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More than Subversion: Four Strategies for the Dominated

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Abstract

This article asks what strategies are available to dominated actors in fields of cultural production. Using archival and biographical materials on Ottoman/Turkish women intellectuals, we show that they effectively used, depending on their social and cultural capital and their past practices, at least four strategies. Apart from the well-theorized strategy of subversion, they could also deploy acquiescence, collaboration, and defiance. These four strategies, we argue, constitute a two-dimensional space defined by loyalty vs. resistance on one hand and the overtness vs. covertness of loyalty or resistance on the other. While much of this space is best understood in terms of reciprocal social exchange, the assumptions of exchange break down in the case of overt resistance, showing that strategy goes beyond negotiation and that the understanding of power as always-already implicated with resistance has limits.

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Notes

  1. While the term that Bourdieu more frequently uses is “agent,” our sense is that that word is too closely associated with the principal-agent problem of rational choice theory in contemporary English-language scholarship. We therefore use “actor.”

  2. In the literary field, for example, the most established writers enforce current definitions of good literary taste (Bourdieu 1996a, 234).

  3. In the bureaucratic field, for instance, well-educated newcomers refrain from challenging the Grand Ecole diploma as they own that diploma and expect it to be useful (Bourdieu 1996b).

  4. As an example of the former, intellectuals can challenge the reason of the state by pointing out that that reason violates other cherished values of the polity such as truth (Bourdieu 1996a, 129–131). Bourdieu’s use, in his youth, of a reclaimed (and subtly redefined) critical reason against the scholarly establishment exemplifies the latter.

  5. Bourdieu portrays them as engaged in field-level permanent revolution (1996a, 239–241). While regularly changing the dominant actors, such revolutions rarely succeed in transforming the logic by which domination works.

  6. Indeed, strategy and subversion appeared in the social sciences at the same time and have grown in tandem: the correlation, for the years 1980–2017, between the number of Web of Science hits for strategy in sociology and the number of Web of Science hits for subversion in the social sciences is 0.93115199.

  7. See Chaudhuri et al. 2014; Kim 2013; Lempert 1996; Marmenout and Lirio 2014; Reynolds and Prior 2003. For instance, Marmenout and Lirio (2014) list continuing education and learning, crafting an emotional and instrumental support system, engaging in structural and personal redefinition, and targeting suitable employment options as “strategies.”

  8. For example, see Burke 2012; Lorber 2002; and Paxton and Hughes 2015.

  9. It is found to both underestimate (e.g. Amrullah 2011) and overestimate (e.g. O’Shaughnessy 2009) women’s agency, which suggests to us that it may be the happy medium.

  10. This is not to claim that gender was no bigger obstacle to intellectual careers than was class. Our point is merely that, just as there are survivors of class discrimination in fields of cultural production, there are also survivors of gender discrimination.

  11. The epithet derives from the name of their political party, The Party of Union and Progress. The union in question is the union of the nation and so it does not signify a commitment to the working class, or any other social class.

  12. While women received the franchise under Atatürk, for instance, there were no meaningful elections until circumstances forced multi-party democracy on his successor in 1945. As such, while Kemalism created some new educational and economic opportunities for women, the boost it provided them is less than what its myth suggests.

  13. In their 1910 manifesto, for example, the Fecr-i Ati group wrote that “very few people have understood the significance and seriousness of the word “literature” and conveyed that significance and seriousness to the people in our country.”

  14. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, a leading Kemalist theorist and novelist, wrote that he was “opposed to any literature of epic heroism (...) that corrupts historical truths,” calling such literature “demagogic” (quoted in Fedai 2011, 34; original statement in 1934).

  15. Ahmed Midhat letter to Fatma Aliye, September 7, 1890. Fatma Aliye Hanım evrakı [Fatma Aliye papers], Atatürk Kitaplığı [The Atatürk Library], Istanbul.

  16. Ahmed Midhat letters to Fatma Aliye, January 19 and 20, 1896. Fatma Aliye papers.

  17. It would be unfair to place Bourdieu squarely in this camp, but there are parallels between his work and the elitist tradition. His emphasis on the need to construct an alliance between those who are rich in dominated kinds of capital and those who lack any capital may be interpreted as proof that he viewed the latter group as incapable of acting independently and effectively in pursuit of its interests.

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Acknowledgements

The two co-authors have contributed equally to this manuscript. The research was funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Institute of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), grant number 115 K098. An earlier version was presented at the Third Pierre Bourdieu Symposium in Antalya, Turkey. We would like to thank Didem Havlioğlu, Sevcan Karcı, Tuna Kuyucu, three anonymous reviewers, and the Editor-in-Chief of Qualitative Sociology for their invaluable comments.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Koç University, Rumelifeneri Yolu, 34450, Istanbul, Turkey

    Barış Büyükokutan

  2. Department of Southeast European History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Hale Şaşmaz

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  1. Barış Büyükokutan
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Correspondence to Barış Büyükokutan.

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Büyükokutan, B., Şaşmaz, H. More than Subversion: Four Strategies for the Dominated. Qual Sociol 41, 593–616 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9396-9

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