Scales of subversion

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumScales of subversion Comment on Herzfeld, Michael. 2022. Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Jatin DuaJatin DuaUniversity of Michigan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWhat does it mean to subvert a system? The subversive often entails a sense of the insurgent; to subvert is to attempt to overthrow. But, unlike the actions of the belligerent, the subversive acts from within the system. Legal regimes have been attuned to this distinction between subversion and belligerence, labeling the former as a betrayal and the latter as an act of war. While subversion is not war (though it can be war on the cheap), it doesn’t mean that leniency is afforded to the subversive. Among the forms of punishment for engaging in subversive acts in various US criminal statutes is the denial of a burial in a national cemetery (38 CFR § 3.903). The specter of subversion has been critical in the development of national security states and forms of criminalization and illegalization, as well as moral panics.In the anthropology of the state, the subversive, when it appears, emerges primarily as a discourse about discourse, about the ways in which “subversive actors” and “acts of subversion” serve to legitimize forms of state violence and its projects of illegalization (Caldeira 2000; Andersson 2014). Within this same literature there exists a counterarchive of subversion. Here, the subversive is attached to modes of “insurgent citizenship” or an “art of not being governed” (Holston 2007; Scott 2010). Subversion is one of the “weapons of the weak” in the arsenal of the marginal, a modality through which subaltern citizens resist the state. The story of the subversive, then, is a story of these two scales, the view from the state or modes of resistance and rejection from below.Based on his 2018 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, Michael Herzfeld’s Subversive archaism is an important intervention that unsettles the ease with which the subversive tends to be identified with the state or against the state. Moving across two ethnographic locations that have enjoyed pride of place within his extensive ethnographic oeuvre, the mountain village of Zoniana in central Crete and the Pom Mahakan (Fort Mahakan) in Rattanakosin Island (old city) Bangkok, while drawing from a series of other locales, this work exemplifies the productivity of ethnographic comparison to generate analytical framings that breathe new life into the anthropology of political organization. As Herzfeld notes, while the nation-state as “newcomer to the galaxy of social arrangements” has “achieved global supremacy” within these forms of political organization it remains vulnerable. He argues, “the threat to the nation-state is that of an insubordinate ‘way of knowing and seeing’—and using—national heritage” (p. 2). Heritage, specifically competing claims over national heritage, unites these disparate examples as Herzfeld’s interlocutors, with varying degrees of success, lay claim to alternative narratives of national heritage that embarrass bureaucratic and elite sensibilities and on occasion threaten the “self-ascribed cultural authority” of those who claim to represent the nation-state.Heritage is important to this story both given its centrality to the nation-state project and for revealing a crucial aspect of Herzfeld’s argument, namely that both sides of this contest over heritage “look remarkably like what they oppose” (p. 5). Unlike belligerents, who declare war on the very foundation of the nation-state, Herzfeld’s subversive archaists do not reject the nation, but often “exceed the traditionalism of the state” (p. 5). Heritage matters because the rules of the game say it does. On this point both the bureaucrat and the subversive archaist agree. But if the bureaucrat has a Western-inflected global idea of heritage that fits within the modernist project of the nation-state, the subversive alternative is a little uncouth: it does not speak to bourgeois sensibility. It emerges in an adherence to practices such as banditry, living in extended nonnuclear family structures, and other such “outmoded” ways of life. By claiming to be authentically national, the subversive archaist reminds modernist citizens and their technocratic sensibility of the thing they seek to forget amidst the edifice of the nation-state and its lofty ideas of citizenship and rationality. For Herzfeld this challenges the nation-state in ways that are distinct from the challenge of minority belonging or noncitizens. If these “others” to the nation can be ignored, the subversive archaists cannot just be ignored because they challenge something closer, something more internecine. Remember that while the subversive is accused of disloyalty by the state, in turn those accused of subversion often claim that it was loyalty to the ideal of the nation-state that led to a forced betrayal.Subversive archaists often appear by elimination in the book; they are not this nor that. In part, this is because there is something profoundly slippery, unsettling, and inchoate about this claim to simultaneous loyalty and critique, patriotism and insurgency. At times this mode of polity is reminiscent of the world of “primitive rebels” (indeed Herzfeld locates the mafiosi in the constellation of actors that can be labeled as subversive archaists). In Eric Hobsbawm’s classic text, primitive rebels are those engaged in a prepolitical, indeed “blind” form of claims-making. In this framework, the social bandit is the archetypical outlaw form. Social banditry, “a universal and virtually unchanging phenomenon, is little more than endemic peasant protest against oppression and poverty: a cry for vengeance on the rich and oppressors, a vague dream of some curb upon them, a righting of individual wrongs” (Hobsbawm 1959: 5). For Hobsbawm, the ambitions of social bandits are often modest based on next to no organization or ideology. These figures were no revolutionaries, but rather reformist or even conservative in