Resistance

Abstract

A new literature on cultural resistance has enormously expanded our view of how people challenge the systems in which they live. While in the 1960s and 1970s we concentrated on armed peasant rebellion, recent years have turned us instead to devil worship in South America (Taussig, 1980), Mexican-American sexual humor (Limón, 1989), Chinese social networks (Yang, 1989), and safety pins in British ears as aspects of a subversive cultural resistance. While this may reflect in part the political changes of the 1980s, it also forces us to ask about the relation between the two kinds of resistance. Armed peasant rebellion and quiet cultural subversion seem quite different, and we tend to use different theoretical approaches for them. Yet each kind of resistance implies a relation to the other, with armed rebellion having clear cultural roots, and cultural resistance having at least the possibility of coming out of the closet as an actual political movement.