The Intimate Life of Dissent: Anthropological Perspectives. London: UCL Press
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The Intimate Life of Dissent AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 1 30/07/2020 13:31 AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 2 30/07/2020 13:31 EthicsTheCanada Intimate and in the FrameAesthetics Life ofofCopyright, TranslationDissent Collections and the Image of Canada, 1895– 1924 ExploringAnthropological the Work Perspectivesof Atxaga, Kundera and Semprún Edited by Harini Amarasuriya, Tobias Kelly, Sidharthan Philip J. Hatfield HarrietMaunaguru, Hulme Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Jonathan Spencer AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 3 30/07/2020 13:31 00-UCL_ETHICS&AESTHETICS_i-278.indd9781787353008_Canada-in-the-Frame_pi-208.indd 3 3 11-Jun-1819/10/2018 4:56:18 09:50PM First published in 2020 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Collection © Editors, 2020 Text © Contributors, 2020 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Amarasuriya et al. (eds.). 2020. The Intimate Life of Dissent: Anthropological Perspectives. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787357778 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third- party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third- party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978- 1-78735- 779- 2 (Hbk) ISBN: 978- 1-78735- 778- 5 (Pbk) ISBN: 978- 1-78735- 777- 8 (PDF) ISBN: 978- 1-78735- 780- 8 (epub) ISBN: 978- 1-78735- 781- 5 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787357778 AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 4 30/07/2020 13:31 Contents Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction: the intimate life of dissent 1 Harini Amarasuriya, Tobias Kelly, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Jonathan Spencer 2 One is the biggest number: estrangement, intimacy and totalitarianism in late Soviet Russia 22 Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic 3 Dissent with/out resistance? Secular and ultra-Orthodox Israeli approaches to ethical and political disagreement 46 Erica Weiss 4 Friendship behind bars: Kurdish dissident politics in Turkey’s prisons 68 Serra Hakyemez 5 Intimate commitments: friends, comrades and family in the life of one Sri Lankan activist 90 Harini Amarasuriya and Jonathan Spencer 6 Dissenting conscience: the intimate politics of objection in Second World War Britain 112 Tobias Kelly 7 Friends with differences: ethics, rivalry and politics among Sri Lankan Tamil former political activists 132 Sidharthan Maunaguru COnTEnts v AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 5 30/07/2020 13:31 8 The intimacy of details: a Tibetan diary of dissent 151 Carole McGranahan 9 Dissident writing and the intimacy of the archive in authoritarian Indonesia 172 Doreen Lee Index 196 vi THE InTIMATE LIFE OF DISSE nT AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 6 30/07/2020 13:31 Notes on contributors Harini Amarasuriya is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Studies at the Open University of Sri Lanka. She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include state–society relations, political movements, dissent and activism. Serra Hakyemez is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her research concentrates on the anthropology of law and politics, with a special focus on ‘war on terror’, sovereignty, counter- insurgency, human rights, political prisoners and the Kurdish movement in Turkey. Tobias Kelly is Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include political violence and human rights. Doreen Lee is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. Her past research on student movements in Indonesia has largely focused on the relationship between radical youth politics and historical consciousness. Her current work investigates the production of debt and precarity in urban Indonesia. Carole McGranahan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She is the author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010). Her research focuses on Tibet in relation to British, Chinese and US empires, and on issues of history and memory, citizenship and political asylum, protest and refusal. Sidharthan Maunaguru is Associate Professor in Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He was awarded a Newton Fellowship by the British Academy and the Royal Society. He is the author of Marrying for a Future: Transnational Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (2019). Notes On conTrIbutorS vii AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 7 30/07/2020 13:31 Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic has been a Teaching Fellow at UCL and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She has published on the anthropology of Islam and atheism in the Balkans and Russia. She has also co-edited a collection of essays titled Being Godless: Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion (2017, with Ruy Llera Blanes). Jonathan Spencer is Regius Professor of South Asian Language, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh. He has worked in Sri Lanka since the early 1980s, in recent years almost always in collaboration with Sri Lankan colleagues. Erica Weiss is a cultural anthropologist at Tel Aviv University. She researches the ways in which people navigate the ethical dilemmas they encounter during their everyday lives and their encounters with the state, with a particular interest in liberalism and its discontents. She undertakes research in Israel and Palestine, using ethnographic methods. viii THE InTIMATE LIFE OF DISSEnT AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 8 30/07/2020 13:31 Acknowledgements This volume was made possible through the support of an ERC Horizon 2020 Consolidator Grant (648477 AnCon ERC- 2014- CoG). It grows out of a workshop funded by the same grant held at the University of Edinburgh in the summer of 2018. We would like to thank the partici- pants in that workshop for their invaluable feedback. Particular thanks are due to Janet Carsten, Lydie Fialova, Lotte Hoek, Maya Mayblin and Sharika Thiranagama. We would also like to thank Laura Major for her help in preparing the final manuscript and Chris Penfold at UCL Press for his support for this project. ACKnOwLEDGEMEnts ix AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 9 30/07/2020 13:31 AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 10 30/07/2020 13:31 Chapter 1 Introduction: the intimate life of dissent Harini Amarasuriya, Tobias Kelly, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Jonathan Spencer Natalya Gorbanevskaya, one of the participants in a Red Square protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, did something surprising: she brought her baby son to the demonstra- tion even though she anticipated arrest. She pushed a pram with her child to the demonstration in the centre of the Square and unfurled a home-made banner. She then left the baby in the lobby of the KGB headquarters while she underwent an extensive interrogation. When asked by a KGB officer to name the father of her child, Gorbanevskaya refused, declaring that family issues were irrelevant. Yet in many ways her act of political opposition had been forged and sustained by relations with lovers, friends, family and with other dissidents. Gorbanevskaya’s mother, for example, both supported and fretted over her daughter’s political engagements. When Gorbanevskaya was charged with anti- Soviet agitation, her actions were said by the prosecutor to amount not only to a betrayal of the Soviet state, but also to a betrayal of her own children. She was cast as both a bad Soviet citizen and a bad mother. The jury then punished Gorbanevskaya with a lengthy confinement in a psychiatric ward, resulting in separation from her family and friends (many of whom shared her hostility towards the Soviet state). In one fell swoop, Gorbanevskaya seemed to have both transgressed and reinstated the boundary between the intimate life of sex and family and the public life of political protest. Her story shows what is at stake, both politically and personally, in acts of dissent. The chapters in this edited collection examine those moments when people take a stand, acting in ways that go against the grain of social and political life, often at great personal risk. For Soviet dissidents, Kurdish activists, Sri Lankan leftists, Orthodox Jewish Israelis, InTrODuCTIOn 1 AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 1 30/07/2020 13:31 Indonesian students and prisoners, Tibetan exiles and British pacifists, acts of dissent are attempts to take a position of principle, to set oneself up against the status quo. We might view such acts of dissent within a range of possible interpretive frames, such as ‘resistance’, ‘refusal’ or ‘protest’ (McGranahan 2016; Simpson 2014; Weiss 2016), but we are particularly interested here in those acts where people declare or act on their commitments. Dissidence implies not just strong dissatisfaction, but also determined and open opposition. Such acts of dissent are found not so much in forms of hidden and subtle resistance, but in the processes that Leela Gandhi has described as ‘actively renouncing, refusing and rejecting’ (2006, 5). In this collection we are trying to understand the conditions of possibility for such acts, and the culturally thick meanings and significance with which they are inscribed.