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Abstract
False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap, or are entirely absent.

AbstractSocial philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents.But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness enables us to see how having it does not in itself render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 antisuffragist manifesto "An Appeal against Female Suffrage," arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterization is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal.

Pencak Silat is a martial art, performance practice and system of body cultivation prevalent throughout much of Indonesia and the Malay-speaking world. This article compares different modalities of the practice and pedagogy of Sundanese Pencak Silat in West Java with more recent attempts to standardize practice at a national level under the auspices of the Indonesian Pencak Silat Association ( Ikatan Pencak Silat Indonesia). Drawing on David Sudnow's seminal account of learning how to play jazz piano, it is suggested that learning how to improvise is a highly structured process that proceeds from the mastery of certain generic principles from which are generated potentially unbounded repertoires of habitual response. In the institutionalized instruction that is propagated by IPSI generative potential is subjugated to the desire to achieve homogeneity in practice. Aspects of Pencak Silat as it is taught nationally under the auspices of IPSI are examined in relation to the notion of spectacle. In conclusion, it is argued that the limits of the Nationalist project become self-evident as the dynamic potential of the body in Sundanese Pencak Silat is subsumed in an attempt to achieve fixity of the symbolic order.

The last decade in Indonesia has seen the emergence of localized militia groups. In Bali, these groups are now particularly prolific. Conventional wisdom in international relations thought is that these organizations constitute a threat to the authority of the state (its monopoly on the legitimate use of force) and may require national security measures to deal with them. Yet these organizations ultimately define their own role in terms of the provision of security, claiming that they act to preserve or advance core values of their communities. In this sense, their security role with reference to the state is ambiguous: they often enjoy legitimacy at the local level and perform important security functions for their local communities, even while constituting an alternative site of security practice and challenging the (exclusive) security role of the Indonesian state. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines these actors as security agents and employs a framework of security contestation to make sense of the manner in which they engage with and redefine the provision of security in Bali. In this context, the emergence and practices of Balinese militia groups challenge the way we view non-state actors in the security space and, more generally, the way we conceive security agency in international relations.