Power of the Talking Stick: Indigenous Politics and the World Ecological Crisis by Sharon J Ridgeway & Peter J. Jacques

Author:Sharon J Ridgeway & Peter J. Jacques [Ridgeway, Sharon J & Jacques, Peter J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317253624
Google: vmLvCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27890798
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Social Construction of the Modern European State

This section of the chapter will briefly look over the dominant theories (sociological, liberal, and Marxist) of the state to assess the prominent position the state has in political theory, and at the same time identify the Eurocentric and modern culture that the state fundamentally represents.29 We will show that the state’s role has been identified as one of authoritative Western global control but leaves nature out of the understanding, and is therefore incomplete.

The state is the “apparatus” of national government, but it is also so much more.30 Held notes that the state is a part of politics that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because its power is felt throughout the most personal levels of society, but is also very difficult to tangibly locate. The apparatus of government here at a minimum level is the central government of a country, but the state infiltrates public and private moments, rules, and opportunities that are not recognizable in the simple form of a national law or a national military or police force. Apparatus here also implies a system of social control that extends deep into a society through social networks and, as Antonio Gramsci would describe in his prison notebooks, this network of social control is hegemonic, but covertly so.31 In other words, the apparatus of the state is like an iceberg, or perhaps like a cockroach on the kitchen counter—what you see is only a fraction of what is there. Gramsci describes this hegemony as a class-based state apparatus that reaches down into schools, churches, markets, and families. Here, control is exerted through the expectations and social demands to, simply, not challenge the hegemonic power. For the most part, citizens become trained, and in the case of nationalism extremely so, to not only refuse to question the central foundations of the state as an institution, but to defend it through national pride.

Our ideas of the state have been extraordinarily limited, and few reach the criticisms or scrutiny of Gramsci who sees the state as a latticework of hegemony and repression working in defense of class and dominant cultural interests.32 Instead, most understandings of the state are apologetic at best, and naturalizing at worst to the extent that the state is assumed to be a natural extension of civilized societies—even though the state began as almost exclusively a western European institution. Sociological theories, such as those of Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, or Max Weber, see the state as a naturally evolving institution meant to serve an increasingly complex society. Durkheim is among the most important thinkers regarding the state. As a founder of the “functionalist” school of sociology, he likens the institutions of society to an organism. This school of thought uses the organism for two reasons. It not only sees institutions as developing “naturally,” it also posits that these institutions are meant to work together for the function of the whole organism. This coordination and control become important for sociological theories that see several pathogenic results of complex society and divisions of labor that hurt some people.

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