Powers: Religion as a Social and Spiritual Force

The Visible and the Invisible in South Asia

The Visible and the Invisible in South Asia Peter van der Veer You may not have noticed it yet, but, according to some observers, democracy has arrived in the Middle East. It came as part of the shock and awe of the American invasion in Iraq and resulted in elections there that were declared a success. Now it is spreading all over the Middle East. Some years ago we saw a large anti-Syrian demonstration in Beirut on our television screens. Our commentators said that this was another sign of the coming of democracy, a process of transformation of the Middle East that was started by the American invasion of Iraq. No longer could the voice of the people be suppressed by corrupt elites. When the Shi’ite Hezbollah later organized an even larger proSyrian demonstration, our commentators were somewhat at loss whether this should also be interpreted as a sign of the coming of democracy. After the destruction of parts of Beirut by Israeli planes in a conflict with Hezbollah, nobody talked about the coming of democracy anymore. Much of this representation follows the narrative and imagery of the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately of that primal scene, the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution: the people finally get rid of dictatorship and take power in their own hands. Whether the facts on the ground are the same or even similar is doubtful, but the representation is the same for East Germany , Romania, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, and Lebanon. These are just a few instances of the worldwide soap opera of democracy we are enjoying daily on our televisions. It is hard to tell whether we are better informed about the world because of the availability of these images, are just better entertained, or are amused to death, as Neil Postman put it. However, there is little doubt that, with an increasing visibility of locales in a world market of images, there is no decrease in invisibility of practices and institutions in those locales. We 1 03 P E T E R VA N D E R VE E R see more, but we know perhaps not less but just as little. A good example of this is the representation of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989 in Beijing, which fits neatly into the narrative of the coming of democracy and its suppression and thus has been widely televised and circulated . Images of demonstrations by tens of thousands of members of Falun Gong in 1999 on the same square against the suppression of their so-called sect have scarcely been televised or circulated, since that story cannot be easily represented as a narrative of democracy. The actions of Falun Gong and the response by the Communist Party escape from this narrative frame, and one needs quite a bit of extra information to be able to interpret why breathing meditation is threatening to Communist rule in China. This dialectic of the seen and the unseen, of the visible and the invisible, occurs in many ways, and I will try in this presentation to make some of it visible. My main suggestion is that a focus on the visual register should involve a strong awareness of both what is made visible in state practices and what is made invisible, as well as a sense of the counterfactual nature of liberal claims of openness, transparency, and full accountability. The nation form is a modern social configuration. Its modernity is shown in the emergence of a range of institutions and practices, including visual ones. Modernity is also shown in the disappearance of visual practices that are stigmatized as nonmodern or traditional. Foucault gives a famous European example when he speaks about the disappearance of the public execution , the spectacle of the auto-da-fé, the stake, and the gallows. This is such a good example because it connects the disappearance of the public execution to the rise of a number of other modern practices, such as new ideas of the person, of crime and punishment, and of mental health, which are part of new perceptions of the possibilities of the nation-state. It is also such a good example since it implicitly makes one think of the variability of modern arrangements existing today, since, indeed, public executions have not disappeared in China and Saudi Arabia, while in the United States witnesses are invited when the death penalty is carried out. One needs comparative work, as in this volume, to...