Gambetti 93upon the ancient Greek distinction between idion and koinon^6 or on the
more modern demarcation between the intimate and the civic, suffice in
themselves such that they do not call for the additional qualification of
“sphere”? One might think that the spatial and relational nuances that
obtain from the public/private distinction and that have come into focus
through rich and diverse anthropological studies would, for both practical
and theoretical purposes, render the notion of a public sphere redundant;
or at least would allow it to be used interchangeably with related concepts
such as “public,” “space,” “publicity” and “culture.” The basic categorical
argument of this essay is that to assume this is so would be a serious theo-
retical and political mistake.
t should be conceded at the outset that the numerous critics of the I
normative Habermasian model of the public sphere as a civic arena of
deliberation and reasoned opinion-formation are all highly convincing.
There is no need to reiterate their position here at length, for Habermas’s
model is not the driving force of this essay. Briefly put: the deliberative
model cannot take power differentials into account; it lacks gendering; it
heavily emphasizes a masculine and bourgeois use of reason and persua-
sion; it fails to conceive of social identities as constitutive of the public
stances of individuals; it is highly rigid in its separation of the public from
the private, of the state from society, and of the public sphere from every-
day life; finally, it glosses over the constitutive role that conflict or political
struggle plays in the formation and upholding of public spheres.^7 Carrying
these points onto another plane, recent studies suggest that we retain the
communicative aspect of publicness inherent in the normative model, but
quite convincingly expand the scope of communication, refusing thereby
to constrain ourselves to the Kantian ideal of the public use of reason. This
exercise not only expands the means whereby publics are formed, but also
broadens the spaces in and through which publicness takes effect. The
salons, reading societies and informed journals mentioned in Habermas’s
historical account of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere then
cease to be the privileged spaces of critical publicity.^8 Justifiably, the lan-
guage of anthropology speaks of representational spaces, symbolic spaces,
spaces of circulation, spaces of performance, margins and in-betweens.
ut it should also be observed that the overly antimodernist fervor B
of anthropologists debilitates their notion of the public sphere. Discarding