versus Realism All observers agree that down-to-earth pragmatism associated with the this-worldliness of the Protestant ethos is a part of the Cieszyn Silesian self-stereotype. Moreover, it seems to be related to the demystification

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and disenchantment of the world so characteristic of Protestant cosmology. The sparse and solemn décor of Lutheran churches symbolizes this feature and is clearly contrasted to the relative opulence of the more otherworldly oriented Catholic spaces. It is also related to the cultural scenarios emphasizing a low-key focus on one’s daily duties. Catholic symbolism and rituals permeate the culture of the Nowy Targ Gòrale. Mythical accents are common in a model of religiosity that is one of the most clearly articulated variants of what may be called the plebeian version of Polish Catholicism. As such it is also shot through with magical elements. Malewska-Szałygin argues that the Nowy Targ culture is a complex mosaic composed of several different “historical” layers and parts, but it is shot through with a specific type of religious imagery, sometimes even invoking a “quasi-Augustinian conception of the City of God” (2008: 209). But the complexity of the regional culture needs to be appreciated. In her fieldwork conducted in a different part of Podhale, Pine observes a phenomenon well understood by ethnographers: people’s bombastic pronouncements of some ideological or mythical “truths” are usually counterbalanced by more “private” pragmatic and sober evaluations of the experienced realities, shared in private conversations among friends and kin. As she puts it, “There are many stories and legends of successful migrants; the reality, as everyone knows, is often harsher and bleaker” (Pine 1999: 57, emphasis added). In this case, the myth presents a positive picture, while practice provides negative examples. There exists, however, another contrast: in the “official” mythical narratives circulating among the Podhale villages, the West (usually, America) has been often portrayed as “the hostile and antisocial outside world” contrasted negatively with “the moral and good community of the mountain village” (Pine 1999: 57). It is hard to provide succinct, unambiguous portraits of either the Podhale or Cieszyn culture and assess which one is more prone to be “mythical” and which one is more “pragmatic.” What is clear, however, is that while in both regions both types of discourses coexist, in one of them (Cieszyn) a unique cultural syndrome (related to Lutheranism) endows the regional culture with a more pragmatic tinge. West versus East The binary “West-East,” while quite central to most if not all discourses of collective identity in Eastern Europe, plays differently in the borderlands than in the more central locations of a country. The hybrid character of borderlands’ cultures, changing administrative/political boundaries, and the historically shaped liminal (betwixt and between)

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position of their populations constitute powerful cultural filters that dilute the sharp and categorical imagining of the “others” that is quite common in more central locations within modern nation states. In addition, for the people of borderlands, who have always tended to travel abroad more often than their counterparts in the interior, “the West” has become more familiar, somewhat “tamed” by personal experiences, and to some degree at least demythologized. The monolithic myth of the West-East binary is replaced by a more complex image, which, however, may be built on other stereotypes. The portrayal of the “West” Kubik heard most often from his interlocutors in Cieszyn Silesia was nuanced, frequently based on their personal experiences, mostly in Germany, and although it sometimes contained negative assessments of specific phenomena, by and large it was “balanced” and indicated an investigated and “tamed” external reality. In this region, one can often hear positive references to this or that perceived feature of “German culture.” In fact, from time to time the locals hit the tone of pride that something in their town or region was properly dealt with in a “German-like,” that is efficient, manner. A comparative analysis must begin with an observation that the reference points, at least during the state-socialist period, were different: America for the Nowy Targ Górale, Germany for the Silesians. Additionally, the proclivity to rely on stereotypes may result from a simple fact: while most Nowy Targ migrants never learn English and therefore tend to rely on often extreme stereotypes of the American realities from which they remain isolated by the language barrier, many Cieszyn Silesians speak at least rudimentary German and possess more detailed and culturally textured knowledge of the German realities. It seems that in their discourse, the distance between “myth” and “practical knowledge” is shorter than among the people of Podhale (Górale). This analysis leads to another correction of Sztompka’s generalizations: in both regions, with extensive traditions of “pendulum” labor migrations, the picture of the West is complex, in which mythologized, sharp contrasts are counterbalanced by pragmatic, measured, and experience-based assessments. In both of them, the mythologized exaltation of the West is often offset by other types of knowledge, tightly related to specific, practical experiences of labor migrants from both regions, albeit each with a different collective memory of the migrant experience. The East, associated with Russian influence, is assessed by and large negatively in both regions, though the argumentation may be quite different. While in Cieszyn Silesia the challenges to the Soviet (and by extension, communist) dominance have been somewhat muted (particularly among the Protestants, explainable, perhaps, by their doctrin-

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ally founded proclivity to accept authority), in the strongly Catholic and “patriotic” Podhale the criticisms were more robust. It is easy, however, to encounter a strong disdain for things communist/Soviet among the Cieszynians in another area: in their negative assessment of the systemic economic ineptness of the people living in the territories of the former Russian partition of Poland, an affliction inherited from the years of partitions (1795–1918). Usefulness versus Truth It is difficult to comment on this dimension given the paucity of data to which we have access. It should be noted, however, that the opportunistic manipulation of knowledge (“truth”) is a feature of all human situations, though in varying degrees.

So, Who Is Really Waiting for That “Manna from Heaven”? It is easy to show that in the Cieszyn Silesian culture, Weber’s Beruf (calling) has not been simply a subject of contemplation, theological dispute, or an abstract ethical deliberation, but rather an “organic” concept organizing the practice of everyday life. In the prevalent, if somewhat idealized, self-reconstruction of the regional ethos, the essence of life is seen in labor (robota); labor is tedious but defines one’s humanity. It had also the ultimate religious justification: “Each daily chore had in it some element of the cross and Lord’s suffering, so one had to follow Jesus’ example” (Szczepanski 2003: 108). “The man lived to labor, that is to do the work he was assigned. Labor constituted the most essential content of life” (Szczepanski 2003: 32–33). The ethos of practical religion is shot through with basic Protestant ethical precepts. It is, however, easy to overinterpret the link between the “Protestant ethic” and the “spirit of labor.”33 As many researchers observe, the ethos of hard labor characterizes most if not all peasant cultures and is not limited to groups whose cultures are influenced by Protestantism (Sen 2004). Pine finds a cult of hard work quite strongly embedded in the culture of the Podhale Górale. But, expectedly, the cultural frames around physical labor are different in each region at least for two reasons. First, in Podhale the dignity of labor did not/does not have such an explicit and elaborate religious doctrinal grounding as it does in regions influenced by the spirit of Protestantism. Second, it is possible to point out some attitudes and cultural patterns that reflect a more “Catholic” idea, elaborated by some early Christian thinkers, that “work was punishment for original sin, an idea that had been inherited from their

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reading of Hebrew Scripture” (Schnall 2001: 41).34 This can be seen, arguably, in a combination of “skills” that is more difficult to find among the more “straightforward,” disciplined, and modest Cieszynians: hard work and entrepreneurial tricksterism (Pine 1999, 1997). Górale value hard work (Pine 1999: 56) and they see themselves as “hard-working people” who “want to work because they want to achieve something” (Malewska-Szałygin 2008: 53), but their self-stereotype rates “individualistic, entrepreneurial skills much higher than regular waged labor” (Pine 1997: 66). It is obviously impossible to come up with a precise determination of the relative importance of both components, but the whole syndrome is centered on a clearly developed concept of active, creative personhood realizable through work. It is confirmed both by self-stereotypes and outside observers. Putting aside unavoidable imprecision of these ethnographic portrayals, the general picture of both cultures is clear: it is hard to detect in them cultural scenarios (norms) of passivity and “waiting for manna from heaven” expected by Winiecki. This finding has also serious theoretical implications for Sztompka’s model, because he suggests looking for the symptoms of “civilization incompetence” exactly among cultural patterns, not in social practice. Neither Cieszyn’s nor Podhale’s cultural patterns resemble the syndrome of Homo sovieticus. They contain some of the hypothesized elements, but those are mixed with other elements and the resulting syndromes are region specific. It may well be that each identifiable region has its own specific configuration of cultural scenarios. This needs to be determined, as we are aware that our two case studies come from the areas of Poland where regional cultures are extremely well articulated. What is happening in practice may be a different matter, but it is beyond the scope of this study. However, it is worth noting that after twenty years of postcommunist transformations, economically both regions are among the most successful in Poland. The results of this analysis are summarized in Table 9.1. For the sake of simplicity and in order to emphasize the contrasts between the cultures of the two studied regions, we exaggerate some features of these cultures. It needs to be remembered, however, that those are ideal types whose intensities are exaggerated and that in reality the actual phenomena may be less distant from each other.

Political Test: Electoral Results Given the nature of evidence and the partial incompatibility of the data, the comparison of the two regions must be cautious. Perhaps, the main

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Table 9.1. Summary of the analysis based on two ethnographies Feature

Nowy Targ/Podhale (P)

Cieszyn Silesia (CS)

Private versus public

Strong conviction about the authorities’ ineptitude, corruption, and—sometimes— ethnic distance (anti-Semitic overtones)

Strong sense of local/ regional identity, coupled with respect for authority. Modest trust in the state and its agencies (stronger among Lutherans).

Attachment to the nation

Strong

Ambivalent

Identification with the state

Ambivalent

Strong

Trust in authorities

Weak

Strong

Past versus present

Past celebrated and used entrepreneurially (related to the significance of tourism)

Past celebrated and used entrepreneurially (related to the significance of tourism)

Fate versus agency

Strong agency (in local/ regional context): hard work. Trickster/entrepreneur model (popular though perhaps not used by everybody). Fatalistic resignation concerning the state authorities.

Strong agency: hard work associated with the Lutheran work ethic. Fate (predestination) does not paralyze (Weberian analysis).

Negative versus positive freedom

Arguably more emphasis on negative freedom than in Cieszyn Silesia, thus stronger “anarchic” tendencies.

Emphasis on positive freedom: significance of social and economic discipline.

Mythology versus realism

Both. Strong religiosity but also emphasis on practical, entrepreneurial skills.

Strong pragmatism related both to the religious doctrine and the situation as a religious minority.

West versus East

Close, practical knowledge of the West (reliance on stereotypes resulting from isolation due to language barrier).

Close, practical knowledge of the West (less reliance on stereotypes due to language competence. Cultivation of hybridity and code switching).

Usefulness versus truth

Hard to determine

Hard to determine

Labor (work)

Highly valued (elements of entrepreneurship).

Highly valued (labor as an autotelic value).

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problem is that while Malewska-Szałygin focused on the “average people,” often poorly educated, Kubik’s work was conducted among the local elite. Moreover, his ethnographic work took place mostly in the early 1990s (1991–1994), while her team collected data later (1999–2005). But assuming that local cultures, “at the level of the quotidian,” do not change rapidly and that the elites and the nonelites share some basic convictions as they are exposed to the same discursive “regional” fields, the existence of two distinctly different vernacular cultural syndromes should be reflected in electoral choices. The Polish electoral spectrum has remained remarkably polarized since 1989. A leading expert on Polish elections characterized this split in a personal communication: At the opposite ends of this continuum are the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, or PO) and Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwos;c;, or PiS) parties. In their manifestos and other proclamations [Słodkowska and Dołbakowska 2006] both parties present sharply different visions of social, political, and economic order. PO tends to emphasize a commitment to individual liberties, procedural democracy, and entrepreneurial freedom as the basis for economic growth. PiS, on the contrary, stresses the need for nourishing a national community based on shared values and traditions, and for basing public policy on the principles of social solidarism. In doing so, it does not shy away from expressions of economic nationalism, often with a Euro-skeptic bent. (Jasiewicz, see also his 2009)

The cultural syndrome detected among the Nowy Targ Górale is clearly much more compatible with the electoral platform proposed by the more traditionalistic and nationalistic PiS, while the Cieszyn Silesians should opt rather for the more pragmatic and cosmopolitan PO or the coalition of the left parties. Additionally, Protestants are wary of the Catholic overtones of the strongly nationalistic discourse propounded by PiS and its leaders. Results of the last Polish parliamentary election in 2007 (Table 9.2) confirm our hypothesis.

