Tactics of association

Abstract

This essay puts Michel de Certeau's work on tactics in conversation with the work of F. G. Bailey on tactical subjects and Roy Wagner's work on alliance. In doing so, my objective is to introduce the notion of the association as an essential aspect of a contemporary anthropological theory of tactics. I approach the notion of association from three angles: as an ethnographic object and political entity, as an anthropological analytical tool and as a pragmatic, political gesture. By analysing associations from these three interrelated perspectives, I attempt to shift attention away from understandings of tactics as having to do with spontaneous creativity, cunning and reversal of power. Instead, I showcase that the deployment of tactics demands the setting up and maintenance of a tactical infrastructure of alliance, capable of making the future and pre‐emptive deployment of tactics possible.

Clinician-led evidence-based activism: a critical analysis

“…A cursory glance at social movements studies will confirm the common-sensical view that, often, this prioritization means putting off addressing one form of injustice until a more urgent one has been overcome (Moore, 1978). However, as Kyriakides (2018b) argued, the alliances that are formed as a tactic to achieve one goal remain in place even after the battle to achieve that goal has finished. In this sense, tactics are not just shaped by social relations, but also have an ongoing influence on the social structures to which they were a strategic response.…”

“…Thus the question of scholarly interest moves from how successful a tactic might be for achieving a goal, to what kinds of relations of power led to the use of a tactic in the first place. And, crucially for Kyriakides (2018b), how did the use of such tactics themselves influence those relations? In common with Bourdieu (1991), he considered neither social status nor social relations to be fixed.…”

“…In other words, the campaigners who use CLEBA understand the process of collective enquiry to be subordinate to achieving other progressive goals. We use the work of Kyriakides (2015Kyriakides ( , 2018b to analyse CLEBA as a 'tactic' and focus on the possible consequences.…”

Tactical Chor(e)ographies: Tactics of Inhibition as a Threat to Public Space in Limassol’s Seafront

“…The diametrical opposition between strategy and tactics in de Certeau's work has led to an understanding whereas the latter is solely attributed to the "weak" and the former is understood as a monopoly of the "powerful." Tactical subjects are therefore portrayed as resisting and subverting institutional power (Kyriakides, 2018). In addition, according to Napolitano and Pratten (2007, p. 8) this distinction between tactics and strategies poses "too rigid an opposition between the official (proper) and the everyday (the popular), for failing to recognise relationships of complicity and processes of consensus, and for providing only a partial cartography of the spaces between compliance and resistance.…”

Alluvial Tactics: Land Access and Control on the Ayeyarwady River

“…Yet, seeing strategy and tactics as respectively the domain of the powerful and the powerless tends to disregard "the relationships of complicity and process of consensus" (Napolitano and Pratten 2007; see also Mitchell 2007) between social actors who engage in power negotiations at different scales. More recently, Kyriakides (2018) emphasizes on tactics as an ability to maneuver through webs of power by a practice of alliances and political associations that lead to a blurring of the boundary between the tactical and the strategical. In this article, I engage with the notion of tactics to interrogate how alluvial land dwellers along the Ayeyarwady River navigate at an always changing land interface.…”