Politics isn’t Boring

Welcome back. There is an atrociously long gap between this blog post and its predecessor. Yet despite my limited chances of winning blogger of the year I intend to reoccupy this space with the hope of elevating the insights, materials and frameworks I have discovered at university onto a useful public platform. Whether the benefactor of this use value is me or one single student, who happened to land upon this page, is irrelevant. I recognise the significance of this endeavour in the creation of a resource that accredits and evaluates anthropological text whilst staging a dialogue between these insights and the capricious nature of life in the contemporary moment. An additional shoutout must be given to the corona virus for giving me 10 days of emptiness that I’ve chosen to fill with words (this blog's pic features Hugo the dog and I crafting this post from isolation station).

So, to begin properly: Politics isn’t Boring

This post introduces the field of political anthropology, that which Jonathan Spencer (1997, pg. 5) branded as ‘the sub-discipline that died of boredom.’ Despite the callousness of his words, Spencer managed to capture my attention given that in a somewhat childlike manner I have always found politics rather boring. Perhaps dense may be the more appropriate term to account for my perception of the complex myriad of exhaustive policies, historic institutions, vying parties and general air of grumpiness which appeared to compose politics; a denseness too intimidating to tackle. However, I have since moved beyond my political ignorance with the help of this sub-discipline and its sensitivity to the way individuals experience politics and understand themselves as political subjects within their intimate, everyday encounters.

Scholars within political anthropology have worked tirelessly to redefine and re-invigorate the field beyond Hick’s unattractive title. Contemporary contributions have veered away from the tendency to document different political and social orders on the basis of their affinity or divergence from the idealised model of euro-American liberal democracy. The symbolic dichotomy between ‘us and all of them’, that which what we call the West is founded upon, gradually became seen for what it is: ‘an ideological construct’ (Trouillot, 2003). Accordingly, Euro-American political anthropologists had to part with preconceptions that the forms of political organisation known to them were somehow better or more rational than that which exists elsewhere. Instead, the sub-discipline has sought to recon with the depth and complexity within what we think of as politics across time and space, blurring the boundaries between the seemingly normal and abnormal, the mundane and peculiar, the rational and irrational. In a broader sense, the development of our intellectual faculties within the discipline in general relies upon an awareness of the manner in which the colonial encounter continues to shape our world.

The scholarship produced from this new and improved discipline of political anthropology, has provided important insight for interrogating what individuals mean by the term politics, what it looks like to enact these meanings, as well as what happens when opposing interpretations come into contact with one another. This culminates in an effort to de-fetishize politics, to make it more real, more human, more tangible and thus more changeable. Rather than envisioning politics merely as a series of abstract, macro arrangements we ought to follow political anthropology’s lead in reckoning with the way politics is all around us, from the way we talk to the way we dress. We are blessed in this country to have the capacity to enact our own individual politics in diverse ways. Yet the elitist, intimidating and dense connotations surrounding this term often distort this reality.

Bringing attention to the political capacity of ourselves and others is central to underscoring the fact that the political landscape should be accessible and welcoming to all. Furthermore, examining threats to our political capacity – lockdown for one – introduces a stronger vocabulary upon which claims against governmental decisions can be launched. Thus political anthropology has the capacity to empower, inspire and elevate unheard voices through its methods and terms of engagement. Personally, I find this significant on the basis that only through recognising individuals’ subjective experiences and enactment of politics – the good, the bad and the ugly- can social and political difference be meaningfully honoured and respected. To embark on such an endeavour is significantly less boring than Spencer and I may have at first imagined.

Spencer, J. (1997). Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3(1), pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034362

Trouillot, M.R. (2003) ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’, in Trouillot, M.R. (ed.) Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. pp. 7-28.