Table 9.2. Selected results of the parliamentary elections 21 October 2007 Poland

Nowy Targ: County

Nowy Targ: commune

Nowy Targ town

Cieszyn Silesia County

Ustron;

Turnout (percent)

53.88

47.42

45.67

56.26

57.25

63.18

PiS

32.11

51.94

52.78

37.23

28.07

23.42

PO

41.51

31.62

28.63

46.03

43.72

50.68

United Left

13.15

4.62

2.66

7.82

17.54

17.47

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The electoral results from the Nowy Targ commune come from the population represented by Malewska-Szałygin’s respondents, while the results from Ustron; come from the site of Kubik’s fieldwork. The difference in turnouts shows the predicted (from the analysis of discourse) difference in the sense of citizenship duty (higher in Cieszyn Silesia, whose culture is influenced by Protestantism). The support for the two main political rivals also confirms the predicted regularity: while the Górale of Nowy Targ prefer a party whose platform is clearly more in tune with their culture, the more “pragmatic” Cieszynians support a party that explicitly emphasizes pragmatism in its platform. The “left” is very unpopular among the “Catholic” Górale, while it enjoys considerable electoral support in “Protestant” Ustron;.

Conclusions: Back to the Five Features of Vernacular Knowledge. Does Homo sovieticus Exist? People who experience an externally engineered social change are neither necessarily defensive nor incompetent; they often plot offensive actions. Such plotting usually occurs from within culturally constructed social worlds that are often local or regional.35 In order to explain and understand people’s actions, their conception of the world, and their life strategy, including economic choices and political sympathies, researchers need to study vernacular knowledge. They need to reconstruct locally developed cultural scenarios that provide at least partial guidelines for people who try to navigate the complex and changing world around them. Reliance on such scenarios does not guarantee success, but failures need to be explained by showing faults in the actual scenarios or their implementation, not by invoking a putative syndrome of Homo sovieticus that seems rarely to exist as a whole, although its components may or may not be present in any given local or regional vernacular knowledge. Vernacular knowledge that is both the generator and depository of such scenarios is very complex, often contains contradictory pictures of “reality,” and stipulates incompatible courses of action (by containing contradictory norms or scenarios). Its precepts are practical (common sense), not abstract and contemplative. But the knowledge based on common sense does constitute a relatively coherent syndrome, endowed with the aura of authority derived from “the past,” whose vision is always a subject of contention, though this contention is usually regulated by its own, also historically established rules (Appadurai 1981). Common sense needs to be seen as a type of cultural (sub)system that is

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cultivated within an identifiable, though increasingly virtual, local (or regional) community. It is thus a local phenomenon (though the notion of locality needs to be reexamined). The special role in this cultivation is reserved for local, organic intellectuals. But most locals are competent users and adjustors of this knowledge. In the increasingly complex and changing “external” world, vernacular knowledge functions both as a protective mechanism and as a platform for launching collectively coordinated actions. The cultivation of such knowledge helps to erect and maintain the symbolic/cultural boundaries around “localities” even as people are increasingly comfortable challenging them and moving across them, in both directions. Vernacular knowledge constantly evolves though there are certain elements of it that remain remarkably resilient. For example, the cultural code of “z tela” (from here) in Cieszyn Silesia is a perfect example of the boundary-maintenance mechanism. The term has been used for generations to distinguish “natives” from “newcomers.” It is hard to obtain a clear answer to the question how much time one needs to be become a “native,” but eventually most newcomers are “absorbed” by the local culture. A recent sociological study confirms that “among the inhabitants of this region almost 95 percent define themselves as Cieszyn Silesians and recognize themselves as inhabitants of a separate territorial entity” (Kempny 2005: 358). Similarly, in Podhale, as Pine observes, “there is a historical continuity in the Górale’s engagement with the outside world, and their resistance to an imposition of outside will on their local order” (1997: 72). Let us return to the debate between the advocates of social adjustment and institutional adjustment that anchors our analysis of the concept of Homo sovieticus. Anthropologists represent almost unanimously, as much as we can see, the latter approach. In their writings, the main source of problems engendered by postcommunist transformations is located in the faulty institutional designs, often hastily implemented by clueless reformers working in social and cultural contexts they misunderstand. More importantly, however, some anthropologists offer a novel conceptualization that overcomes the dichotomy between these two extreme positions. This conceptualization is built around a careful and contextualized reconstruction of human agency. If in the view of social adjustors people (often in general) are seen as the “material” that needs to be fixed, and while institutional adjustors call for fixing reform programs and their implementation, in this new way of thinking people are seen as agents who are capable of fixing themselves and who, in fact, are always doing so. The proponents of this view emphasize agents’ ability to adjust their strategies (we might call their theory

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strategy adjustment) in order to cope with the changing environment. They reject the conceptualization of postcommunist transformations as driven exclusively or mainly by external mechanisms. They also challenge broad, aggregate pictures of social reality in which actors, or at least “median” actors, are motivated by cultural clues coming from generalized syndromes of cultural scenarios construed as attributes of large populations, such as whole nations or large regions (Homo sovieticus in the postcommunist region is the chief example). They always try to reconstruct actors’ strategic creativity (agency) that is built out of elements provided by vernacular knowledge. The “agentic” theories—as they are sometimes called—are of course not the exclusive domain of anthropology. (Social) psychologists (Bandura 2007),36 sociologists (Emirbayer & Mische 1998; Somers 1994), and political scientists have also developed quite a few variants. Among influential theories, suffice it to mention the theory of practice (Bourdieu), theory of structuration (Giddens 1986), or the actor network theory (Latour 2005) in sociology or the whole family of game theories. In the field of postcommunist studies, Stark and Bruszt (1998) offered a theory of recombination. The specificity of anthropological contribution to the “agentic” research program stems from two assumptions, specific to the discipline: (1) the significance of culture and the (2) significance of microscale, often informal, interactions. What have we learned about the most productive way of incorporating cultural analysis into the studies of regime change, particularly postcommunist transformations? At a minimum such incorporation should follow several principles: (1) avoid excessive conceptual aggregation (focus on micro-, mezzo-, and, in particular, local mechanisms); (2) replace the logic of monodirectional causality with the logic of interdependence (of cultural, political, and economic factors); (3) construe cultural processes as variably influencing social changes (sometimes this influence is more, sometimes less, pronounced); (4) conceptualize cultural elements as both psychological and semiotic phenomena; and (5) treat cultural elements as (potential) resources and/or constraints for/of political or economic action. In brief, culture per se can neither bring about democracy nor bring it down; culture per se cannot do anything, for it is an abstraction. Democracy can be forged (destroyed, sustained) only by the actions of (some) people; in these actions they usually rely on or are constrained by—among other resources and constraints—“cultural elements” such as discourses, symbols, attitudes, etc. Moreover, these “elements” are best studied as components of indefinable syndromes (elite, regional, local) constituting vernacular knowledge that may or may not be ade-

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quately represented by models derived from large-n studies of “national populations,” etc. Interpretive ethnography is particularly (perhaps uniquely) suitable for such studies.

Notes 1. Goldstone believes that cultural factors do not play any significant role during the old regime’s breakdown. “It is chiefly after the initial breakdown of the state, during the ensuing power struggles and state reconstruction, that ideology and culture play a leading role” (1991: 405). We believe that this generalization is wrong. Kubik’s research (1994a) shows that the fall of Polish state socialism was caused by a constellation of factors, among which the cultural ones were at least as consequential as the political and economic ones. For instance, he argued that although the loss of legitimacy resulting from the emergence of powerful counterofficial discourses does not automatically lead to the regime’s collapse, such an emergence does, however, weaken the regime’s authority and influences the course of the regime’s collapse and the transfer of power. This is what happened in Poland. The organized opposition and the Roman Catholic Church were able to produce an alternative political discourse of such elaboration and persuasiveness that it facilitated a mobilization of hundreds of thousands and then millions of people. The existence of such a powerful counterhegemonic discourse was responsible for the fact that the Polish anticommunist revolution—the first successful one in the region—was massive and peaceful. 2. The concept of Homo sovieticus has been used by several authors and has several meanings. See, for example, Zinoviev 1986; Tischner 2005; Levada 1993 (his introduced a related concept of “simple Soviet man”). In this chapter we analyze the concept as it has been defined and used by Piotr Sztompka (1993). Kubik wishes to express his gratitude for indispensable discussions of this chapter at the seminar led by Prof. Joanna Kurczewska in the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw, 30 May 2011). Victoria Dunaeva’s comments and suggestions were particularly useful. 3. “Vernacular” as an adjective has, according to Merriam Webster Dictionary, three basic definitions: “1 a: using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language; b: of, relating to, or being a nonstandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country; c: of, relating to, or being the normal spoken form of a language; 2: applied to a plant or animal in the common native speech as distinguished from the Latin nomenclature of scientific classification (the vernacular name); 3: of, relating to, or characteristic of a period, place, or group; especially: of, relating to, or being the common building style of a period or place (vernacular architecture).” 4. Geertz writes about local knowledge, native’s point of view, and common sense; Bourdieu about practice and habitus; and Schutz and Luckmann (and Habermas) about Lebensvelt (the life-world). 5. Chakrabarty builds his analysis explicitly on Heidegger’s idea of “being-in-theworld” (2007: 21). 6. This is of course true also for much of academic/theoretical writing, including various “historicisms.” For a useful critique see Chakrabarty (2007: 6–16).

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7. These issues are discussed in greater detail in chapter 2. 8. Mignolo distinguishes his decolonial project from the more common postcolonial theory: “The radical difference between—on the one hand—post-colonial theory and post-coloniality in general and de-colonial projects—on the other hand—lies in the genealogy of thought in which each projects found its energy and its vision. Post-coloniality emerged from the extension of Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan to the colonization of Palestine by Israel, and its Oriental underpinning (Edward Said) and to the post-colonial situation of India as an ex-colony of the British Empire (Ranajit Guha, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak). De-colonial projects at its turn, emerged in contemporary intellectual debates from the critical foundation established, in Latin America, by Jose Carlos Mariategui, in Peru (in the 1920s), and by dependency theory and philosophy of liberation, in the 70s spread all over Latin America” (2007: 163). 9. For an extensive discussion of ethnography see chapter 2. 10. There is the second problem: the lack of distinctions suggested by Trouillot prevented anthropologists from formulating a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the relationship(s) between the world (however it is conceptualized) and specific locations and localities. This has changed once the expansion of capitalism and its “local” consequences, colonialism (and postcolonialism), migrations, and globalization(s) have become the bread and butter of anthropology. We do not discuss this dimension here. 11. For Anthony P. Cohen, community does not need to be based on face-to-face interactions: “Our argument has been, then, that whether or not its structural boundaries remain intact, the reality of community lies in its members’ perception of the vitality of its culture. People construct community symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and referent of their identity” (1985: 118). 12. “Because of the disjunctive and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national policies, and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (however large), has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders” (Appadurai 1990: 15). 13. Chabal & Daloz 2006: 155. 14. In short: “It will take six months to reform the political systems, six years to change the economic systems, and sixty years to effect a revolution in the peoples’ hearts and minds” (Cepl, quoting Dahrendorf, 1997: 229–30). 15. This list comes from the influential study by Almond and Verba (1963). 16. Stefan Nowak, one of the most respected Polish sociologists, formed a thesis about the vacuum created by state socialism in the “middle” of social structure. In democratic countries, associations adding up to civil society occupy this part of social structure. Howard (2003) presents the strongest argument and data to demonstrate the weakness of civil society in the postcommunist Europe. 17. On the ideology of developmentalism, see Escobar 1995. 18. On the application of the category of “Orientalism” to the analysis of Eastern European societies, see Buchowski 2006. 19. Kubik needs to disclose that Professor Sztompka was his teacher and colleague in the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, from 1974 to 1982. Since then they have stayed in touch and occasionally meet and talk “shop.” Kubik acknowledges a great intellectual debt to Sztompka’s teaching and scholarly guidance. Since the publication of his 1993 piece, Sztompka revised his views, at least in some publications. See, for example, Sztompka 1996. The argument is, however, not about his specific theory, but about the limitations of sociological theorizing, as diagnosed by anthropological approaches relying on ethnography.

