Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Sandro Mezzadra: Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class

Identity and class

While identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can say that it is only in the second half of the 20th century that the development of cultural anthropology and sociology lays the theoretical ground for such a politicization, which is unconceivable without taking into account the emergence in many parts of the world of feminist movements as well as of a panoply of struggles against racial domination and for the rights of “minorities.” Such important debates as the one surrounding multiculturalism contributed to foster identity politics and more generally to nurture a coding of politics in terms of (cultural) identity. Claims based upon identity played an important role in denouncing the presumed “neutrality” and even universalism of political institutions and in shedding light on the continuity of past histories of conquest and domination. This was for instance the case in settler colonial countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States, with respect to the condition of indigenous peoples. More generally, identity provided a language for the articulation of claims and desires for liberation of a multiplicity of subjects whose oppression was predicated upon specific systems of oppression that were not targeted as such by established traditions of emancipatory politics. Struggles of racialized people or sexual minorities are good instances in this respect as well as claims proliferating within feminism along the lines that fracture the unitary figures of “the woman” and “universal sisterhood” (just think of the debates surrounding “postcolonial feminism” since the 1980s).

Women march down a street holding protests signs.
Image 1: Ni Una Menos march, Buenos Aires, 3 June 2017. Photo by Titi Nicola.

From this point of view, it is not surprising that one of the first polemical targets of identity politics was the concept of class and class politics. If one takes class as a collective subject (and even as a collective identity) whose unity and homogeneity are immediately given as an “objective” outcome of the relations of production, it is easy to see that there is no space here for a politics capable to grasp claims and movements articulated in specific terms – be it in gender or racial terms. There is no shortage of historical examples of such conflicts and clashes within the labor movement. Take for instance B.R. Ambedkar, the great spokesperson of the Dalits in colonial India. In the late 1920s he had several debates with the leaders of the Communist Party of India, always pointing to the peculiarity of the position of the Dalits and to the spread of practices of untouchability in the world of labor and emphasizing the need to give priority to those questions in labor politics. This is precisely what Communist leaders did not want to accept, leading to a split with Ambedkar (Roy 2016, 110). The latter, in his The Annihilation of Caste (1936), took stock of those debates writing that caste is “a division of laborers,” and even more precisely “it is a hierarchy in which the divisions of laborers are graded one above the other” (Ambedkar 2016, 233-234). The question of caste is directly addressed here from the point of view of what we could call the composition of labor, of the disruption of its unity as a sociological factor and as a political subject. And Ambedkar points to the relevance of conflicts within the ranks of workers – conflicts that played an important role elsewhere in the world, for instance in the relation between African American struggles and the labor movement in the United States (see for instance Roediger 1991).

In this essay I will discuss a specific notion that has become particularly influential in framing the discussion of identity and identity politics – intersectionality. I will show that the original formulation of that notion was crucially intertwined with debates on class and class politics. At the same time, my argument is inspired by a theoretical and political concern with the main forms of contemporary identity politics, which are nurtured by such notions as “white privilege” and by “decolonial” language and theories (see Mezzadra 2021, 30-33). While I remain wary of the moralistic tones of identity politics today, what troubles me more is the tendency to simply affirm a subaltern identity as a closed and bordered one (often in the framework of a race to establish that identity as the most oppressed and humiliated). This makes alliances, convergences, and coalitions – as well as opposition – ultimately impossible (Haider 2018, 40). It is against this background that I ask in the last section of the essay whether it is possible, and even necessary to rethink the very concept of class to open up a different political perspective for struggles and movements as the ones that are at the center of theories of intersectionality. Needless to say, this requires going beyond the traditional notion of class that I have sketched above, I admit, providing a kind of caricature.

Intersectionality, so what?

