The papers in this volume show how people construct political meanings and become involvedâor not involvedâin political actions. The stories, commentary, and actions of people in diverse cultural settings provide a deeper understanding of behaviors that are often confusing from a distance. In this introduction, we explain our person-centered approach to politics, place it in relation to other work on politics and social movements, and argue for the insights to be gained from drawing upon the theories and methods of psychological anthropology.
Politics, Culture, and Persons
As many scholars have noted, defining âpoliticsâ is tricky. Some definitions limit the realm of politics to issues involving âgovernment as mediator, target, or claimantâ (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 5). This would narrowly cast politics as being about what disputants think governments should do. At the other extreme, we could follow the lead of feminists , including many cultural anthropologists, who, in defining politics, point out the way âpower is both structured and enacted in everyday activitiesânotably, in relations of kinship, marriage, and in inheritance patterns, rituals, and exchange systemsâ (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991, p. 312). This politics of everyday life deliberately highlights the âpoliticalâ in nearly all interactions. Research from both the narrow and broad paradigms has been extremely valuable, but neither corresponds to the notion of the political we use in this volume. For our purposes, the politics of everyday life is too broad. That research importantly points to power relations that are often hidden, but our focus is on what is disputed. Following Swartz, Turner, and Tuden, we agree âpolitics always involves public goalsâ (Swartz et al. 2002 [1966], p. 105), and add that it is about contention regarding goals for some collectivity. Those goals could be material ones about âthe allocation of scarce resources in the face of conflict of interests,â as March and Olsen (1989) explain political systems (quoted in Aronoff and Kubik 2013, p. 23), or they could involve competing understandings of collective identities or the grounds for social respect. We believe there is much that can be productively explored by looking at how persons draw upon learned meanings to interpret, psychologically manage, and engageâwith varying degrees of hesitation or enthusiasmâwith disputed goals and identities in their society. In so doing, however, we keep in mind the contribution of scholars who have shown the way powerful ideas and entrenched structures prevent or obstruct disputes from ever arising about legitimate authority and about the distribution of material and symbolic rewards.
The papers in this volume study politics through case studies of people engaged in (or disengaged from) political contests in Denmark, India, Israel, Jamaica, Kuwait, Nigeria, Romania, and the United States. Many of these cases concern social movements, for example, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in the United States, third gender activism in India, Rastafari in Jamaica, and Salafi movements in northern Nigeria and Kuwait. Snow et al. (2004) define social movements as collective actions for social change that have some longevity and operate outside of established institutions. They argue that social movements are increasingly prevalent and can be considered âa kind of fifth estate in the world todayâ (Snow et al. 2004, pp. 4â5), so a better understanding of them is essential. Several of the chapters focus on change over time in peopleâs sense of themselves as movement actors; some others consider the way people interpret social movements or are shaped by them.
We believe a better approach lies in an improved understanding of the forces shaping peopleâs outlooks, feelings, and actions. Outside of cultural anthropology, the place of culture in studies of politics, including social movements, has been growing (Aronoff and Kubik 2013; Polletta 2008). This âcultural turn,â as it has been called, is positive. A necessary next step, however, is a better understanding of culture and its relation to individuals. As the sociologist James Jasper (2010) explains cogently, it is not enough to gesture vaguely at âsocial constructionâ or âcollective interpretationâ without explaining who is constructing or interpreting and how those people think and feel. He calls for building better theories of social movements by starting at the micro-level with a deeper understanding of social actors. We agree with him that âwe need to insert individuals into our models, along with their decisions, dilemmas, defections, and so onâ (Jasper 2010, p. 967).
A better understanding of social actors meshes well with one current in mainstream ways of thinking about culture in contemporary anthropology. Brightman (1995) summed up theories at the end of the twentieth century, which critique an older âimage of culture [and society] as an autonomous system,â like âa grammar ⊠independent from the individuals who followed their rulesââ (Rosaldo 1989 cited in Brightman 1995, p. 513). Outlining the rules of the system took precedence over understanding how people recreate, improvise within, and sometimes change that system. Seeing culture as an autonomous system typically minimized historical change and the impact of external influences, underplaying the diversity of ideas and practices present in a society.
By contrast with culture as an autonomous system, âanthropological writing has increasingly focused upon culture as ⊠constructed, reproduced, and transformed in and through the ideation and practices of agentsâ (Brightman 1995, p. 514). Culture is central to understanding agentsâ ideas and practice, but this is not culture as an abstract system. Instead, it is culture as what is experienced, then enacted, by different members of society. For most anthropologists, cultural meanings âshould not be understood as a separate domain of human activity, contrasted for example with politics or economyâ; instead, they are âa dimension of all social interactions since as humans we always traffic in meaningâ (Aronoff and Kubik 2013, p. 60). The meanings in which we traffic, however, may not be the same from one person to the next .
Psychological anthropologists theorize acting subjects, studying the sociocultural contexts in which cognitions, emotions, and motivations are formed and the psychological factors that are important in culture learning and expression. We focus on the personal, affectively invested meanings of public discourses, structures, and collective actions, and how those meanings develop over time and motivate or demotivate peopleâs action. Individualsâ meanings shape the practices that reproduce and change social structures and public culture. Psychological anthropologists study peopleâs narratives, subjective identities, phenomenological experiences, emotions, memories, discourses, explicit and implicit beliefs, conscious goals and unconscious desires, conceptual structures, and psychological development in diverse social and cultural contexts (Strauss 2015). These aspects of peopleâs subjectivities and expressions can be applied to politics.
Distinctive to psychological anthropology are âperson-centered â methods and ethnographic descriptions that focus on âthe individual and on how the individualâs psychology and subjective experience both shapes, and is shaped by, social and cultural processesâ (Hollan 2001, p. 48; see also LeVine 1982). It is rare, in contemporary psychological anthropology , for âculture â to be a generalization based solely on mass phenomena, surveys, or public cultural symbols. What is typical, instead, are studies based on specific people whose outlooks (spoken or tacit), feelings, desires, and actions provide insight into the interaction between culture in its multiple manifestations in the world and culture as complexly incorporatedâand contestedâin persons. Observation, interviews that give people maximal opportunities to tell their own stories and express their personal outlooks and concerns and experiences, and other forms of conscious and unconscious self-expression are key tools (e.g., Hollan 2003; Mageo 2011; Quinn 2005).
In many ways, though, the very features of person-centered research that have allowed it to shed light on unexpected and under-mentioned aspects of political subjectivity are also the ones that have been critiqued as being poorly adapted to the study of politics. Specifically, some have argued that person-centered research is so focused on the emergence of subjectivities in individuals that it fails to account for the broader, structural forces at play in politics including global and local power structures, economics, structural inequalities, and legal systems. We insist, however, that a deep understanding of structural conditions is, in fact, critical in the analysis and interpretation of person-centered research because it is only through this broader knowledge that a personâs story can be understood (cf. Friedman 2007). Person-centered research cannot replace the vitally important study of structural conditions, public culture, and history, but it complements it by focusing on the personal meanings of those conditions, messages, and events. Furthermore, approaches to the study of politics that fail to account for person-centered dataâincluding, accounting for deep and difficult to understand contradictory or inconsistent dataâwill be incapable of predicting or even understanding how and why a political climate can seem to change so rapidly (see also Mageo and Knauft 2002). Still, this approach to research has its own political hazards, to which we will return at the end of this introduction.
Person-centered research is not only a method of data gathering and form of ethnographic writing; but it also includes a set of theories for understanding how social...