Back to the rough ground: Textual,oral and enactive meaning in comparative political theory

Introduction

One of the expressed aims in the field of comparative political theory (CPT) is to unsettle dominant western concepts and categories of political analysis, in part by demonstrating how political ideas held to be universal are actually parochial and particular to European traditions of political thought. CPT promotes intercultural dialogue (Dallmayr, 2004) and challenges the summary disqualification of non-European political systems for allegedly lacking any rational structure (Shogimen, 2016). In this respect, CPT provides a corrective to the colonial assertion that political ideas are always abstract and portable by emphasizing how some cultures view collective norms and decision-making as inextricably embedded in particular places and worldly practices. As James Tully observes, the promise of intercultural dialogue is linked in no small part to the cultivation of practices that go beyond the traditional analysis of transposable and transportable texts toward direct cultural engagement in which “the interlocutors’ utterances have their meaning in this worldly sense” (Tully, 2016: 59).

For the most part, theorists are attuned to the fact that conventional methods of analysis have failed to meet non-western political systems on their own terms. They continue, for example, to privilege the work of cultural elites. Farah Godrej (2009) has cautioned against over-reliance on elite literature, observing that the political understandings we seek to engage are not always or necessarily limited to texts but can also be found in the everyday words and deeds of the community. Roxanne Euben (2006: 13) makes a similar observation in her work on early-modern travel-writing:

There is much about the phenomenon of human mobility not captured in writing, and many travellers past and present do not have the education, leisure, or institutional power to produce a written text of what often were and continue be harrowing experiences of dislocation.

Likewise, Melissa Williams and Mark Warren (2014: 9) have observed that in some non-western political systems “the most important media for maintaining and transmitting traditions may take the form of rituals and other embodied practices, themselves part of alternative methodologies of knowledge production from which political theory might gain.” James Tully (2016) also emphasizes the need to read “texts in their contexts (traditions, practices and places)” (Tully, 2016: 59) and to consider the spectrum of “political thought, speech, enactments, practices and activities, problems, traditions and places” so as “not to privilege written texts” (Tully, 2016: 70 n. 29). This practical (extra-linguistic) freedom of enactment permits acts of resistance to norms and laws as well, sometimes as grand as mass political protest but often as quotidian as challenges to personal relations of power (Scott, 1985; Tully, 2008; Ehrlich, 2009 [1913]).

There is, therefore, a general acknowledgment that if the field of CPT is to be successful, traditional methods will not suffice (see Iqtidar, 2016; Little, 2018; Shapcott, 2016; Shogimen, 2016; Tsai, 2017). A genuinely comparative approach to political theory is successful to the extent that it is willing to return “‘back to the rough ground’ of meaning-in-use in traditions” (Tully, 2016: 59), which means that theorists cannot assume that a culture’s written literature is exhaustive of political understanding, nor can it be assumed that all understandings are textual in precisely the same way. In the last decade, CPT has shifted away from these sometimes tedious debates over methodological constraints on intercultural translation to the more substantive and exciting work of actually engaging with diverse systems of political understanding (Von Vacano, 2015).

During this shift the question of how different modalities of political belief and practice should be accounted for was left open and unresolved. In the absence of a basic framework of differentiating between modes of political understanding and practice, contributions to CPT can only provide a perfunctory acknowledgement of the existence of practice- and place-based political understandings. After prefacing with such acknowledgments of non-textual meaning, contributions tend to proceed with the conventional work of analyzing texts. Thus, most CPT work gestures toward extra-textual sources of political norms with phrases such as “text and tradition” (Godrej, 2011: 95; Kapust and Kinsella, 2017: 3; March, 2009: 560; Tully, 2016: 62), “texts and thought” (March, 2009: 538), “text or phenomenon” (Von Vacano, 2015: 18.5), “texts and practices” (Godrej, 2011: 51), or “texts and ideas” (Godrej, 2011: 69). Sometimes a distinct oral dimension is intimated, as with the phrase “written and oral texts” (Freeden and Vincent, 2013: 18). In rare cases, a practical dimension is sometimes identified, as in the phrase “texts, as well as performing rituals or practices” (Iqtidar, 2016: 425). On even rarer occasions, the phenomenological elements of actual cultures are invoked, as in the phrase “embodied philosophies of indigenous peoples” (Murphy, 2009: 272).