There is something important that must be stressed at the outset of this section. Over the last few years, the notion of intersectionality, originally forged in the United States, began to travel. And as is often the case with “traveling theories” (Said 1983 and 1994), it acquired new meanings and was in a way even reinvented first of all in the streets, outside of the academia. This happened in particular in the framework of the new wave of feminist movements in Latin America and Southern Europe, often using the slogan Ni Una Menos (“No one less”). In Argentina and Brazil, the notion of intersectionality is used to articulate and connect the movements and claims of indigenous and black women, rural and metropolitan communities, sexual minorities and women living in slums, without losing sight of their specificity, while in Italy and Spain it allows addressing issues of migration, colonialism, and sexuality. In a way, one can say that this appropriation and these uses of intersectionality prompted a re-politicization of the notion, where what is at stake, to quote the words of Angela Davis, is “not so much intersectionality of identities but intersectionality of struggles” (Davis 2016, 144). Interestingly, this notion of intersectionality also played outstanding roles in the debates within the massive movement for black lives and against police brutality in the United States in the summer of 2020 (see for instance Thompson 2020).

I spoke of a re-politicization of intersectionality because over the last years in the United States the notion had become a kind of standard academic reference and its original political imprint had been to some extent neutralized (which does not mean of course that there were not many scholars continuing to do a very interesting and even radical work in the framework of intersectionality – see Nash 2019). This is why there is a need to go back to the origin of the notion, and even beyond that to shortly reconstruct its genealogy. As I anticipated above, the reference to the world of work is foundational for intersectionality. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is usually credited to have “invented” the notion, defines it as follows. Intersectionality, she writes, designates “the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women’s employment experiences” (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). Discussing the De Graffenreid v. General Motors case of 1977, in which the court rejected the claim of five black women that the company’s seniority system discriminated against them, Crenshaw famously writes that the court’s refusal to acknowledge “combined race and sex discrimination” rested on the assumption “that the boundaries of sex and race discrimination are defined respectively by white women’s and black men’s experiences” (Crenshaw 1989, 143). The interplay of those boundaries effectively obscures and deletes a specific subjective experience within the ranks of workers, the one of black women. In focusing on such a neglected difference, intersectionality sets out to shed light on the parallel working of systems of oppression and domination that hierarchize the working class.

Writing in 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw was aware of the fact that the notion of intersectionality that she forged from a specific perspective of critical legal thinking had been long in gestation in Black feminist thought as well as in the toil and struggles of black working women in the United States (see Carasthatis 2016, chapter 1 and Bohrer 2019, chapter 0). In the turmoil of the 1970s we can find for instance in the “Statement” of the Combahee River Collective (1977) a striking formulation of the problematic of intersectionality. Named after Harriet Tubman’s raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina during the Civil War, which freed 750 enslaved people, the collective was a Black radical feminist and lesbian organization formed in 1974 (see Taylor 2017). As they write, their politics is defined by an active commitment “to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” and they see as their “particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (Taylor 2017, 15). This notion of “interlocking” systems of oppression clearly foreshadows intersectionality. At the same time, it calls attention precisely to the moment of “interlocking,” which means to the junctures and articulation between them. “We also find it difficult,” the collective writes, “to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously” (Taylor 2017, 19). The concept of “identity politics” that readers can find in one of its earliest uses in the “Statement” of the Combahee River Collective has consequently quite different meanings than the ones that became usual later on. This concept is here a rallying and battle cry, urging Black women to focus on their “own oppression” and struggle for their own liberation, which would necessarily be a general liberation since “our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Taylor 2017, 23).

Even long before the 1970s, the experience of the “interlocking” of racial, sexual, and class oppression had shaped the living experience of a multitude of black women in the United States. And it was contested in multifarious ways through struggles and organizing, first against slavery and then against lynching and segregation. While writings from the early stage of Black feminist thought (including such important names as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells-Barnett) compose an important archive for anybody interested in the genealogy and prehistory of intersectionality (see Gines 2014), I would like to shortly dwell here on the debates about the condition of the Black proletarian woman in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. in the 1930s and in the 1940s. In the writings of Louise Thompson and Claudia Jones the questions of race and sex are indeed discussed from the point of view of the concept of exploitation, which will be later marginalized in the intersectional debate. Writing in 1936, Louise Thompson provides in Toward a Brighter Dawn a striking analysis of the condition of black women, focusing on a “Southern road,” on “the plantations in the South,” and on “Bronx Park, New York.” The legacy of slavery runs through the whole article, which finds a dramatic apex in the description of the predicament of black domestic workers in the Bronx. Thompson speaks of a “slave market” in the Bronx, and casts it as a “graphic monument to the bitter exploitation of this most exploited section of the American working population – the Negro women.” And this is because they “meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, and as Negroes” (Thompson 1936).