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20. Bourdieu explains: “The notion of habitus has been used innumerable times in the past, by authors as different as Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim, and (Marcel) Mauss, all of whom used it in a more or less methodical way. However, it seems to me that, in all cases, those who used the notion did so with the same theoretical intention in mind. … I wanted to insist on the generative capacities of dispositions, it being understood that these are acquired, socially constituted dispositions. … I wanted to emphasize that this ‘creative,’ active, inventive capacity was not that of a transcendental subject in the idealist tradition, but that of an active agent. … I wanted to insist on the ‘primacy of practical reason’ that Fichte spoke of, and to clarify the specific categories of this reason” (1990: 12–13). 21. On the phenomenon known as the nomenklatura capitalism, see, for example, Staniszkis 1991 and Kryshtanovskaya 2002. 22. In Appadurai’s words: “The world may consist of regions (seen processually), but regions also imagine their own worlds. Area studies must deliberate upon this aspect of the relationship between regions, as must any discipline that takes subjectivity and ideology as something more than ephemera in the saga of capital and empire” (2000: 13). Elsewhere in the same essay, Appadurai observes: “Put more simply, the large regions that dominate our current maps for area studies are not permanent geographical facts. They are problematic heuristic devices for the study of global geographic and cultural processes. Regions are best viewed as initial contexts for themes that generate variable geographies, rather than as fixed geographies marked by pregiven themes” (2000: 7). 23. Sztompka engages in “the search for underlying patterns for thinking and doing, commonly shared among the members of society, and therefore external and constraining with respect to each individual member” (1993: 87). 24. Kubik used the Polish name of the town, Cieszyn, as his fieldwork was conducted mostly on the Polish side of the Polish-Czech border. In Czech, the name is spelled Tesen; in German, Teschen. 25. Górale is plural, Góral singular. 26. Studies on trust usually focus on measuring levels of trust rather than interpreting the meaning (cultural construction) of trust in various communities or locations. Sztompka (1999) develops a useful sociological theory of trust and has an interesting chapter on “the culture of trust.” Tilly (2005) offers a rich historical sociology of trust networks. None of them, however, focuses on the cultural construction of trust in specific locations and communities. 27. “While the Podhale economy expanded, hostility to the state and the privileging of the local social order became if anything stronger than before” (Pine 1999: 54). 28. Female counterpart of male gospodarz is gospodyni. The cultural model for this role is different. A gospodyni certainly needs to be competent like a gospodarz in many areas (particularly in the area of her economic and social duties), but this is not a role endowed with the same authority. 29. Jozef Tischner, an influential philosopher, priest, and a moral leader of the Solidarity movement, writes (1984: 60): “An old polish word, gospodarz, refers to an individual who has tied his fate to the land—to work on the land. With this term is associated the word homestead. A homestead is a tract of land that has been tamed by the work of the homesteader—homesteading. The meaning of all these words is deeply rooted in our history. Poland was primarily a nation of those who worked the land. Tending the land—the work of homesteader—is the oldest Polish work, Poland is the oldest homestead.” 30. It certainly was when Kubik attended his religious classes taught by a very influential Cieszynian pastor (in the late 1960s).

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31. This is a discourse in a country whose Jewish population was almost completely wiped out during the Holocaust. The analysis of anti-Semitic tones present in some regions of Polish culture is beyond the scope of this volume. 32. For the extensive, empirical analysis of anti-Semitism in Polish culture after 1989 see Krzeminski 1996 and 2004. 33. There is not room here to enter a complex debate on the accuracy of “Weber’s thesis.” Suffice it to note that at least in The Protestant Ethic he did not postulate a sociological law, “No Protestantism, no capitalism,” as some commentators seem to suggest (Schnall 2001: 44). This famous essay is a case study in which Weber tries to show that under specific circumstances, in a specific moment in time, certain elements of Protestantism (Calvinism) contributed to the emergence of a specific “spirit,” that emphasized the autonomous value of hard work. See Kalberg (2002: xx, l). 34. “In the Bible, labor is introduced as a scourge and punishment to mankind” (Schnall 2001: 46). 35. Snow and Anderson (1991) refer to such “worlds” as “cultural systems of action” that are researched most effectively by the case study method that includes ethnography. See also Snow and Trom 2002: 149. 36. “To be an agent is to influence intentionally one’s functioning and life circumstances. In this view people are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating and selfreflecting. They are contributors of their life circumstances, not just products of them” (Bandura 2007).

Chapter 10

_

CONCLUSIONS

W

hen this project was only a vague idea, more then ten years ago, for most of its practitioners political science was moving toward the unification of its methodology around formal methods of game theory and statistical analysis. Yet, at the same time a countermovement began taking shape. It was based on different preoccupations: the systematization of qualitative methodologies, revival of historical approaches, and the specification of the relationship between quantitative and qualitative approaches. Eventually an ideal of multimethod work emerged as a metric of excellence, particularly in comparative politics. The underlying philosophical commitment of all these studies, often exceptionally competent and innovative, was naturalism and positivism. In the broadest sense it means accepting an assumption that the social reality in some important sense works like the reality of “nature” and thus the essential methodological precepts are/can be basically the same in natural and social sciences. The consequence of this assumption is powerful: the social scientist does not need to be particularly concerned with the fact that the species she studies is Homo symbolicus, a creature that can exist and survive only insofar as it creates, communicates, and interprets meaning. The orientation in political science we represent is concerned with the consequences of the fact that humans are unquestionably Homo symbolicus. Constructivists (antinaturalists), as we may be labeled, assume that society, including political and economic activity, must be approached in such a way that this essential attribute of the species— meaning formation and communication (semiotic practices)—is central to the models we build. We assume that members of that species endow with meaning all elements of the world within which they form

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their communities, and thus one central arena of politics is contest over meanings. As antinaturalists we rely on the method of interpretation; we are, therefore, intepretivists as well as constructivists. But we do not shy away from using the results of quantitative studies, nor do we forgo the principal task of social science—explanation. Our firm belief that the duty of the social scientist is to provide both explanation and interpretation of the observed phenomena places us in a noble tradition: we are followers of Max Weber. But we make two further assumptions that influence our methodological choices, and, in particular, lead us to privilege ethnography as the principal, albeit certainly not exclusive, method of research. First, we believe that much important social and political activity transpires outside of formal institutions. Hence, we focus on informality. Second, we problemitize “large” social objects such as “societies,” “nations,” or “classes,” suspecting that human actions, regardless of whether they are driven by calculation or habit, often originate in small settings, within actual communities, localities. Hence, we generally focus on small-scale phenomena. We assume that an ethnographic study of a small village or participant observation of a parliamentary committee reveal a lot about the way social and political processes work, also at a “higher,” say “national,” level. We therefore sometimes build from the local to the national, as in chapter 5. Research projects focused on small-scale phenomena are best served by adding ethnography to the mix of methods. We delineated five types of ethnography in chapter 2 and have illustrated their use in various combinations in our analyses of the cases in chapters 4 through 9. The analysis of the symbolic dimensions of political ritual was based primarily on interpretive ethnography. The material was collected through participant observation and interpretation of the ritual of rebellion in the Israel Labor Party as well as elements of paraethnography and discourse analysis of the ritual reburial of the “Bar Kochba” bones and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland. Some evidence for the analysis of the visit was collected also via participant observation. Chapter 5 is based on global and multisited ethnography of processes of democratization in polities on three continents. Ethnography here is mostly traditional/positivist in the treatment of identifiable segments of society, polity, and culture. Whereas the Israeli case drew primarily from participant observation, to a certain extent the Dutch case, and especially the case of India, were based on analyses of experts involving elements of paraethnography. Chapter 6 drew upon cumulative fieldwork conducted in the spirit of interpretive ethnography over four decades. The mosaic-like analysis of spatial, temporal, and other contextual dimensions of contested and

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contingent collective identity reflects the influence of postmodern ethnography. The analysis of contested interpretations of the negotiations at Camp David in chapter 7 is a clear example of paraethnography. The somewhat postmodern spirit of the analysis is reflected in its chief goal: to ensure that many voices of key participants are recorded. The data on civil society in chapter 8 was collected to reconstruct people’s forms of association rather than their discourses (social rather then cultural phenomena). The work here is the clearest example of the traditional/ positivist ethnography we offer. In chapter 9 interpretive ethnography was the main tool. People’s discourses are at the center of attention. Writing this book has been a long journey through many neighborhoods of social science. For each of us the point of departure was different, and our paths have been sometimes separate, but we believe we arrived at a common destination. For Aronoff, who has doctorates in both disciplines, the main preoccupation has been to apply anthropological tools, both conceptual and methodological, to the analysis of national-level, formal, “Western” institutions (such as political parties). He was also focused mostly on developing syntheses built on insights of both disciplines. For Kubik, who arrived at political science with a doctorate in cultural anthropology, the main task has been to use anthropological tools to see what is happening—particularly at a local level—when “the West” expands to a new area, in this case to Eastern Europe after the fall of state socialism. Instead of searching for syntheses between political scientific and anthropological approaches, his starting point has been to articulate contrasts between them. But in the process of analyzing our cases and writing this book, we reconfirmed our common commitment to the basic premises of the interpretive creed: 1. Symbols and culture matter as politics is often incomprehensible if the social scientists cannot decode the meanings political actions have for the actors themselves. 2. Struggle over power is often, if not always, waged in the symbolic domain, in addition to being a political contest and economic competition. 3. Formation and defense of collective identities is not merely a cultural process; it is a political process par excellence, because the way people imagine their communities informs their political and economic actions. In brief, what we want to contribute to political scientific analyses is the analysis of cultural/symbolic dimensions of politics, their intricate

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relationship with “purely” political mechanisms, and the importance of informality, even in the seemingly highly “formalized” institutions. We also want to understand what political science, particularly comparative politics, and (political) anthropology can learn from each other. To realize this goal we revisit the discussion of the conventional distinction between so-called traditional and so-called modern societies. It demonstrates precisely how concepts developed for the analysis of the former can be profitably adapted to explain and interpret similar phenomenon in the latter. All societies—at all levels of complexity—have cultures and politics. Therefore they all have political cultures (providing the meaning of politics and its elements) communicated through various types of symbols, myths, rituals, and rhetorical styles. They all develop collective memories (and amnesia), and collective identities that are, more often than not, contested. Where power exists, those who wield it usually attempt to gain legitimacy by transforming their power into authority by obtaining the consent of the ruled. This is typically done by surrounding power claims with the “aura of sanctity,” by embedding it in a symbolic universe accepted by the ruled. More generally, therefore, we discuss how the meanings constituting political culture constrain and justify political actions of the rulers. Universally, there are also actors who challenge political and cultural authority and attempt to undermine it. We show, therefore, how semiotic practices are employed to reject the ruler’s claims to legitimacy or challenge authority. In our case studies we focus on a dynamic interplay of attitudes (psychosocial dimension), discourses (semiotic dimension), and institutional settings within which this interplay transpires and where power is actualized (power dimension). Our extended case analyses of specific themes/ processes/events provide exemplification of this generalized process. We devote an entire chapter to the analysis of contemporary political rituals in Israel and Poland and analyze the specific contexts in which rituals of rebellion, presumed to exist exclusively in “traditional” classless societies, play a significant role in a “modern” complex state. Whereas in Israel ritualized politics in the Labor Party allowed it to temporarily prolong its dominance of the political system—by suppressing controversial debate and preventing decisions on pressing issues—ultimately, it contributed to Labor’s defeat. The successful employment of ritualized challenge to communist rule in Poland resulted in revolutionary regime change. We illustrate through these examples the importance of specifying the political and cultural contexts in order to evaluate the efficacy of such rituals. To the best of our knowledge these analyses are unique in the literature. We modestly suggest they exemplify the

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methodological and conceptual advantage of our hybrid combination of anthropology and political science over monodisciplinary approaches. Our constructivist analysis of contested nationalisms in Israel is informed by the same synthetic approach. We move beyond the conventional dichotomy—civic/ethnic nationalism—and suggest that various hybrid combinations of the two garnered most popular support in Israel over the decades. We are able to demonstrate how three cultural syndromes constructed out of specific understandings of time, space, religious orientations, and sense of personal/collective security are systematically associated with three forms of nationalism whose exponents vie for power and authority. We discuss how specific contexts of relative calm or increased violence influence perceptions of collective security/insecurity, helping explain shifts in support for political movements/parties associated with the different types of nationalism. Whereas this approach is less parsimonious than those traditionally favored by political scientists, we suggest the analytical payoff for understanding the complexity of this dynamic and universal phenomenon is well worth it. Our in-depth comparative analysis of socially and culturally divided states on three continents demonstrates how different mechanisms of cultural and political control and accommodation were applied to various sectors within each of the societies at different stages over the past half century. These cases vividly illustrate the dynamic and rarely unidirectional nature of democratization. As previously marginal groups within the societies achieved greater political power, more exclusive forms of nationalism gained ascendance (which relates to the preceding analysis of the contested nature of collective identity). The dynamic, multidirectional, and kaleidoscopic nature of various processes of democratization can only be fully elucidated through such in-depth case analyses. In the same vein, meticulous attention to minute (political and cultural) differences within, as well as between, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators and American mediators at Camp David produced a more nuanced analysis of events than the more parsimonious (hence necessarily oversimplified) portrayal of these momentous negotiations. Both the dominant and revisionist schools of interpretation essentially focused on who was to “blame” for the failure of the summit conference. By contrast, a close reading of the published accounts as well as original interviews with most participants enabled us to utilize them—several of whom were trained academics—as our “informants” and generate a far more accurate—we believe—picture. It enabled us to appreciate how much was actually accomplished at Camp David and thereafter.

