Julia Eckert

From subjects to citizens : legalisation from below and the homogenisation of the legal sphere

Abstract The paper examines the increasing relative social significance of the normative and institutional complex of state law, particularly in relation to political structures of domination and procedures of ruling in urban India. Resistance to everyday structures of domination is increasingly sought by the use of law that complements or even replaces other modes of resistance such as protest, withdrawal, subversion or other ‘weapons of the weak’. The use of law as a ‘weapon of the weak’ is interlinked with the wider political processes of democratisation in India. Democratisation is transforming a sense of entitlement rooted in the Nehruvian ideology of the developmental state into a rights consciousness. Particularly those who have to face transgressions of state legal norms by the state agencies on an everyday basis increasingly use the law to negotiate their rights. The paper discusses the immediate effects of law as a weapon of the weak, as well as the longer-term effects, such as the reproduction or transformation of structures of domination. It proposes to open up the analysis of practices of citizens and state agents to their productive and transformative potentials. It proposes to look at the way practices entail a gradual transformation of institutions of government and thus shape the state beyond producing a ‘state effect’ or the mimetic reproduction of bureaucratic procedures.

The charisma of direct action : power, politics, and the Shiv Sena

This is a study of the Shiv Sena, a minor but most influential affiliate of the Hindu nationalist movement. It discusses the politics and appeal of the party which has been governing Mumbai and has achieved electoral success in a democracy that it often despises. Through an analysis of the Shiv Sena, the book attempts to understand anti-pluralist movements of violent direct action in particular.

Urban Governance and Emergent Forms of Legal Pluralism in Mumbai

Abstract The little discussed forms of legal pluralism that emerge within the effective administration of justice and entitlements by state and non-state agencies have long determined the operative legal order of (urban) India. They are considered here in relation to the ‘selective state’, characterised by the formal and informal devolution of judicial competences of the state to alternative organisations. The merger of devolution and appropriation gives rise to new forms of legal pluralism, illustrated in Mumbai by the Shiv Sena, a regional political party of the Hindu Right. The Shiv Sena has established local party offices, the Shakhas, in every part of Mumbai as well as in most towns and villages of the state of Maharashtra. The Shakhas offer numerous local services, performing distributive and productive tasks which involve the organisation of allocation. The Shiv Sena also through the Shakhas explicitly takes on regulatory functions in many matters, most clearly in their administration of local disputes. An informal system of ‘courts’ within the Shakhas deals with disputes relating to everyday living in the city, including civil as well as criminal matters, and often also administrative regulation. Judgments are swiftly enforced, by violence if necessary. Rulings are said to be guided by ‘common sense’, this notion involving implicitly the Shiv Sena’s notions of the proper order, but being also intricately linked to local social relations. The Shiv Sena’s courts are justified on grounds of accessibility and efficiency, supporting the party’s general claim to fulfil state tasks better than the state itself. However, the operative legal order thus established is not hegemonic. It is constantly open to adaptations and changes that result from plural pressures and the competitive normative offers of various actors in the field of adjudication, and thus sways between phases of monopolisation and dominance and phases of pluralisation and adaptation. In the daily practice of the Shiv Sena issues such as those of women’s rights are often dealt with in contradictory ways, differing from one Shakha to the other, as well as depending on the specific local constellation and demands. The Shiv Sena has achieved a relatively high degree of institutional incorporation into state modes of governance. Its interpretations and enactments of law are (re-) introduced into the practices of state agencies, and its institutional integration with some state agencies is one of various degrees of cooperation and complementarity, and thus of mutual interdependence. The case of the Shiv Sena suggests a question as to the interaction between state and non-state legal orders. In studies of legal pluralism, while non-state legal orders are said to be semi-autonomous, state law is often treated as autonomous, as shaping but not as being shaped. In Mumbai state law is constitutive of the rules of the game, but seems also to be fundamentally transformed by the productions of legal order in the interactions of various actors involved in the administration of law and order, resulting in what is a relatively integrated operative legal order. The case sheds light on the complex matters of the use and transformation of law and the precariousness of power relations. It suggests that in India the emergence of the dominance of local governance by organisations like the Shiv Sena, ensues from a merger of cunning devolution by the state and forceful appropriation by local organisations.

Introduction: subjects of citizenship

In a peculiar paradox, citizenship has resurfaced as a central format of struggles for justice and social well-being today. That is, social and political struggles of individuals and social groups are often expressed in the form of claims on the state with reference to rights entailed in citizenship regimes. This is paradoxical because it occurs at a time when states’ aspirations to sovereignty and their presumption of responsibility seem to have been abandoned to some degree. This is not to say that the state has disappeared, as so many in the 1990s predicted would happen (e.g. Strange 1996, Altvater and Mahnkopf 1997, Friedman 1999, Schmidt 1999). Rather, the state remains a central site of sovereignty, and despite the increased academic and political attention to alternative, competing or complementary sites of sovereignty (cf. Ong 2000, p. 57, Schlichte and Wilke 2000, Schlichte and Migdal 2005, p. 16, Hansen and Stepputat 2006), states have, in general, not lost out to these alternatives but have established or continued long-standing plural constellations of governing (Eckert 2004, Zürcher and Köhler 2004, von BendaBeckmann et al. 2009). What has changed, however, is, first, the ideological underpinnings of this relationship between states and their citizen-subjects. The reconceptualisation of the state in terms of ‘good governance’, which started in the late 1990s, was followed by a refashioning of state sovereignty in the face of the institutionalisation of a global human rights regime. This was fundamentally shaped by geo-political relations that were informed by various security concerns structuring the global geographies of culpability (cf. Sundar 2004, Clarke 2009). Second, and in a dialectic relation to the changing ideological underpinnings of state/citizen relations, the balance between regulatory, productive, distributive and controlling functions is in a constant state of flux, with states advancing in some of these functions and abandoning others (Eckert et al. 2003, von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2009). Of course, at no point in history did actual states conform to a single idea of the relationship between citizens and the state, neither in practice nor in theory; differential citizenship has always been the norm (e.g. Inda 2005, Holston 2006, Nuijten and Lorenzo 2009), and the actual forms of stateness continue to be highly diverse (Schlichte and Migdal 2005, p. 16). The aspirations of high modernism for the state to take responsibility for creating some sort of commonwealth, however, have increasingly been abandoned or redistributed.

