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Resistance and the Problem
of EthnographicRefusal
SHERRY B. ORTNER
173
174 SHERRY B. ORTNER
with larger regional (Nepal state and British Raj) dynamics; Richard Fox's
(1985) study of the evolutionof Sikh identityundercolonialism-all of these
show thatan understandingof political authenticity,of the people's own forms
of inequalityand asymmetry,is not only not incompatiblewith an understand-
ing of resistancebut is in fact indispensableto such an understanding.
THINNING CULTURE
Justas subalternsmustbe seen as havingan authentic,andnot merelyreactive,
politics, so they must be seen as havingan authentic,and not merely reactive,
culture.The cultureconceptin anthropologyhas, like ethnography,come under
heavy attackin recentyears, partlyfor assumptionsof timelessness, homoge-
neity,uncontestedsharedness,andthe like thatwerehistoricallyembeddedin it
and in anthropologicalpracticemore generally.Yet those assumptionsare not
by any means intrinsicto the concept, which can be (re-)mobilizedin powerful
ways withoutthem. Indeeda radicalreconceptualizationof culture, including
both the historicizationandpoliticizationof the concept, has been going on for
at least the last decadeor so in anthropology;andthe attacksuponits traditional
form areby now very muchin the way of beatinga deadhorse(see Dirks, Eley,
and Ortner1994). In any event, like JamesClifford,one of the majorfigures in
the attack on the concept of culture, I do not see how we can do without it
(1988:10). The only alternativeto recognizing that subalternshave a certain
prior and ongoing cultural authenticity,according to subalterns, is to view
subalternresponsesto dominationas ad hoc andincoherent,springingnot from
theirown senses of order,justice, meaning, andthe like butonly from some set
of ideas called into being by the situationof dominationitself.
Culturalthinningis characteristicof some of the most influentialstudies of
resistance currentlyon the scene.8 Some of the problemswith this tendency
may be brought into focus through a consideration of the way in which
religion is (or is not) handled in some of these studies. I do not mean to
suggest by this that religion is equivalent to all of culture. Nonetheless,
religion is always a rich repositoryof culturalbeliefs and values and often has
close affinities with resistance movements as well. I will thus look at the
treatmentof religion in a numberof resistance studies before turningto the
question of culturemore generally.
In one of the foundingtexts of the SubalternStudies school of history, for
example, Ranajit Guha emphasizes the importanceof recognizing and not
disparagingthe religious bases of tribaland peasantrebellions (1988). Indeed
this is one of the centralthreadsof SubalternStudies writings, a majorpartof
its effortto recognize the authenticculturaluniverseof subalterns,from which
8 The work of the British CulturalStudies scholars is
seemingly a major exception to this
point. I would argue if I had time, however, that for much of the work in this field, the treatment
of both culture and ethnographyis also "thin"(Willis 1977 is a majorexception). In any event,
my focus in this section is on influential work that is much more obviously problematicwith
respect to the thickness of culture.
RESISTANCE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC REFUSAL I8I
their acts of resistancegrew. Yet the degree to which the treatmentof religion
in these studies is actually cultural, that is, is actually an effort to illuminate
the conceptual and affective configurationswithin which the peasants are
operating, is generally minimal.9Rather,the peasantis endowed with some-
thing called "religiosity,"a kind of diffuse consciousness that is never further
explored as a set of ideas, practices, and feelings built into the religious
universe the peasant inhabits.
Guhaandothersin his grouparejoustingwith some MarxistIndianhistorians
who share with bourgeois modernizationtheoristsa view of religion as back-
ward. The SubalternStudies writers, in contrast,want to respect and validate
peasantreligiosity as an authenticdimensionof subalternculture,out of which
an authenticallyoppositionalpolitics could be andwas constructed.YetGuha's
own notionof peasantreligiositystill bearsthe tracesof Marx'shostilitytoward
religion, defining "religious consciousness . . . as a massive demonstration of
self-estrangement"(1988:78). Moreover,insteadof exploringand interpreting
this religiosityof the rebelsin any substantiveway, he makesa particulartextual
move to avoid this, relegating to an appendixextracts of the peasants' own
accounts of the religious visions that inspiredtheir rebellion.
