19 research outputs found
âBuying a pathâ: rethinking resistance in Rwanda
In this essay, I tell the story of Jean-Baptiste, the president of a motorcycle taxi driversâ co-operative, and his struggle against the machinations of certain high officials in Kigali City Council. Crucial to this story is the way in which Jean-Baptisteâs attempts to retain his position in the face of powerful opposition pit certain agencies of Rwandaâs party state against others. I use this ethnographic narrative to question the way in which much scholarship on popular resistance in Rwanda, drawing on Scottâs simplified opposition between the powerful and the powerless, opposes âordinary Rwandansâ to âthe stateâ as monolithic entities with opposed interests. Theorising Jean-Baptisteâs story in terms of Rwandan idioms of relative power and influence, I suggest that such a Manichean view of power and resistance in Rwanda oversimplifies social realities. I propose instead a model of power and resistance that sees the state as a field of capacities and possible relationships that it presents for certain people, where âpathsâ to influence and security may by âboughtâ â especially, but not exclusively, by those who are âstrongâ and âhighâ
Counterparts: Clothing, value and the sites of otherness in Panapompom ethnographic encounters
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Anthropological Forum, 18(1), 17-35,
2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00664670701858927.Panapompom people living in the western Louisiade Archipelago of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, see their clothes as indices of their perceived poverty. âDevelopmentâ as a valued form of social life appears as images that attach only loosely to the people employing them. They nevertheless hold Panapompom people to account as subjects to a voice and gaze that is located in the imagery they strive to present: their clothes. This predicament strains anthropological approaches to the study of Melanesia that subsist on strict alterity, because native selfâjudgments are located âat homeâ for the ethnographer. In this article, I develop the notion of the counterpart as a means to explore these forms of postcolonial oppression and their implications for the ethnographic encounter