The Issue of Marginalization and the Concept of Habitus - Essay Example

“How Far do they Critically Place the Issue of Marginalization and the Concept of Habitus and do the Examples Tryto Universalize these Concepts?” The four essays are linked by a common design which speaks, in various tones and intonations, about the never-ending cycle of disempowered local body fighting for participatory rights. And how these instruments of disempowerment must retain their “disempowered” position forever to contest their causes forever and not achieve any end. The papers points out how the agents of the subversion through participation is always contained, not as part of the greater discourse, and how it maintains its own identity by being subversive and therefore, an alternative and marginalized body representing the “Other”1. In Uma Kothari’s Power, Knowledge and Social Control in Participatory Development, she delves into the Foucaultian world of participatory power-play and limits of social-power and how the pattern of judgement and punishment becomes a strategic weapon that is supported by a said and unsaid network of sign systems everywhere. She begins by quoting Foucault and argues how the processes of canonisation affects those individuals and who are often marginalized by their separation and isolation from the production of knowledge and the formulation of policies and practices, to be included in decisions that affect their lives. She focuses on participatory techniques as methods of knowledge accumulation and attempts to unravel the sorts of power that are reproduced at the micro-level through the use of these approaches, and how participants and participatory development practitioners are themselves conduits of power. The arguments she presents presented are how participatory development can encourage a reassertion of control and power by dominant individuals and groups, that it can lead to the reification of social normsthrough self-surveillance and consensus–building, and that it ‘purifies’ knowledge and the spaces of participation through the codification, classi- fication and control of information, and its analysis and (re)presentation. The chapter also explores the limitations of participation in terms of how it demands certain kinds of performances to be enacted. It is suggested here that individuals and groups can and do subvert the methodology and, in doing so, gain control by shaping the form of their participation through their ‘performances’ on the PRA stage and in their selection of the information they conceal or choose to disclose. Kothari shows that an individual’s behaviour, actions and perceptions are all shaped by the power embedded and embodied within society, something which Friedmann will call habitus. But, whereas, Friedmann offers a more detailed analysis of transnational migration and the corresponding effects on the loci of the migrants and the lands they are migrating to, Kothari tries to chart out the power structure of individuals and groups that are often selected for participation because of their disadvantaged position vis-à-vis, for example, their access to resources and services, or their control over decision-making. She upholds Foucault’s idea that all individuals are most certainly affected by macro-structures of inequality (such as gender, ethnicity, class), and that even when individuals think that they are most free, they are in fact in the grip of more insidious forms of power, which operate not solely through direct forms of repression but often through less visible strategies of normalization (Foucault 1977, 1980). Power is cappilary and difficult to locate as it runs through notions and practices, can be enacted by individuals who may even be opposed to it, and localized through its expression in everyday practices – through, for example, self-surveillance. Where as Kothari demonstrates that a link exists between power relations and the production of the ‘truths’ by which we live, which soon gets accepted as cultural norms, Kirsten Simonsen argues that the disemmination of this cappilary force has been one of the most important agents in tradition of patriarchy. Sandercock, on the other hand, argues that the extreme sense of heterogenosity which exists win today’s world, inevitabvly leads to a fear psychosis and anxieties which is far more nasidious than what Friedmann calls as the problems of habitus. What Shandercock also does is try to prioritise the loci of represenattion of these latent fears: something that she calles: “whose fears are getting represented and whose are not”. Shandercock points out, as does Kothari in her essay, that in this age of surveillance, there has been a case of paranoia whach has crept into the general life, an example which gets easily explainde in the perspective of the scores of fear literatures that the 1990’s have produced. More than what is called as the “double diaspora” of the marginalized women, all the essayists point out the reasion of marginalizxation existing today and how the sense of identity, space and time has become what Salman Rushdie calls “chutnified”. In Habitus and Migration in Transnational Cities, John Friedmann, talks about how theories of social reproduction, may be extended to illuminate also processes of social change and the effects of gender-specific habitus– the rules of the patriarchal order in 'exile' and , increasingly transnational metropolis. By using the hypothetical Kabyle society model, Friedmann tries to argue that the opposition between the world of female life and the city of men is based on the same principles as the two systems of oppositions which it opposes to one another. The application to opposing areas of the same principium division is that establishes their opposition ensures economy and a surplus of consistency,without involving confusion between those areas (Bourdieu, 1990: 276-7). Deriving from Bourdieu, he goes on to show how the original habitus of the hypothetical Kabyle household was ordained by a system of patriarchy where the discourse of power was disseminated in a manner whereby the women folk of the house need not go out of the house and were to be supported by the men folk. Interestingly, he defines it as a world “World Reversed” and then goes on to problemetize the canon of patriarchy where then Kabyle women also have to go out of their houses in order to fetch their livelihood, especially with mass exodus of the community from their original homeland.He shows the large scale violence and intolerance that would follow with this order of transnational migration and says: “…wounded places will remain wounded, ghetto formation will almost certainly continue, and anti-foreign feelings will seek to find expression in nationalist parties.” In Kirsten Simonsen’s Modernity, community or a diversity of ways of life: A discussion of urban everyday life, Kothari’s concept of the dissemination of power and Friedmann’s concern with the changing role of the habitus in transnational social dynamism is fused to portray a three parted argument whereby she identifies the dominant models of urban life and illustrates the dichotomic character of their origin, draws assumptions of the advanced models, with a case study of the way of life in a Copenhagen neighbourhood and offers an alternative approach to the theorisation of social practice on which a more contextual understanding of urban life can be based. What is interesting to note in Simonson’s essay is that where as Friedmann was concerned with the outer and to a certain extent the more political connotations, as in the perpetration of violence and insecurities which would arise with the change in habitus, Simonsen focusses on the segmentation of personal relations and associations that provides the individual with a greater sense of uniqueness and freedom, a self-consciousness that encourages individualism. She shows how the habitus can be manipulated and reduced to the capacity of the individual to attain a lasting and meaningful unification of the multiplicity of cultural objectivations surrounding him/her in everyday life. Alike Kothari, she shows how marriage divides the sexes into their distinctive roles, and how strengthens the relationship between the daughter and the mother who has been through it all before (Young and Willmott 1957, p. 61). The life of these, habitus, she argues, becomes based on strong gender-segregated social networks. Thus, she upholds how in a semoitic habitus, the strong women’s networks function as communities which can help to break down feelings of doubt and isolation in relation to child care and other work of reproduction, but they also function as guarantees when the man is absent for one reason or another. All the essays deal with the loci of marginalization and its effect on geograhy and history of the contemporary times. They are all diected by a common vision of anxiety which loks at the disorientation of modern life from the angles of power and tries to rationalise them in their individual histories. Works Cited 1. Althusser. 1978. Lenin and Philosophy. (Trans. By Ben Brewster). New York: Monthly Review Press. 2. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971 3. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. 4. Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), publ. Routledge, 1972 5. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. 6. Lacan, Jacques, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. with Notes and Commentary by Anthony Wilden. Johns Hopkins, 1968. 7. Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1995) Read More