A similarcasualnessaboutreligion, while paying it lip service, is evident in
James Scott's Weaponsof the Weak(1985). The point can be seen again not
only in what Scott says and does not say but in the very shape of his text.
There is no general discussion of the religious landscapeof the villagers, and
the discussion of religious movements in his area, many of which had sig-
nificant political dimensions, is confined to a few pages toward the end
(1985:332-5). During Scott's field work a number of rumors of religio-
political propheciescirculatedin his area, as well as a "flying letter"contain-
ing similar prophecies. Like Guha's rebels' testimonies, this letter is repro-
duced, unanalyzed, in an appendix. The fact that "rarelya month goes by
withouta newspaperaccountof the prosecutionof a religious teacheraccused
of propagating false doctrines . . ." is also relegated to a footnote (1985:335).
But culturalthinning, as noted above, need not be confined to marginaliz-
ing religious factors, nor is it practiced only by non-anthropologists(like
Guha and Scott). In his landmarkwork, Europe and the People without
History (1982), Eric Wolf devotes a scant five pages at the end of the book to
the question of culture, largely in orderto dismiss it. And in his superbstudy
of the Sikh wars against the British (1985), RichardFox similarly,and much
more extensively, argues against the idea that culture informs, shapes, and
underpinsresistance at least as much as it emerges situationallyfrom it.
There are a numberof differentthings going on here. In part, Wolf and Fox
(and perhaps some of the others) are writing from a sixties-style materialist
9 Of course the SubalternStudies school is complex, and a varietyof tendenciesappearwithin
it. Shahid Amin's "Gandhias Mahatma"(1988) is more fully culturalthan many of the other
writings, as is GyanendraPandey's "PeasantRevolt and IndianNationalism"(1988).
I82 SHERRY B. ORTNER
Let me say again that in some ways I am sympatheticwith what they are
trying to do, which is to introducecomplexity, ambiguity,and contradiction
into our view of the subject in ways that I have arguedabove must be done
with politics and culture(and indeed resistance).Yet the particularpoststruc-
turalist move they make toward accomplishingthis goal paradoxicallyde-
stroys the object (the subject) who should be enriched, ratherthan impov-
erished, by this act of introducingcomplexity.
This final form of ethnographicrefusalmay be illustratedby examiningan
article entitled, "'Shahbano,"' on a famous Indian court case (Pathak and
Rajan 1989). The authors, who acknowledge their debt to Spivak's work,
addressthe case of a MuslimIndianwomancalled Shahbano,who went to civil
court to sue for supportfrom her husbandafter a divorce. Althoughthe court
awarded her the supportwhich she sought, the decision set off a national
controversyof majorproportionsbecausethe court'saward(and indeed Shah-
bano's decision to bringthe case to a civil courtin the firstplace) controverted
local Islamic divorce law. In the wake of the controversy,Shahbanowrote an
open letter to the courtrejectingthe awardand expressingher solidaritywith
her co-Muslims.
The authors'argumentaboutthe case runsas follows. The court'saward,as
well as the larger legal framework within which it was made, operated
througha discourseof protectionfor personswho are seen to be weak. But "to
be framed by a certain kind of discourse is to be objectified as the 'other,'
representedwithout the characteristicfeatures of the 'subject,' sensibility
and/or volition" (Pathak and Rajan 1989:563). Within the context of such
discursive subjectification,the appropriatenotion of resistanceis simply the
"refusalof subjectification,"(1989:571) the refusal to occupy the category
being foisted upon one. Shahbano'sshifting position on her own case-first
seeking, then rejecting,the award-represented such a refusalof subjectifica-
tion, the only one open to her, given her situation. "To live with what she
cannot control, the female subalternsubject here responds with a discon-
tinuous and apparentlycontradictorysubjectivity"(1989:572). But "her ap-
parent inconstancy or changeability must be interpretedas her refusal to
occupy the subject position [of being protected]offered to her" (1989:572).
