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

Abstract

The emerging field of comparative political theory (CPT) seeks to expand our understanding of politics through intercultural dialogues between diverse systems of political thought. CPT acknowledges diverse modes of political understanding, yet the field is still methodologically focused on textual forms of political practice and learning. I argue that the privileging of political literature in CPT has been inherited from orthodox political theory and the history of political thought and that the prioritizing of text over oral and enactive practices places constraints on intercultural dialogue. First, methodological focus on texts inhibits dialogue with Indigenous traditions that do not prioritize text in the same way or to the same extent in the reproduction of political culture. Second, the incorporation of oral traditions tends to conflate orality with text in ways that obfuscate the contribution of enactive performance. One result of these methodological oversights is that CPT risks recapitulating some of the historical exclusionary logics that it seeks to overcome.

Dialogue of the “Globals”: Connecting Global IR to Global Intellectual History

“…Second, IR scholars should also be prepared to go beyond their usual textual horizons, following recent calls for dealing with non-textual material in gaining access to the knowledge and ideational frameworks of various cultures. 88 Such a readiness could pave the way for evaluating different societies within the confines of their, at times distinct, practices of producing and sharing knowledge.…”

More than Words: A Multidimensional Approach to Deliberative Democracy

“…As such, our argument builds on the work of Toby Rollo (2017Rollo ( , 2018, who has convincingly shown that non-verbal forms of expression can play an important democratic role in a deliberative system. Rollo (2018: 5) argues that an enactive approach to politics 'accounts for the ways in which our embodied practices are themselves sites of political reasoning and contestation over rules'.…”

“…Words are considered to be the main medium through which humans can understand and communicate the truth, contribute to knowledge production and make moral decisions (Rorty, 1967). Words are also central in contemporary political theory (Rollo, 2018), in the conception of 'free speech' in liberal theory, in the development of structuralist and poststructuralist theories (e.g. Butler, 1990) and in normative understandings of democracy, most notably in deliberative democracy (e.g.…”

Teaching political theory: a pluralistic approach

“…Nevertheless, political theorists may assemble a usable history for themselves that gives meaning to their work and an archive to reconstruct. For political theorists today, that archive includes lived experiences, rituals, oral traditions, cuisines, clothing, and the visual arts (Behl 2022;Freeden 2021;Rollo 2021;Thomas 2010). 2 Here is an example from what my students may learn from taking a sequence of my courses.…”