In almost all cases, there is no follow-up examination of the relevant differences between these practical, oral, and textual registers, what constitutes their unique contributions to a particular political culture, or how they relate to one another within the culture in question. These issues are pressing because the integrity of CPT as a critical approach hinges on its ability to think not just beyond the canon of western political thought but beyond western notions of what constitutes political analysis and political thought. To that end, Thomas (2010) has cautioned that in subordinating non-textual political systems and assuming the veracity of texts scholars risk reproducing an orientalist subordination of non-western political life. Western political theory has a rather infamous legacy of corroborating if not overtly championing the superiority of European political thought over peoples who do not exhibit the same commitment to textuality, especially alphabetic writing. In this sense, CPT comes close to reproducing colonial analyses that prove “abstract, manipulative and false” (Tully, 2016: 59).

In the following, I argue that the reticence of CPT to move beyond texts stems from an inability to engage in what Farah Godrej (2011: 17–20) refers to as a process of “self-dislocation” and “relocation.” Godrej has argued that CPT entails both physical and intellectual movement with the aim of “dwelling in, residing in, and existence within otherness, to immersion and participation in ways of life by inheriting a perspective internal to the tradition and to its members” (Godrej, 2011: 20). I wish to argue that the enacting of political practices is often indispensable to cultivating political understanding (de Certeau, 1988). It is important that CPT not restrict itself to “imaginative dislocation” but, rather, take part in “actual physical movement away from the comforts of home and hearth” (Godrej, 2011: 59). Moreover, in elaborating the idea of self-dislocation that is both physical and conceptual, I argue that we must be aware of three registers of political understanding: textual, oral, and enactive. The current focus on textual self-dislocation, that is, dislocation for the purpose of understanding written texts, can predispose theorists to ignore non-textual political understandings, both in one’s own tradition as well as in the tradition into which one is travelling.

The appeal of purely textual analyses is itself rooted in the parochial view that human beings’ stock of background understandings is reproduced by the on going negotiation and renegotiation of meaning through language (see Rorty, 1992). Here, embodied practices are viewed in terms of inert scripted behaviour that, to be altered, must be interrupted by critical intellection. According to this universalist view of linguistic practice, it is only through speech and writing, or through communicative symbolic acts that emulate speech, that human beings affirm, contest, or modify collective norms and rules of conduct. As I shall show, however, in some traditions of political learning and understanding this relationship is placed on its head: the meaning of speech and text is situated in, or derived from, the political meaning already located in embodied practices as they are enacted in particular places.

Textuality, orality, and the enactive

Before proceeding, I would like to elaborate on the nature of the three interrelated registers of meaning-making and cultural reproduction: textual, oral, and enactive. By textuality I mean those forms of writing that involve a physical medium and mechanics of inscription that provide permanence through transcription of ideas, especially those formally preserved in oral traditions. In a textual political culture, the reproduction of legal and political norms does not depend primarily on memory and oral transmission. Textuality presupposes fluency for both speaker and audience in a particular language as well as in the written form of that language. By contrast, the register of orality is comprised of verbalized stories, narratives, and instructions recited from memory, which also requires fluency in a particular language for both speaker and audience. The two registers of oral and textual literacy are representational in the sense that they ‘make present again’ some meaning or understanding for an audience, often transmitted across an epistemic distance imposed by time, context, or culture.

