Geography Reference
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Durkheimian tradition overly constitutes individuals as collective identities.
The extent to which we internalise or resist the social role projected on us
remains open to investigation. This makes social
inquiry di
erent from a
positivistic enterprise, as there is no de
nite outcome of ideology. If we
cannot have a general theory about ideology such that
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specif[ies] the uni-
versal pre-conditions, signi
, we need to recon-
sider the questions we pose (Asad 2006: 252) and the categories we use for
analysis.
It is from a work of
cance and e
ect of discourse
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fiction that I want to start an alternative analysis.
Ibsen
splayAn Enemy of the People (1982) captures social life not in terms of
social systems, but in terms of how each individual acts in a particular way,
which in return in
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s villagers are cer-
tainly not willing to stand up against the status quo and their own stakes, this
play, albeit
uences political outcomes. While Ibsen
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fiction, intricately demonstrates how outcomes are highly rele-
vant to the choices each individual makes even when being ruled by the
ect in the study of
politics where the focus has primarily been on the system rather than how
people act within the system. In this context, Abeles (1992: 17, in Gledhill
2000: 20) argues that the crisis of legitimacy that now besets political life in the
North makes it necessary to move beyond a focus on the state, to an analysis
of how power is acquired and transmitted in society as a whole, how we can
better understand the
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multi-layered complexity of political reality
. We need
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to look at how the primary concern may not be with
as a system,
but rather with how and why people act the way they do. However problematic
the notion, we cannot get away from the need to become better at exploring
and interpreting the motivation for people
democracy
s behaviour.
Bailey (1969), in particular, elaborated on the ways social structure arises
out of and is used by the interactions of individuals in the political arena,a
concept that replaced the more static approach that had framed politics as
equalling political structures. Bailey distinguished between culturally deter-
mined normative rules and pragmatic rules. The latter are the
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rules of
the political game, since applying these rules is how things get done. In this
regard political
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real
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ned as essentially a pragmatic
business where political returns count for more than long-term political
objectives and issues of public concern. As we have seen, this is usually
expressed with such concepts as omote and ura. What is of particular interest
here is the way Bailey divided political supporters (
life in Japan has been de
) into two types
according to their relationship with their political representatives: contract
teams and moral teams.
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teams
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Contract
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teams refer to supporters who receive
chie
y material bene
ts in return for their support,
i.e. the relationship
between leaders and followers is of a clientelist nature.
teams base
their support on a shared ideology. Bailey argues that leaders of moral teams
have the security of knowing that they can count on the support of their fol-
lowers even when things such as elections go badly. At the same time, they are
under pressure to live up to the normative ideals of the group. Bailey
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Moral
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s
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