On De-Pathologizing Resistance

This introductory essay draws attention to two processes, the pathologization and exoticization of resistance. Working independently or in parallel, these two processes silence resistance by depoliticizing it as illogical or idealizing it in out-worldly terms. In both cases, resistance is caricatured as abnormal or exotic and distanced from current political priorities. I argue that analytical de-pathologization and de-exoticization of resistance can (a) provide valuable insights on the silencing of resistance and (b) help us understand the relationship between hegemony and resistance in terms that stretch beyond the moderately pathologizing view of political inaction as apathy or “false consciousness”. In my analysis, I also engage with James Scott's seminal view of resistance, which, despite its de-pathologizing orientation, fails to capture the dialectical relationship of resistance and hegemony. I suggest that attention to the pathologizing and exoticizing workings of power may reveal the complexity and compromising ambivalence of resistance and contribute to the broader field of resistance studies, conceived as renewed interest in insurrectionary movements, rebellion, and protest

The Transformation of Social Institutions in the North American Southeast

Corporate institutions, which transformed in the American Southeast over some 14,000 years, include social heterarchies and hierarchies that arose within the institutional contexts of descent groups, ritual sodalities, and social houses. The strategic and tactical actions of competitive and cooperative agents contributed to differing expressions of organizational changes through a variety of forms, including feasting, feuding/warfare, inalienable goods circulation, indebtedness, monumental constructions, mortuary events, processions/rogations, strategic marriages, and additional ritual and social practices. The nexus of social institutions that evolved along these pathways served as a catalyst for social changes, including the ways through which social institutions became transformed. Such social processes inform archaeologists of the agency, organization, and practice of people who not only invented and manipulated cosmologies, ideologies, institutions, and resources to achieve varying degrees of inequality, power, and wealth, but also those who resisted the efforts of aggrandizers. The author’s arguments focus on aristocratic social actions and actors, and the practices that enabled them to gain power and wealth through exclusive and restrictive corporate institutions