The third register I refer to as the enactive because it denotes the non-verbal and non-textual enactment of political norms. Since it is the least understood of the three registers, I will provide more explanation as to its structure. The enactive register is non-representational in the sense that actions are cognizable as intentional and norm-governed in the absence of oral and textual accounts. Although the enactment of norms is often accompanied by representational accounts, recognizing an enactment as being norm-governed does not require supplementary oral or textual information. We find the enactive register at work, for instance, in the basic norm-governed games of chasing, tickling, and peekaboo that adults co-invent with pre-verbal children. The expectations of interaction built up through sustained interaction over time constitute norms of conduct that are recognizably affirmed or violated without representation of the norms (Rollo, 2017). Such practices are cognizable as intentional and, insofar as they bear on the conduct of a community, as political. The enactive register is therefore distinct from both the simple behaviour exhibited in our uncritical and unconscious compliance with a norm as well as from modifications we make to our purely personal, non-political behaviours and routines.

One advantage of recognizing enactive political practices is that it accounts more robustly for shared political understandings that have not been (or cannot be) successfully formulated intellectually or articulated in text/speech (Alcoff, 2000; Scott, 1998). More importantly, however, an enactive approach accounts for the ways in which our embodied practices are themselves sites of political reasoning and contestation over rules. To illustrate, let us briefly consider the example a norm-governed practice such as bowing (Hevia, 1994). Bowing is intelligible at the level of the enactive register as a norm-governed practice, which is to say that one need not be explicitly informed that bowing is an intentional and social act in order to recognize it as such. When one experiences a person prostrating themselves or bending at the waist before another person, even within cultural contexts that are very unfamiliar, the movement is not understood as an unintentional spasm or as an isolated erratic or eccentric behaviour, but as a practice. The specific cultural nuances are not immediately discernible, of course, but it is precisely the intelligibility of bowing as a norm-governed practice that invites us to question what constitutes an affirmation or a violation of its norms.

This is not to say that there is something culturally universal or essential in the meaning of bowing. We must, of course, guard against essentialism and the inclination to impose preconceived norms onto unfamiliar practices. I wish only to call attention to our recognition of bowing and prostration as enactments of norm-governed practice. The antiquated curtsy, the Catholic genuflection, the Japanese dogeza, the Metania and zemnoy poklon performed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and the Muslim practices of Sujud and Ruk’u – each is recognizable as a practice around which there exist normative expectations. Initiates into a culture who do not speak the language will quickly realize that there are normative expectations to which they must conform. Given enough time, through observation, imitation, and trial and error, one can cultivate a deep pragmatic enactive understanding of the range of bows and the particular circumstances in which they are appropriate. Thus, an initiate into Japanese culture might become highly proficient at judging when and where a deep bow is appropriate – cultivating a judicious cultural know-how – all without ever knowing that the term for a deep bow is saikeirei and that it technically involves a 45° bend at the waist, a bit of discursive detail that is valuable but perhaps unnecessary for everyday enactive proficiency.

In order to cultivate a deep understanding of a political culture, one must first understand how its textual, oral, and enactive systems of meaning contribute, both independently as well in relation to one another. For example, as we shall see below, in many Indigenous systems there is a kind of epistemic authority granted to direct embodied experience of particular places or relations between places, persons, and species (Turner, 2004). The way an animal or plant species behaves, or the way two species relate to one another over time, can be understood to embody a particular legal or political norm that must be witnessed to be fully understood. In such contexts, although emphatic principles and rules of conduct may be derived from this experience, the rules cannot be accurately represented by a speaker or writer to an audience without the mutual understanding that comes from both the author and audience being physically present to experience the norm as it is enacted, often multiple times. Sometimes, it is next to impossible without years of observation to elaborate a rule of conduct from the way a particular animal conducts itself. In other cases, particular individuals or families are, by virtue of where they were born and the lands upon which they live, entrusted to preserve a particular law within a broader Indigenous legal system. Often, these understandings can only be communicated in specific places and to particular audiences. Sometimes, a story is so intimately tied to a context of embodied enactment, such as relations of mutual dependence on a particular territory, that it is considered illegitimate or profane to communicate it outside appropriate relations, territories, ceremonies, and traditional spaces. Because of the necessity of direct experience and intimate connection between oral and enactive contexts, one cannot simply assume that one can gain access to an Indigenous system of political thought from a text without an immeasurable loss of relevant understanding or without violating certain legal and political norms in the process.

