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Chapter 1 The Politics of Heritage
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Hegemony, Nationalism, and the Investigation of Armed Separatism

Nationalist projects, and especially armed separatist movements, would seem particularly useful cases for evaluating the conflicting claims for the analytical utility of the concept of hegemony. After all, nationalist projects are, unavoidably, popular undertakings—projects that involve "inviting the masses into history" (Nairn 1977, 340). Though conceived from above by elites, armed nationalisms are incarnated on the ground by rank-and-file fighters and adherents struggling to replace one set of state-level elites with another, more familiar one.[11] In the absence of direct physical coercion, what motivates such perilous endeavors on the part of subordinates? How serviceable is the hegemony concept for understanding mobilization for armed separatism?

Armed secession is almost always an exceedingly hazardous undertaking, defying as it does an established state whose military might is usually far superior and whose reaction to attempted secession nearly always vengeful. Armed separatist struggles demand mortal sacrifices, requiring individual adherents "not so much to kill, as willingly to die" for the nationalist cause (Anderson 1983, 16).[12] That elite appeals to the "nation-as-community" (Foster 1991, 241) appear to move so many ordinary actors to collective and often costly action invites reliance on cultural hegemony as an analytical tool. The voluntary par-


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ticipation of rank-and-file adherents in armed nationalist movements would seem to provide prima facie evidence for the motive force of resonant nationalist ideas.

Employing hegemony to understand armed nationalism is not, however, free of complications. For one, the notion of hegemony was originally devised to explain the political inertia of subordinate classes (those who had yet to launch a proletarian revolution in Gramsci's Western Europe), not their mobilization for collective action. Analyses of nationalist mobilization keyed to hegemony (or to kindred concepts—see, e.g., Bentley 1987; Kapferer 1988) do not of course employ it to explain political immobility on the part of subordinates but rather their engagement in "concerted, directed action" (Kapferer 1988, 83). Explaining collective action and accounting for social stasis are quite dissimilar undertakings. Successful collective action requires, in addition to an initial propellant, direction, containment, and continual remotivation. Adequate explanation of such action requires making sense of motion—of how political movements surge and subside and change course.

There are more practical problems as well when applying hegemony to the explanation of separatist movements. Separatist insurgencies in particular present certain methodological difficulties for ethnographers attempting to gain subordinate perspectives on ethnonational movements. Direct interviews of ordinary adherents tend to draw political statements exhibiting self-conscious attempts at correctness ranging from self-censorship to psittacism (see, e.g., Swedenburg 1991; Bowman 1993, 457, n. 19). That is to say, the likelihood is great that, under conditions of armed struggle, political questions posed to fighters and supporters will elicit only authorized answers—only the "official transcript" of political relations and events (Scott 1990).[13] There is, in addition, the problem of obtaining official permission to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in regions where the authority of the central state is actively contested. Such difficulties may account for the relative scarcity of ground-level ethnographic accounts of separatist insurgencies.[14]

It is a central irony of modern ethnonationalist movements that, though fashioned to disengage from totalizing, centralizing states, they invariably advance ideological projects mandating cultural and political homogenization within their own declared territories.[15] The personal costs of one such hegemonic project have been powerfully described by the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic, who describes


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herself as "pinned to the wall of nationhood—not only by outside pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself" (1993, 51): "The trouble with this nationhood . . . is that whereas before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character—and, yes, my nationality too—now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats." (1993, 51).

The formative and inhibitive effects of ethnonationalist movements on their ordinary adherents are evidenced most dramatically and coinstantaneously in armed secessionist struggles. The vindictive responses of state authorities to separatist movements, and the ferocious hostility of their militaries toward civilians suspected of seditionist leanings, substantiate separatist rhetoric and provide significant impetus for the creation of a transcendent national identity constituted in large measure on the possession of a common enemy (see Bowman 1993). At the same time, such struggles tend to create political environments comparable to that described by Drakulic in her observation that today "in Croatia it is difficult to be the kind of person who says, 'Yes, I am Croat, but . . .'" (1993, 51). That double-edged character of armed separatism—opening a new discursive space for imagining a transcendental (and oppositional) community while severely restricting the space for expressing other identities and concerns—suggests that listening for voiced dissension about the location of the crucial community should be a primary task for ethnographers attempting to assess the hegemonic force of nationalist ideas on such movements. It also, of course, renders the elicitation of dissident rank-and-file perspectives on armed nationalist movements through direct discourse especially problematic.

