The introduction provides the background for a sociological approach to the study of sovereignty, including the study of contested and paradoxical concepts, moments of contestation, and a view on intellectual history and conceptual history as sources of sociological methodologies. The chapter emphasises that basic concepts like sovereignty and democracy appear as rhetorical and polemical resources in constitutional contestation. It accounts for the relevance of such writers as Max Weber, Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Rosanvallon to specify a sociological approach to national and international sovereignty debates.

This paper traces F. G. Bailey’s varied oeuvre to arrive at three enduring and significant aspects in his ethnography of politics: morality, truth, and power. In a career spanning more than six decades, Bailey’s political ethnographies have generated concepts, and sharpened the theoretical and methodological innovations of the ‘Manchester School’ for discerning and explaining political phenomena. Focusing mainly on his political ethnographies of Orissa in India, as well as his comparative studies, I attempt to show how Bailey’s paradigm helps us navigate universal principles of social life in specific cultural contexts and political practices. Underlying Bailey’s theoretical concerns is the search for a normative core of societies, and the way collectivities negotiate between norms and strategies. Morality is located in the eschewing of violence in favour of disengagement, the saving lie, indifference and manipulation – elements of so called ‘gentlemanly politics’. In Bailey’s political ethnographies, however, ordinary villagers and peasants, the proverbial small men, are the ones who deploy these strategies to preserve their world unencumbered by those in power. It is this idea of morality that informs Bailey’s substantive notion of politics and political power, leading in turn to his idea of truth in politics arrived at through hard-nosed political ethnographies: contingently, as the case may be.

This chapter explores how Khabar Lahariya (KL), a digital news channel run by rural women journalists – mostly Dalit and Muslim – used the #MeToo moment to test the elasticity of an urban, privileged movement to encompass experiences of assault on women working in small towns and rural areas of north India. It locates #MeToo in a charged moment in India’s technological trajectory, as more and more of India’s rural population, whether or not they have access to food and housing, definitely have access to a mobile phone connection. Alongside shifting electoral politics, this also sets the stage for a significant change in the nature of gendered relationships and intimacies in the Indian hinterland. The KL reporters, as ‘lower’-caste women questioning power and overstepping their place, are at the receiving end of blatant sexual assault from colleagues, sources and officers in the police and administration. However, with their necessary familiarity with mobile technologies and digital networks, they also negotiate new spaces and relationships in their work, cultivating sources and colleagues at odd hours, on Whatsapp and Facebook, bending notions of sexual convention – based on age, caste, class, geography – out of shape. There is a pleasure and an agency in this that deeply affects their public and private lives. The chapter navigates how the MeToo mo(ve)ment serves to constrain these nascent disruptions, as it also works to visibilise the violence inherent in the everyday lives of rural women who overstep their boundaries.

Territorial struggles are not simply struggles for space. They are struggles for and through the emergence of new territorialities. In the context of Zapatistas movement (insurgent indigenous people and activists in Chiapas, Mexico), shared spaces acquire a very important role. It is in those spaces that the reclaiming of new territorialities actually takes shape. In shared spaces, Zapatistas do not simply practice commoning as a form of regulating and producing egalitarian social relations. They produce in those spaces new collective subjects capable of mobilizing both ancestral traditions and new critical knowledges. This chapter focuses especially on a specific project (a school for educating the teachers of Zapatista alternative education), which was designed by architect-activists in Greece and was realized in a Zapatista autonomous municipality through cooperation based on solidarity.

This chapter draws on F. G. Bailey’s foundational work in Tribe, Caste and Nation (1960) about the role of entrepreneurial individuals in creating new leadership roles through ‘bridge-actions’ that make use of resources, ideologies, and roles in one political structure to act in another structure. Pastors in the Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church, appeared to advocate a shift away from the ethnic pluralism and hereditary rank that organize Fijian society toward multi-ethnic leadership based on professional achievements. But closer examination suggested that pastors used bridge-actions to create new kinds of leadership roles drawing together the structures of the indigenous Fijian vanua, on the one hand, and transnational Pentecostalism and business, on the other, in order to suggest that successful Pentecostal professionals would surpass the power of indigenous chiefs. What looked like social class was really an attempt by entrepreneurial pastors to create new roles for themselves in response to local political and economic changes challenging chiefly power and ethnic pluralism in Fiji.

In a short period of time, we have witnessed both the seismic effects of the #MeToo movement and its ageing. We have felt the optimism that gathered as the hashtag travelled, while being sceptical about this particular wave of ‘clicktivism’. Even as we saw how an individualised ‘me’ gathered and mobilised an ever-widening ‘too’ – exemplifying how a hashtag amalgamates individual experiences into a story of systemic harm and mobilises collective solidarity – worries accumulated. For every Harvey Weinstein who was stripped of power and influence, there was a Brett Kavanaugh who accumulated power and capital in spite of the force of women’s testimony. Alongside the downfall of powerful men, women were implicated as aggressors.

The title is from Freddy’s 1978 paper. Tertius gaudens (literally, ‘third man rejoicing’) refers to a third party who benefits from conflict between two others. The gaudens is a strategist and manipulator. Numen conveys religion, divinity, and power. A numen controls via collective beliefs and values. Their legitimacy transcends the self-serving gaudens. Discussion of third parties runs through much of Freddy’s work: political stratagems to acquire ‘spoils’; tension between individualism and action on behalf (or perceived to be on behalf) of a community; the nature of leadership and control over followers; the dangers of a world dominated in the name of numen. I focus on the range of theoretical books between Stratagems and Spoils and God-Botherers and Other True Believers. Third parties are also important in the theory and practice of conflict resolution. In this chapter, I bring together Freddy’s conceptions of third parties with what we know about how they function in the world of disputes and conflicts; and I use what we have learned about third parties in conflict resolution to expand the range of Freddy’s concepts.