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Our analysis provides a balanced account of the mistakes, failings, and missed opportunities on all sides that may help future negotiators avoid the same errors. Hopefully, it will provide future scholars with methodological and conceptual tools for analyzing events that they are unable to personally observe. Our study of civil society is designed to dispel some conceptual confusion surrounding the phenomenon and propose an analytical model that facilitates an investigation of the conditions under which what we call “incomplete civil societies” can emerge outside of the West and perform the vital twin functions of providing political accountability and tools of emancipation. Again we argue against simplifying binaries: we do not assume that a country has or does not have a civil society. Rather, we are beginning to develop an evolutionary approach that is based on an assumption that under certain conditions forms of associationism may emerge that have some attributes of the “Western” civil society, but combined with specific native social arrangements and conceptualizations. Such hybrids may offer functional equivalents for at least some tasks routinely seen as prerogatives of civil societies in the West. We also show that in some places outside of the West, the ideas and practices of “Western” civil society can be quite consonant with local political practices and cultural scripts; in others they many not. Nothing should be determined a priori, as much depends on specific contexts. Whereas binaries are the basis of cybernetics, they are the bane of our convergent approach. We have used them only with caveats and caution. Ideal type dichotomous distinctions, such as traditional and modern society, can become intellectual blinders—especially because they are so easily reified. With our convergent approach we analyzed rituals in “modern” societies and alternate variations of civil society in transitional polities. We have consistently proposed complicating dichotomous conceptualization by introducing hybrid categories, e.g., ethnic republican nationalism, which combines elements of civic and ethnonationalist forms and the important Eclectic School of interpretation of the Camp David summit. The significance of context is highlighted again in our analysis of Homo sovieticus. By relying on detailed ethnographic studies of two Polish regions, we show that a syndrome of postsocialist helplessness— attributed to the whole society or its significant segments—is a sociological fiction. While singular elements of the syndrome can be detected as components of specific cultural constellations in various regions or localities, they are always combined with other elements of vernacular cultures, none of which resembles the theorized “totality.” In other words, single attributes of Homo sovieticus are observed in research,

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but they are always contextualized, always embedded in specific local cultural idioms, and played out in region- or locality-specific practices. This finding has tremendous consequences for designing economic assistance or political advising. Each region needs a tailor-made set of policy measures that—in order to be effective—must resonate with local cultures. Most importantly, the actors are not passive puppets, helpless objects of massive transformations. Many of them are active strategists who creatively develop and implement actions whose scripts are provided by local cultures, but whose execution is dictated by the assessment of specific conditions. In general, our approach sensitizes us to the problem of scale: what is the most salient cultural context of any given, for example “national,” political action? Our answer is that much of it transpires in “small” locations, be it villages, towns, or neighborhoods; specific, contained segments of the governmental structures (committees); or relatively small locations in which “globally significant” negotiations are conducted. The problematization of scale and the resultant attention to small spaces and locations made us, ultimately, reconsider the way larger social wholes are “put together.” Local units do not simply add up to form a larger unit, as may be assumed by analyses informed by ontological homogeneity and epistemological naturalism. The aggregation and disaggregation are not just issues of economic policy conveniently modeled as (decontextualized) games; they are also political problems and cultural puzzles. Ethnically or religiously heterogeneous units cannot be effortlessly aggregated to form a larger polity (a modern nation-state), without a mechanism that effectively “adjudicates” the existing differences. While reflecting on such issues we developed a strong interest in local politics, decentralization, and the necessity of reconstructing “proximate” cultural worlds from within which actors launch their actions to “take on” the world. Coming to the end, we want to reiterate that our efforts have been driven by a troika of anthropological preoccupations: semiotic practices, small-scale processes, and informality. This tripartite focus has allowed us to develop (and locate in other people’s works) alternatives to standard political scientific pictures and models of several important phenomena: the politics of nationalism, democratization in deeply fissured societies, the role of rituals in complex modern societies, the development of civil society in non-Western contexts (particularly in postcommunist countries), and the cultural legacies of state socialism (communism). It is our hope that our own empirical work and the summary of the relevant existing literature we provide can serve as a useful launch pad for further studies.

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NAME INDEX

A Abbott, Andrew, 8, 58n16 Abdelal, Ravi, 59n24, 111 Abélès, Marc, 18, 31, 48, 109n25 Abramson, Glenda, 162 Acemoglu, Daron, 27, 132 Adams, Laura, 171 Adetula, Victor Adebola, 213 Ake, Claude, 213 Adler, Ilya, 109n25 Adler-Lomnitz, Larissa, 109n25 Agha, Hussein, 173, 176–7, 179–82, 196n16 Akerlof, George, 14 Alexander, Jeffery, 4, 15, 22n9, 199 Ali, Ayana Hirsi, 169n24 Allina-Pisano, Jessica, 21 Almond, Gabriel A., 21, 63, 67–8, 137, 276n15 Anderson, Benedict, 129 Anderson, David, G., 219 Anderson, Leon, 50, 278n35 Andeweg, Rudy, 151–5, 169n8, 169n10 Appadurai, Arjun, 44, 112, 272, 276n12, 277n22 Arad, Gulie Ne’eman, 129n5 Arafat, Yasser, xxiv, 121, 156, 172–91, 193–4, 196n22, 196n26 Aran, Gideon, 130n20 Arato, Andrew, 201, 237–8n9, 238n10, 239n24 Archer, Margaret, 66 Aronoff, Yael, 122, 130, 195n2 Arsenault, Matthew, 137 Asad, Talal, 4, 7, 20 Atlas, Pierre, 109n18, 147 Ashforth, Adam, 37–8 Auda, Gehad, 82

Austin, J. L., 76, 84–5n16, 245 Avruch, Kevin, 119, 129n10, 130n20 Azaryahu, Maoz, 129n5

B Bailey, F. G., 18, 31, 75–6 Baker, Keith Michael, 84n10 Balandier, George, 10 Bambach, Charles, R., 6 Bandura, Albert, 274, 278n36 Banton, Michael, 18 Barak, Ehud, xxi, 122–23, 126, 131n31, 152, 172–82, 183–95, 196n8, 196n25, 196n30, 196n32, 197n35, 197n37 Barnard, Alan, 57n6, 58n14 Barry, Brian, 139 Bartal, Israel, 130n18 Barth, Fredrik, 57n6 Barthes, Roland, 71 Bates, Robert, 24 Bayard de Volo, Lorraine, 25–6, 48 Becker, Gary, 83n3 Beilin, Yossi, 173, 175, 178, 181–6, 188–9, 191–2, 194, 196n17, 196n19, 196n20, 196n21, 197n38, 197n42 Bell, Catherine, 73 Ben-Ami, Shlomo, 172, 177–9, 181, 184, 186–7, 192–5, 196n13, 197n39, 197n40, 197n41 Ben-Ari, Eyal, 129n4 Ben-Yechuda, Nachman, 129n5 Benford, Robert D., 85n19 Bennett, Andrew, 4, 50 Berezin, Mabel, 86, 109 Berger, Peter, 7, 245 Berman, Sheri, 83n1, 206, 213, 236 Bermeo, Nancy, 133, 209–10, 218, 238n17

Name Index

Bernhard, Michael, 199, 238n17 Bevir, Mark, 5–6 Bilu, Yoram, 129n4 Blee, Kathleen, 31 Bleicher, Josef, 6 Bloch, Maurice, 246 Bloom, Gadi, 131n30 Blyth, Mark, 22n15, 35, 83n1 Bocock, Robert, 74, 84n13, 90 Boehm, Christian, 211 Bohannan, Paul, 31 Boix, Carles, 132 Bonnell, Victoria, 27 Borneman, John, 40, 57n4 Borocz, Jozsef, 129n7, 215 Boudon, Raymond, 21 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 63–6, 81, 142–3, 247, 257, 274, 275n4, 277n20 Bowen, John R., 39–40 Bozoki, Andras, 226 Brady, Henry, 3–4, 50, 56, 238n17 Brightman, Robert, 8–9, 61 Brouwer, Imco, 238n16 Brubaker, Rogers, 59n24, 111 Bruszt, Laszlo, 35, 214, 218, 274 Buchowski, Michał, 12, 35, 243, 254–5, 257, 276n18 Bunge, Mario, 9 Burawoy, Michael, 29, 33, 44, 49, 51, 54–7, 59n27, 219, 256 Buruma, Ian, 166

C Calhoun, Craig, 237n2 Campbell, Joseph, 72 Cannadine, David, 109n25 Cassirer, Ernst, 71–2 Castells, Manuel, 44 Cepl, Vojtech, 250, 276n14 Chabal, Patrick, 19, 21, 25, 37, 39, 57n2, 62–3, 249, 276n13 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 245, 248, 275n5, 275n6 Chalmers, Douglas A., 238n5, 238n7 Chambers, Simone, 199 Chapman, Phillip C., 17 Chong, Dennis, 62, 65 Claessen, Henri J.M. (Hans), 13, 20, 48 Clark, Roberts William, 61 Clark, Stuart, 61 Clastres, Pierre, 89 Clifford, James, 4, 8, 28, 40, 44, 58n8

327

Cohen, Abner, 18, 19, 36, 109n25, 111 Cohen, Anthony, 250, 276n11 Cohen, Asher, 120, 157n32, 143, 147 Cohen, Jean L., 201, 237n9, 238n10, 239n24 Cohen, Ronald, 17, 22n23 Colas, Dominique, 262 Coleman, James S., 61, 84n6 Collier, David, 4, 39, 50, 56 Comaroff, Jean, 36, 43, 198, 199 Comaroff, John, 36, 43, 198, 199 Comte, August, 16, 57n6 Conolly, William, 111 Connor, Walker, 11 Cooper, Frederick, 59n24, 111 Crapanzano, Vincent, 7, 22n12, 40 Cruz, Consuelo, 62 Currier, Ashley, 31 Cuthebertson, Gilbert, 72

D Daalder, Hans, 137, 140, 153 Dagnino, Evelina, 216 Dahrendorf, Ralph, 250, 276n14 Dajani, Omar, 194, 196n33 Daloz, Jean-Pascal, 19, 21, 25, 37, 39, 57n2, 62–3, 249, 276n13 Dalton, George, 11 Da Matta, Roberto, 109n22 Danto, Arthur, 5, 59n34 Davis, Eric, 39 Davis, W. D., 129n4 Day, Sophie, 256 Dayan, Moshe, 95 Dayan, Aryeh, 120 De Coulanges, Fustel, 73, 88 Delgado, Elena, 248 Denzau, Arthur T., 83n1 Diamond, Larry, 199, 238n17, 241 Diamond, Matthew, 120 Diamond, Stanley, 213, 215 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 6, 22n10 Dirks, Nicholas B., 24, 43 Dogan, Mattei, 129n2 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer, 121, 124, 130n19 Dörge, Friedrich Christoph, 85n16 Doron, Gideon, 131n35, 151 Douglas, Mary, 36 Dowty, Alan, 131n35 Dryzek, John, 238n15 Dunn, Elizabeth, 12, 211, 219

328

Name Index

Durkheim, Emile, 16, 57n6, 88, 89, 253, 277n20 Duverger, Maurice, 92

E Easton, David, 17–19 Edelman, Murray, 19, 86, 90 Edles, Laura Delfors, 19, 27, 37, 57n2, 86, 109n25 Edwards, Michael, 200–1, 237n2 Eggan, Fred, 17–8 Ekiert, Grzegorz, 58n16, 169n12, 199, 213, 217–8, 223 Eldersveld, Samuel J., 153, 169n10 Eley, Geoff, 24, 43, 201 Elster, Jon, 23, 61, 64 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 274 Epstein, A. L., 51–2 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 112 Escobar, Arturo, 13, 20, 59n28, 108n3, 213–4, 276n17 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 17, 27, 30, 87