Such problems are prominently evidenced in Ted Swedenburg's study of popular memory among Palestinian peasants (1991, 1995). Swedenburg observes that in response to Israeli "repression of all manifestations of Palestinian identity," and in accord with official Palestinian nationalism's efforts to "marginalize the dissonant strands" of popular memory, his informants "couched popular-democratic statements in nationalist language, as divergent rather than oppositional versions of a national past" (1991, 165, 175). He also remarks that his informants felt that, through him, "they were addressing a U.S. audience, which they recognize as a powerful determinant of their situation . . . Accordingly, and in line with official discourse, informants often practiced self-censorship, presenting an image of the revolt suitable for


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both national and foreign consumption" (1991, 172). Swedenburg's attempts to solicit "dissident strands" of popular memory among Palestinian peasants were thus effectively blocked by both the repressive context of his fieldwork environment and his own identification as a conduit to an American audience. When attempting to analyze his methodological difficulties, however, he turns to a version of cultural hegemony, noting, "Whereas I previously tended to regard nationalism as a discourse imposed from above, I have come to conceive of it as a joint construction of the popular classes and the leadership . . . All parties agree that [the] internal struggle [between Palestinian leaders and followers over various social issues] is secondary to the fight for national liberation" (emphasis mine, 1990, 28). One wonders exactly how Swedenburg is able to ascertain what "all parties" agree upon when those whose opinions most concern him are (as he has just informed us) practicing self-censorship.[16]

While the notion of cultural hegemony appears at first regard to hold promise for understanding ethnonational mobilization, the problems attendant on its application generally—how to disentangle the operation of coercion from that of hegemony, how to determine the political authenticity of the authorized narratives of power relations told by (and to) subordinates—are actually intensified in situations of armed separatism. One route around those problems is to seek out the equivalent of James Scott's "hidden transcript," the unauthorized, "offstage" discourse of subordinates (1990, 4). While not necessarily contradicting the official account of power relations, "a hidden transcript is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript. By assessing the discrepancy between the hidden transcript and the public transcript [it becomes possible] to judge the impact of domination on public discourse" (Scott 1990, 5). The informal ways in which Campo Muslim residents speak to one another about the Muslim separatist movement constitute a discursive practice (a form of hidden transcript) that, while not fundamentally subversive of Muslim nationalist interests, does articulate a collateral view—one that includes, and often privileges, goals and identities different from those authorized by movement leaders. In particular, the unofficial songs and stories of the separatist rebellion have been discursive vehicles for independent evaluations of the separatist project and have sanctioned subordinate actions that, in some cases, have directly contravened the edicts of movement leaders. Songs composed by rank-and-file fighters proclaimed that they were


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"fighting for the inged "—the local, face-to-face community—and made no mention of the Bangsamoro, or Philippine Muslim nation. Popular narratives of supernatural assistance provided to those fighting to defend Muslims from aggression spoke, in some cases, of divine mercy bestowed on individuals shunned by the rebel leadership and in others of the denial of divine assistance to officially approved rebels.

Analyses of nationalism have taken notice of the fact that the key-words of nationalist ideologies may be significantly altered in meaning while being absorbed by subordinate classes (see, e.g., Chatterjee 1993; Wright 1985). Unauthorized narratives of the Bangsamoro Rebellion spoken in Campo Muslim reveal not only the alteration of official descriptions of the separatist movement but the use of independent language as well—language expressing distance from the authorized aims of Muslim nationalism. The critical assessments made of the rebellion by ordinary adherents questioned not only the claims and promises of movement leaders but also their fundamental aims and assumptions.

The view from the ranks in Cotabato poses a direct challenge to the prevalent assumption that successful nationalist mobilization requires the ideological incorporation of ordinary adherents. Despite the notable misalignment between the official discourse of the rebellion and the language, perceptions, and intentions of its ordinary adherents, the Muslim separatist struggle in Cotabato has had considerable success. The practical compliance of subordinates is at least as consequential for successful mobilization. As we shall see, the practical compliance of ordinary adherents is based importantly on their possession of a common enemy but also on a host of collateral intentions: self-defense, defense of community, social pressure, armed coercion, revenge, and personal ambition, among others. The Cotabato material bolsters Scott's critique by questioning the utility of the concept of hegemony (as presented in most current usages) both for the analysis of ethnonationalism and for relations of domination in general. Even so, I am not so inclined as Scott to reject the notion entirely. There remains the need for a vocabulary for speaking about the relationship between physical coercion (broadly defined) and public political culture. Appropriately refashioned—by emphasizing, for example, its grounding in "everyday fear" (Sayer 1994, 374)—hegemony may usefully serve that purpose.[17]


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Chapter 1 The Politics of Heritage
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