Veronique Benei has written an elegant and tantalizing book, impressive in its finely engraved argumentation. The book is about the role of schools in the burgeoning of nationalism in Maharashtra, India. Veronique hangs her ethnography of schoolchildren and teachers on three ideas: The first is that nationalism, and its accompanying violence, is best seen not as a crisis phenomenon but as a daily, habitual experience that includes the taken for granted and even the boring. The second idea is that much of the learning of nationalism takes place in the site of the school, and this includes children smaller than supposed. And finally, she presents the idea of preverbal and verbal, emotional, affective, habitual practice as “sensorium” and embodiment. These key ideas apart, there are also discussions of the implications of nationalism and the doing of anthropology.
Benei's most interesting notion is the idea of sensorium, or how the senses and bodily practices work for children to produce an experience of the nation within their bodies. The first chapter, “Singing the Nation into Existence,” tries to describe some of the daily performance of the nation through the singing at morning assemblies (“liturgies”). Benei makes an interesting chapter carry more analytical weight than its ethnography can perhaps sustain, as she goes through several arguments: about a universal reliance on music for binding groups together, then on a particular indigenous belief in word efficacy and a “homology between school and temple” (p. 48), and finally on the popular religious nature of the patriotism being produced, comparable to bhakti or devotion.
The second chapter on “Producing Good Citizens” takes from Bourdieu, Foucault, Rosaldo, and others to discuss everyday socialization through the emotions, here through somatic routines and a stress on correct language. “Producing Mother-India at School” describes the gendering (“maternalization”) of the pedagogical space. It extends the analysis of the daily production of nationalism into finer nuances and suggests that gender, nation, and the private–public space are simultaneously produced. A provocative chapter, it pushes the idea of a sensorium into early school years and draws a connection between those years and early infancy, questioning an established, reified separation of public–private, and mental–emotional.
The next two chapters form a cluster, one describing the production of regional masculinity around the Hinduized figure of Shivaji, and the other on “becoming” or “learning to be” Muslim in western India. The chapter on Muslims has closer interpretation and also a twist, as Muslims are shown to be produced as different and a minority, while at the same time also sincere and dedicated Indians and citizens. Benei's overall effort in the book is well exemplified here: “[S]chool operates as an idealized locus of, and for, the nation (and the region) that seeks to transubstantiate a heterogeneity of class, caste, and so on into a homogeneity of patriotic devotion. Yet at the same time that the space of school generates normative performances, it crystallizes identifications and polarizations” (pp. 207–8).
In her final chapter, Benei describes a military school that does not produced gendered citizens but, counterintuitively, an ideal, genderless, universal citizen. The ethnography is particularly empathetic and the interpretations persuasive: all six chapters seem to move forward in a progression to further refinement of both ethnography and interpretation. I would like to sum up some of the arguments together with gaps within them—all of which are suggested by Benei herself, in the way of nuanced monographs.
The first idea, of the quotidian, banal nature of nationalism, and of the nationalism itself as partly queered, partly less bellicose than expected, makes for an exciting contribution to the anthropology of everyday life. The second idea, that production of local and regional nationalism happens at the social or community levels, but with the growing importance of education, more and more in official sites such as the school, is an extremely important and productive one that needs wide publicity. What Benei misses out on is a vision of what makes a school a specific site. Educators have a particular predicament in that they must discipline and engineer, but they are dealing with inadequacies at two levels: their own weak formulations of their project, and the maneuvers of consistently (not randomly or partially) resisting subjects. Thus, Benei's understanding of students' unruliness, elation, and (in)ability to interpret meaning into drawings or songs is not given the same sharp interpretive treatment as her discussion of nationalism.
Finally, the idea of the sensorium is powerful, and, as in the work of like-minded scholars whom Benei cites, can only be pushed further. The irony is that while speaking intimately of the body and of emotions, the subjects of study become themselves unable to persuade us of possessing any love or passion, sometimes reality or life. Benei says that the task of anthropology is to denaturalize the natural. This is curiously old-fashioned. The task of anthropology should surely be to denaturalize itself and the subject-anthropologist first, or equally, with the subject-informants.
“Schooling passions”—could the title mean teaching passions? Or the passions of schooling? Obviously, it means the former, and I bring this up to say that it should have meant the latter as well.