F Falk, Sally (See Moore, Sally Falk) Fay, Brian, 7 Fearon, James D., 58 Fel, Edit, 265 Fernandes, Leela, 17, 160, 213, 239n22 Firth, Raymond, 58n14, 103 Fischer, Michael M.J., 4, 58n21, 245–6 Flood, Christopher G., 72, 130n17 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 21n1 Fortes, Meyer, 17, 27, 30, 87 Fox, Jonanthan, 217–8 Frank, Andre Gunder, 44, 108n3 Frazer, Nancy, 237n1 Fried, Morton, 12, 48 Friedman, Menachem, 130n19 Frykman, Jonas, 232 Fukuyama, Francis, 135, 240 Funnekotter, Bart, 170n26

G Gagnon, Philip V., 37 Galnoor, Itzhak, 129n4, 129n12 Gamson, William A., 68 Gaventa, John, 31, 48, 142, 247 Gavison, Ruth, 124, 131n35 Geddes, Barbara, 23–4, 57n3, 59n25

Geertz, Clifford, 3, 6–7, 20–1, 22n17, 29–30, 36, 41, 61, 63, 66, 69, 73, 77, 80, 84n12, 129n8, 130n22, 195, 245, 259 criticisms of, 7, 41 on common sense, 245, 275n4 on ideology, 80 Gellner, Ernest, 5, 113, 199, 201, 207, 217, 220, 226, 238n10, 238n15, 238n17, 239n25 on civil society versus kinship, 211–3 George, Alexander L., 4, 50, 56 Gerring, John, 7, 50, 51, 56 Gertz, Nurith, 129n5, 130n26 Ghanem, As’ad, 131n25 Giddens, Anthony, 21n3, 26, 66, 274 definition of positivism, 22n11 Giesen, Bernhard, 22n9 Gillis, John, 109n25 Ginsborg, Paul, 213 Gismondi, Michael A., 250 Gladdish, Ken, 153, 169n10 Glebov, Sergei, 108n1 Gledhill, John, 7, 18, 20, 46, 89, 213, 215, 238n20 Gluckman, Mary, 84n14, 90 Gluckman, Max, 17–8, 49, 51–2, 59n35, 59n37, 73, 84n13, 84n14, 85n17, 90–1, 101, 109n6, 109n10 on rituals of rebellion, 90–4, 101–4, 106–7 Goertz, Garry, 4 Goldstein, Judith, 83n2 Goldstone, Jack, 67, 133, 275n1 Goodin, Robert E., xvi Goody, Jack, 96, 108n4 Gorski, Philip S., 263 Goss, Kristin A., 202 Gough, Kathleen, 20 Gouldner, Alvin, 238n13 Gowin, Jarosław, 226 Grabowska, Mirosława, 207 Gramsci, Antonio, 66, 81, 85n18, 142, 247, 276n8 Granovetter, Mark, 11, 14 Green Daniel M., 21, 22n14, 22n15 Greenspan, Alan, 59n29 Grosby, Steven, 129n12 Gudeman, Stephen, 12, 14 Gusfield, Joseph R., 67

Name Index

H Habermas, Jürgen, 21n3, 45, 201, 203, 237n2, 237n9, 238n9, 275n4 Hagendoorn, Louk, 169n25 Haggard, Stephan, 27, 132 Hall, John, 67, 201, 239 Hall, Peter, 22n13, 24, 25, 58n19, 83n1 Hall, Stuart, 63 Hammoudi, Abdellah, 40, 57n4 Handelman, Don, 109n21, 116, 12 Hanieh, Akram, 195n4 Hann, Chris, 11, 16, 21, 22n19, 199, 211, 219 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 161–2 Hardgrave, Robert L., 158, 168n18 Harel-Shalev, Ayelet, 169n19 Harkabi, Yehoshafat, 98–9 Harris, Michael, 151 Harrison, Lawrence E., 25, 69 Hart, Keith, 11, 16 Hasan, Zoya, 193 Hefez, Nir, 131n30 Hegland, Mary, 109n25 Heilman, Samuel, 130n22 Hempel, Carl G., 3 Henderson, David K., 7 Herzfeld, Michael, 34, 37, 45, 112, 226 on cultural intimacy, 220–1 Herzinger, Richard, 165 Hirschberg, Peter, 122 Hirschman, Albert O., 84n10 Hobsbawm, Eric, 78–9, 112 Hocart, A.M., 73 Hodgen, Margaret T., 16 Hofer, Tamas, 265 Hollis, Martin, 84n8 Holmes, Douglas R., 29, 46–8, 59n29, 59n30, 59n31, 171 Holy, Ladislav, 39 Howard, Marc Morje, 199, 276n16 Humphrey, Caroline, 21, 35, 219 Hunt, Lynn, 63, 67, 86 Huntington, Samuel P., 25, 69, 240

I Inbar, Efraim, 131n31 Inglehart, Ronald, 26, 63, 69 Irvine, Judith T., 14

J Jalal, Ayesha, 158–9, 161

329

Jasiewicz, Krzysztof, 271 Johnson, James, 21, 57n2, 63, 65, 83, 84n11 Johnston, Hank, 67

K Kacowicz, Arie, 191–2 Kalberg, Stephen, 278n33 Kalyvas, Stathis N., 23 Kapferer, Bruce, 71, 109n25 Karakoc, Ekrem, 199, 238n17 Karlstrom, Mikael, 217 Katzenstein, Peter J., 22n15, 83 Kaufman, Robert R., 27, 132 Keane, John, 198–9, 201, 207, 237n9 Kempny, Marian, 259, 273 Kennedy, Michael D., 200, 221, 240 Keohane, Robert O., 7, 83n1 Kershner, Isabel, 130n28 Kertzer, David I., 27, 63, 73, 86, 87, 109n25 Kideckel, David, 12, 21, 201, 219 Kimmerling, Baruch, 109n18, 129n4, 130n24 King, Garry, 3, 6–7 Klieman, Aharon, 192 Klosinska, Krystyna, 26 Klotz, Audie, 22n15 Kohn, Hans, 129n2 Kooiman, Jan, 153, 169n10 Kopelowitz, Ezra, 120, 131n35 Kriesi, Hanspeter, 169n11 Król, Marcin, 226 Krygier, Martin, 201, 238n9 Kryshtanovskaya, Olga V., 277n21 Krzeminski, Ireneusz, 278n32 Krzyzæanowski, Michal, 27, 37, 58n17 Kubica, Grazæyna, 259 Kumar, Krishnan, 198–9, 238n13 Kurtz, Donald V., 10 Kwon, Heonik, 37–9 Kymlicka, Will, 199

L Laitin, David D., 62, 66, 81–3, 85n18, 111, 142, 247 Lamentowicz, Wojciech, 133 Lane, Cristel, 19, 86, 109n25 Langer, Susan, 70, 72–3 Lathrop, Stacy, 31 Latour, Bruno, 48, 274

330

Name Index

Lawrence, Denise, 102 Leach, Edmund, 36, 58n9 Levada, Jurij, 275 Levi-Struass, Claude, 253 Levy, Gideon, 131n31 Lewellen, Ted, 18 Lewis, Arnold, 130n27, 238n10 Lewis, Oskar, 256–7 Lewis, Paul G., 238n10, 238n15 Lieberman, Robert C., 83n1 Liebman, Charles S., 121, 124, 130n19 Linch, Amy, 54 Lijphart, Arend, 137–40, 149–50, 152–3, 159, 168n3, 169n9, 169n10 Linz, Juan J., 132 Lipset, Seymour M., 143 Little, David, 3, 7, 59n25 Lofgren, Orvar, 232 Luckmann, Thomas, 7, 245, 275n4 Lukes, Steven, 48, 84n8, 142, 247 Lustick, Ian S., 85n18, 130n20, 131n31, 135, 140, 142, 147, 169n17, 172 Lynch, Cecelia, 22n15

M Macey, Samuel L., 129n5 Mach, Zdzisław, 86, 109n25 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 39 Mackenzie, W.J.M., 86 Mahajan, Gurpeet, 7, 21n3 Mahmood, Saba, 49 Mahoney, James, 5, 58n16 Maine, Henry Sumner, 17, 57n6, 87, 89 Mair, Lucy, 94 Malewska-Szałygin, Anna, 259–62, 264, 266, 269, 271–2 Malinowski, Bronisław, 28–9, 51, 57n6, 59n35, 239n25 Malley, Robert, 173, 176–7, 179–82, 196n16 March, James G., 23, 64–5 Marcus, George E., 4, 8, 28–9, 40–8, 58n9, 58n21, 58n22, 59n26, 58n29, 58n30, 171, 249 Martin, Michael, 7 Martin, Scott B., 238n15, 238n17 Marty, Martin, 129n11 Mascia-Lees, Frances E., 21 Masquelier, Adeline, 217 Marx, Karl, 16–7, 20, 45, 63, 80, 88 McCarthy, Nolan, 61, 83n2 McNamara, Kathleen R., 83n1

McNeill, Desmond, 10 McWilliams, Wilson Carey, 124 Medding, Peter Y., 129n3, 150 Mendilow, Jonathan, 129n14, 169n7 Meirowitz, Adam, 61, 83n2 Merelman, Richard, 77–8, 136 Migdal, Joel S., 123, 131n33, 154, 205 Mignolo, Walter D., 248, 276n8 Miller, Aaron David, 197n43 Miller, Richard W., 3, 7 Mitchell, Clyde J., 52 Monroe, Kristen Renwick, 4, 21n6, 28, 58n22 Montesquieu, Baron de (Charles-Louis de Secondat), 57n6, 62, 108n2 Moore, Sally Falk, 73, 74, 77, 86, 90, 109n24 Morgan, Lewis H., 17, 57n6, 88–9 Morris, Benny, 176, 177, 197n35 Morrow, James D., 32, 65 Mudde, Cas, 169n22 Muller, Max, 71 Munck, Geraldo L., 2, 62 Myant, Martin, 238n15 Myerhoff, Barbara G., 73–4, 77, 86, 90, 109n24

N Nader, Laura, 19 Nagel, Ernest, 3, 21n4 Narayan, Deepa, 202 Narotzky, Susanna, 12 Navot, Doron, 131n35 Nieburg, Harold L., 74, 84n13, 86, 90 Nord, Phil, 209, 23n17 North, Douglass, 33 Norton, Anne, 25, 34, 60 Nugent, David, 215, 216, 217, 218

O O’Donnell, Guillermo, 133 Offe, Claus, 240 Ogrodzinski, Piotr, 201 Ohana, David, 129n5 Oliveri, Mary Ellen, 33, 58n20 Olsen, Johan P., 23, 64, 66 O’Neill, Barry, 27, 57n2, 65, 83 Ong, Aihwa, 238n20 Ortner, Sherry B., 24, 43, 70, 85n18, 130n16 Oushakine, Serguei Alex, 58n12 Oxhorn, Philip, 238n15

Name Index

P Paine, Robert, 75, 119, 120, 130n23 Paley, Julia, 37 Palmer, Richard E., 6 Paluch, Andrzej, 16 Paptaxiarchis, Evthymios, 256 Patterson, Molly, 28, 58n22 Peled, Yoav, 109n18, 131n35, 154 Peleg, Ilan, 130n24, 131n35 Pempel, J. T., 109n7, 158 Peres, Shimon, 131n29, 178, 182–3, 188–9, 191–2 Peres, Yochanan, 120, 130n15, 130n25 Perry, Elizabeth, J., 133 Petersen, Roger, 31–2, 39, 40, 64 Petro, Nikolai, 19, 263 Pierson, Paul, 58n16 Piester, Kerianne, 238n15, 238n17 Pine, Frances, 259, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 273, 277n27 Plattner, Marc F., 237n Plattner, Stuart, 11, 12 Poggi, Gianfranco, 209 Polanyi, Karl, 11 Pollack, Detlef, 241 Popper, Karl P., 3 Pressman, Jeremy, 197n36 Prior, Markus, 169n25 Przeworski, Adam, 26, 27, 132, 241 Putnam, Robert D., 135, 199, 202, 220, 237n8, 238n17