Those working on CPT must continue with textual analysis, but they must do so while demarcating the contexts and limits of those texts. Only in this sense can CPT progress past the cursory “text and tradition” caveat that has become convention toward a more robust mapping of diverse meanings within a tradition. I am not claiming that comparative political theorists must become anthropologists or ethnographers, but I am suggesting that we must be equipped to explain how the texts we take to be authoritative relate to other modalities of political understanding within the political tradition. We must account for how political texts may be nested in a context of literature, but also a context of oral traditions, which may itself be nested in a rich enactive system of political practices.

Political theory as dialogue

What are some of the commitments in western political theory that contribute to our inability to consider these distinct registers? One problem seems to be the conflation of orality and textuality inherited from the history of political thought where the familiar analogy of text being like speech tends to collapse into an identification of text with speech. One consequence is the conflation of the different forms of communicative context – discursive vs. enactive, for instance – within which texts and speech are respectively embedded. Moreover, where speech and text are not collapsed there is nevertheless a sense in political theorizing that the natural trajectory of political norms is toward articulation of enactive understandings into speech and, preferably, of speech into text. Though not without its critics, the primacy granted to the written word is an enduring feature of western political thought, especially among those in the hermeneutic traditions for whom it is assumed that, to use Gadamer’s expression, interpretation constantly “looks to an ever possible verbalization” (Gadamer, 1960: 573). There is a prevailing assumption that all understandings relevant to a form of politics eventually are, or at least ought to be, found in the written literature of a given culture or tradition. Here, as in most post-structural approaches to agency, non-verbal practices are understood as constituted through language and therefore remain more or less accessible to language.

CPT borrows from contextualist approaches to the history of political thought where it is assumed that the political understandings of a different historical era are potentially and appropriately located in the historical literature of that age. Here, understanding the intentional and therefore historical context of a particular work is essential to its understanding. Quentin Skinner (2002: 125) articulates the rationale: “the ‘relevance’ of such studies lies in their capacity to help us stand back from our own assumptions and systems of belief, and thereby to situate ourselves in relation to other very different forms of life.” At the very least, we can “become less parochial in our attachment to our inherited beliefs” (Skinner, 2002: 126). CPT has adopted a version of the contextualist view (Freeden and Vincent, 2013: 6–7; March, 2009: 534–535; Williams and Warren, 2014: 9–10). CPT theorists are fellow travellers, echoing the contextualist perspective that theorists can “acquire a perspective from which to view our own form of life in a more self-critical way, enlarging our present horizons instead of fortifying local prejudices” (Skinner, 1988: 125). They also share a commitment to situating understandings within particular forms of life and to the disruption of assumptions that such studies provide (cf. Jenco, 2007: 744 n. 3).

There is, however, a problematic analogy being drawn between writing and speaking in the contextualist approach to CPT. Scholars are colloquially described as being ‘in dialogue’ with a text and ‘in conversation’ with one another through texts; but this is an informal description that easily slips from a metaphor into a conflation of text and speech. Skinner has been explicit in extending the analogy between the intent of a distant author and that of a direct interlocutor, suggesting that written texts just are performative speech acts: “texts are acts, so that the process of understanding them requires us, as in the case of all voluntary acts, to recover the intentions embodied in their performance” (Skinner, 2002: 120). This approach invokes something of an equivalence between speech and text by asserting that the meaning of a text is tied to intentions ‘embodied in its performance’ in the same manner that we find in the performance of a speech act. It is unclear what the textual equivalent would be of the rich world of non-linguistic and non-representational conditions that disclose authorial intentions in speaking situations, or, conversely, to put it in the language of speech-act theory, it is unclear what would constitute the enactive ‘felicity conditions’ of successful utterances in a text (Austin, 1975; Alcoff, 2000).

