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Science, politics, and dancing boys: propositions and accounts

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13534640802159112

1460-700X

Lawrence Cohen,

Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The point is offered modestly: the very distinction obscures the fact that Chief Ministers are by their very role national level party leaders. It is offered nonetheless to locate where charisma enters and motivates a national political system. For charismatic authority see Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 2. See M.S.S. Pandian, The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1992); S.V. Srinivas, 'Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity', in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.297–317. 3. The variant English orthography of Laloo's first name contributes to the ludic stakes in his charismatic apparatus: see also Lalu Prasad, Lallu Prasad, and Lalloo Prasad. 4. Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p.75. 5. Partha Chatterjee's discussion of 'political society' versus 'civil society' is relevant here, though I am not convinced its dualism is that clear‐cut in most urban milieus. Chatterjee's point is that many if not most residents of 'global cities' across the world – as squatters or slum dwellers working in the informal sector – live in a relation of illegality in terms of their access to labor and land. As such, they cannot secure a legal relation of citizenship within a liberal frame of civil society distributing rights and responsibilities to individuals. However, the need of governing institutions both to regulate and discipline all bodies and populations means that these marginal populations cannot be abandoned: forms of brokerage through which slum dwellers negotiate for example questions of sanitation and waste must be undertaken by state or non‐state agencies of government. The implication is to reframe Giorgio Agamben's discussion of 'bare life' in Homo Sacer: slum populations may be treated not as members of the polis but as animal populations requiring biopolitical regulation, but this treatment realistically requires in most cases forms of brokerage and negotiation that in effect produce a politics in continual excess of the bare life Agamben proposes. The leader who can mobilize the appearance of pleasure in his or her flouting of civil norms offers him or herself as an able broker in such negotiations and as a symbol of what is at stake in such a marginal form of life. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller‐Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 6. The reference, as in the title of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), is to persons born around the time of Indian Partition and Independence in August 1947. 7. Rabri is a kind of sweet cheese used in making desserts. The story goes that in Rabri's family the custom was to ask the new mother what she wanted to eat just after childbirth. Rabri's sisters are named Jalebi and Rasgulla (both kinds of sweets) and Paan (betel leaf). The sisters' names are repeatedly used by the metropolitan media to stress the backwardness of the family and not, for example, women‐centered customs. 8. Yadav was imprisoned by Gandhi during the Emergency under MISA; his daughter Misa was born while he was in prison. 9. James Ferguson, The Anti‐Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 10. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 11. 'Misa jokes' came to supplement Laloo and Rabri jokes. A widely circulated Internet posting noted 'some definitions provided by Miss Misa Yadav, Laloo's daughter, in her Medical Entrance Exam', including 'ANALLY – happening every year', 'ARTERY – the study of fine paintings', and 'BENIGN – what you be after eight'. 12. A for Ara, B for Ballia across the border in U.P., C for Chapra, and D for Deoria in U.P. The links of the region and pederastic form, explored below, are underscored in a series of jokes, one of which lays off the name of a famous corporation, ABCL or Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited, started by the celebrated actor and occasional politician of that name: 'we too have a big corporation in Bihar, our own ABCL, in the ABC districts! It stands for Ara Ballia Chapra Londebaazi'. Londebaazi, to translate the punch line, is pederasty, the pleasure in londe or young men. 13. This quotation and those that follow are not verbatim but reconstructions from field notes written minutes to hours after an interview. 14. Lawrence Cohen, 'What Mrs. Besahara Saw: Reflections on the Gay Goonda', in Queering India: Same‐Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.149–60. 15. Lawrence Cohen, 'Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of Modernity', GLQ 2, no. 4 (1995) pp.399–424. 16. Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 17. Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 18. McKim Marriott, The Feast of Love. Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes, ed. Milton Singer (Honolulu: East‐West Center Press, 1966); and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti‐Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). 19. Veena Das, 'National Honor and Practical Kinship: Unwanted Women and Children', Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp.212–33. 20. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). 21. Naidu offers another critical site to track the charismatic organization of contemporary forms of reason through the figure of the Chief Minister, a project that would require an essay unto itself. But his failure to win re‐election despite becoming an international celebrity – Bill Clinton's 2000 visit to the Andhra capital of Hyderabad was enormously significant in this regard – redefined what had been a charismatic form as something else, a cautionary note. The lesson from Naidu was for better or worse taken by political cognoscenti to be his inability to craft an adequate relation (in either or both policy or populist terms) to the state's many poor, a failure that in my 2004 work on reportage on poor farmers in Andhra selling their kidneys at a time when the state's infotech economy was booming emerged as a joke: 'What's Chandrababu's favorite web site? www.saleofkidneys.com'. See Lawrence Cohen, 'Operability: Surgery at the Margins of the State', Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), pp.165–90. 22. Veena Das, 'The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility', Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), pp.225–52. 23. Praful Bidwai, 'Left Faces Critical Choice', Combat Law 6:3 (2007).