The Intimate Life of Dissent: Anthropological Perspectives

Table of Contents:
  1.      Introduction: The Intimate life of Dissent Harini Amarasuriya, Tobias Kelly, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic, Jonathan Spencer  2.  One is the Biggest Number. Estrangement, Intimacy, and Totalitarianism in Late Soviet Russia Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic  3.      Dissent With/Out Resistance?: Secular and Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Approaches to Ethical and Political Disagreement Erica Weiss  4. Friendship Behind Bars: Kurdish Dissident Politics in Turkey’s Prisons Serra Hakyemez 5. Intimate Commitments: Friends, Comrades and Family in the Life of one Sri Lankan Activist Harini Amarasuriya and Jonathan Spencer  6.  Dissenting Conscience: The Intimate Politics of Objection in Second World War Britain Tobias Kelly 7.  Friends with Differences: Ethics, Rivalry in Politics and Ex-Tamil Sri Lankan Political Activists Sidharthan Maunaguru 8.      The Intimacy of Details: A Tibetan Diary of Dissent Carole McGranahan 9. Dissident Writing and the Intimacy of the Archive in Authoritarian Indonesia Doreen Lee Index

About the Author :
Harini Amarasuriya’s research interests include political and social movements, state society relations, and public policy. Prior to joining the Open University of Sri Lanka in 2011, she worked in the development sector, with organisations including UNICEF and CARE Sri Lanka. She was appointed in 2016 to the Public Representations Committee on Constitutional Reform in Sri Lanka and was a member of the team that submitted a report to the Sri Lankan parliament on constitutional reforms based on public consultations. Tobias Kelly's research interests include human rights, war and peace, and political and legal anthropology. He has carried out ethnographic and archival research in Israel/Palestine, the UK and at the UN. He received a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2003, and has worked at the Institute of Law of Birzeit University, the Crisis States Programme at the LSE, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University. Sidharthan Maunaguru’s research interests are: the intersections of violence, kinship, marriage and state; transnational migration and political violence; politics and religion, and Diaspora. His work is placed within the South Asian region and beyond; it often includes multi-site fieldwork and intersects with anthropology, history and philosophy. He was awarded a PhD by Johns Hopkins University. Since obtaining her PhD from Anthropology Department at UCL, Galina has engaged in ethnographic and archival research on anthropology of religion and political anthropology in Russia and the Balkans. Her current project explores a politico-ethical question of collective autonomy among Jews in the Soviet Union and Russia, with a specific focus on Anti-Zionism, Left-wing Jewish politics and alternative political configurations such as the Autonomous Jewish Province of Birobidzhan in the Far East. Jonathan Spencer’s (FBA, FRSE) primary research site has been Sri Lanka. His original work there focused on rural change, politics and nationalism. He has since published extensively on the causes and consequences of ethnic violence. He has also published occasional articles on Buddhism, and on the institutional history of British anthropology. Since 2004 he has been involved in a string of collaborative projects with younger Sri Lankan colleagues, on politics and religion, and most recently on urban planning, and the history and ethics of political dissent. In this work he has increasingly experimented with new modes of North-South collaboration and co-writing.

Review :
'a productive read' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) 'The Intimate Life of Dissent offers a useful guide for better understanding the "intimacy" of ... (public) injuries.' Theory & Event 'In this collection, the socialities of intimacy multiply and offer other ways of accessing dissidences in worlds not so distant from Brazilian readers. It is still a pertinent question, however, to imagine how dissenters not informed by graphic forms (for example, writing) would present their intimacies, or even the non-human modes of dissident intimacies. These are questions for reading such reflections.' Mana 'This book puts acts of high principle back into the personal relations out of which they emerge and take effect, raising new questions about the relationship between intimacy and political commitment. ... The Intimate Life of Dissent will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers in anthropology, history, political theory, and sociology, as well as to those teaching introductory undergraduate courses on political anthropology.' Allegra Lab 'To what extent are experiences, expectations and obligations from and to friends and partners, comrades or family members in harmony with dissident practices and when do they stand in almost irreconcilable conflict with each other? Or should they rather be understood as mutually dependent aspects of resistant socialities? What roles do the beautiful and dark sides of solidarity, love or antagonism play and how are they expressed in ways of subjectification and forms of political articulation? The exciting anthology revolves around such and related questions.' PERIPHERIE - Politik - Ökonomie - Kultur