R Rabin, Yitzak, 123, 130n29, 148, 173, 176, 182–3, 186, 197n37 Rabinbach, Anson, 165 Rabinovich, Itamar, 172, 173, 175 Ragin, Charles, 50 Rakic, Vojin, 82 Ranger, Terrence, 112 Rao, Vijayendra, 13, 14, 25, 35 Rapoport, David C., 124, 129n4 Rau, Zbigniew, 201, 207, 226 Ravitzky, Aviezer, 120, 130n21 Reisinger, William M., 241 Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins, 59n28 Rickert, Heinrich, 6 Ricoeur, Paul, 80, 81 Robertson Smith, William, 73 Robinson, James A., 27, 132 Rochon, Thomas R., 62

Rokkan, Stein, 143 Romero, Ronaldo J., 248 Rose, Charlie, 185, 196n25 Rose, Richard, 13 Roseberry, William, 7 Rosenberg, Alexander, 21n3 Ross, Dennis, 172, 174–6, 179–81, 187–8, 189–94, 195n7, 196n29 Ross, Marc Howard, 62, 83 Rothstein, Bo, 135 Rouhana, Nadim, 131n35 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 16, 108n2 Roy, Ravi K., 83n1 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 5, 58n16 Rumsey, Alan, 28, 58n9 Russell, Bertrand, 5 Rutz, Henry J., 129n5

S Sahlins, Marshall, 6, 36, 61 Sahlins, Peter, 108n1, 108n5 Sassen, Saskia, 44 Schaffer, Frederic C., 21, 41 Schama, Simon, 155, 165 Schnall, David J., 269, 278n33, 278n34 Schatz, Edward, 5, 21n6, 25, 26, 48, 57n4, 57n7, 58n13 Schlozman, Kay L., 238n17 Schmitter, Philipper C., 133, 199, 237n9, 238n17 Scholem, Gershom, 119 Schutz, Alfred, 7, 245, 275n4 Schwartz, David, 19 Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine, 5, 7, 21n6, 63, 172 Shweder, Richard, 8 Scott, James C., 31, 46, 49, 62, 77, 82, 85n18, 109n26, 142, 143, 159, 168n4, 169n21, 213, 217, 246–7 Searle, John R., 85n16 Seidman, Steven, 4, 63 Seligman, Adam, 209 Sen, Amrtya, 1, 264, 268 Sewell, William H. Jr., 57n5, 60, 63 Shalit, Erel, 131n34 Shamgar-Handelman, Lea, 116, 120 Shamir, Michal, 124 Shamir, Yitzak, 122 Shankman, Paul, 7 Sharpe, Patricia, 21 Shavit, Ari, 131n31

331

332

Name Index

Shelef, Nadav G., 157, 163 Sher, Gilead, 173, 175, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196n9, 196n24, 196n26, 196n27, 197n40 Shiller, Robert J., 14 Shore, Cris, 31 Shweder, Richard A., 8 Silberstein, Laurence J., 129n5 Skalnik, Peter, 22m24 Skocpol, Theda, 238n11, 238n17 Skorupski, John, 84n8 Smith, Anthony D., 112–3, 117 Smith, Michael, 168n1 Smith, Rogers, 37, 39 Smooha, Sammy, 131n35, 146, 147 Sniderman, Paul M., 169n25 Snow, David. A., 49, 50, 85n19, 278n35 Synder, Richard, 2 Somers, Margaret R., 67, 257, 274 Southhall, Aidan, 18 Spencer, Herbert, 16, 17, 57n6 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 142, 276n8 Staniszkis, Jadwiga, 277n21 Stark, David, 35, 214, 218, 274 Steinmetz, George, 109n26 Steinmo, Sven, 58n15 Stepan, Alfred, 132, 238n10, 238n12, 238n15 Stern, Yoav, 169n7 Sternhell, Zeev, 129n5, 169n16 Stewart, Michael, 256 Stokes, Susan C., 132 Sullivan, John L., 124 Susser, Leslie, 120, 131n29, 131n32, 143, 147 Swartz, Marc, 17, 59n36, 77 Swidler, Ann, 57n5, 64, 67, 68, 133 Swisher, Clayton E., 173, 174, 193 Szacki, Jerzy, 226 Szczepan;ski, Jan, 264, 268 Szporluk, Roman, 67 Sztompka, Piotr, 135, 251–5, 257–8, 260, 263, 267, 269, 275n2, 276n19, 277n23, 277n26

T Tak, van der, Theo, 153, 169n10 Tarkowska, Elzbieta, 238n9 Tarkowski, Jacek, 237n5, 238n9 Tarrow, Sidney, 45

Taylor, Charles, 21n2 Taylor, George H., 80–1 Taylor, P. J., 129n12 Tester, Keith, 237n9 Thelen, Kathleen, 58n15 Thienhaus, Ole J., 116 Thomas, William I., 7 Thompson, Michael, 253 Tilly, Charles, 24, 25, 132, 141, 204, 253, 258, 260, 277n26 Tischner, Józef, 275n2, 277n29 Tobin, Beth, 22n16 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 62, 89, 108n2, 199 Toland, Judith, 22n24 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 89 Trickett, Edison J., 33, 58n20 Troen, Ilan, 162 Trom, Danny, 50, 278n35 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 41, 44, 45, 59n26, 248, 276n10 Tuden, Arthur, 17, 59n36, 77 Tudor, Henry, 72, 130n17 Turner, Terence, 109n20 Turner, Victor, 17, 36, 49, 52–4, 57, 59n36, 73, 77, 101 Tyler, Stephen A., 29, 30, 59n11, 58n22

V Vainshtein, Grigory, 241 Van Schendelen, M.P.C.M., 140, 154 Van de Velde, Pieter, 22n24 Van Velsen, Jaap, 52, 54, 59n37 Varshney, Ashutosh, 112, 211, 213, 216–8 Verba, Sidney, 3, 6, 7, 21, 63, 67–8, 137, 238n17, 276n15 Verdery, Katherine, 21, 33, 35, 109n25, 219, 221, 256 Vincent, Joan, 17–8, 20, 22n7, 22n18, 22n21, 31, 57n6, 58n14, 59n26, 66, 84n9 Vogt, Evon Z., 109n25 Von Wright, Georg, Henrik, 21n3

W Wacquant, Loic J. D., 25, 59n37, 64–5 Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica, 37, 86 Waller, Michael, 238n15 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 44, 108n3 Walton, Michael, 13–4, 25, 35 Warren, Mark E., 135 Waxman, Dov, 131n34

Name Index

Weber, Max, 6, 16, 62, 68–9, 77, 80, 88–9, 265, 277n20, 278n33, 280 Wedeen, Lisa, 19, 21, 27, 31, 37, 39, 41, 49, 57n2, 57n5, 58n10, 62–3, 83, 84n16, 86, 106, 109n23, 236 Wedel, Janine, 31, 219 Weigle, A. Marcia, 237n3 Weinstein, Jeremy M., 23, 24, 129n5 White, Hayden, 4, 28, 58n22 Wight, Colin, 83n4 Wildavsky, Aaron, 253 Wilentz, Sean, 109n25 Willett, Thomas D., 83n1 Willis, Paul, 33, 256, 257 Wilson, Richard W., xvii Wilson, Thomas M., 58 Windelband, Wilhelm, 6 Wistrich, Robert, 129n5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 35, 239n25, 245 Wnuk-Lipinski, Edmund, 207 Wolf, Eric, 19, 44, 108n3 Wolff, Larry, 16

333

Wood, Elizabeth Jean, 24 Woodruff, David, 13, 35 Woolcock, Michael, 202 Wortman, Richard. S., 86, 109n25

Y Yadgar, Yaacov, 121, 130n25 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 35 Yanow, Dvora, 5, 7, 21n6, 63, 172 Yiftachel, Oren, 129n4, 131n35 Young, Michael W., 58n8 Yuchtman-Ya’ar, Ephraim, 120, 130n15, 130n25 Yurchak, Alexei, 21

Z Zashin, Elliot, 17 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 129n5 Zerubavel, Yael, 116, 129n5, 130n18 Zinovoev, Alexander, 275n2 Znaniecki, Florian, 7

SUBJECT INDEX

A Accommodation, 46, 134–136, 137, 138, 140–6, 148–9, 152–3, 157–8, 163, 165–8, 169n9, 283 Accords (of Camp David), 123, 156, 173, 182 Agency, 24, 33, 45, 66, 108n, 203, 243, 253, 255, 264–5, 270, 273, 274 agency versus structure, 33, 66 Anthropologist, 1–2, 4–8, 10–11, 14, 15, 18–21, 22n, 30–1, 34–5, 40–2, 44, 48, 49, 51, 57n, 60–1, 86, 90, 105, 107, 108n, 111, 135, 168n, 198–9, 200, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 219–20, 241, 243, 250, 254, 255, 258, 273, 276n as translator, 7 Anthropology, 2, 3 cultural, 2, 6, 8–10, 26, 36, 84n, 106, 110, 281 history of, 15–20 political, 2, 17–8, 19, 20, 22n, 30, 31, 35, 37, 46, 59n, 83, 87, 90 relationship with political science, 17–21 social, 8, 16, 18, 19, 25, 35, 54 Anti-naturalism (of interpretivism), 7–9 Anti-Semitism, 124–5, 130n17, 278n32 Arab(s), 92, 95, 118, 122, 127–8, 129n14, 134, 138, 144, 146–51, 154, 156–8, 163–5, 169n7, 173, 177–8, 182, 190 Authenticity, 246

B Bar Kochba (Bar Koziba), 96–8, 100, 105–6, 280 Behavioral approach in political science, 16, 67–8, 136

Bible/biblical (also Torah), 109n19, 112, 116–9, 212–2, 125, 127, 163, 278n34 Black Madonna of Czeçstochowa, 70 Borders, 115, 118, 120, 121, 123–4, 126, 127, 131n, 163, 183, 189, 248, 261, 276n

C Camp David, xxiv, 123, 156, 171–4, 176–8, 180–4, 187–8, 191–5, 195n, 281, 283, 284 Case study, 49–57. See also extended case study three types of, 49–57 Caste, 134, 145, 160, 164 Catholic, 74, 100, 103, 116, 141, 150–3, 222–5, 230–3, 261–2, 265–6, 268, 271–2, 275n1 Ceremonial revolution, 82, 101, 104, 106 Citizen/citizenship, 72, 74, 108n1, 113, 118, 124–5, 129n14, 134,144, 147–9, 157, 199, 216, 224–8, 230–1, 239n26, 240–1, 252, 255, 260–2, 272 Cieszyn Silesia (Cieszyn), xxii, xxv, 221–228, 227, 230–236, 239n, 259, 261–273, 277n Civic nationalism, 114, 124, 128, 145, 167, 189. See also ethnic nationalism, ethnic republicanism, ethnonationalism Civil religion, 70, 73, 121, 124 Civil society, 198–203, 204–221, 223, 225–6, 229–230, 233–6, 237n, 238n, 253, 276n, 281, 284–5 as discourse and form of social organization, 199–200 and other areas of the polity, 204–8

Subject Index

components/dimensions of, 200–8 definition, 200–8 in non-Western contexts, xxv, 210–19 Civility, 135, 221, 241, 252 Class, 33, 36, 44, 65, 82, 84n13, 91, 134, 137, 144–6, 154–5, 160–1, 232, 239n22, 251, 256–8, 280, 282 Clinton parameters for peace, 174, 179, 180–2, 184, 188 Collective identity, 24, 65, 71, 83, 111–2, 121, 125, 128, 134, 145, 147, 156–7, 165, 167, 168, 266, 280, 283 Collective memory, 38–9, 78, 111, 116–7, 126, 129n, 141, 161, 22, 267 Collective security, 115, 124, 283 Colonialism, 20, 22, 41, 112, 246, 276n10 Common sense, 81, 245–6, 272, 275n. See also vernacular knowledge its components, 245–6 Communism, 35, 199, 221, 22–3, 228, 231, 240, 285. See also state socialism Comparative politics, 2, 21, 22n, 23, 37, 39, 41, 48–9, 61, 62, 83, 88, 90, 279 Competitive party system, 74, 105, 114, 138, 146, 148, 160 Conflict, 23, 46, 52–4, 62, 66, 74, 78, 83, 90, 91, 95, 97, 103, 107, 109n, 110–1, 118, 124, 126, 128, 135, 143–4, 153, 154, 158, 162, 166, 168, 174–8, 186, 188, 190, 194 205, 210, 216–17, 246 Congress Party (in India), 138, 145, 158–9, 163–4, 169n18 Consensus, 15, 75–7, 135, 136, 142–3, 145–6, 150, 154–6, 164–7, 169n, 186, 188, 194, 198, 207 Contest, 8, 9, 24, 36, 61, 82, 103–4, 110, 113, 115, 121–2, 128, 129n, 132, 134, 142, 145, 146, 147, 156, 161, 164–5, 171, 189, 195, 201, 224, 263, 279, 280, 281–3 Control, 24, 38, 40, 41, 65, 74, 77–8, 82, 91, 99, 104, 120, 132, 134–6, 138, 141–5, 147–9, 160, 163–4, 167, 175–6, 181, 186, 201, 207, 214, 222, 223, 227, 238n, 246, 248, 252–3, 255–6, 259, 260, 264, 283 Consociational (democracy) (consociationalism), 120, 135–7,

