Bourdieu – Studying state as a field?
Bourdieu’s
transcribed and translated lecture rises a very important question – ‘how to
think about the state when we are already thought of by it?’ Bourdieu engages
with this question by claiming that there is no analytical purchase outside
state to ‘study state’, because those who study it are already the products of
state in some way or the other. Social sciences, he argues are themselves the projects
of state and those who engage with the state problems are only thinking within
the framework provided by state and do little to move beyond it. One way of circumventing
this circularity, he suggests, is to enquire into the genesis of state in its
historic contingency and recognize it as the possibility that was actualized
over other possibilities at the time of its origin. By doing so, we would not
misrecognize state as ‘the most natural form of social and political organization’;
instead we would be able to see its cultural arbitrariness. He opines that this
enquiry into its genesis is a very important prerequisite for any kind of
disciplinary engagement with problems that emerge at the intersection of state
and society. Further the presumptions behind the actualized possibility [that
is state] should be understood and reconstructed in order to visibilize other
possibilities.
Speaking of the
structure of state, Bourdieu’s thoughts on state and how it needs to be studied
falls within the theoretical paradigm he uses to study society. The concepts of
field, forms of capital, habitus, embodiment, misrecognition are all present in
this lecture. Balancing the powers wielded by social structure and individual
agency, he does not make either of the two deterministic of the other, but is
keen on showing how they are intertwined in ways more complex that we would
like to acknowledge. This is the charge of his theoretical approach to state. Throughout
the lecture, he draws our attention to two aspects of the state – the objective that operates at the
structural level and the subjective which
operates at individual and cognitive level. He regards state as a meta capital,
a concentration of all kinds of capital, an overarching entity that organizes
and regulates all of social life within it. He takes example of school to show
how the organizational structure produces effects at the mental and subjective
level when individuals embody and function with an implicit understanding of rules
governing the field [that is school]. Objective organizational structures
produce corresponding mental structures which bring state into existence and
make people recognize it and respond and act within its boundaries. This reflection
of state that is present at the subjective level as a mental structure enabling
us all to act with certain knowledge is what makes it difficult to understand
state according to Bourdieu. The resonances of this argument can be identified
in the essay by Althusser on ideological state apparatuses which we read in the
last session.
The symbolic value
of the state functions as a transcendental value that wields nominal authority over
individuals without any external reference. Over time it becomes so naturalized
that we misrecognize it as the only possibility and therefore do not question
its existence or foundational principles. The problems studied by social scientists
only become problems of state that take for granted the structure that produces
them. Hence the findings of research only serve as an addition to the knowledge
of state rather than critiquing its very necessity.
While Bourdieu
is successful to some extent in identifying the logical flaw inherent in any
study of state, he is not so efficient in throwing light on what kind of
knowledge is possible if we choose the route suggested by him and enquire into
the genesis of the state and reconstruct its other possibilities that were erased
at its institution. By gesturing towards an all encompassing theory that
explains the whole of society within the state, is he not rendering futile that
entire theoretical paradigm that can identify the contingency and unnaturalness
of state, but cannot yield any further theoretical ground for its critique? Balancing
out the structural and agential elements might offer a more comprehensive and
complex understanding of state, but it does not theoretically offer insights as
to how to understand the problems that are part of or responses to state. Is
proving state idea as historically contingent theoretically more incisive in
understanding the state produced problems? Would not all problems then have similar
answers that only enlighten the larger scope of the problem but do very little by
the way of attending to their specificities? Or is Bourdieu helpful only to understand
the larger historical context of state and gain knowledge of its overall
functioning but not deal with the specific problems that are produced by the
state? I strongly feel that the theoretical scope of his insights is limited for
doing historical and comparative studies of states and at best may help to
contextualize the state specific problems.
Bureaucracy and everyday state
While the readings
deal with distinctly different forms of the State, the connecting thread is
perhaps the experience of the entity of the State by various actors- some
within the state, some outside the ambit of the state and some in an ambiguous
fuzzy place between being state and non-state actors.
Anjaria’s
piece on street hawkers forces us to re-think the distinctions between
legitimate and illegitmate in thinking of state, and citizenship. By paying
attention to ways in which hawkers enact citizenship through acts outside the
formal regulatory apparatus of the state, the piece unpacks for us the ways in
which people relate to the State. For instance, a protest by hawkers becomes a
collaborative exercise between lower level public officials and the hawkers.
The collaborative nature of the public spectacle does not make it devoid of
politics- instead, it gives rise to a certain kind of politics, where the State
needs to be both confronted as well as collaborated with. Even as Anjaria pays
attention to various unofficial arrangements hawkers cultivate with
state-representatives at the lower levels of bureaucratic hierarchy and urges
us to think about what maybe an “intimate state”, he makes a few
qualifications. There is explicit recognition that paying attention to the
unofficial forms of negotiation could end up trivialising extortionary
practices and romanticisation of being outside the law. This is an important
qualification, for in thinking about the extraordinary state, even as we recognise
how substantive claims of citizenship are articulated in the unofficial and
extra-legal, the existence of force and unequal power relationships cannot be
glossed over. That said, Anjaria’s observations offer several possibilities to
think about the State. From the pertinent observation that low-level municipal
workers and police constables and hawkers inhabit intersecting social worlds,
to the ways in which paper-records created by the State as means to count a
population, can be turned into records to stake claim to legitimate claims over
a space, ethnographic observations in the article offer many useful insights. Anjaria
argues that the project of anthropology of state has been to develop an
analytical perspective that always questions the boundedness of the state
without denying its effects. He seems to be pushing the question in a different
direction when he asks about how people inhabit strategies of governance.
