Order and Disorder
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Order and Disorder

Anthropological Perspectives

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Fernanda Pirie, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Fernanda Pirie

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Order and Disorder

Anthropological Perspectives

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Fernanda Pirie, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Fernanda Pirie

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Disorder and instability are matters of continuing public concern. Terrorism, as a threat to global order, has been added to preoccupations with political unrest, deviance and crime. Such considerations have prompted the return to the classic anthropological issues of order and disorder. Examining order within the political and legal spheres and in contrasting local settings, the papers in this volume highlight its complex and contested nature. Elaborate displays of order seem necessary to legitimate the institutionalization of violence by military and legal establishments, yet violent behaviour can be incorporated into the social order by the development of boundaries, rituals and established processes of conflict resolution. Order is said to depend upon justice, yet injustice legitimates disruptive protest. Case studies from Siberia, India, Indonesia, Tibet, West Africa, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire show that local responses are often inconsistent in their valorization, acceptance and condemnation of disorder.

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Year
2008
ISBN
9780857450029

INTRODUCTION

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann Fernanda Pirie
The issue of order and how it is generated and maintained is one to which considerable sociological attention has been directed over the decades. Many early ethnographic studies were concerned with the question of how order was produced in small-scale, acephalous societies, those beyond the control of any state. More recently, however, anthropologists have tended to turn their attention away from the issue of how order is maintained in isolated communities to relations of power and domination in more complex societies – the effects of colonialization, domination and resistance, inter-state relations and globalization. Forms of hierarchy, hegemony and the unequal access to resources have received more attention than structures of order. At the same time, anthropological analyses of conflict and violence have proliferated.1 The focus has been on the violent, the illegitimate and the immoral while order, it seems, has almost disappeared from the anthropological picture.
The question that arises, then, is whether the issue of order is still relevant as an object of anthropological enquiry. Can questions about order still lead to valuable insights? The analytic value of the concepts of both order and disorder, we suggest, needs to be reconsidered, along with the theories elaborated during the first decades of sociological and anthropological thinking and the extent to which they are still relevant. To consider such questions the contributors to this volume were invited to a workshop hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in November 2004. The papers that resulted, reproduced here, all take a fresh look at the question of order. They do so in the context of wider configurations of power and politics, including commercial competition, and recent anthropological analyses of the state and political relations. They suggest, among other things, that the notion of order can have different meanings in different contexts. The term may refer to the absence or containment of violence, to the existence of a shared set of norms, but also to a sense of predictability and feeling of security. It can, thus, be used in both an objective and subjective way. Several chapters indicate that the existence of disorder, in the sense of a lack of peace and security, does not necessarily imply a lack of shared norms or sense of predictability for those caught up in it. Indeed, most chapters address the issue of how order emerges out of disorderly contexts and discuss the creative ways in which people create small spaces of order in situations of disorder and disruption.
The role of the state emerges as a central theme in the volume. It is shown to be a source of disorder as much as a guarantor of order, especially where it is weak or retreating. Where it does assert the primary role of creating and maintaining order, as in the case of the nation states of the developed world, it may do so through elaborate symbolism and ritual, while local spheres of order are simultaneously established in ways that have little to do with the state’s legal system. In this introduction we highlight some of the ways in which this is done, picking up the threads that run through the individual chapters. We then turn to consider some of the themes that emerged when anthropologists were more explicitly concerned with the principles according to which societies do and should function and reassess these in the light of the case studies.

