Exam 12: How Do Anthropologists Study Political Relations

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Scott quickly realized that the poor peasants of "Sedaka" were not about to rise up against their oppressors. But this was not because they accepted their poverty and low status as natural and proper. For one thing, organized overt defense of their interests was difficult because local economic, political, and kinship ties generated conflicting loyalties. For another, the peasants knew that overt political action in the context of routine repression would be foolhardy. Finally, they had to feed their families. Their solution was to engage in what Scott called "everyday forms of peasant resistance": this included "foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth" (1987, xvi). These actions may have done little to alter the peasants' situation in the short run; however, Scott argued, in the long run they had the potential to be more effective than overt rebellion in undercutting state repression.

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In recent years, Bowen reports, French judges have devised two ways of crafting a solution to these unwelcome consequences. One has been to modify the concept of public order by making so-called practical exceptions for Muslims who emigrate to France. The other is to be more flexible with Muslim marriage and family practices as long as these arrangements involve individuals who are not French citizens. These pragmatic solutions are an improvement over what Bowen calls the "more blunt-instrument approach" associated with the older understanding of public order. Bowen concludes that in France today, Muslim and French jurists alike are both struggling to craft "the legal conditions for common life that are capacious enough to 'reasonably accommodate' people living in different conditions and with differing beliefs, yet unitary enough to retain the hope that such a common life is conceivable" (2010, 178).