-
Ch. 6/ Everyday Spaces of Resistance
- University of Washington Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
181 T he exercise of power over others—the essence of the relationship between colonizer and colonized —is often expressed through the establishment and control of boundaries. Spaces are claimed, named, mapped, and regulated. The power relationship also defines what behaviors are acceptable within these spaces. By transgressing or ignoring these boundaries and behaviors, people can create spaces of resistance. They might do this through heroic struggles and grand gestures carried out in full view of the powerful. To protest the resumption of nuclear testing in 1995, Tahitians drove bulldozers through Faa‘a International Airport. To call attention to environmental destruction caused by tourism development, Tahitians in canoes have surrounded the dredges that pump white sand from the lagoon onto the otherwise muddy shore. As Hiro remarked, “A symbolic gesture expresses a break, a shock, and it’s understood as a provocation. Thus, it is necessary to choose significant gestures” (Hiro 2004, 85).1 For him, one particular gesture was the wearing of a pareu instead of Western clothing . He said, That’s a story in itself! I was a joke! Everyone’s joke! The poet! The dreamer! The intellectual! The bumpkin! Because of the pareu, I lived through a period of ridicule. Some people confronted me directly, but since I wore it on all occasions and everywhere, it shocked people and then became ordinary. And then, more and more people started to wear it. The pareu reconciled Polynechapter six Everyday Spaces of Resistance 182 chapter six sians with what was always profoundly a part of them. It reconciled them with themselves. (Stewart, Mateata-Allain, and Mawyer 2006, 80)2 As seen with Hiro’s pareu, challenges to conventional behavior do have the ability to effect profound change. Whereas spaces of domination are those of exclusion, spaces of resistance are multiple and dynamic. They are usually dislocated from spaces of domination because “the powerful are continually vigilant of the borders” (Pile and Keith 1997, 16). These spaces of resistance can occur in myriad ways, both brazenly provocative and quietly subtle: Potentially, the list of acts of resistance is endless—everything from footdragging to walking, from sit-ins to outings, from chaining oneself up in treetops to dancing the night away, from parody to passing, from bombs to hoaxes, from graffiti tags on New York trains to stealing pens from employers . . . and the reason for this seems to be that definitions of resistance have become bound up with the ways that people are understood to have capacities to change things through giving their own meanings to things, through finding their own tactics for avoiding, taunting, attacking, undermining, enduring, hindering, mocking the everyday exercise of power. (Pile and Keith 1997, 14) embodied acts of pleasure Everyday acts of resistance tend to be those that are more subtle, habitual, and ambiguous. As de Certeau has observed, Innumerable ways of playing and foiling the other’s game, that is, the space instituted by others, characterize the subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups which, since they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations. . . . Like the skill of a driver in the streets of Rome or Naples, there is a skill that has its connoisseurs and its aesthetics exercised in any labyrinth of powers, a skill ceaselessly recreating opacities and ambiguities—spaces of darkness and trickery—in the universe of technocratic transparency, a skill that disappears into them and reappears again, taking no responsibility for the administration of a totality. (de Certeau 1984, 18) These less obvious spaces of resistance are opaque and ambiguous, quietly disappearing and reappearing. Emerging from everyday acts of empower- [44.212.26.248] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:10 GMT) everyday spaces of resistance 183 ment, people, almost unconsciously, behave in ways that are meaningful to them and that express their identities. Rather than deliberate acts of aggression , these behaviors are usually embodied acts of pleasure. Rather than expressing anger, frustration, and fear, they are about desire, joy, and playfulness as people seek places that are familiar and comfortable within a space otherwise bounded, administered, or denied. These spaces weave themselves seamlessly and subversively through geographies of power, creating spaces outside the dominant realm. They are low-risk, yet highly effective, means of resistance (see Scott 1985). Tahitians often create such ephemeral counter-spaces in ways that are visible and audible only to one another. Their foods, music, dance, language, and humor are particularly productive channels for doing this. In...