Vernacular Democracy and the Idea and Idiom of Political Representation in Nagaland, North-East India

We would like to invite you to the next Modern South Asia seminar, on 1 December 2014, 17:00 – 19:00. For this month’s seminar J.P. Wouters will be our guest speaker. He will speak about “Vernacular Democracy and the Idea and Idiom of Political Representation in Nagaland, North-East India”. The talk will be followed by a reception. 

While modern democracy crucially hinges on the idea of ‘political representation’, the social contract that exists between representative and represented has received little anthropological attention. This appears all the more astonishing given that anthropology has a great deal to say about other kinds of political linkages, for instance between patrons and clients and tribal chiefs and commoners. Such anthropological insights have however not readily been extended to the realm of ‘political representation’, about whose idiom and idea Spencer (1997) rightly noted a pervading semantic and cultural emptiness. If the normative framework of liberal democracy projects the universality of impersonal statehood and politicians behaving as servants, the intellectual archaeology that supports such notions is historically situated in certain parts of Europe and across the Atlantic. Drawing on both the ethnographic longue durée and contemporary ethnographic snapshots from the small and rugged ‘tribal’ state of Nagaland, situated in India’s generally much lesser known Northeast, this talk highlights the subjectivity of such globalist philosophies. 

Rather than measured by pre-set criteria, J.P. Wouters will insist that the sorts of qualities, behaviour, and actions that make a good or a bad politician is ultimately an empirical question, a question he seeks to approach through the eyes of ‘ordinary’ electors in two Naga villages. Theoretically, he argues that the idea and idiom of ‘political representation’ is culturally and historically elastic and that its study provides an insightful window into the character and substance of local political life. 

Jelle Wouters is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Sikkim University (India) and currently a visiting faculty at the Eberhard Karls University, Tubingen (Germany). He holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and is a PhD candidate at the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, India. His PhD project is financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and broadly centers on issues pertaining to development, state and democracy in Nagaland, Northeast India.  

The talk will be followed by a reception. 

Do join us!