Appalling fascination

Abstract

This paper starts from a very specific ethnographic context – the carniva­lesque world of electoral politics in rural Sri Lanka in the early 1980s – and moves out to propose a new object for anthropological enquiry in postcolonial South Asia. My earlier work in Sri Lanka had delineated the ways in which a strong local understanding of « politics » (desapalanaya) and the « political » had developed in the years since Independence. The political was the zone of agonism and abuse, engagement and disgust, of performance and rhetoric, an area of life at once fascinating and appalling. Similar readings of « the political » occur in recent ethnographies from other points in the subcontinent, suggesting at least a family resemblance in these geographically disparate cultural responses to the world of mass politics. Drawing on recent developments in radical democratic theory – especially the work of Chantal Mouffe – I shall attempt a more formal account of "the political" as a necessary, but necessarily unpredictable and uncontainable, expression of democratic modernity in South Asia. Ethno­graphic attention to the idea of the political as a site of unruly cultural production may, I suggest, help the ongoing renewal of the anthropology of politics, and allow ethnographers to escape the arid explanatory grids (formalism, instrumentalism, culturalism) which so limited earlier political anthropology.