Bringing Subalterns into Speech? Investigating Anarchic Resistance to Hegemonic Modernity

Abstract

This article aims to critically examine Gayatri Spivak’s (1992) demand to undo subalternity by inserting subalterns into the circuit of hegemonic modernity.For Spivak, working for the subaltern does not demand speaking for them, rather it entails facilitating their speech acts. From the perspective of an anthropology of anarchy, the opening up of political communication towards inclusion of subaltern speech is, on the one hand, an essential goal. It is congruent with the basic democratic principles of consensual decision-making among social groups living outside or at the margins of state influence. On the other hand, the insistence on including subalterns into hegemony entails an inherent paradox: many subalterns, who resort to anarchic ways of life, escape from the state and its communicational structures as a cultural and political survival strategy. My ethnographic example from the Andaman Islands in India addresses this tension. I focus on the subaltern history and resistance practices of the so-called Ranchis, Adivasis (first settlers, Indigenous Peoples) from the Central Indian hill region, who migrated to the Andamans as contract labourers and settled in marginal forests. The Ranchis’ evasion from the state into the margins, enabled by subsistence practices, presents an alternative to Spivak’s compelling demand to bring subalterns into speech: an inclusion of the Ranchis into the circuits of hegemony would moderately benefit them in terms of getting access to the state and the economy, but, at the same time, it would also imply a loss of their partial autarky, as well as cultural and socio-political autonomy from the outside world.