Gene Sharp, the guru of nonviolence in America whose books were spotted throughout the Middle East during the Arab Spring, has recently published another book: Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts, and it's a useful primer and reference book for nonviolence. Terms, movements, legislations, conflicts, principles, the book includes nearly 1,000 entries, and it will be immensely useful for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the rich history of this broad-based and cross-cultural movement.
As I go through the book, I'll post a term or anything that strikes my fancy, and maybe offer a comment or two on it. Here's the first one that struck me:
Cultural Resistance—Persistent holding to one's way of life, language, customs, beliefs, manners, social organization, and ways of doing things despite pressures of another culture. This resistance may protect a culture of indigenous origin or be directed specfically against a culture imposed by a military occupation or colonialism.
Cultural resistance may take very undramatic forms, such as teaching one's language to one's children. This may be a form of microresistance. Only rarely may such resistance be tied to political resistance or open struggle. When it is, it usually becomes a form of defiance or noncooperation.
Such persistent holding to one's own culture may lead to cultural survival even in highly unfavorable circumstances.
Comment: This is what I love about Gene Sharp. He prosaically and thoroughly charts the ground of nonviolent resistance, and he leaves no stone unturned. Here, he's made available our daily lives for the shaping of a resistance movement, even the lessons that we leave our children. Maybe I'll start to teach my daughter about the deceptions of American advertising from an early age, and maybe she'll learn that buying certain products at a bargain prices causes real human suffering far away, and maybe some of the students in the Occupy Movement had parents who were part of the 60's protests, and maybe a little of their own sense of justice trickled down and is now returning when injustice seems on the verge of winning.
Cultural Resistance, an idea whose time has come because it's an idea that's always been with us.
