ABSTRACT

This essay examines the phenomenological and political dimensions of force in north India. Manifest as embodied experience, and as power and domination, force encompasses felt emotion and collective clout. Yet unlike other categories traversing the political and experiential, force has been comparatively understudied. This paper surveys ethnographic and historical examples where force is prevalent. We see it in urban life, as an idiom of moral states, as embedded in community narratives and social hierarchies, and as enacting political demarcations. A focus is on the 1992 nationalist destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, when force was invoked and expressed. Through this study, certain tensions and paradoxes are raised. Force is seen as indispensable to state authority and legal sanction. Simultaneously, it is a field of potentials irreducible to human intentions. While force is a recurring locus of impetus and influence, it is also volatile and delinquent. It gives us insight into moments of concatenation without presuming contained interest or enduring stability. Force, affective and effective, is also slippery and insurrectionary, illuminating processes of mutability and contingency, in India as elsewhere.

摘要

本文探讨了印度北部武力的现象学和政治层面。表现为经验的体现，是力量和统治的体现，力量包括感觉到的情感和集体的影响力。然而，与其他跨越政治和经历的类别不同，对力量的研究相对较少。本文调查了普遍存在武力的人种学和历史事例。我们在城市生活中将其视为道德状态的习语，被嵌入社区叙事和社会等级体系中，并制定了政治界限。重点是1992年民族力量在阿约提亚（Ayodhya）摧毁了巴布里清真寺（Babri Masjid），当时使用了武力并表达了武力。通过这项研究，提出了某些紧张和悖论。武力被视为国家权威和法律制裁所不可或缺的。同时地，这是人类意图无法消除的潜力领域。武力是不断发展的动力和影响力的源泉，但它也是易变的和犯罪的。它使我们可以洞悉串联的时刻，而不必假定存在兴趣或持久的稳定性。在印度和其他地方一样，情感和有效的武力也很滑和起义，说明了变异和偶然性的过程。