Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism

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Автор: Gavin A. Smith

Название: Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism

Язык: English

Издательство: New York: Berghahn Books

Год: 2014

Серия: Dislocations, Vol.12

Формат: pdf

Размер: 11 mb

Страниц: 254

Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people's actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls "the society of capital" and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.

Gavin Smith is the author of Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru (1989); Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology (1999); and, with Susana Narotzky, Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain (2006). He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: Intellectuals, Historical Realism and Counter-politics 1

Part I: Intellectual Infrastructure

Chapter One Capital: Structural, Phenomenological, Financial 27

Part II: Scales of History and Politics

Chapter Two The Scales of Ethnography: Periodizing Spatial

Coherence in Early-Twentieth-Century Spain 67

Chapter Three Popular Struggle, Intellectuals and Perspectives in Realist History: A Case from Late-Twentieth-Centurv Peru 86

Chapter Four History's Absent Presence in die Everyday Politics of Contemporary' Rural Spain 124

Chapter Five History as Possibilities: On the Threshold between Everyday Practice and Historical Praxis 150

Part III: Politics' Edge

Chapter Six Conditions of Possibility: Dominant Blocs and Changing Contours of the Hegemonic Field 177

Conclusion: Between Reflexivity and Engagement

References

Index