Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
In terms of how the Yellow Vests came to join or meet tangentially
with the environmentalists and then the Black lives matter - I call
this thresholding - each group stayed pretty much in it's own lane
but they met in the lobby or on the threshold - and began through
these processed to understand and somewhat trust each other.
Yellow Vests did their own thing at an Environmental Justice demo -
the official protest march went one way down the boulevards of Paris
- and the Yellow Vests veered off in a "wild" march in another
direction.
However, over time the Yellow Vests came to understand, or
incorporate environmental concerns. One of their main slogans
become:
"From the end of the Month (when they would run out of money) to the
end of the world"
in other words they began to recognize the environmental concerns in
their own way.
  

    
Just fyi, the book is free online, OPEN ACCESS.
I was committed to that because it was a description of a movement
that believes in the commons and I wanted to make sure it was
accessible to all - even if it is not yet available in French
  

    
Here is the link to open access to Ida's book:

<https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003534518/yellow-vests
-battle-democracy-ida-susser>
  

    
Was it difficult to get the publisher to agree to offer open access?
Or is that something they routinely do?
  

    
It was not easy to arrange open access. Some publishers do it for
some books. I was determined to make the book available free so I
used my last research funds to pay the press to provide OPEN ACCESS.
I felt that the whole question of how to promote transformation in
the direction of social justice was so crucial and people who had
few financial resources but were trying to make changes had a right
to read the work and see if it made sense to them or was useful in
any way. I wrote the book to contribute to thinking about social
change. I wanted people concerned with that to have access to it -
and not to limit readers to those with resources or in the academic
world.
  

    
The book is trying to understand the possibilities for progressive
social change. As I see it, the book is an examination of the ways
in which people in civil society, or ordinary people in local and
national movements, can build alliances and protest governments
which do not support public needs - whether for food, health or in
terms of the environment. Much of what I saw among the Yellow Vests
can be compared with the ways in which protesters got together in
neighborhoods in Minnesota to protest ICE. 
I argue that in the actual process of protesting, ordinary people
begin to understand their own political situation and experience
what Eric Olin Wright called "real utopias" - or ways of relating in
common that they had not thought possible.
I show the ways in which protest or "fighting for the commons"
actually changes the way people relate to each other, their views of
the world and their aspirations.
  

    
Thank you, Ida, for ensuring open access. I have the luxury of
enough income to buy a physical copy of the book, and I hope the
Seattle Public Library will buy some copies. Reading books online
hurts my brain. If anyone here likewise needs a physical book, I'm
willing to put mine in circulation.

Another recent read for me was Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise
Built in Hell," about communities coming together in the aftermath
of disaster with robust mutual aid. Might you describe this as a
kind of communing?
  

    
I haven't read Rebecaa Solnit's book but I think from the
descriptions I have seen that it is describing a kind of commoning.
After a disaster, in a situation where routines and formal
structures have been destroyed, in what anthropologists call a
liminal space where hierarchies have been broken down and "the world
turned upside down" there is plenty of evidence that people help one
another to rebuild and for a period of time relate in
"horizontalist" on non-hierarchical ways. 
My former doctoral student, Sarah Molinari, wrote her dissertation
(and is now writing her book) on the combination of the government
bankruptcy in Puerto Rico which was directly followed by Hurricane
Maria. Sarah showed that a whole older generation of women in the
village she studied couldn't leave the island and instead took over
a school where they cooked food, arranged community activities and
helped the disabled while there was almost no outside help and the
water and electricity systems had collapsed. This community
organization became quite strong and lasted over several years.
Sarah shows that this cooperation changed people's relations to one
another and contributed to the emergence of a protest movement to
cancel the debt and remove the governor.
Such a situation of commoning in which people come to recognize one
another's needs can lead to a kind of political learning and
rethinking among the participants.
In my work with the Yellow Vests, people protesting were joined by
many from the left and from unions and the sharing in the occupation
led people to think differently about their own lives and others
suffering from poverty and disabilities. It helped to generate a
more informed and educated public who protested not only against the
rising cost of gas and the dismantling of the welfare state but
began to join  with other groups and over time also to protest
against police violence and environmental destruction, 
  

    
I'll watch for your student's book! 

A note about disability and language: I think many disabled
activists would say that it is ableism, with its attendant lack of
respect, accessibility, services and medical care, that causes
suffering and would not describe themselves as suffering from their
disabilities.
  

    
Ida, your book's subject is usually taken up by political theorists
and journalists.  What makes your approach as an anthropologist
different from these other disciplines?  The news business talks
about reporters being "embedded" with their subject. 
Anthropologists talk about doing "fieldwork" and "participant
observation."  How did you collect your data on the Yellow Vests? 
  

