How 'dynasty' became a modern global concept : intellectual histories of sovereignty and property

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power.PostprintPeer reviewe

From the mouth of God: divine kinship and popular democratic politics

This article proposes "divine kinship" as an analytical tool with which to explore the relation between the divine, "the people", and their political leaders and advance an ethnographically led comparative anthropology of democracy. More specifically, using the political ethnographies of five localities-North India, Venezuela, Montenegro, Russia, and Nepal-we discuss lived understandings of popular sovereignty, electoral representation, and political hope. We argue that charismatic kinship is crucial to understanding the processes by which political leaders and elected representatives become the embodiment of "the people", and highlight the processes through which "ordinary people" are transformed into "extraordinary people" with royal/divine/democratic qualities

The bandit and his myths

De Pablo Escobar à Phoolan Devi, les mythes de bandits plus ou moins sociaux se développent de manière exponentielle et se répandent par le biais des médias numériques. Célébrant des bandits, des gangsters, des politiciens mafieux – morts ou vivants – à partir de bricolages transculturels, ces mythes constituent des armes effectives dans le présent immédiat mais aussi un rendez-vous avec une postérité incertaine. Fiction et faits semblent ainsi fusionner et donner naissance à des réalités fictionnelles puissantes qui débordent les vies présentes et post-mortem de ces figures. Cette introduction expose comment ces réalités fictionnelles sont concrètement élaborées par le biais d’« écritures scénarisées de mythes » qui sont pleinement constitutives de l’autorité de ces bandits. Ce concept théorique que nous développons est aussi un objet ethnographique : nous explorons empiriquement cette fabrique quotidienne de la séduction, de la fascination et de l’effroi, laquelle est indissociable de la capacité à faire agir autrui dans les économies politiques criminelles.From Pablo Escobar to Phoolan Devi, myths featuring bandits (more or less socially-responsible) have grown in popularity and reach and are disseminated through digital media. Constructed through processes of transcultural bricolage, these myths celebrate bandits, gangsters and mafia politicians, dead or alive, as effective weapons in the present. At the same time, they project an uncertain posthumous future for the bandit. In these myths, fact and fiction are fused to give birth to powerful fictional realities that exceed the life of these figures, giving them sometimes unexpected post-mortem careers. This introduction reveals how these fictional realities are elaborated through a process of ‘myth scripting’ that becomes constitutive of bandits’ authority. This concept is also our ethnographic object: we explore an everyday fabrication of seduction, fascination and terror indissociable from the bandits’ capacity to spur others to action that is essential to the criminal political economy

Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia

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