335

140, 143–4, 146–7,149–50, 159, 162, 167, 169, 238n21 criticisms of, 139–140 Constructivism (constructionism), 8, 22n, 39, 40, 49, 68, 113 Abbott’s definition, 8 Cultural intimacy (Herzfeld), 220–2, 236 Culture, 4, 6–9, 12, 13, 15–6, 20–1, 25– 7, 35–6, 38–9, 40–2, 44, 47, 51, 52, 54, 57n, 61–71, 74, 75, 79–80, 82–83, 83n, 84n, 103, 105, 108, 108n, 110, 112–3, 116, 124, 128, 133, 136–9, 141, 143–4, 146–9, 152–7, 159, 160– 3, 165–6, 176–7, 182, 189, 190, 192, 195, 195n, 198, 207, 208, 214–5, 217, 219, 221, 223, 225–7, 229, 230–4, 236, 240–1, 243–8, 249–254, 256–9, 261, 263–9, 271–4, 275n, 276n, 277n, 278n, 280–2, 284–5 as constraint versus as resource, 66 definitions, 36, 67–9 in economic analysis, 13–14 sociopsychological versus semiotic definitions, 67–8 Cultural scenarios, 61, 63–4, 66, 83n1, 104, 233, 256–9, 269, 272, 274 Custom, 63, 79, 81, 89, 98 Cyclical time, 115–6, 118, 122, 126

D Democracy, 4, 21, 37, 54, 67, 89, 94, 108n, 124, 128, 131n, 133–5, 137–8, 140–2, 144–5, 147, 149, 150–1, 154– 9, 167, 199–200, 204–5, 209–213, 215–6, 220, 238n, 241, 251, 254–5, 260, 271, 274 Democratization, 1, 27, 37–8, 60, 132– 5, 141, 145, 152–4, 165, 167, 169n, 204, 218, 235–6, 260, 280, 283, 285 Developmentalism, 13–14, 20, 254, 276n Discourse analysis, 27, 37, 69, 77, 84n10, 106–7, 171, 220, 222, 257–8, 260, 267, 272, 274–5n1, 280–2 Divided societies, 132–5, 137–9, 141, 157, 160, 167–8 Dominant ideology, 77–8, 158, 164, 167 Dominant party (system), 92–4, 105–6, 114, 138, 144–6, 150, 158–160, 162, 163, 169n Doxa, 81

336

Subject Index

Dutch (Holland, Netherlands), 113, 139–141, 144–5, 147, 149, 150–7, 164–7, 168n, 169n, 170n, 280

E Eclectic school in interpreting Camp David negotiations, 177–8, 182, 194–5, 197, 284. See also orthodox school, revisionist school Elite(s), 20, 69, 81–2, 93–4, 96, 98–100, 105, 117, 134, 135, 137–8, 140, 144, 152–3, 158, 160, 163–5, 210, 224–6, 228, 251, 263–4, 271, 274 Embeddedness, 32, 142, 221, 258, 268 of economy, 11–2, 14, 18 Enlightenment, 16, 87, 92, 116, 129n, 145, 155, 217, 247 Enlightenment, Jewish (Haskala), 117 Epistemology (Epistemological doubt), 1–2, 3–5, 7–9, 25–7, 40, 59n, 245, 285 Ethnography, 4–5, 8, 15, 21, 21n, 23–50, 55, 57, 57n, 58n, 59n, 88, 105, 107, 128, 168, 171, 194–5, 197n43, 199–200, 237, 243, 248–9, 256, 275, 276n, 280–1 global (multisited), 43–6 interpretive, 35–40 meaning of, 28 positivistic (realist), 30–5 postmodern, 40–3 paraethnography, 46–8 Ethnic republicanism (Ethnic republican nationalism), xxiii, 110, 114, 121–2, 124–8, 284 Ethnicity, 108n5, 110, 112–3, 125, 134, 137, 144, 146, 150, 276n12 Ethnographic framing (problematization, sensibility), 32, 57n7, 58n13 Ethnonationalism, 114, 122, 125–8, 145, 160, 190, 284 Ethnoscape, 117–8, 12, 124, 126–7. See also homeland Exile, 5, 70, 118–121, 127, 130n21 Explanation, 2–3, 6, 8, 10, 21n3, 21n4, 36, 38, 64, 69, 80, 84n6, 115, 138, 161, 172, 188, 195, 239n30, 241–2, 280 and interpretation, 2–4, 6–8, 20, 28, 30, 36, 39, 54, 63, 69, 70, 77, 81–2, 98–100, 107, 115,

120, 125–6, 153, 172, 180, 195, 245, 280, 283 Extended case study, 15, 44, 49, 50–1, 56–7, 107. See also situational analysis, social dramas

F Fissured societies, xxiii, 135–7, 144, 163 Formalism (in economic anthropology), 11, 12, 14, 15, 34, 180, 230 versus substantivism, 11–15

G Gaza, 122–3, 127, 144, 147, 150, 156, 177, 189, 193 Global (Globalization), 1, 30, 40–1, 44–9, 59, 112, 134, 145, 154–6, 162, 207, 244, 248–9, 250, 276n Góral (Górale – plural), 259–73, 277n25 Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful/ settlers movement), 116, 119, 125, 127, 162, 190

H Habitus, 63, 255, 275n4, 277n20 Halacha, 119, 127 Hamas, 144, 156, 173, 180 Hardal, See Jews Haredi, See Jews Hegemony, 20, 37, 62–3, 66, 74, 81–2, 85n20, 95–6, 100, 106–7, 135–6, 142–3, 147, 159–160, 164, 168n4, 168n5, 169n20, 240, 247 definitions, 81–2 weak versus strong, 82, 143 Histadrut (Labor Federation), 93, 151 Holocaust, 71, 117, 121, 125, 158, 278n31 Holism (holistic image of the world), 6, 8–9, 22n9, 28, 58n9 versus positivism, 5–8 Holland. See Dutch, Netherlands Homeland, 97, 112, 117–8, 121, 123–4, 126, 157, 162–3 Homo economicus, 15, 61–6 Homo habitus, 63, 255, 275n4, 277n20 Homo sociologicus, 11, 63–5 Homo sovieticus, xxv, 240–243, 251, 255, 269, 272–3, 275n2, 284 Homo symbolicus, 63–65, 69, 279 Hybrid, 65, 114, 141, 150, 195, 213–220, 235–6, 247–9, 256, 261, 266, 282–4

Subject Index

Hybridity, 214–5, 217, 247, 248, 270 of civil society, 213–9

I Identity, 24, 34, 37, 40–3, 49, 59n24, 60, 65, 66, 71, 83, 110–3, 115, 118, 121, 125–6, 128, 131n34, 132, 134, 136, 143, 145–7, 149, 151–2, 154, 156–7, 160–1, 163, 164–8, 170n26, 215, 220–2, 224–8, 230, 240, 249, 262, 266, 270, 276n11, 280, 283 collective, 24, 49, 65, 71, 83, 110–3, 121, 125, 128, 134, 145, 147, 156–7, 165, 167–8, 266, 280, 283 Ideology, 12–13, 17, 20, 35, 58n22, 70, 74, 80–1, 94, 106, 115, 120, 143, 150, 152, 164, 192, 226, 229, 236, 245–7, 275n1, 276n17, 277n22 dominant, 80–1 and hegemony, 81–2 and utopia, 80–1 India, 113, 132, 135, 138, 139, 144–5, 150, 157–164, 167, 169n15, 169n19, 216, 217, 276n8, 280 Institutional adjustment, 242, 273 Interpretation, 2–4, 6, 8, 20, 28, 30, 36, 39, 54, 63, 69–70, 77, 81–2, 98–100, 107, 115, 120, 125–6, 153, 171–81, 195, 245, 280, 283 and ethnography (interpretive ethnography), 5, 8, 15, 21, 23–30, 35–49, 57, 57n1, 57n7, 58n10, 58n11, 58n20, 58n22, 59n28, 59n29, 59n31, 59n37, 107, 128, 168, 171, 237, 243, 249, 256, 275, 276n9, 276n19, 280–1 and explanation, 2–4, 6, 8, 21n3, 21n4, 36, 69, 239n30, 241–2, 280–1 as understanding, 6, 21n3, 41 Interpretivism, 7, 36–7, 40, 49 anti-naturalism of, 6–9 Intifada, 131n31, 173, 176, 185, 194. See also Palestinian uprising Invented tradition, 79 Islam (Islamic), 66, 118, 145, 156, 165–6, 173, 217, 236 Israel, 19–20, 27, 31, 53, 70, 73–4, 79, 86, 92–99, 105–7, 109n7–8, 109n8, 109n19, 110–128, 129n4, 129n5,

337

129n9, 129n12, 129n14, 130n18, 130n19, 130n21, 130n25, 130n26, 130n27, 130n28, 131n29, 131n31, 131n34, 134–139, 144–167, 169n7, 169n8, 169n19, 171–187, 189–195n2, 195n5, 195n6, 196n22, 196n28, 196n34, 276n8, 280, 282–3 Israel Labor Party (Mapai), 19, 27, 31, 73, 92, 109n8, 114, 121, 280

J Jerusalem, 70, 97, 117, 174–5, 178–9, 182–3, 187, 196n27 Jews, 95–99, 114, 116–121, 126–7, 129n10, 134, 139, 146–151, 154, 158, 160, 162–3, 168n6, 187, 191, 239n26, 264 Hardal, 119 Mizrachi Jew (Mizrachim [plural]), 129n10, 130n27, 146, 148, 168n6 Orthodox, 115, 118–21, 127, 130n19, 134, 139, 146–50, 172–4 Secular, 99, 114, 116–21, 126–7, 134, 139, 146–7, 149–50, 154, 162 Traditional (Mesorati), 98, 100, 115–6, 118, 120–1, 126–7, 130n25, 134, 150–1, 154 Ultra-orthodox Jew (Haredi), 118–20, 130n21, 146–7, 150 John Paul II, 100–101, 106–7, 280

K Kadima, 114 Key scenario, 70, 130 Kinship, 10, 35, 38, 87, 89, 200, 211–4, 217, 219, 221, 226 Kulturkampf, 120

L Labor Party (in Israel), 19, 27, 31, 73, 92–101, 105–7, 109n8, 114, 121, 280 Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), 70, 97, 112, 117–23, 126–7, 129n9, 130n21, 190 Legitimacy (legitimation, legitimating discourses), 17, 36–9, 60, 63, 65, 68, 72–3, 77–8, 79, 80, 83, 96, 100–3, 106, 109n19, 112–3, 115, 123–4, 141, 143, 155–6, 160, 174, 180, 194, 241, 247, 261, 275n1, 282

338

Subject Index

Legitimating discourse, 77–8, 136, 142–3, 146, 158, 167 Likud (party in Israel), 20, 96, 100, 105– 6, 114, 121–2, 125–6, 148, 154, 156 Local (locality), 24–5, 27, 37, 47, 111, 220–1, 244, 247–51, 273, 285 Locutionary acts, 76. See also illocutionary, perlocutionary Logos, 71–2

M Mapai, 114, 121, 138, 158–9, 163. See also Labor Party in Israel Melting pot, 136, 146. See also pressure cooker Mesorati Jews (traditional), 120–1 Messianic, 72, 116, 118–20, 124, 126–7, 154, 162, 190 Methodology, 4, 15, 19, 27, 44, 50–1, 58n19, 171, 241, 279 Minority (minorities), 134–9, 233 Minority veto in consociationalism, 138, 139, 148 Mizrachi Jew (Mizrachim [plural]), 129n10, 130n27, 146, 148, 168n6 Modern society, 87–9, 200, 284 versus traditional society, 74–5, 84n12, 86–9, 91, 284 Monodimensionalty versus multidimensionality, 9–11 Myth, 19, 68, 70–3, 76, 96, 100, 111–3, 115–8, 121–2, 126, 129n5, 130n17, 141, 174, 179, 221, 245, 253, 259, 260, 265–7, 270, 282 types of, 71–3 Mythos, 71–2