    
Yes, I guess anthropologists say we are doing ethnographic
fieldwork, but perhaps it's clearer to people to say we embedded
with the protesters. I marched with people in the streets, talking
to people as I met them and hanging out in cafes afterwards. I lived
in a working class district outside Paris and went to the markets
and followed local political campaigns over several years. As I met
people in the Paris streets, they began to invite me to their towns
and roundabouts outside Paris and in this way I learned about the
way of life and the origins of the protests in the urban peripheries
of France. Yellow Vests had met for weeks at their local roundabouts
- and then some decided to drive to Paris, or sometimes Toulouse or
Bordeaux or other cities to join the protests in the city streets.
Yellow Vests arranged picnics, barbecues, even Yellow weddings,
Sunday fetes and much else around their roundabouts, the cabins they
built or simply in the parks. I attended many of these as well as
the times when Yellow Vests prepared food for their food collectives
and distribution to many different groups of people such as refugees
or Roma without homes or access to food. 
After I talked with people a bit, I often gave them my email and
asked them to send me a written account of what they had told me.
Yellow Vests called this a testimonial and many people sent me such
accounts. In a way, this meant that I was not speaking for people
but engaging them in some way in the research. 
The Yellow Vests were very very clear that they did not want other
people to represent them. They took their own photos and videos of
every protest and documented everything on the web themselves. They
did not trust the media to represent them accurately. Nor did they
trust politicians to represent them - they did not choose to vote
for people who claimed they were Yellow Vests candidates running for
office and many Yellow Vests were quite critical of these
candidates.

In fact, I worked along with an Anthropology Professor in France, to
arrange workshops with Yellow Vests. Through the workshops we worked
with Yellow Vests to make a book of testimonials which have been
translated into  English. This collection (edited by Benoit Hazard
and myself) Yellow Words/Yellow Vests is coming out soon with
Routledge.
  

    
There is some difference between the idea of a journalist embedding
with a group and the idea of ethnography. Anthropologists would
claim that they are placing their field experience in the light of
an analysis of the historical and political context of the events.
It is a claim to a body of theory that illuminates the political
developments. Although it may not be of so much interest to Inkwell
readers, I put my analysis in the context of writers like Antonio
Gramsci and Karl Polanyi, who wrote in the years of the development
of fascism. I try to see in what ways we might understand the Yellow
Vests as perhaps promoting a movement toward social transformation
and limiting the move towards something like fascism today. Or
perhaps they might have been a right wing movement that only
hastened a move towards illiberalism or perhaps fascism.
  

    
I hope that some of these findings, about the ways in which
leftists, environmentalists and union activists joined the Yellow
Vest conversations at the roundabouts and in the protest marches,
led to a political process which did not move to the right but
considered questions of inequality and the overall assaults on
people's lives. I think the book illustrates the ways in which
groups might begin to come together in their protests, without
losing their autonomy as groups, and voice parallel demands.
  

    
While doing the fieldwork, you probably were watching the TV news
and reading the local newspapers.  How did the picture they were
painting or telling the Yellow Vest story differ from what you were
seeing and hearing during the demonstrations?  What were the
individual reactions to the news accounts?
  

    
Many of the newspapers including the international media such as the
New York Times and The Guardian were initially shocked and talked
about fear and the extreme right influences. 
Since the protesters came mostly from outside Paris and the
provinces, the social analysts as well as the reporters were
suspicious that they represented a far right movement. 
In 2013 there had been a previous movement from Brittany which had
started on the left in opposition to a haulage tax for truckers.
Originally socialist mayors supported this movement but later it
became representative of the major haulage companies with an
emphasis on nationalism and the far right.
Historically in France, villages in the provinces had represented
both the left and the right. In the last elections many turned to
the National Rally, the extreme right, while most of the cities
elected socialist or further left administrations.
Since the Yellow Vests came from the rural areas they were or felt
stereotyped by the media as right wing and less educated.
President Macron had a history of such stereotyping and also very
soon characterized the Yellow Vests as anti-semitic.
In characterizing the Yellow Vests as extreme right, the media and
politicians were implying also that they were probably racist,
Islamophobic and anti-immigrant.
This was one way in which the government tried to undermine the
widespread support throughout France (initially over 80% support
according to many reports) for the disruptive protests of the Yellow
Vests.
In my work, I look at the charges of anti-semitism, racism,
anti-immigrant etc, setting them in the historical context of
Dreyfus and Vichy as well as the colonial history of Algeria and
North Africa and find a very different picture. Although there were
all kinds of individual views, the Yellow Vests did not respond to
"dog whistles" of racism and anti-semitism and refused to follow
political leaders who built their campaigns on these issues.
In contrast to the success of the Maga movement and Trump in the
United States, the Yellow Vests did not take on these political
tropes as a group and over time, in the processes of political
protest and criss crossing movements, such as the environmentalists
and the black lives matter, they began to recognize the importance
of these demands 
  
  

    
Over time, as President Macron refused to recognize the Yellow Vests
as legitimate protests and the participants were not allowed these
recognized rights, the police walked the streets in full riot gear,
threw tear gas canisters and assaulted the Yellow Vests with LBDs
(supposedly non-lethal bullets).
Many Yellow Vests lost eyes, hands, feet and were wounded in other
ways by the police - 
People who had previously seen the gendarmes as local neighbors,
learned the violence of city police.
They eventually formed an organization, The Mutilated, which joined
in many Black lives matter demonstrations in the poorer immigrant
areas. This is the process I call thresholding - which led to people
from the  provinces beginning to recognize the demands of people
from the working class areas of immigrants and others outside the
major cities. 
  

    
like the concept of testimony
  

    
In the book you mention violence in citizen protests and uprisings. 
What role did violence play in the Yellow Vest movement?
  

    
Ida, thanks so much for the book and your notes here. I am currently
immersed in the revolutions in Germany of 1848 and 1918 so that
these and your book help me see better what is happening in the
world, especially the US, and the possible outcomes. 

I wish you well in your work.