The conflation of embodied interaction and textual interaction is most explicit in Skinner’s assertion that there is nothing in the writing of others that is any more or less mysterious than our interpretations and ‘reading’ of those with whom we speak directly: “acts are in turn texts: they embody intersubjective meanings that we can hope to read off” (Skinner, 2002: 120). While it is true that acts can be compared to texts to the extent that they are both representational acts interpretable within specific contexts, what functions as context in learning from political texts is categorically different to learning from situations involving speech (or non-verbal interaction). As noted, what constitutes context in conventional political theory tends to be limited to the works to which a classic author is implicitly or explicitly responding. Familiarity with the body of literature that constitutes the discursive context within which a particular text is situated is important because arguments cannot be understood in isolation from the rival arguments and counter-arguments (rhetorical or otherwise) of interlocutors. Likewise, as Williams and Warren (2014: 19) observe, the aim of CPT is to work with texts and concepts “that are most revealing of the background political imaginary that orients agents in a particular context.”

Yet, as Williams and Warren have also pointed out, background political understandings need not be textual nor perhaps even accessible to articulation. The distinct intelligibility and meaning that inheres in enactive interactions bears only a metaphorical resemblance to the propositional context of a concept or word located in a sentence, a sentence in an argument, an argument in a book, and a book within the wider literature. The notion that we ‘read off’ others just as we read a text is far too literal an interpretation of the metaphor, for in our everyday embodied understandings of norms we do not always find the critical and reflective process of inference between propositions that characterizes textual interpretation. When we do take up a critical position with regard to action, it is the more fundamental level of mutual intelligibility that serves as the condition of possibility for such inquiry. This much is clear in the work of Wittgenstein that Skinner invokes. For while we may observe, as Wittgenstein does, that ‘words are deeds’ on occasion, it does not follow that all deeds are necessarily words (Skinner, 2002: 4). In this sense, to the extent that CPT accepts political theory’s operational inattention to different modes of understanding, it inhibits its own expressed goal of challenging disciplinary conventions.

Literacy and empire

For theorists motivated to confront the vestiges of colonial thought in political theory (Ferguson, 2016), the veneration of text should be a source of concern. The degradation of spiritual practices, environmental practices, everyday convivial interaction, ritual performance, and oral traditions has been central to a civilizational discourse whose effect is to subordinate non-western cultures and preserve the orthodoxy of dominant political and intellectual frameworks. The legacy of infantilization and the disqualification of non-western political forms of life warrant a deeper interrogation of the presupposition that texts are the paradigmatic sites of learning and understanding (Ackerly, 2005), not to mention the implicit teleological premise that political understandings embodied in the enactive register should eventually find expression in a literary work.

For CPT, it should be relevant that the privileging of texts is not a neutral and innocent methodological presupposition. The exclusionary history of political theory was ideologically driven, but this ideological commitment informed a disciplinary preoccupation that CPT must be wary of importing. Clear historical examples include the alleged inferiority of Chinese ideographs to alphabetic script and or the inferiority of Indigenous societies that lacked alphabetic script. The possession of writing has been a centrepiece of civilizational discourse for millennia. Even JJ Rousseau (1966 [1781]), the early-modern critic of civilization, nevertheless distinguished between forms of writing that allegedly conform to stages of cultural, intellectual, and political development:

These three ways of writing correspond almost exactly to three different stages according to which one can consider men gathered into a nation. The depicting of objects is appropriate to a savage people; signs of words and propositions to a barbaric people, and the alphabet to a civilized people. (Rousseau, 1966 [1781]: 17)

