Saris, A. Jamie (2007) Culture, inequality and the bureaucratic imagination: states and subjects for a new millenium. Irish Journal of Anthropology (Special Edition), 10 (2). pp. 54-60.
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Abstract
In this paper, I want to make a case for imagination as a ubiquitous, but neglected,
modality in social life. Unfortunately, in such a short piece, I will not be able to offer
anything like a comprehensive examination of such a complex term. Even confining
ourselves to English-language speculation, for example, such a summary would still
be huge. Just in the space between Hobbes’s rather lame sense of imagination as
decaying sense (1992 [1651]) and Locke’s subtly subversive understanding of
reflection (1700), imagination emerged as the spectre haunting anglophone
philosophy’s empiricism. It is, arguably, one of the most interesting words in the
English language and, while it appears in variations in parts of modern anthropology
(such as ‘imaginary’ derived from the work of Lacan), its more natural language sense
as a potential of certain kinds of thought is less well researched. In particular, the
sense of this term denoting a way of visualizing a hoped-for better future – perhaps
best expressed by one of the slogans connected to the wave of protests loosely
referred to as ‘anti-capitalist’, that is, another world is possible – is less commonly
examined. My interest in this paper, then, is in thinking about how we actively
imagine the world in which we actually live, especially the connections within this
global moment we are least inclined to see. If there is a slogan connected to my
argument, it would run something like: this world is here because we are actively
making it. Thus, there is a grimmer side to the case I am making – we are well along
the road of imagining a world that is pretty unpleasant, and we had better start to
understand some of the ways that this is actually done, if we want to go about
changing it.
Item Type: | Article |
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Keywords: | Culture; inequality; bureaucratic imagination; |
Academic Unit: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology |
Item ID: | 1123 |
Depositing User: | Dr. A. Jamie Saris |
Date Deposited: | 12 Jan 2009 14:58 |
Journal or Publication Title: | Irish Journal of Anthropology (Special Edition) |
Publisher: | The Anthropological Association of Ireland (AAI) |
Refereed: | Yes |
URI: | https://mu.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/1123 |
Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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