Would this be muddying the waters? Or just recognizing pre-existing mud?
It provoked me to wonder whether lists like this are (built on a fiction
of being) pre-capitalist -- which may be by-the-by or not. Just
wondering.
--Alena
"It would be wrong to see a contradiction in the fact that violence is
here [in the master/*khammes* (sharecropper) relationship] more present
and more masked. Because the pre-capitalist economy cannot count on the
implacable, hidden violence of objective mechanisms which enable the
dominant to limit themselves to reproduction strategies (often purely
negative ones), it resorts simultaneously to forms of domination which may
strike the modern observer as more brutal, more primitive, more barbarous,
and at the same time as gentler, more humane, more respectful of persons.
This coexistence of overt physical or economic violence and the most
refined symbolic violence is found in all the institutions characteristic
of this economy and at the very heart of each social relation. It is
present in both the debt and the gift, which, despite their apparent
opposition, can each provide the basis of dependence and even servitude,
as well as solidarity, depending on the strategies they serve. [...] This
essential ambiguity of all the institutions that modern taxonomies would
incline one to treat as 'economic' is evidence that the opposing
strategies that may coexist, as in the master-*khammes* relationship, are
alternative, interchangeable ways of fulfilling the same function: the
'choice' between overt violence and gentle violence depends on the state
of the power relations between the two parties and the integration and
ethical integrity of the group that arbitrates. So long as overt
violence, that of the usurer or the ruthless master, is collectively
disapproved and is liable to provoke either a violent riposte or the
flight of the victim -- that is, in both cases, for lack of any legal
recourse, the destruction of the very relationship that was to be
exploited -- symbolic violence, gentle, invisible violence, unrecognized
as such, chosen as much as undergone, that of trust, obligation, personal
loyalty, hospitality, gifts, debts, piety, in a word, of all the virtues
honoured by the ethic of honour, presents itself as the most economical
mode of domination because it best corresponds to the economy of the
system."
Pierre Bourdieu (1990 [1980]). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press. pp. 126-127
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