On such accounts, alphabetic writing is understood to activate the critical rational faculties of human beings, which are singularly capable of allowing us to free ourselves from stultifying dependence on uncritical and irrational traditionalism. By untethering us from the limiting embodied and enactive conditions of practice which contextualize mere orality, literacy opens up the world of abstract concepts and universalizable claims (Scribner, 1984). In the now classic Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong (2002), recognizes that ‘orality’ has contextual limitations distinct from writing and imputes to them the production of different modes of being. For Ong, the meaning that inheres to texts is not bound to material contexts of interpretation: “Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words. Yet words are alone in a text” (Ong, 2002: 100). The effect of text is likewise deeply transformative and civilizing. We find a similar message in a book titled The Domestication of the Savage Mind, in which prominent anthropologist Jack Goody (1977) argued that writing had the effect of “transforming the nature of cognitive processes” themselves (Goody, 1977: 18). Even Marshall McLuhan (2011), who was much less sanguine about the benefits of adopting alphabetic text, nevertheless maintained for instance that “the Chinese are tribal, people of the ear” because they lack an alphabetic form of writing, for only the alphabet “has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere” (McLuhan, 2011: 31). There is hope for primitive peoples, however, since a “single generation of alphabetic literacy suffices in Africa today, as in Gaul two thousand years ago, to release the individual initially, at least, from the tribal web” (McLuhan, 1994: 84). From the 18th century onward, alphabetic text is presented as the midwife of freedom, philosophy, and an authentically human life, exemplifying the modern view of literacy as liberation (Mignolo, 2003). These subordinations of non-textual understanding – if not in theory then in practice – reflect precisely the kind of exclusionary logic that CPT seeks to correct.

Orality and performance

One widely accepted strategy for overcoming the exclusionary legacy of literacy has been to reject outright the subordination of orality to literacy by placing them on equal footing as legitimate sources of cultural and political constitution. This new appreciation of orality seems to address the concern that the most elite-driven, doctrinal, and orthodox works may not be fully reflective of the political understandings located in the everyday talk or the immediate experiences of the people in question. However, one reason for exercising caution in venerating oral traditions is that the focus of speech has proven only marginally less prone to a neglect of enactive features of political understanding. Recall that the designation ‘oral culture’ is itself a remnant of the civilizational discourse that characterized early anthropology. The concept of orality can mask how speech rests on a rich set of non-representational interactions that constitute an intelligible, non-propositional lifeworld of norm-governed relationships and understandings. Indeed, the concept of orality can be viewed as reinscribing the privileging of literacy through the continued exclusionary western focus on representation through language. The concepts of both orality and literacy can obfuscate the importance of the meaningful pragmatic contexts. To that end, some critics have argued that orality as a concept is obsolete and should be replaced with a concept that explicitly embodies both representational and non-representational modes of understanding and learning (Scollon and Scollon, 1995). Legal theorists such as Bernard Hibbitts (1992) have added that given how much of the normative content and context in ‘oral’ cultures is enacted and implicit rather than spoken and propositional, it may be more fitting to think of non-literate cultures as performative since “significant information is delivered through many media and not just orally,” including media of “speech, gesture, touch, smell, and taste” (Hibbitts, 1992: 883). He stresses how such domains of meaning are “carriers of important cultural and legal information” that are easily overlooked despite their centrality (Hibbitts, 1992: 883). Contemporary anthropological work, like that of Bruce Miller (2011) in Oral History on Trial, has acknowledged the limits and dangers of interpreting the orality of Indigenous cultures as exhaustive of political meaning and requiring transcription into text.

Direct engagement with political practices may be necessary to understand the theories that emerged from them, but for the purposes of engendering understanding participation should not be confused with the ethnographic exercise of taking up everyday practices as an object of study in the same way political theorists analyse a discourse or text. Just as we should exercise restraint in analogizing speech and text, we must also be cautious when likening enactive practices to text. As Geertz (1977: 10) conceived it, ethnography consists in “trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’)” a people in the same way we read “a manuscript.” Not only does this seem to accept the unwarranted assumption that all meanings are, as Williams and Warren (2014: 34) noted, necessarily “expressible in discursive terms,” it also seems to presuppose the suitability of engagement in diverse practices for the purposes of academic application. We see this assumption expressed by many of the founding thinkers of ethnography. By contrast, I would argue, CPT welcomes not just the articulation of enactive political understandings, wherever suitable and available, but also the disruption of the idea that diverse practices can and should be articulated in order to recognize them as fully political. One of the contributions of CPT, then, is to highlight different ways of being political, as well as the ways in which the privileging of articulation and text can erase these ways of being.

