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.

The chapter addresses the human rights revolution after the second world war, as one of the most complex challenges that the idea of sovereignty has confronted. It examines the debate on the tension between transnational human rights regimes and national and popular sovereignty. It discusses propositions as to how we are to consider the relationship between popular sovereignty and the human rights discourse.

This chapter draws on the authors’ experiences of leaving and returning to the field in research with people living with dementia as part of an ESRC-NIHR-funded five-year longitudinal study of the neighbourhood experiences of people living with dementia and their families, friends and care partners. The authors deployed a range of approaches and methods that placed fieldwork and the sustained, repeated engagement with participants in particular places over a period time. The ‘field’ they were concerned with was not simply a geographically bounded location such as the neighbourhoods where participants lived, but also temporal – incorporating change over time, and social – incorporating relational ties with other people regardless of their location. Dementia can be associated with a range of symptoms including cognitive change such memory loss, declining physical abilities and communication difficulties. Over time, these can make it difficult for those participating in the research to cognitively and physically access, recognise or locate themselves in the social and spatial fields the authors were exploring. Participants may also be unable to remember previous interactions with the research team or the experiences they previously have shared. The authors’ repeated interactions with participants and their associated social networks, in the places they visited or where they lived, prompted a messy process of entering, ‘leaving’ and re-engaging with what the authors came to recognise as the field. This chapter seeks to question what it means to leave, return and remember the field as a cognitive as well as a physical and temporal location.

The author was trained and supervised by Bailey at Sussex in the early 1970s and remained in touch with him for the next half-century. This chapter examines Bailey’s original theoretical influence on the writer’s focus on community, leadership, continuity, and change. It considers Bailey’s debt to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, and someone frequently overlooked, the classicist Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University whose attention to the Stoics drove to the heart of Bailey’s political anthropology, to his character, and helps explain F. G. B.’s antipathy to Marx and to religion ‒ something this writer’s background was steeped in. Indeed, was it not for embarking on this essay to begin with, it is likely the author would have skirted the discomfiture his faith-religion long presented. The chapter is divided into four histories: (i) Bailey’s Oxford years, (ii) Liverpool and Manchester, (iii) F. G. B.’s initial role and impact on the author, and (iv) on Griffin’s use of FGB’s concepts in Nice and a Var village in the 1970s, and on a Traveller-‘Gypsy’ caravan site in west London in the 1980s. In between, and later, not included here, the writer did fieldwork in Fiji, and (collaboratively on a case of nomad displacement) in Chennai.

Researchers often have concerns about how to leave the field and end the relationships they have forged with communities. However, in some cases the field expands, and the researcher moves from being at the periphery to become a full participant within the networked relationality of a community of practice. This chapter explores this experience of becoming fixed within the field. Reflecting on research with care-experienced children and young people in Wales, an ongoing journey of increasing nearness, rather than increasing distance, is considered. The original study led to impact activities and further research, within a field of young people in care, care leavers and partner organisations, in which the researcher became immersed and gained an ongoing sense of permanency. In considering this position of ‘no exit’ the chapter draws on déjà vu and jamais vu. Déjà vu, already seen, occurs when one feels as though a situation is familiar, despite evidence that the situation could not have been experienced before, resulting from familiarity-based recognition, or recognition based on feelings of familiarity that occur without identification of their source. Jamais vu, never seen, occurs when things seem unfamiliar and there is little connection between long-term memory and perceptions from the present. In becoming more than native and embedded in the emotion, policy, practice and mediation of care experiences, the chapter presents encounters and relationships with partners and young people that generated feelings of déjà vu and jamais vu through the complexities of familiarity, shifting positionalities and self-contained worlds of common understanding.

From fieldwork among Irula and Alu Kurumba communities within the Nilgiris mountains of South India, this chapter examines increased anxiety and psycho-social symptoms associated with socioeconomic and cultural transformations. Drawing upon F. G. Bailey’s classic work, I argue that the conflicts between value systems associated with Adivasi (indigenous), Hindu, and civil society have become intensified through landscape transformations in recent years, resulting in a generalized sense of malevolence within communities. Reduced access to land has undermined the cultivation of traditional dietary and ritual staples. As local residents put it, ‘food was medicine’, and ‘now we are sick’. Many have left their respective village-based communities as itinerant laborers. One consequence of this livelihood shift has been the neglect of communal ritual life centered upon ancestral ‘sacred groves’. The disruption of ritual life, in turn, has produced shifts in diet and access to traditional medicines, as well as a drift towards Hinduism, associated with the Tamil population. A rise in ‘new illnesses’ has resulted. Community healers speak of increasing illness due to intensified sorcery. The anxieties and symptoms, in turn, reflect and exacerbate growing inequality and precarity. Notions of change and malevolence construct a tribal harmony that is retroactively imagined in its perceived demise. Against a structuralist or functionalist understanding, and following Bailey’s influential critiques of ‘ideological holism’, I argue that a growing archive of local ideas about cultural loss partially obscures underlying pathologies of power within rural India, and the forces that divide and defer the tribal from non-tribal.