Power in a minor key: Rethinking anthropological accounts of power alongside London’s community organisers

Farhan Samanani

doi:10.1177/0308275x211038041

Abstract

Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension. Social scientific theories of power allow anthropologists to situate subjects and mediate between contending perspectives. However, in doing so, such theories inevitably also end up displacing the grounded perspective of interlocutors themselves. This tension sustains a contentious debate, which positions attention to power and attention to grounded perspectives in opposition. In this article I draw on ethnography conducted with the UK’s largest community organising body, Citizens UK, to trace an alternative approach to this tension. For Citizens UK organisers this tension becomes a way of driving change by enrolling diverse actors in collective projects and by displacing hegemonic understandings from within. Good theories, for Citizens UK organisers, are characterised by the practical ability to mediate between contending positions and, in doing so, transform them. To make sense of this mode of theorisation I take up queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘low theory’, geographer Cindi Katz’s notion of ‘minor theory’, and I draw on the linguistic anthropology notion of ‘register’. This allows me to unpack how organisers use theory to act, but also to trouble established anthropological understandings of what theory is and what it ought to do.

Highlights

Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension
I draw on ethnography conducted with the UK’s largest community organising body, Citizens UK (CUK)
The theory of power elaborated by CUK organisers may seem slippery, tautological, perhaps even self-contradictory: power is the ability to act, but to act, you need power; relational power is built by appealing to self-interest, but self-interest is constituted through relationships; to secure change you must forge a relationship with your opponents, but doing so involves allowing this relationship to reshape your interests, imperilling the original impetus for action – and so on

Summary

Introduction

Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension. Social scientific theories of power allow anthropologists to situate subjects and mediate between contending perspectives. The three core goals of organising expressed a distinctively civicrepublican vision of political life (see Feldman, 2013), where politics was not about the exercise of detached reason or the pursuit of individual interests, but about the interweaving of several elements, including: everyday experience; feelings of belonging; relationships of attachment and accountability; collective traditions such as those found in faith institutions or in the culture of a school; and particular forms of subjecthood.

Results

Conclusion