Anthropologie der Konflikte : Georg Elwerts konflikttheoretische Thesen in der Diskussion

Einleitung: Gewalt, Meidung und Verfahren: zur Konflikttheorie Georg Elwerts / Julia Eckert

Beyond Agatha Christie: Relationality and critique in anthropological theory

Critical anthropological theory needs to be a theory of relationality. Only through a relational theory can we come to a perception of our fundamental commonality and conceptualise difference as being given significance by the unequal relations that we stand in towards each other. A relational theory needs concepts that reflect on the asymmetrical interdependence that shapes the dynamics of power relations, which give rise to institutions of ‘significant difference’. I propose Luc Boltanski’s notion of ‘situation’ as a concept that enables us to grasp the structured contingency that shapes our mutual interdependence. Situation, by making possible the micro-analysis of macro-relations, also provides the conceptual tools to think beyond that which is, towards that which is possible.

Die Verstetigung des Konflikts: zur Rolle von Religion im Hindu-Nationalismus

Im Fruhjahr 2002 wurden im indischen Bundesstaat Gujarat 2000 Menschen in kommunalistischen Ausschreitungen ermordet. Fast alle, die starben, waren Muslime, und die Zahl der Toten liegt wahrscheinlich viel hoher als die offiziellen Schatzungen es zugeben. 72 Stunden, drei Tage, hatte der Ministerprasident von Gujarat, Narendra Modi, der „verstandlichen Wut“ der Hindus gegeben, um sich auszutoben, der angeblich naturlichen und zwangslaufigen „Reaktion auf die Aktion“: ein Pogrom als New-ton’sches Naturgesetz. Dann wutete die Gewalt zwei Monate, unterstutzt von der Polizei, gerechtfertigt von fuhrenden Politikern Indiens.

Theories of Militancy in Practice: Explanations of Muslim Terrorism in India

This article analyzes the interaction between theories of radicalization and state responses to militancy in India. Focusing on the interpretation of the increased frequency of terrorist attacks in Indian metropolises in the last decade, the article examines the narratives surrounding those classified as terrorists in the context of rising Muslim militancy in the country. Different state agencies operate with different theories about the links between processes of radicalization and terrorist violence. The scenarios of radicalization underlying legislative efforts to prevent terrorism, the construction of motives by the police, and the interpretation of violence by the judiciary all rely on assumptions about radicalization and violence. Such narratives are used to explain terrorism both to security agencies and to the public; they inform the categories and scenarios of prevention. Prevention relies on detection of future deeds, planning, intentions, and even potential intentions. “Detection” of potential intentions relies on assumptions about specific dispositions. Identification of such dispositions in turn relies on the context-specific theories of the causes of militancy. These determine what “characteristics” of individuals or groups indicate potential threats and form the basis for their categorization as “potentially dangerous.” The article explores the cultural contexts of theories of radicalization, focusing on how they are framed by societal understandings of the causes of deviance and the relation between the individual and society emerging in contemporary India. It examines the shift in the perception of threat and the categories of “dangerous others” from a focus on role to a focus on ascriptive identity.

Tugend, Recht und Moral: Tendenzen der Verantwortungszuschreibung

Abstract The attribution of responsibility in world society is increasingly a field of contestation. On the one hand, the perceptions of far-reaching causal and moral links between spatially and temporally distant events are ever more explicitly pronounced; on the other hand, the very complexity of these links often engenders a fragmentation of responsibility in law as well as in moral commitment. Identifying three competing conceptualisations of responsibility, namely a turn to virtue ethics, processes of juridification, and processes of moralisation, this article explores their different temporal and social dimensions, and the effects they each have on the relation between those held responsible and those affected by the situation that is to be accounted for.

Vision Statement: Anthropological Theory from and for Everybody:

Anthropological Theory (AT) since its first issue in March of 2001 has flourished. It did so by achieving in varied ways the goals laid out for it in the editors’ first editorial, ‘The Six Field System’. Consequently, our vision for the journal is evolutionary, taking what has been accomplished well and improving it. We will publish in areas of anthropological thought where there is intellectual excitement and confrontation, seeking theoretical essays distinguished by their rigor, significance, and movement of intellectual debates into new domains. We will encourage theoretical analyses in realms that are not metaphysical exotica, but emerge from the hurly-burley of life with the goal of ‘making a difference’ – in the sense of speaking to and improving the human condition. Clearly we, the new editors of AT, do have certain views concerning the discipline, and we would like to make these clear to readers of, and authors for, the journal.