Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T00:33:02.815Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Social and Cultural Politics of Everyday Resistance and Empowerment

from Part Three - Resistances and Intersections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

Cecilia McCallum
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Silvia Posocco
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Martin Fotta
Affiliation:
Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Get access

Summary

This chapter looks at the anthropological contributions to resistance as it manifests itself within people’s everyday lives. It sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which power, in the Foucauldian sense, is renegotiated in the context of everyday relationships and cultural activities. The material discussed in this chapter offers a reflection on how new forms of identities around gender and sexuality, religion, race, and ultimately agency are produced through political and cultural forms of resistance to sexism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, imperialism, and nationalism. In the first part, the chapter sets out the anthropological debates on resistance with a specific focus on Black feminist anthropology and anthropology of law and human rights. In a second part, the chapter examines different samples of feminist practice of resistance including political protest and social movements and everyday bodily performativity. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the methodological implications a feminist-queer anthropological gaze on resistance entails, stressing the need to take the voices and experiences of actors located at the margins as a starting point from where to understand the diverse, and to some extent paradoxical, forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abu‐Lughod, L. (1990). The romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 4155.Google Scholar
Abu-Lughod, L. (2010). The active social life of “Muslim women’s rights”: a plea for ethnography, not polemic, with cases from Egypt and Palestine. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6(1), 145.Google Scholar
Alexander, M. J., and Mohanty, C. T. (1997). Introduction: genealogies, legacies, movements. In Alexander, M. J. and Mohanty, C. T., eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies and Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, pp. xiiixlii.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands: la frontera, vol. 3. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Asad, T., ed. (1973). Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Ithaca Press.Google Scholar
Badran, M. (2008). Engaging Islamic feminism. Islamic Feminism: Current Perspectives, 96, 2536.Google Scholar
Brown, M. (1996). On resisting resistance. American Anthropologist, 98(4), 729–35.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., and Sabsay, L., eds. (2016). Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, P. (2009). On resistance: the case of 17th century Quakers. Durham Anthropology, 16(2), 822.Google Scholar
Cooper, F. (1992). The dialectics of decolonization: nationalism and labor movements in postwar Africa. Paper prepared for the Power Conference, Program in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, K. (1989). “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–68.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 1241–99.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999). Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. Mineola, NY: Dover.Google Scholar
Duncome, S. (2008). Resistance. In Darity, W., ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, pp. 207–10.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1998). The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Fraser, N. (1993). Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In Calhoun, C., ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 109–42.Google Scholar
Göle, N. (1996). The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gramsci, A. (2006). State and civil society. In Sharma, A. and Gupta, A., eds., The Anthropology of the State. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 7185.Google Scholar
Guha, R. (1985). Forestry and social protest in British Kumaun, c. 1893–1921. In Guha, R., ed., Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi, pp. 54100.Google Scholar
Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J., eds. (1997). Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hall, S. (2006). What is this “black” in black popular culture?. In Hall, S., ed., Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 479–89.Google Scholar
Halstead, F. (1978). Out Now!: A Participant’s Account of the American Movement against the Vietnam War. Pathfinder Press.Google Scholar
Harding, S. G., ed. (1987). Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Harrison, F. V., ed. (1991). Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.Google Scholar
Harrison, F. V. (2011). Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.Google Scholar
Hart, G. (1991). Engendering everyday resistance: gender, patronage and production politics in rural Malaysia. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 19(1), 93121.Google Scholar
Hirschkind, C. (2001). Civic virtue and religious reason: an Islamic counter-public. Cultural Anthropology, 16(1), 337.Google Scholar