F. G. Bailey has likened himself to the fox, who has many ideas, as contrasted to the hedgehog, who has but one (and supposedly defends it with bristling spines). However, this is not to say that there is no coherence in his writings from the 1950s into the 21st century. Over decades, he has developed a sophisticated and ever-refined repertoire of terms and axioms applicable and adaptable for the analysis of social action in general – famously, he was among the first scholars to speak of political ‘arenas’. With his model of actors struggling not only over substantial prizes but also over the very rules of the political game, F. G. Bailey has always remained epistemologically modest, basing his analyses on observed behaviour and plausible inference, culturally grounded but always assuming a very humanistic unity of mankind. His eventual turn towards rhetorical persuasion as a prime vehicle of social action opens a window into his very conception of human nature. Drawing on a thorough reading of F. G. Bailey’s theoretical corpus, this chapter summarizes his proverbial toolkit to demonstrate how the various parts interlock and offer an accessible middle-range approach to interaction and conflict. It ends on a reflection on the position of F. G. Bailey’s work in the patchy history of political anthropology. A discussion of three critics of his approach serves to underline the specific strengths of the toolkit, with its universalist ambitions. Operating at a level of abstraction less fashionable today, as the postmodern drift of political anthropology has rerouted disciplinary interest away from political action to political form and eventually political thought, it might not receive fair and adequate representation in current textbooks, but still remains an inspiring and cohesive contribution to not only interaction, but social theory.

In this chapter an artistic practice involving a performative interpretation of an everyday mundane object, a chair (designed by the modernist architect G. Rietveld), is analyzed as indicative of the power to potentialize space which is hidden in the production and use of everyday objects. Objects may become mediators of sharing, and carriers of an open community of commoners in the making. The project “Sitting is a Verb” seems to hint towards such a possibility. This project took place at IMPA, a recuperated factory in Buenos Aires (2010–2011. A visual artist, Aimée Zito Lema, and a social anthropologist, Nahuel Blaton, conceived this project as an artistic contribution to a larger project: the creation of a University of Workers inside the IMPA building complex. This project tried to orient the means through which its contribution to the emerging University of Workers (to be hosted inside IMPA) was realized towards a commoning ethos. Beyond the distinction between a useful object and an art object (considered as an object of no use), the Rietveld-IMPA chairs were art-works by being useful (as functional) but also by being emblems of cooperation, symbolic condensations of an emerging autonomous education spirit. Excerpts from an interview with the artist are included in the chapter.

While some ethnographers plan their exit strategies extensively, ‘leaving’ is nuanced by several contextual factors, not least the type of relationships fieldworkers build with their research participants, and the nature of their participatory involvement during fieldwork. To illustrate the situated qualities of ethnographic disengagement, the chapter presents two ‘confessional’ vignettes – one from education, the other from (elite) sport – on how two male researchers managed the process of departing their respective fieldwork sites. The first case study charts Alex’s leaving narrative as a working-class academic researching working class schooling. It discusses how the researcher’s social baggage came to influence the mediation and maintenance of field relations, and how, over time, friendly relations (especially with pupils) were formed and enhanced. The narrative reports that even though the researcher planned to stay in contact with participants post-fieldwork, this did not happen for several practical and methodological reasons. The second case study traces the evolution of Harry’s interpersonal connection with his principal gatekeeper, ‘Coach, and examines how the changing circumstances of their relationship shaped the manner of Harry’s disengagement. More specifically, the narrative explores the exchange of power, vulnerability and responsibility that Harry shared with Coach over time that confirmed Harry’s sense of duty to remain in contact long after the cessation of his fieldwork. Through a comparative analysis of these leaving experiences, the chapter concludes by reflecting on the ethical commitment ethnographers make to involve themselves, long term, in people’s lives, and the ethical judgements that arise therefore from ethnographers’ choice of exit strategy.

The chapter addresses the cultural and symbolic dimension of constitutions, particularly their connection to popular and national sovereignty. Beginning with Rousseau’s symbolic constitutionalism, it demonstrates how fundamental political and legal matters are closely integrated with cultural processes related to affective responses and identification. It argues that sovereignty as symbolism and story, despite its reflexive character, is inherently connected to the constitutional culture of the territorial state.

A short description of a fieldwork experience in highland Peru is used to illustrate how Bailey’s work during his last years at the University of Sussex provided key elements for the author’s ethnographic method and understanding of culture. This is followed by the author’s memories of his time as a doctoral student under Bailey’s supervision. This narrative is then re-envisioned through the lens of selected tools from Stratagems and Spoils.

Especially focused on the ways spatial form can organize (form-as-organization), express (form-as-expression of values), and materialize (form-as-construction process) spaces of commoning, this chapter sketches the theoretical trajectories that will be developed throughout the book with the help of concrete research examples. By understanding architecture as an intellectual practice that focuses on the shaping of space, its role in developing an awareness of the potentialities of space and in searching for spatialities of emancipation is explored.