In Sharma’s
piece, the positioning of Mahila Samkhya as NGO or GONGO to different actors
explicitly foregrounds the ambiguities with the idea of the State. Such ambiguity of positioning offers several
possibilities for MS representatives. As with the case of the Kol tribe women,
who learn bureaucratic procedures and are able to retain a piece of prime land
with assistance from MS representatives, government- or at least strategies of
bureaucratic governance- can be empowering.
At the same time, similar strategies could be instruments of domination (When
MS representatives use MHRD letterheads to intimidate women’s groups into
compliance, for instance). Placed organisationally between the government and
the non-government, Mahila Samkhya offers several possibilities to think about
where the State lies. A suggestion made in the piece is that the State as an
entity works along the axis of class, caste and gender. A question that emerges
is- how does one tell the State apart from social hierarchies? (Neoliberalism-
formation of subjects)
Emma Tarlo is
unpacking the state in an entirely different way by looking at objects filed
away in a dusted room. The attempt at look at slum clearance and sterilisation
drives during emergency through official documents, and interpretations of
these documents, occasionally by representatives of the state, is an attempt to
locate the everyday state in the pragmatic world of everyday bureaucracy. She discusses
the problem of studying emergency given the lack of material available, nature
of the available material in which we can get glimpses of emergency in its
sanitized form. Her effort is one of extracting and bringing the flavour of the
times out of collective silence. Emergency as event was spectacular in nature, and
received attention for wrong reasons. It is the memory that Indian state does
not want to archive. She has to read against the grain of the documents that
record the period of emergency. The available files gave her access to the
silence. However, she cautions - legitimacy of these documents are not devoid
of discrepancies implying that neither the documents published during
emergency, nor in the period following emergency could be taken as a fact of
what happened. Regardless of this facticity of those documents, they are very
important testimonies of how bureaucratic processes worked during that period. She
shows how documents are not the proofs of facts; instead they are proofs of how
bureaucracy manufactures facts. This poses methodologically a very important
question - how to study such state spectacles which have been silenced or
heavily distorted?
The review
essay by Hull maps the anthropological treatment of bureaucratic documents and opens
up the avenue for understanding them in ways more than just treating them as
mere records of social reality. His approach to bureaucratic documents
considers them as more than semiotic technologies through which state
understands those it governs. He wants us to see the mediating nature of the
bureaucratic documents as they circulate among the officials - state agents and
the people. Documents, he says, are not simply “instruments of bureaucratic organizations,
but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge,
practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, and even the organizations
themselves”. When we analyse the documents as more than just ‘instruments of
representation’ we can see how representations construct objects and how
negotiating these representations is the way in which society comprehends and constantly
redefines state and its boundaries. Thus documents are central to the way a
society imagines state. Further, bringing documents into the ethnographic
framework also helps address the ‘problem of determining the boundaries of
organizations’. It is particularly useful to those doing institutional
ethnographies. Scholars by closely looking at bureaucratic documents and making
tem one of their sources of enquiry can overcome the conventional boundaries
laid down by the anthropology between formal and informal structures and
organizations. The final section of this essay points to some interesting
insights into newer modes of bureaucratic documentation such as electronic
databases and resistance from within the bureaucracy for such changes. It takes
a very measured approach to documentation and urges us to see the continuity
and the novelty of the newer electronic forms simultaneously, challenging rhetoric
of technological revolution and claims of transparency of e-governance schemes.
The aesthetics of electronic modes of documentation resembles that of paper
form.
Hull
demonstrates some of the propositions he puts forward in the review article in his
essay on Islamabad City Development Authority and its everyday functioning with
the neighbouring village of BQB. He shows how records have a certain kind of
fixity far removed from their referential reality, and they are used by both
officials and the villagers as tools to achieve material benefits. He juxtaposes
the bureaucratic simplicity of BQB area and its people on paper and their
complex social reality on ground. The bureaucratic list visibilizing the people
of this area is a constant work in progress that entails adding and modifying the
list several times over based on the negotiations of people with the official bureaucracy.
He places at the centre of the narrative a dynamic bureaucratic document – in this
case a list, which is subject to constant modification and change. The list mobilizes
around it people and activities regularly that is indicative of the routine
functioning of government and bureaucracy everywhere.
Akhil Gupta
pays close attention to the routinized practices of different branches and
levels of state. Akhil Gupta is quite enamoured of disaggregated idea of state.
He looks at development programmes aimed at alleviation of poverty in the
context where they have failed in spite of repeated efforts and schemes of government.
Poverty as a structural problem of the state, he opines, suffers from the
poverty of attention. He sees poverty as violence which is structural and
impersonal in form for which one cannot identify the perpetrator. He draws on
Foucault [the concept of bio power] and Agamben [Homo Sacer and state of
exception]. He critiques Foucault’s idea of bio power for failing to account
for violence implicit in it. While Agamben’s Homo Sacer resembles closely the
poor in the sense that they are expendable and their killing does not violate
the law or the legitimacy of the sovereign, the death of people living in poverty
does not amount to violation of law. However for Agamben, Homo Sacer and
violence exist due to the exclusion from the state. In case of India, the
paradox of poverty is that the poor are killed despite their inclusion in the
projects of national sovereignty. He is departing from both Foucault and
Agamben in his refusal to see state as one unified entity. If state indeed is a
disaggregated entity manifesting itself in many layers, Gupta pushes us to see
the methodological challenges in studying state as a layered and disaggregated
structure – in its translocalism, pluricenteredness, ubiquity and reification.
In dismantling the state to its bare minimum, Gupta seems to have made it difficult
to see it as a unified entity [which is how it projects itself]. Although state
is experienced in its parts, there is a unifying feature about state agencies
which separates it from its citizens. How do we grapple with this projected
dimension of state? - is the question we should debate.
Priya, Savitha
and Rashmi
