An unlikely site of resistance?

Discussing the ambiguity of the politics of “family” vis-a-vis state institutions

By Bartosz Fingas

When I began my anthropological education, the family was one of the first objects of study. With time, I drifted away to phenomena occurring at a larger scale, and visible not only to an academic eye. But family never leaves me, both factually—indeed, there are people whom I call family—and as an object of deliberation. The thought exercise we are about to embark on accounts for one of the stories that an atomic family in liberal democracies can witness, a story greatly influenced by my positionality.

From the comfortable vantage point of the national scale, we descend. Looking for a family, we encroach upon its household. Slithering through its walls, onto the living room floor; searching under the pillows, diagnosing the water meters, examining the artwork on walls, peeking into bookshelves. Perish the thought that we find something taboo in the social order! Our gaze drapes, like a seamless and suffocating plastic blanket over shrubby woodland homesteads and densely populated apartment blocks. Our roots breach into rooms, personal computers, and all other spaces dedicated to worship, nutrition, entertainment, and care.

What I see in this ‘blanket’ is the prominence of the modern nation-state’s knowledge system, where knowledge about is usually connected with control over. This breeds feelings of suffocation and a sense of all-encompassing legibility. I cannot deny that while mass schooling has had a tremendous impact on the homogenisation of human thought, it has also brought wellness to many. Other forms of knowledge also follow channels not detached from modern institutions; take for example DIY or acting workshops relying on monetary exchange. That is not to say that society is devoid of exchange outside of market relations, far from it. But even those find themselves being recorded and remembered by states.

To trace us back to how we hounded a family space not more than a paragraph ago, I wish to recall the famous beginning scene from Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Harrison Ford’s notorious portrayal of a macho man with an objectified female lead is not key for me here, even though it is crucial to understand his movies. Rather, I want to lead us to his cruise through a military-dummy test town. Indiana very much embodies the adventurous spirit of the American people, whether he fends off occultist Nazis or relentless Soviet pursuers. However, when he walks through that dummy town he becomes the eyes of that state, capturing the life of a “model” suburb somewhere in the U.S. right before an atomic bomb collides with it.

ndiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

I wish to locate our attention on the way family is portrayed. Throughout the scene, an unnerving illusion cannot seem to leave me—that the mannequins are alive. At any moment their bodies will animate and continue their day-to-day lives. Jones’ exploration of family spaces tells us something important, namely, that we cannot discursively tackle family as a model unit without peering into our own family relations. In this sense “family” in public society stands like a mannequin that reflects the viewer's experiences onto them. According to some, societies tend to make themselves akin to representations of family, with “family values” often uttered from podiums, or expressed in social categories. However, this view is limiting. Family-as-symbol can only get you so far because most of family life is out of sight.

It is what is behind closed doors that we, along with Indiana, have tried to penetrate. But both gazes freeze life. In order for the mannequins to start living we would need to exit the room. A natalist family, although arguably a non-natalist one as well, offers its members a reciprocal transfer of many forces, be they sentiments of love and affection, or hurt and trauma. The formative years of succeeding generations are imbued with the dynamics present in households. ‘The personal is political’—under such a maxim family space, or its transfers of cultural capital, are both political and private, blurring the lines of clear-cut dualisms so important to modern ways of thought. However, these immaterial transfers are mistakenly nearly always labelled as keys to places of power. For I see in cultural capital not only predisposition for competition with the outside world, but also the seeds of emancipation, the tools to forge one’s own cosmology.

Still, economic inequalities very much rest on transgenerational wealth transfers. We find ourselves witnessing the bourgeois order contingent on money and resources moving hands between parents and children. The images of Barron Trump campaigning alongside his father send a shiver down my spine, the boy’s repulsive aura already resembling a Harkonnen invader at such a young age. Marxist and feminist scholarship has offered us a window into how family is collectively at interplay with broader society. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that family is one of the only places that, as of now, has the potential to resist commodification. A mental and physical space apt to fight against norms. A place for social change to occur. A place to breed autonomy to corporations, the state, corrupt and populist politicians. A place out of sight. This ambiguity of family life fascinates me. Its multivocal role within the politics of society will not soon come to an end. While we can be sure that its function in reproducing oligarchy and capitalism will not soon be reconciled with its potential in self-making of people resisting the system.