Embodying the State : A Carnal Sociology of the ‘Political Fetishism’
Language
en
Communication dans un congrès avec actes
This item was published in
London Conference in Critical Thought 2017, LR-312 - Ethics and Politics of Ethnographic Practice 3, 2017-06-30, Londres.
English Abstract
What does an ethnography of an international organization such as the United Nations (gathering 193 member-states) involve in the understanding of the State apparatus, while being a state representative oneself? How does ...Read more >
What does an ethnography of an international organization such as the United Nations (gathering 193 member-states) involve in the understanding of the State apparatus, while being a state representative oneself? How does this embodiment of the political delegation help to understand the State’s coercive action through the regulation of symbolic power relations and its bureaucratic machinery? Besides the reflexive perspective of one’s own experience of the political fetishism (i.e. studying the delegation phenomenon in the constitution of States’ political power while being a delegate oneself), how could it be possible to dissect the system of power relations involved? And what are the specificities of ethnographying the State regarding “the positioning of structural, interactional, and dispositional property”? Based on a fieldwork at the U.N. center of Vienna, this contribution aims to highlight such mechanisms, defending the work hypothesis that the critical theory of fields developed by Pierre Bourdieu and the carnal sociology of Loic Wacquant based on the concept of “habitus” maintain an analytical lack against which a materialist feminism is armed. Indeed, the latter appears to provide the means to use the historical materialism as a heuristic method to objectivise the State as the monopolistic apparatus of the legitimized physical and symbolic violence crafting the social space and social strategies, of which the ethnographer is a sensible incarnate and situated part.Read less <
English Keywords
State
Sociology
Political fetishism
Origin
Hal imported