Hooks, B. (2000). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Hurston, Z. N. (1990 [1935]). Mules and Men, reprint. New York: Perennial.Google Scholar
Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with patriarchy. Gender & Society, 2(3), 274–90.Google Scholar
Lamphere, L. (2016). Feminist anthropology engages social movements. In Lewin, E. and Silverstein, M. L., eds., Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 4164.Google Scholar
Lifton, R. J. (1999). The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lorde, A. (2018). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. London: Penguin UK.Google Scholar
MacLeod, A. E. (1992). Hegemonic relations and gender resistance: the new veiling as accommodating protest in Cairo. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 17(3), 533–57.Google Scholar
Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Meisenhelder, S. (1996). Conflict and resistance in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men. Journal of American Folklore, 109(433), 267–88.Google Scholar
Merry, S. E. (2006). Transnational human rights and local activism: mapping the middle. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 3851.Google Scholar
Mirza, Q. (2008). Islamic feminism and gender equality. Isim Review, 21, 30–1.Google Scholar
Mohanty, C. T., Russo, A., and Torres, L., eds. (1991). Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, H. L. (1988). Feminism and Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Moraga, C., and Anzaldúa, G., eds. (2015). This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Navarro, T., Williams, B., and Ahmad, A. (2013). Sitting at the kitchen table: fieldnotes from women of color in anthropology. Cultural Anthropology, 28(3), 443–63.Google Scholar
Ong, A. (2010). Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. (1995). Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37(1), 173–93.Google Scholar
Pandey, G. (1982). Peasant revolt and Indian nationalism: the peasant movement in Awadh, 1919–1922. Subaltern Studies, 1, 143–97.Google Scholar
Phadke, S., Ranade, S., and Khan, S. (2009). Why loiter? Radical possibilities for gendered dissent. In Butcher, M. and Velayutham, S., eds., Dissent and Cultural Resistance in Asia’s Cities. New York: Routledge, pp. 199217.Google Scholar
Povinelli, E. A. (2001). Radical worlds: the anthropology of incommensurability and inconceivability. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30(1), 319–34.Google Scholar
Rajagopal, B. (2005). The role of law in counter-hegemonic globalization and global legal pluralism: lessons from the Narmada Valley struggle in India. Leiden Journal of International Law, 18(3), 345–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Randeria, S. (2007). Civil society and legal pluralism in the shadow of the caste: entangled modernities in postcolonial India. In Schirmer, D., Saalmann, G., and Kessler, C., eds., Hybridising East and West: Tales beyond Westernisation. Empirical Contributions to the Debates on Hybridity. Berlin: LIT Verlag, pp. 97124.Google Scholar
Reid, J. (2019). “We the resilient”: colonizing indigeneity in the era of Trump. Resilience, 7(3), 255–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Relis, T. (2011). Human rights and southern realities. Human Rights Quarterly, 33, 509–51.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M. Z., Lamphere, L., and Bamberger, J. (1974). Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Sandoval, C. (1991). US third world feminism: the theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world. Genders, 10, 124.Google Scholar
Sandoval, C. (2013). Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, J. C. (1989). Everyday forms of resistance. The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, 4(1), 3362.Google Scholar
Shohat, E., ed. (2001). Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sivaramakrishan, K. (2005). Intellectual genealogies for the concept of everyday resistance. American Anthropologist, 107(3), 346–55.Google Scholar
Sousa Santos, B. de (2002). Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation. London: Butterworths Lexis Nexis.Google Scholar
Spivak, G. (2013). The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Morris, R. C., ed., Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 2178.Google Scholar
Stella, F. (2012). The politics of in/visibility: carving out queer space in Ul’yanovsk. Europe-Asia Studies, 64(10), 1822–46.Google Scholar
Stoler, A. L. (1986). Plantation politics and protest on Sumatra’s east coast. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 13(2), 124–43.Google Scholar
Tschalaer, M. H. (2015). Muslim women’s rights activists’ visibility: stretching the gendered boundaries of the public space in the city of Lucknow. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 11, 118.Google Scholar
Tschalaer, M. H. (2017). Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tsing, A. L. (1993). In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, B. C. (2015). # BlackLivesMatter: anti-Black racism, police violence, and resistance. Fieldsights – Hot Spots. Cultural Anthropology Online.Google Scholar
Williams, B. C. (2018). The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, R. A. (2006). Afterword to “Anthropology and human rights in a new key”: the social life of human rights. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 7783.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×