Basically I agree with the authors' argumentthat every moment in the
developing situationshiftedto the foregrounda differentaspectof Shahbano's
multiplex identity as a woman, as poor, as a Muslim. Indeed, it does not
requiresophisticatedtheorizingto recognize thatevery social being has a life
of such multiplicityand thatevery social contextcreatessuch shiftingbetween
foregroundand background.I also agree (althoughthe authorsnever quite put
it this way) that, for certainkinds of compoundedpowerlessness(female and
poor and of minoritystatus),"therefusalof subjectification"may be the only
strategy available to the subject. Yet there are several problems with the
interpretationthat need to be teased out.
RESISTANCE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC REFUSAL 185
TEXTUAL RESISTANCE
Running through all these works, despite in some cases deep theoretical
differencesbetween them, is a kind of bizarrerefusal to know and speak and
1 For anotherstrong work on Gandhi'sculturalgenius, see Fox (1989).
I88 SHERRY B. ORTNER
write of the lived worlds inhabitedby those who resist (or do not, as the case
may be). Of the works discussed at length in this essay, Clendinnengoes to
greaterlengths thanthe othersto portraythe pre-colonialMaya world in some
depth and complexity, yet in the end she chooses to pull her punches and
smooth over what the material has told her. Scott, Guha, and Pathak and
Rajan, on the other hand, quite literally refuse to deal with the materialthat
would allow entry into the political and culturalworlds of those they discuss.
The "flying letters"of Scott's peasants, the testimonies of Guha's peasants'
visions, the press interviews of Shahbanoare texts that can be read in the
richest sense to yield an understandingof both the meanings and the mysti-
fications on which people are operating.Whatmight emerge is somethinglike
what we see in CarloGinzburg'sNight Battles (1985): an extraordinarilyrich
and complicated world of beliefs, practices, and petty politics whose stance
toward the encroachmentof Christianityand the Inquisition in the Middle
Ages is confused and unheroicyet also poignantlystubbornand"authentic"-
a very Nandy-esquestory.
There are no doubt many reasons for this interpretiverefusal. But one is
surely to be found in the so-called crisis of representationin the human
sciences. When EdwardSaid says in effect that the discourse of Orientalism
rendersit virtuallyimpossible to know anythingreal aboutthe Orient(1979);
when GayatriSpivak tells us that "the subalterncannotspeak"(1988a); when
James Cliffordinforms us that all ethnographiesare "fictions"(1986:7); and
when of course in some sense all of these things are true-then the effect is a
powerful inhibitionon the practiceof ethnographybroadlydefined:the effort-
ful practice, despite all that, of seeking to understandother peoples in other
times and places, especially those people who are not in dominantpositions.
The ethnographicstanceholds thatethnographyis neverimpossible. This is
the case because people not only resist political domination;they resist, or
anyway evade, textual dominationas well. The notion that colonial or aca-
demic texts are able completely to distortor exclude the voices and perspec-
tives of those being writtenabout seems to me to endow these texts with far
greaterpower than they have. Many things shape these texts, including, dare
one say it, the point of view of those being writtenabout. Nor does one need
to resortto variousforms of textualexperimentationto allow this to happen-
it is happeningall the time. Of course thereis variationin the degree to which
differentauthorsand differentformsof writingallow this process to show, and
it is certainlyworthwhileto reflect, as Cliffordand others have done, on the
ways in which this process can be enhanced. But it seems to me grotesqueto
insist on the notion thatthe text is shapedby everythingbut the lived realityof
the people whom the text claims to represent.
Take the case of a moder female suicide discussed in Spivak's famous
essay, the one that concludes with the statementthat "the subalterncannot
speak"(1988a:308). It is perhapsmore difficultfor any voice to breakthrough
RESISTANCE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC REFUSAL I89
short, one can only appreciate the ways in which resistance can be more than
opposition, can be truly creative and transformative, if one appreciates the
multiplicity of projects in which social beings are always engaged, and the
multiplicity of ways in which those projects feed on and well as collide with
one another.
REFERENCES