their world view. Occupying an interstitial place, primitive rebels represented a last gasp of a passing social order, like the owl of Minerva spreading its wings amidst dramatic socioeconomic transformations.Here lies a crucial, if at times troubling, distinction between social bandits and subversive archaists. Social banditry is a call for justice, a mode of critique and vengeance. But subversive archaism in Herzfeld’s formulation is not a form of social banditry, it has no claim to vengeance, instead it is a call for recognition. Like the nation-state it too recognizes the history of the nation-state in modes of war-making (Tilly 1985) and may valorize a prestate bandit past but what it wants is for its claim to community to be recognized and acknowledged as the true bearer of the nation. In order to do so it seeks authority through archaism. If the bureaucrat says (with apologies to Latour) we have always been modern, this proclamation of modernity is built on claiming a monopoly over the use of things archaic. In turn, the subversive respond with the authenticity of their archaism.This claim to archaism is not only a challenge to the bureaucrat, but also to the project of anthropology. A powerful and trenchant critique of ethnographic practice has emphasized disciplinary forms of spatial and temporal distancing that deny coevalness to ethnographic interlocutors (see, for example, Fabian 1983; Abu-Lughod 1991). A critical discourse within anthropology has sought to undo that difference through various forms of temporal bridging and enacting solidarity, a recognition of the fact that we are all in this together. But speaking in archaism is not about claiming coevalness or even insisting on ontological separation. It is about inhabiting the seeming anachronism of worlds structured by patrilineal kinship, segmentary lineages, and other modalities of communitas identified with the world of “status.” While this makes archaism embarrassing and at times threatening to the nation-state, it also makes, in spite of its claims to inclusion, subversive archaism a project that can be coopted within ideologies of the right and far-right. While Herzfeld rightly cautions us to avoid lumping subversive archaism within proliferating projects of authoritarianism and xenophobia, I want to ask a separate question about this affinity that seeks to move beyond the problem of cooption or collusion. I’d like to think about the kinds of futures that get imagined when one inhabits archaism. If subversive archaism is not simply critique or vengeance but a form of communitas, what communal and political futures can be imagined from the perspective of the subversive? I’m thinking here of the specific ways in which strands of Afrofuturism turn to the monarchic and the precolonial as a way to imagine futurity and community (Eshun 2003). In doing so, they subversively use these political and communal forms not as static foundations, but as something already dynamic, that has its own past and its own future outside of colonialism and the nation. Does subversive archaism, similarly, also have an ability to imagine and produce polities that shatter divides of past and present, status and contract?Finally, I want to enquire about the centrality of the scalar formation of the nation-state to our understanding of subversive archaism. In both Zoniana and Pom Mahakan, Herzfeld emphasizes the various performances of loyalty to the nation even as residents contest the bureaucratic state’s monopoly on the meaning of the nation. As they move between the registers of civility and parody, what is never questioned is both loyalty to the nation and that the primary audience of Herzfeld’s interlocutors remains the state and its bureaucratic, modernist apparatus. I wonder how subversive archaists might account for and engage other scales and regional formations, from the regional to transregional flows of capital that shape the (im)possibilities of polity? Do subversive archaists misrecognize the power of the nation-state? Are they always subaltern actors? Can subversive archaists address transnational capital and other formations and politics that escape the boundness of the nation-state? If loyalty, parody, and civility are key in the encounter between subversive archaists and the state, what other speech acts emerge in rescaling subversive archaism beyond the state? I ask this as someone whose primary interlocutors in the Indian Ocean, pirates and seafarers, share many of the characteristics that Herzfeld identifies with subversive archaists. However, as they traverse liquid paths in the Indian Ocean they encounter and address a variety of actors from navy vessels (some imperial, with wider-than-national aspirations) to a host of other vessels at sea, as well as insurance agents and ransom negotiators on land (Dua 2019). I wonder, can there be subversive archaism without the nation-state?These questions and my attempts to rescale and resituate subversive archaism exemplify the generative nature of this concept and Herzfeld’s comparative ethnography. Subversive archaism is an important, and timely, contribution to understandings of polity and politics in a moment when the need to imagine life otherwise is urgently needed.ReferencesAbu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing against culture.” In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard Fox, 137–62. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarAndersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarCaldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. 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Skinner Book Award, and has published widely on maritime anthropology, captivity, political economy, and sovereignty. His current research on chokepoints, port-making, and stuckness at sea is supported by the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.Jatin Dua[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 13, Number 1Spring 2023 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725204 © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.