The Role of the State

Many anthropological discussions have concerned the maintenance of order apart from the state. They have examined the processes and structures found in small-scale, acephalous societies, those which had hardly, or very lightly, been touched by the controlling hand of the state or the administration of a colonial power. In the present volume the emphasis is, by contrast, on order despite the state, that is on the order that is created by those whose social worlds are deeply affected by a state, but one that does not guarantee them peace and stability. Indeed, in many of the case studies the state is portrayed as a cause of disorder. It is described as a source of instability or, at the very least, as failing to guarantee order. The chapter by Meeker develops such an analysis by portraying the state as an inherently disorderly institution. His case study concerns the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century which, he argues, prefigured processes by which the nation state developed in Europe. He suggests that the Ottoman regime can only be understood as a disorderly conjunction between the order of the state and that of society. The nature of that conjunction changed over time, but it remained a source of tension and conflict, an inherent disorder in the power structures of the Empire. In Meeker’s analysis this illustrates the order of the state and that of society acting upon one another. Some states overwhelm their subject societies, transforming them to their own order, while some societies have the potential to penetrate the colonizing officers, classes and institutions, undermining and corrupting them. However, the relationship between state and society is, in principle, ‘touched by instability’, precisely because states operate through rationalized and codified institutions designed for supervizing a subject population. The order that the Ottoman rulers attempted to create bore the very seeds of its own instability.
Spencer, in his chapter, addresses the assumption found in much political anthropology that we can look to the realm of the political as the location of social order. Like Meeker, he examines the disorderly relations between state and society, here as they play themselves out in the political realm in Sri Lanka. This field, he suggests, simply cannot be understood without paying attention to processes of disorder. The state itself can be regarded as just one amongst several warring parties. Politics is identified with divisions and trouble by his informants in Sri Lanka. It is regarded as a kind of ‘collective moral disorder’, an agonistic space of disorderly activity. Spencer thus dissociates the issue of order from that of politics. Ideologies and images of order and nationality are constructed within the practices and discourses of the political, but they are also ideologically distanced from it. As he puts it, the political in Sri Lanka contains within it both order and disorder.
Also discussing the role of the state, Just, in his chapter, points out that the nation state is the paradigm of ‘legitimate’ governmental control and its order is symbolized in the grandeur, the ritual and the moral symbolism of the parliament chamber and the court room. We might add to this the elaborate ceremonies and regimentation of military parades. These symbols of an abstract, all-encompassing order present to the public the need for a functioning nation state as the necessary condition for the possibility of social life. However, they also celebrate the fact that the state is the source of organized violence, the chaos of war and the agonism of adversarial politics and judicial processes. Such activities are legitimated by explicitly equating them with order and justice. Their disorderly consequences are transformed into symbols of the legitimate order of the state. The state here is simultaneously a guarantor of order and a source of disruption and disorder.
Roberts, in his chapter, considers not so much the state as the workings of the free market and the commercial struggles that are supported and encouraged by it. He likens the interwoven processes of competition and rule breach found in the commercial world to the struggles for political ascendancy described by Victor Turner in his studies of chieftainship in Central Africa (Turner 1957, 1967). His study suggests that if we look beyond the state, we find commercial manufacturers appealing to consumers by creating a sense of a locally-rooted order, using images of local history and interweaving them with more widely-shared cultural images and idioms. All these studies indicate that the state itself is often responsible for conditions of social or political disorder and they highlight the different ways in which this can occur and with what consequences. As Meeker’s case study most graphically illustrates, it is the disorderly conjunctions between state and society that create the framework, or the arena, in which processes of order can and must be creatively established by its citizens.