We are invited to interrogate the tendency to think of the practices within which orality is embedded as an inert repository of meaning, an uncritical background out of which speech and writing emerge to fulfil their critical emancipatory function. In its present state of development, CPT’s relation to non-textual political understanding is somewhat ambiguous. Indeed, there is a sense in which the field has inherited the understanding of enactive practices as a relatively static background of behaviour or habit that is to be taken up as the object of inquiry, a domain of implicit motivations and logics so as to be articulated and subjected to critical interrogation. Here, political theory is a practice of “extracting claims and positions from their taken-for-granted contexts and transforming them into assertions, which in turn function as justifications that could, in principle, be understood by others” (Williams and Warren, 2014: 14). To this view we must add that enactive political practices are not simply backgrounds from which meaning must be extracted; they are also dynamic sites of meaning production and contestation.

Many pertinent understandings remain practice-based or place-based and resistant to articulation altogether. Indeed, practical political knowledge frequently confounds attempts to categorize and conceptualize. Also, in some instances it may be considered inappropriate or profane to transcribe political understandings in a certain language, or to transcribe them at all. There are sometimes cultural restrictions on sharing information with outsiders (Bell, 1998). Unfortunately, all of these dynamics have the effect of confirming a bias toward political literature as more or less exhaustive and authoritative.

Enactive Indigenous political systems

To illustrate, I will briefly introduce how the registers of textuality, orality, and the enactive feature in some Indigenous legal and political cultures. The account is introductory rather than comprehensive and is intended to highlight some elements currently missing from CPT. Many bodies of Indigenous legal contestation remain oral and enactive (Noble, 2008). Indigenous peoples in North America have numerous textual political documents including written treaties, written Constitutions, and legal texts. The majority of these written documents are transcriptions from traditions that have been preserved through generations within oral histories. These oral traditions are themselves frequently derived from traditional practices on particular territories that, to be learned, must be experienced as enacted on those territories, by particular people, and to particular audiences. Indigenous political traditions tend to be bottom up in this sense, with the immediate contexts of land and the speaker/audience relationships themselves containing indispensable lessons, some of which can be transposed into the oral tradition. Thus, to be properly understood, political boundaries may have to be walked and important landmarks viewed first hand. Some boundaries may be flexible and may change with the seasonal migration of animal species, which one can only understand from watching those migrations during the hunting season.

In his work on “outsider education”, Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows (2016a) refers to this as “land-based literacy” (Borrows, 2016a: 15) or “land-based contextual learning” (Borrows, 2016a: 3) in which oral traditions are set in the context of natural processes, land features, and species behaviour (Borrows, 2016a: 7). Elsewhere, Borrows summarizes how an immediate relationship to lands and species is foundational to Anishinaabe law:

The Anishinaabe have long taken direction about how we should live through interactions and observations with the environment. People regulate their behaviour and resolve their disputes by drawing guidance from what they see in the behaviour of the sun, moon, stars, winds, waves, birds, animals and other natural phenomenon. (Borrows, 2016b: 94–95)

This approach can be contrasted with the ‘top down’ approach of many non-Indigenous systems in which texts containing principles of justice and political constitutions are privileged over attention to oral and enactive sites of law in this sense. Learning law “on and from the land” (Borrows, 2016a: 5) means that legal reasoning “cannot be as easily contained within the four-square pages of case law, statutes, and other written texts” (Borrows, 2016a: 4). For many Anishinaabe theorists, “the environment becomes the legal archive that practitioners read and use to regulate their communities” (Borrows, 2016a: 13). Learning legal and political ideas requires “demonstrating competence in ceremonial activities associated with the law” (Borrows, 2016a: 2). Lessons from the land can be transposed and transcribed into various media. Borrows relates that:

Experiences learning law from and on the land are recorded in constitutions, statutes, regulations, bylaws, declarations, adjudicative judgments, songs, carvings, textiles, dances, wampum belts, scrolls, petroglyphs, and so on. Stories are also an important vehicle for recording such laws. (Borrows, 2016a: 27)

There are numerous forms of feast, each with their own legal and political function, but it is only within the feast that political rules and boundaries can be established, affirmed, contested, or modified. Even where oral traditions and histories (adaawk) with respect to rights and rules are transcribed, they are a form of intellectual property that can only be presented and addressed in the context of the feast hall within a particular territory, with particular families and parties in attendance, while observing a very particular set of ceremonial protocols. There simply is no legitimate and robust sense of access to Gitksan legal and political thought without participation in these enactive contexts.

In some cases, the features of particular territories themselves provide the relevant lessons. As Hannah Askew (2016: 40) relates, “Anishinaabe law may be considered to be both derived from the land (through the principle of akinoomaagewin) as well as written on the land through signposts that are visible across the territory.” This understanding of lands and territories as locations of legal and political meaning is shared by many Indigenous cultures around the world. It is found, for instance, in traditions of the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Christine F Black (2010) observes that learning Yolngu historical social theory (or Ganma) requires direct experience of the land:

[T]he Yolngu student is able physically to engage with the historical (Ganma) and philosophical concepts of their society by viewing the land. In so doing, the student learns the Law from the Land by observing its patterns. The Land becomes the great books of knowledge, obviating the need for student to carry the books around with them. Rather, they have only to observe their surroundings. (Black, 2010: 62)

Conclusions

I suggest that an acknowledgment of multiple registers of political meaning is not limited to Indigenous or “oral” cultures. Rather, it enjoins CPT scholars to pursue a few crucial shifts in our approach to political texts. The first is methodological and invites researchers to conduct comprehensive explorations on the limitations of textual engagement in the particular circumstances within which they are working. Researchers can no longer privilege texts without a robust account of their limitations. The now conventional perfunctory acknowledgment of “texts and practices” can no longer be tolerated as a sufficient methodological proviso. Extended exploration into the domain of extra-linguistic enactment is central to the future development of CPT, for not only does attuning the discipline to the enactive allow us to foster ethical and constructive interactions with diverse systems of political thought (not just textual cultures), but the very act of situating political systems within enactive contexts ensures that diverse modes of non-discursive political understanding are not disqualified simply because they cannot (or should not) be made explicit. Engaging Anishinaabe thought would begin by requesting to speak to those who carry Anishinaabe legal and political traditions, to inquire into the importance of practice, the particularities of stories and oral histories, and the limits of textual transcription. What is important to understand, however, is that Indigenous cultures are not unique in having oral and enactive aspects and so it can never simply be assumed based on the availability or academic popularity of texts that the meanings contained therein are exhaustive of political meaning. At best, they should be viewed as indicative of a political system already at work on the ground.

For a CPT that is committed to identifying and removing residual exclusionary logics, the way forward will be to extend the research programme beyond the task of analysing a body of written work from a particular tradition. Actual engagement in practices may be vital to learning, even if we cannot or do not write about them. We must make good on the commitment to what Godrej refers to, following Jenco’s observations about the neglect of practical meaning in critique of Eurocentrism, as “thinking within another tradition” not simply through text but also by “immersing oneself in its categories of experience and practices of inquiry” (Godrej, 2009: 581). I would add that an affirmation of the world of political meaning that exists beyond texts and words should be understood not as a new limitation but, rather, as a new contribution to a future marked by an increasingly shared political life, a global future.