More than a decade later, Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad and doomed to live and work in the U.K. after being deported from the United States in 1955, further develops such analysis. Her An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (1949) starts with an emphasis on the growth in the militant participation of black women “in all aspects of the struggle for peace, civil rights and economic security.” It is in front of this intensified militancy that Jones calls for a new understanding of the role of black women and for an end to the neglect of that role permeating the labor movement. Jones dwells on the position of black women in different social spheres, from the family to mass organizations. She carefully analyzes in particular the condition of black domestic workers, focusing on the reasons that lead to the relegation of black women to “domestic and similar menial work” and stressing their “unbearable misery.” She echoes Thompson’s writing that black domestic workers “suffer the additional indignity, in some areas, of having to seek work in virtual ‘slave markets’ on the streets where bids are made, as from a slave block, for the hardiest workers.” Interestingly, she also analyzes the reasons that divide black and white women also within the working class. “White chauvinism” works as a boundary at the societal level, a boundary that crosses and divides also the composition of the working class. Even the experience of exploitation is hierarchized, as black women clearly demonstrate. As Jones writes, “not equality, but degradation and super-exploitation: this is the actual lot of Negro women!” (Jones 1949).  

Figures of oppression

“Triple exploitation” and “super-exploitation,” the concepts introduced by Linda Thompson and Claudia Jones, are clearly attempts to use a Marxist language to come to terms with the specific condition of black working women. The proposed diversification and even hierarchization of exploitation raise however several problems. This is particularly the case when the notion of exploitation is understood in purely economistic terms and strictly connected to a narrow interpretation of “productive labor.” Such an economistic concept of exploitation has long been prevailing in Marxism, including in the United States, and it allowed a subordination of all forms of oppression (for instance, in Thompson’s words, oppression “as women, and as Negroes”) to exploitation itself (“as workers”) and to the related class politics. Consequently, several activists and scholars began to underscore the autonomy of those systems of oppression (say, sexism and racism) and to prioritize struggles against them, in many cases completely obscuring the relevance of exploitation. This is what characterizes the mainstream of debates on intersectionality, which are often shaped by a conceptual opposition between oppression and exploitation (see Bohrer 2019).

The important book by Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (originally published in 1990), joins a long tradition of theoretical reflection on the continuing legacy of slavery in defining the condition of African American women using the notion of oppression as the main conceptual reference of her analysis. It is worth quoting at length Collins’ book on this point. “Oppression,” she writes,

“describes any unjust situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies another group access to the resources of society. Race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, and ethnicity among others constitute major forms of oppression in the United States. However, the convergence of race, class, and gender oppression characteristic of U.S. slavery shaped all subsequent relationships that women of African descent had within Black American families and communities, with employers, and among one another. It also created the political context for Black women’s intellectual work” (Collins 2000, 4).

Collins’ theory of “intersecting oppressions” has been very influential in establishing the field of intersectionality (or “matrix of domination” as she preferred to say in 1990). It is easy to see that most “forms of oppression” mentioned by Collins (race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity…) are open to processes of multiplication form within, and a proliferation of figures of oppression indeed characterizes debates on intersectionality. Chicana feminism, for instance, introduced new perspectives into a discussion that was born out of the condition and struggles of black women (see García 1997), while the topics of sexual oppression and heteronormativity gained prominence in writings on intersectionality. This led to a kind of explosion of the field, which allowed multiple processes of subjective expression and constitution, shedding light on forms of domination that had long remained invisible, and productively widening the terrain of struggles for liberation. At the same time, it raised specific problems for a theory of intersectionality.

