Why I named this blog Imaginative Realities

The title for this blog comes from this research into imagination and performance to express how our fictive beliefs and our (potential) futures hold powerful sway over our experiences and understandings of politics. To describe this interaction between subjective experience and political institutions thinkers have used terms such as “the fantastic,” “the magical,” “the phantasmic,” or “the make-believe.” I’ve attached the quotations above to spotlight one of my favorite thinkers on this subject, Begoña Aretxaga. I find Aretxaga’s passage (see below) endlessly fascinating for thinking through questions of how humans are able to organize and manage themselves in political arrangements such as states. Imagination and performance, as it turns out, are far more critical to understanding how political arrangements come about than some might think given common association of these terms with the intangible or artistic.

For any anthropological writing in this space, I will draw upon my research alongside IDPs which focused on how people’s representations of their identity interacted with the state and democratic politics. I used the term performance to characterize these enacted individual practices which I documented through their language, interactions and public displays. In this usage, performance had less to do with what many some might consider a “formal” aesthetic act (e.g. theater or dance). Instead, I drew upon thinkers who used the term as a method to understand daily life and lived experience. In this alternate understanding, performance was a “lens” to understand individual representations and expressions of subjectivity. With a careful eye, this lens revealed that their commonplace actions were a means of “making sensible” unique ways knowing and being - being indigenous, being survivors, being politically independent - to others. Such enacted forms of social knowledge were vitally important for their groups as a cultivated form of self-protection, identity, and political expression in a post-colonial context.

These aspects of their human experience were not explicit in the practice of democratic politics in their region. Regional governments and the national state were built by groups who viewed themselves as distinct from peoples in the highlands of Peru. Still, these IDPs yearned for a greater role in their nation, and sought, in spoken and unspoken ways, to influence their officials for inclusion. To understand that vision of inclusion in their institutions and legislative processes in a way that captured their experiences and conceptions, I drew upon the term imagination.

Inspiring Quotations

“In the spirit of the work of Begoña Aretxaga, where she challenges social realist ethnographic portrayals of the political, I employ the ‘make-believe’ as a category to highlight what she called ‘fictional reality’. Aretxaga studied people’s imaginative potentialities as central to the making of their political realities.” (Navaro-Yashin 2007:80)

“The question of desire as well as fear becomes most crucial in rethinking the kind of reality the state might be acquiring at this moment of globalization, not only of capital, services, and culture but also of security operations and states of emergency. The question of subjectivity emerges as critical in a variety of ways. On the one hand, there are the subjective dynamics that link people to states, something that Weber already pointed out; on the other hand is what one would call the subjectivity of the state being (Taussig 1992, 1997). How does it become a social subject in everyday life? This is to ask about bodily excitations and sensualities, powerful identifications, and unconscious desires of state officials (Aretxaga 2000a, 2001a); about performances and public representations of statehood; and about discourses, narratives, and fantasies generated around the idea of the state.” (Aretxaga 2003, 395)

Works Cited

Aretxaga, Begoña. 2003. “Maddening States.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (1): 393–410.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2007. “Make-Believe Papers, Legal Forms and the Counterfeit: Affective Interactions between Documents and People in Britain and Cyprus.” Anthropological Theory 7 (1): 79–98.