Order Despite the State

We must, therefore, look beyond the state for sources of order, but without ignoring the defining role it plays. The papers in the volume edited by Ferguson and Whitehead (1992) concern patterns of disorder, in particular the disruption of warfare, that are brought about by the proximity or intrusion of an expanding state. In the current volume, by contrast, several papers are concerned with conditions of disorder brought about by a weak or retreating state. Subtle shifts and balances then characterize the construction of order, especially amongst unstable social groups.
GrÀtz, in his chapter in this volume, discusses the gold-mining communities that have been established in West Africa, whose actions the state is unable or unwilling fully to control. The rapid growth of these new communities has disrupted patterns of social and economic life for resident populations, while also giving rise to problems of order and stability for the incomers. This has, in part, been due to the new mixture of established residents and recent arrivals in and around the mining camps. The consequent problems were answered by the establishment of vigilante groups who initially provided a welcome and more deliberate measure of regularity and predictability for both residents and incomers. GrÀtz describes how they acquired legitimacy in the eyes of the local population by upholding and enforcing their norms of retributive punishment.
This study demonstrates that the establishment of legitimacy is crucial to the ability of local institutions to guarantee regimes of order, particularly when these are alternatives to the order of the state. Such legitimacy has to be established in the context of local notions concerning social order. As GrÀtz describes, when one of the vigilante groups in West Africa began to use excessive violence, its activities became not only unpredictable and arbitrary but also illegitimate in the eyes of the local population. At the same time, having been tolerated by state authorities in the interests of stability, this group came to be perceived as a threat to the sovereignty of the state. The authorities then branded it as illegitimate and took steps to curtail its activities.
The authority of those who seek to maintain order in a society can also be undermined if their actions infringe the norms of a moral or religious order, which likewise renders them illegitimate in the eyes of the local population. As described by Bertram Turner in this volume, Islamist Salafiyya groups were able to introduce new forms of control into small communities in south-west Morocco because they claimed to be promoting the law of Islam to legitimate their form of social order. Such claims were initially accepted and allowed these groups to impose new controlling elements. However, their subsequent recourse to violence infringed local notions of order, rendering their activities unacceptable to the local population. They were seen to have transgressed local ideas concerning descent and social relations and to have generated unacceptable levels of conflict within the community. In this way, local notions of order became more reflected and contested, and at the same time they became the basis for a challenge to the legitimacy of the external actors who were seeking to establish a position of dominant control.
Like GrĂ€tz’s and Turner’s chapters, Ventsel’s case study from Siberia indicates the importance of a shared set of norms when it comes to establishing order in a community in which state institutions are weak. The population of a Siberian village, established by a strong (Soviet) administration, found itself having to adapt to conditions of weak central control left by a retreating state. Like GrĂ€tz, Ventsel illustrates the way some sections of society, in this case elder men and former prison inmates, had brought a certain structure to the local community by establishing the authority to control violence. Among adolescents and young men status and honour were defined by displays of physical aggression. Although this behaviour was in principle tolerated, people were aware of the threat that unrestrained violence posed to the precarious social order. The elder men had to invest considerable effort in containing the violent behaviour of the youth through practices of restraint and disapproval. Although different views were often expressed about the justification of violence in this community, the success of these practices depended upon certain influential members deciding that a fine line had been crossed between acceptable forms of violence and that which threatened to undermine the local order. Their efforts in limiting excessive or disruptive violence were only successful because they actively established and maintained such standards of acceptability.
While Turner’s chapter, thus, demonstrates the force of underlying, unreflected notions of order, Ventsel illustrates the deliberate establishment of normative standards. In the Siberian village members of a certain age group claimed that much of the violence in which they engaged was justified as a way of ‘proving themselves’. The enforcement of social norms was thus the prerogative of particular members of the community and a certain amount of rule breaking was expected on the part of the young men. It seems that it is not so much that the youth did not share the norms enforced by the elders, but rather that they gained social capital by defying and discursively rejecting them. As Ventsel notes, these young men were expected to accept the punishment that they knew would follow from their behaviour. By accepting punishment they indicated their acceptance of the norms they had violated.
This case study also demonstrates the need for the anthropologist to dissociate the issue of order from that of violence. As Ventsel illustrates, people can develop a range of responses to deal with the perceived threat that the violence of certain sections of society, here the ‘kids’, poses to their social order. Order is not so much found in the absence of violence in such societies, as in the appropriate nature of the response to violence and in the ongoing processes of containment and adjustment by which people react to and limit its effects.
Among the nomads of Amdo, in north-eastern Tibet, Pirie also found that certain individuals were expected to breach the norms. She describes, in her chapter, the way in which the nomads simultaneously invoked a set of shared norms in order to resolve blood feuds, while granting a grudging respect to those who defied the imposition of such norms. In her analysis it is not so much that the members of the group did not share and enact a common set of norms, as that there was an inherent tension between the norms of order and the norms which applied to individual male behaviour. These incorporated a certain valorization of rule breaking and defiance. This case study indicates that while certain forms of violence were obligatory, according to the norms of feuding and reciprocity, elaborate methods of conflict resolution were also undertaken in order to resolve the blood feuds that escalated to dangerous proportions or threatened to do so. A certain form of order was thus reimposed within these groups by means of established responses to anticipated and predictable forms of disruptive behaviour. Nevertheless, the outbreak of violence remained a constant source of concern. Violence, therefore, can be normatively sanctioned, it can even be obligatory as a matter of individual or group action; however, it may also be negatively evaluated and feared for its socially disruptive consequences.
All these studies illustrate the very fine line that is drawn between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence. The new, localized power regimes described by GrĂ€tz gained acceptance, despite being disadvantageous or even oppressive for some, because they were predictable and people felt able to adapt to them. However, when the vigilantes’ use of violence came to be perceived as arbitrary and terror-like it created fear instead of peace and security and the vigilantes lost the trust of the local population. A thin line between acceptable and unacceptable violence and coercion had been crossed. In this case, as in many others, it was also a line between predictability and uncertainty. This is just one indication of the close connection between the issue of order and that of predictability, which recurs in other chapters. Ventsel’s and Pirie’s studies, for example, both show communities adapting to and developing methods to control a certain amount of predictable violence.
These studies also illustrate the imposition of shared norms, both reflected and unreflected. While GrĂ€tz and Turner’s chapters describe the regimes of order established as alternatives to that of the state, relying on a certain amount of violence or coercion, they also demonstrate that new power holders have to draw upon established norms to maintain their positions. Conditions of disorder can also be created from within. While the importance of shared norms in creating the conditions for order has been highlighted, several case studies indicate that such norms may simultaneously be challenged from within. Ventsel and Pirie, for example, both describe societies in which a certain amount of rule breaking is both feared and expected. Bertram Turner, in his chapter, explicitly considers the competing normative systems that characterize relations between territorial and kin-based groups in south-west Morocco. As he describes it, more than one set of ideas about order, law, justice and morality can be found among local groups in the region. Numerous notions of order, based on descent, territory, agricultural activities, religion and local and state laws, interact and intersect, each with its own mode of argumentation and standards for the evaluation of behaviour. He suggests that instead of searching for one fundamental way in which the order of a society is established, it is more fruitful to assume that societies may have several different notions of order, which may be invoked alternately or even at the same time.
Turner contrasts two dominant models of order, one based on the idea of harmony and one based on the principle of retaliation or reciprocity. The norms of retaliation are part of a logic of reciprocity, which is integral to relations between different constellations of territorial and kin-based groups. He describes these relations as generating a permanent state of tension, to which any form of final resolution would be inappropriate and, in practice, illusory. Paradoxically, it is the model of order based on the ide...

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