It is definitely true that, as Ashley Bohrer writes, intersectional theorists “have argued against additive and multiplicative models for their failure to highlight the mutual constitution of the structures of domination” (Bohrer 2019, 102). Nevertheless, it is important to remind that the notion of oppression in intersectional debates is characterized by an emphasis on “irreducibility” (of the single systems of oppression), which goes hand in hand with an emphasis on “simultaneity,” i.e. with the claim that those systems “are experienced simultaneously and are inseparable” (Carasthatis 2016, 57). There is a clear tension here, and while the critique of “single axis” thinking is a constitutive moment for theories of intersectionality, one can say that the principle of “irreducibility” has often tended to obscure the one of “simultaneity.” What is at stake here is the risk of an identity politics that takes the specificity of a system of oppression as an exclusive framework not only for analysis but also for the process of subject constitution. The point is not to propose as an alternative a hierarchization of oppressions and consequently of struggles and claims, which is anathema to theories of intersectionality. It is rather to shift attention to the unitary moment in the working of systems of domination and oppression and to work toward the establishment of spaces of convergence for diverse and heterogeneous subjects. A focus on a specific system of oppression can well be an important moment in a process of subjectivation, even necessary to break processes of marginalization and to open up new vistas of liberation. Nevertheless, when the “identity” forged by such focus becomes frozen it paradoxically risks replicating the boundaries of the specific system of oppression it sets out to contest. And it becomes an obstacle to wider processes of subjectivation.

Within intersectional debates this problem is often addressed from the angle of a theory of coalition. “It was a while,” writes Audre Lorde, “before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather that anyone particular difference” (Lorde 1982, 226). These words nicely encapsulate the point I just made on identity and identity politics. The “house of difference” can be a powerful image to describe an intersectional coalition, intertwining solidarity and resistance toward a politics capable to bring “into being the worlds we really need” (Bohrer 2019, 257). Such a coalition, as Bohrer rightly emphasizes (256), is necessarily different than being what is traditionally understood as the lowest minimum denominator among different groups. While in this case the subjectivity and identity of the collectives involved remain untouched, an intersectional coalition is a space of convergence for a multitude of diverse and heterogeneous people, within which new subjectivities and even identities are continuously fabricated in a common struggle for liberation. Needless to say, the very unity of a coalition is not given in advance, it is itself at stake in this process of subjectivation.

A yellow banner hanging on the side of a trailer reads Feminism is Class War.
Image 2: International Women’s Day in Berlin, 8 March 2020. Photo by Leonhard Lenz.

Class, reloaded

The critique of the economistic notion of exploitation that I sketched above led to a marginalization of class, and even capitalism, in many debates on intersectionality. As it happened in cultural and postcolonial studies (see Mezzadra 2011), capital and capitalism were confined to the realm of “economy” while class was often identified with white, male, heterosexual workers in a standard employment relation. Differential systems of oppression like sexism and racism were considered to operate at the margins of capitalism, which could definitely instrumentalize the processes of hierarchization generated by them without ceasing to remain a fundamentally homogenizing power. I am convinced that such an understanding of capitalism is deeply flawed, and that a different way to look at the history and contemporary working of capitalism could provide us with an effective way to tackle the question of the “simultaneity” of systems of oppression raised by theories of intersectionality.

At stake here is first of all the question of the relation of capital with “difference” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 32-38). This is a question that has been reframed over the last years by historians of colonialism and global historians of labor, by postcolonial scholars and critical researchers working on the topic of development. There is an emerging consensus that what Lisa Lowe (1996, 28) calls the “social production of ‘difference’” is a distinct and crucial moment in the operations of capital, which works in tandem with (and enables) the production of “abstract labor” as a norm for the reproduction of capitalism writ large. In my work with Brett Neilson, I have argued that the interplay between difference and abstraction, or homogeneity and heterogeneity is particularly apparent in the working of contemporary global capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013 and 2019). This interplay regards in particular the question of labor. Following Marx’s definition of labor power as “the aggregate of attitudes and capabilities” contained in the body, “the living personality of a human being” (Marx 1976, 270), I contend that there is a need to emphasize the gap between the element of attitudes and capabilities and their “container,” the body (Marx uses the German word Leiblichkeit, whose absolute materiality is not adequately rendered by the English translation with “physical form”).

Such an emphasis on the body opens up new continents for the understanding of labor power as well as of its production as a commodity. What is at stake here is what we can call the production of subjectivity that is required for the very existence of that commodity. The differential fabrication of hierarchized bodies, where systems of oppression like sexism and racism have prominent roles to play, emerges as a crucial moment in the production of labor power as a commodity, which is according to Marx the cornerstone upon which no less than the existence of capitalism is predicated. The very boundary between production and reproduction, as well as between productive and unproductive labor appears tested and blurred from this point of view. And it is easy to see that a merely economistic understanding of capitalism and exploitation becomes untenable. The moment that I called of a production of subjectivity has rather multiple dimensions that must be acknowledged as internal to exploitation. We are confronted here with a panoply of (exploited) subjective figures, whose experience of oppression and exploitation is definitely mediated by different subject positions (where for instance racism, sexism, or heteronormativity can be prevailing) while their “simultaneity” is orchestrated by the operations of capital.

