Fomenting a quiet revolution

N Jonathan Unaka

Using anthropological investigations of the Kabyle of Algeria, Bourdieu elucidates the human condition, by making profound insights about communal interactions.¹ He generates a critical theory that analyzes social structure. He looks at economic transactions, social organization and other examples of culturally based interactions that illustrate the world view of a particular society. This is extrapolated to similar societies and is contrasted with those not seen as similar. The theory thus developed by Bourdieu puts forward the idea of two parallel worlds; the universe of the undisputed (which he calls “doxa”) and the universe of argument. In the first, opinion is disallowed since the nature of doxa is that one is suppressed by the system and self-suppresses, in part because the idea of something different is unknown. Thus an individual in doxa can only push back by further withdrawal (less discourse), which further strengthens the system. In the second universe, there is a division into orthodoxy and heterodoxy. When a break occurs in the doxa (usually by the introduction of a foreign element), the system begins to lose its absolute control. Those who had benefitted from the hierarchy of the society will attempt to reinstate that dominance. This is the development of orthodoxy – using the mechanism of dominance to try to reassert a declining worldview. Conversely, heterodoxy accepts that there are always other ways of seeing the world and often accepts that none are superior. The world the anthropologist is observing has its own rules – its own warrants, which explain the behaviors of the people observed. They inhabit a different world. Though this world is different, there are parallels with the world of the anthropologist. The anthropologist uses language that does not claim to be objective but aspires to be non-judgmental, in the description of the different context. Paradoxically, certain value judgments can be made, within that world-view, in the process of theorizing.

Bringing these ways of theory making by seeking out emergent patterns, art historians are using material culture to help explain the complex web of human interaction. Bernard Herman is a proponent of this approach.² He analyzes the life Thomas Mendenhall, a Wilmington, DE merchant and property owner in the late 18th century. We are introduced to him by way of the demolition his residence in the early 21st century. Herman uses Mendenhall as a lens with which to see the contemporaneous life of Wilmington. He posits that what we glean from this is transferable to the rest of early revolutionary America. He also implies that in understanding the history of this building and its synchronistic context, we can understand something about the decline that it epitomizes in that part of Wilmington, and possibly similar areas of other such cities. To understand this we must travel back to the time of its construction. We must understand what the underlying motivations of the person(s) involved. By observing the evidence of the material record, including architecture and the artifacts of everyday use, in conjunction with the written record, one can arrive at a better, fuller understanding of the setting under study. More broadly, written records of a society “reveal the self-conscious values and beliefs,” whereas, the artifacts of everyday indicate “precisely… what a culture does take for granted.” They are a record, so to speak of the warrants of the culture. Involved in these unearthing are an investigation of the buildings owned by the subject – especially, the one in which he lived, the crockery unearthed from the building site, period city directory, showing ownership of property, bills of sale, invoices of transactions involving the subject, and newspaper articles about the subject. In addition, letters and other correspondence between the subject and others or about the subject and diaries with entries about events that pertain to the subject, also form part of this rich study.

Unlike Bourdieu, Herman does not have access to the subject or other actors. To fill out the picture more comprehensively, he also studies literature about architecture from that period to establish the refinement and relative cost of buildings. He also cites research from other sites detailing crockery unearthed from synchronic location, to establish a relationship between social standing and the types of crockery possessed in a contemporaneous home and documentation showing transactions of importation and sale of crockery at the time to indicate relative costs. He also reads through period city directory, bills of sale, invoices, newspaper articles, letters and diaries discussing pertinent issues more broadly to get a sense of the period. Thus a fuller picture begins to emerge. Dovey discusses Bourdieu’s coinage of habitus to “refer to the complex net of structured predispositions.”³ Thus, the ‘arbitrary’ can be constituted as “‘real’, culture seen as nature, ideology inscribed in habit and habitat,” coloring the landscape, influence our warrants and assumptions. She reflects on how his thinking parallels Giddens’ theory of structuration:

…structuration is based on a differentiation between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’. ‘Agency’ is simply the ‘capacity’ to transform our world. ‘Structures’, on the other hand, are the organized properties of social systems in the form of rules and resources, the frameworks of possibility within which our capacities are realized or not. The relations between structure and agency are primarily those of ‘enabling’ and ‘constraining’. Structure both enables and constrains the forms of agency that are possible. And at the same time structures are constructed by agents.⁴

Any urban landscape is thus imbued with these multi-facetted layers of meanings. It is well understood that in looking at a site, architects, urban planners and others professionally engaged in the recording and recreating the environment, glean what they can of topographical and other social records. However, these records are represented, according to Heatherington, “not merely… [by] intellectual labor”, but by “sensation [that] evoke the metaphors that give apparent form and life to history.”⁵ She also writes of conflicting visions of what that past is and what metaphors are used. Hence, the translation of these sensations and material artifacts are in constant flux and are constantly being negotiated. People come with varied notions of what things mean and what meaning is. These differences often align with certain institutions or form along gender lines. Translation here is intrinsic to the everyday lived experience. Since as, Herman has showed, we live in a multi-layered world⁶ that according to Heatherington involves a kind of time travel,⁷ as we are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting the landscape. These interactions operate in a realm that involves complex power dynamics. The interactions of the institutions of the state, often represented by the presence of the police only heighten the creativity with which non-dominant groups manipulate the system.⁸ The dominant group wishes to maintain their position of power and manifests in overt and covert oppression of expression by others. Dominance is maintained through control of structures such as the use of language. Or in the words of Erving Goffman:

Messages that are not part of the officially accredited flow are modulated so as to not interfere seriously with the accredited messages. Nearby persons who are not participants visibly desist in some way from exploiting their communication position and so modify their own communication, if any, so as to provide interference.⁹

In all these environs, there are socially accepted structures, but equally there are frequent transgressions of those social strictures. The marginalized group often takes and owns these restrictions – even celebrating them. For instance, Sharon Zukin discusses the ways members of dominant culture in America historically claimed that it is in “the black ghetto where all blacks ‘belong’, or are relegated, by their exclusion from other social sites.”¹⁰ African Americans, in turn, took ownership of their neighborhoods and develop positive signifiers of the ghetto – even the word begins to have positive connotations. This repeats in numerous immigrant communities and even in so-called homogeneous communities, along gender lines, socio-economic lines, etc…


James C. Scott refers to Hegel in formulating a theory about how the “weak” are constantly testing and questioning the power structures.¹¹ He decries leftist academics who romanticize “peasant revolutions.” He notes that they often never work and in the rare occasions they do, they generally bring in more autocratic regimes. The desires of the peasant multitude are usurped by the dreams of the heroic few. After all, it is rare that the proletariet cared much about Marx’s vision. They often did not wish to rock the boat – they wanted to get by, get through. Thus Scott describes the elaborate ways that the poor of rural Malaysia negotiate within the given power structure of tradition and religion. Thus in any society, history is written and rewritten by these acts of transaction and translation – and the world is enacted through negotiation. These everyday acts are what Scott calls “small arm fire in the class war,” or what a Rasta friend of mine has named “fomenting quiet revolution.”

1 Pierre Bourdieu, Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power, in
Culture/power/history: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. by Dirks et al. Princeton University
Press, 1994
2 Bernard L. Herman, “Multiple Materials, Multiple Meanings: The Fortunes of Thomas Mendenhall”,
Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 19, No. 1. (Spring, 1984), pp. 67-86.
3 Kim Dovey, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, London: Routledge, 1999, p19
4 Dovey, Framing Places, 1999
5 Tracey Heatherington, “Street Tactics: Catholic Ritual and the Senses of the Past in Central Sardinia”,
Ethnology, vol. 38, no. 4, Fall 1999, pp 315-334
6 Herman, “Multiple Materials, Multiple Meanings”
7 Heatherington, “Street Tactics”, 319.
8 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-
27
9 Erving Goffman, Ritual Interaction: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon, 1967. p35
10 Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, 1993
11 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press
1985