N Nation, 37, 39, 67, 79, 106–7, 112–13, 115, 119, 125, 128, 129n12 National identity, 37, 110–2, 115, 121, 125, 132, 154, 166, 170n26, 221 levels of (micro versus macro), 37 National Union, 114, 125, 127 Nationalism, 71, 110–1, 113–5, 117, 119– 120, 124–8, 129n1, 129n2, 130n15, 134, 135, 141, 145, 154, 160–2, 167, 189, 220–1, 225–6, 229, 233, 234, 236, 271, 283–5 Civic, 114, 124–8, 145, 167, 189 Ethnic, 124–5, 129n2, 145, 154, 283

Republican, 110, 114, 121–2, 124–8, 284 Ethnonational, Ethnonationalism, ethno-nationalist, 108, 114, 122, 125–8, 145, 160–2, 190, 284 Naturalism, 6, 8, 26–7, 279, 285 of positivism, 6–9 versus anti-naturalism, 6–9 Netherlands (Dutch, Holland), 113, 135–8, 149–156, 163–7, 169n9, 169n23, 210, 263 New Movement-Meretz, 114, 125–6 Norms, 31, 52, 63–4, 83n1, 84n6, 94–5, 99, 106, 236, 242, 250, 269, 272 Nowy Targ, xxii, 259, 266–72

O Ontology, 1–2, 5–11, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 36, 40, 48–50, 58n19, 243, 285 Orthodox school in interpreting Camp David negotiations, 120, 172–4, 177, 179, 181, 195. See also eclectic school, revisionist school Oslo peace process, 173, 176, 179, 180, 182–3, 191

P Palestine (Palestinian, Palestinians), 97, 114, 117–8, 130n27, 138, 171, 180, 276n8 Palestinian Authority, xxiv, 123, 144, 182 Palestinian uprising (intifada), xx, 150 Participant observation, 19–20, 25–30, 32–3, 39, 44, 47, 57, 57n7, 105, 107, 280. See also ethnography Particularism, 2, 208 and interpretation, 2–4, 208 Perestroika movement (in political science), 4 Performatives (Austin), 76 Phenomenology, 7, 41, 245 Plural societies, 137 Pluralism, 135–7, 142, 147, 164, 168n1, 203, 224–6, 233, 236, 237n6, 251 Pluralist theory (in political science), 78 Podhale (region in Poland), xxii, 259, 261, 263, 265–70, 273, 277n27 Poland, xviii, xxi–xxii, 7, 54, 70, 74, 82, 86, 100–1, 104–5, 107, 202, 221–4, 227–230, 236, 239n26, 243, 254,

Subject Index

259, 261–2, 268–710, 275n1, 277n29, 280, 282 Political anthropology, 2, 15, 17–20, 22n18, 22n22, 30–1, 35, 37, 46, 59n36, 83, 87, 90. See also cultural, social anthropology history of, 17–21 Political culture, 26, 54, 61, 64, 67–70, 75, 80, 83, 84n10, 116, 133, 137, 139, 141, 146, 147, 152–6, 161, 176, 190, 231, 240, 282 semiotic versus sociopsychological approach, 21 Political science, 2–6, 9, 16, 18–21, 48, 83, 279 Politics, 2, 6, 9–10, 12–3, 15, 16–7, 19–32, 22n13, 22n15, 34–43, 46, 48–50, 60–2, 67–9, 72, 75, 77–8, 80, 82–3, 86–90, 105–8, 109n23, 111, 122, 128, 129n13, 135–6, 140, 144, 146, 149, 151–3, 155–8, 160, 164–8, 169n9, 169n10, 169n15, 189, 198, 202, 208, 212, 215–18, 222, 224, 229–30, 232–3, 238n12, 244, 260, 262–3, 279, 281–2, 285 defintions of, 23–4 Positivism (positivistic), 3, 5–7, 25, 27, 29–30, 35, 39, 41, 46, 48, 51, 56, 199–200, 280–1 definition of, 22n11 granular view of the world in, 5–6 versus Hegelianism, 5 Postcommunism, 21, 200, 214–228, 219, 229, 241, 257 Postcommunist transitions, (transformations), 12, 33–5, 214, 241, 243, 254–5, 258, 269, 273–4 Power, (powerful), 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 17–20, 23, 26–8, 30–7, 40, 43–6, 48–9, 52–6, 58n20, 60–1, 63, 68–74, 76–8, 81–2, 87, 89, 90–3, 96, 99–103, 106, 109n8, 112, 117, 121, 130n16, 131n31, 132–4, 136–9, 141, 142–4, 149–150, 154, 156–161, 163–8, 181, 190, 198, 208, 213, 214, 216–220, 223, 226, 229–30, 238n12, 238n15, 241, 246–8, 253, 256–8, 262, 264, 267, 275n1, 279, 281–3 ethnographic study of, 31–2 Power sharing, 138, 149–150, 158, 160, 163, 165, 167. See also consociationalism

339

Practices, 14, 17, 21, 29–30, 34, 36, 39, 40, 43, 45, 48–9, 54, 58n10, 58n20, 59n28, 68, 78–9, 84n10, 106, 133, 140, 142, 153, 163, 167, 171, 219, 220, 279, 282, 284–5 semiotic, 21, 40, 49, 58n10, 106, 279, 282 Proportionality in consociationalism, 139, 140, 149, 151, 154 Protestant(s), 141, 150, 222, 224, 232–5, 264–5, 268, 272, 278 Public domain, 201–3, 205, 208, 217 Public space, sphere, 82, 106, 126, 161, 201–3, 215, 218, 234, 238n13, 260

R Redemption, 117–121, 127, 190 Reflexive anthropology (reflexive social science), 51, 54–6 Regional identity, 220, 222, 226–8, 230, 261, 270 Religion, 10, 11, 20, 21, 70, 72–3, 88–90, 93, 115, 121, 124, 134, 137, 150–1, 157, 163, 190, 239n22, 245, 264, 268 in Israel, 115, 157, 163, 190 in Poland, 264, 268 Research (researchers), 5, 7–9, 23–33, 37, 40–1, 43, 46–50, 54–7, 59n33, 59n37, 60, 69, 83, 107, 135, 140–1, 171, 173, 177, 198, 200, 211, 214, 217, 241, 249, 256, 264, 268, 274, 275n1, 278n35, 280, 284 quantitative versus qualitative, 5, 8, 46–7, 50, 199, 241, 279–80 Revisionist school in interpreting Camp David, 172–3, 176–7, 179–80, 195, 283. See also eclectic school, orthodox school Revolution(s), (revolutionary), 16, 62, 64, 67, 73, 82, 87, 91–2, 100–1, 104, 106–7, 108n2, 116, 152, 215, 218, 222, 229, 230–1, 233–4, 236, 239n27, 240, 244, 260, 263, 275n1, 276n14, 282 ceremonial, 82, 101, 104, 106–7 Rhetoric, (rhetorical), 53, 75–6, 84n10, 90, 100, 101, 107, 111, 121, 161, 245, 282 types of, 75–6 Right of return (of Palestinians), 177, 183, 186–7, 191, 196n22 Ritual(s), 10, 19–20, 38–9, 52–3, 64, 68, 73–7, 84n12, 84n13, 84n15, 86–97,

340

Subject Index

99–108, 109n6, 109n8, 109n10, 109n20, 109n21, 111, 117, 119, 141–42, 155, 161, 246, 248, 261, 266, 280, 282, 284–5 definition of, 84n13 of confirmation, 102–3 of rebellion, 73, 84n12, 84n13, 90–4, 99, 101–2, 104–7, 280, 282 political, 90 sacred versus secular, 73–5, 90, 105 Root metaphor, 52, 70, 118, 130n16 Round Table (in Poland), 54

S Scripts, cultural, 62, 64–5, 134, 155, 284–5 Secondary leaders/ leadership, 93, 96, 99, 106 Secondary society, 202–3, 234 Secular ritual, 73–45, 90, 105 Security, 76, 110, 115, 121–6, 128, 138, 154, 156, 169n24, 172–3, 176–8, 186, 189, 192–3, 283 collective, 110, 115, 123–5, 283 personal, 110, 124, 283 Semiotic, 20, 21, 29–30, 40, 42, 49, 58n10, 60, 62–3, 67–9, 82–3, 83n4, 84n11, 85n20, 106, 133, 274, 279, 282, 285 practices, 21, 29, 40, 49, 58n10, 63, 106, 279, 282, 285 Settlers movement (Settlement (of the Land)), 114, 116, 125, 127, 130n27, 154, 161–2. See also Gush Emunim Situational analysis, 51–2, 57. See also extended case studies, social dramas Social adjustment, 242–3, 273 Social dramas, 51–4, 57, 103. See also extended case studies, situational analysis Socialism, 21, 54, 92, 100–1, 198, 226, 230, 233, 240, 251–2, 255, 256, 263–4, 275n1, 276n16, 281, 285 Solidarity (movement in Poland), 27, 54, 100, 224–5, 229–30 Space, 25, 31, 34, 36, 41–2, 44, 51, 55, 82, 83n4, 106, 115–20, 123, 126–7, 129n4, 129n11, 129n14, 145, 161, 195n7, 201–4, 215, 218, 234, 236,

237n1, 237n3, 248, 260, 262, 266, 283, 285 State, 18–21, 74–5 and civil society, 204, 207–8, 223 and invented tradition, 79 and nation (in two regions of Poland), 260–2 fissured, 144 of Israel (competing views on), 119–21, 126 legitimacy of, 76–7, 113 Weber on, 88 Stateness/state building, 110, 157, 167 State socialism, 12, 21, 54, 92, 100–1, 198, 223, 230, 233, 237, 240, 251–2, 255, 263–4, 275n1, 276n16, 281, 285. See also Communism Substantivism (in economic anthropology), 11–12, 14–5, 23, 34, 177, 182, 185, 187, 230, 239n26 versus formalism, 11–12 Symbol(s), (symbolic), 6, 19, 24–5, 27, 29, 36, 37, 45, 48, 53–4, 63–5, 68–70, 73–4, 77, 79, 80–1, 84n10, 84n13, 86–7, 90, 94, 97–8, 100, 102, 104–8, 111, 118, 121, 129n6, 130n16, 141–3, 147, 155, 166,183, 186, 221, 237, 245, 247, 256, 262, 266, 273, 274, 276n11, 279–82 types of, 69–70, 282

T Taba (peace negotiations), 123, 173, 177, 181–2, 184–6, 189, 191 Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif), 183, 187–8, 191–2 Thomas theorem, 7 Time, 115–29 archaic, 116 cyclical, 115,116, 118, 122, 126 linear, 108, 115–16, 118, 122–3, 127 mixed, 65, 115–7, 121–2, 126 Tradition (invented tradition), 7, 15–16, 20, 25–6, 28–30, 79–80 Traditional society, 74–5, 79, 84n12, 86–9, 91, 107, 214, 284. See also modern society versus modern society, 87–9 Transparency, 200, 202, 202, 209, 211–2, 213, 219, 226 Trust, 13, 135, 253, 258, 263, 277n26

Subject Index

341

U

W

Universalism, 2, 37 and explanation, 2 Ustron;, xxi, 271–2 Utopia (utopian, utopias), 16, 72, 80–1, 117, 120, 133, 217, 253

West Bank, 109n19, 122–3, 128, 130n27, 144, 147, 150, 154, 182, 193, 196n28 Weimar Germany, 208

V

Zionism (Zionist), 70, 98–9, 105, 112, 114, 116–22, 125–6, 129n10, 130n16, 130n18, 130n19, 130n27, 146–9, 156, 161–3 ethnic republican, 114, 126 nationalistic, 98, 105, 121 secular, 116, 121 religious, 129n10

Values, 26, 42, 58, 63–4, 68, 77, 83n1, 85n19, 101–4, 115, 133, 145, 155–7, 166–7, 236, 241, 249–50, 271 Vernacular knowledge, 47, 240–1, 243–4, 247, 249–51, 258, 272–4. See also common sense Violence, 38, 81, 125, 145, 156, 165, 167, 175–6, 180–2, 184, 188, 191, 194, 247, 283

Z