Class is today composed by this multitude of differences living, toiling, and struggling under the pressure of capital’s exploitation. Multiplicity is the hallmark of class. While I emphasize the relevance of a non-economistic notion of exploitation for rethinking class today, there is a need to add that class politics today requires a panoply of movements and struggles that go well beyond the boundaries of class. Once we acknowledge the constitutive relevance for the working of exploitation of, say, racism and sexism, mobilizations against them, which may well include people who are not “exploited,” are of the utmost importance – and can never be considered as addressing a kind of “secondary” contradiction. Parallel to such transversal struggles there is a need to forge and practice new forms of solidarity and spaces of convergence, where intersectionality becomes a method for a multiplicity of encounters and for counteracting any ossification of identity politics. The latter can definitely play a positive role in opening up new fields of struggle but is always at risk of becoming an obstacle for wider processes of subjectivation – for building a more effective base for struggles against exploitation and oppression. The notion of class, a “multitudinous class” or a “intersectional class” to put it with Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2019, 84), provides a subjective name to that base and opens new lines of investigation and political intervention. And the reinvention of intersectionality that I mentioned above (as an “intersectionality of struggles,” to remind the words of Angela Davis) seems to foreshadow a new politics of solidarity and even a new class politics.

Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna. His scholarly work has centered on borders and migration, contemporary capitalism and globalization, Marx and workerism. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019) As an activist he is currently engaged in the “Mediterranea Saving Humans” project (https://mediterranearescue.org/).

Originally published in Papeles del Ceic 2021/2.

References

Ambedkar, B.R. 2016. The Annihilation of Caste. Ed. and annotated by S. Anand, London – New York: Verso.

Bohrer. A.J. 2019. Marxism and Intersectionality. Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality Under Contemporary Capitalism. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Carasthatis. A. 2016. Intersectionality. Origins, Contestations, Horizons. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Collins. P.H. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, second edition. New York and London: Routledge.

Crenshaw. K. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” In University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139-167.

Crenshaw. K. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” In Stanford Law Review, 43 (6): 1241-1299.

Davis, A. 2016. Freedom is a Constant Struggle. Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Gines. K.T. 2014. “Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-Intersectionality.” In Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach. Ed. by N. Goswami, M. O’Donovan, and L. Yount. London: Pickering & Chatto: 13–26.

Haider, A. 2018. Mistaken Identity. Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London – New York: Verso.

Hardt, M. and T. Negri. 2019. “Empire, Twenty Years On.” In New Left Review, 120: 67-92.

Jones. C. 1949. An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! In New Frame, available at https://www.newframe.com/from-the-archive-an-end-to-the-neglect-of-the-problems-of-the-negro-woman/ (accessed April 18, 2021).

Lorde. A. 1982. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography. Berkley, Calif.: The Crossing Press.

Lowe. L. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marx. K. 1976. Capital,Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books.

Mezzadra, S. 2011. “Bringing Capital Back In: A Materialist Turn in Postcolonial Studies?” In Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12 (1): 154-164.

Mezzadra, S. 2021. “Challenging Borders. The Legacy of Postcolonial Critique in the Present Conjuncture.” In Soft Power 7 (2): 21-44.

Mezzadra. S. and B. Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mezzadra. S. and B. Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Nash. J.C. 2019. Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Roediger, D. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of American Working Class. London – New York: Verso.

Roy, A. 2016. “The Doctor and the Saint.” In B.R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, ed. and annotated by S. Anand, London – New York: Verso.

Said, E.W. 1983. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 226–247.

Said, E.W. 1994, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000: 436-452.

Taylor. K.-Y. 2017. How We Get Free. Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Thompson, D. 2020. “The Intersectional Politics of Black Lives Matter.” In Turbulent Times, Transformational Possibilities? Gender Politics Today and Tomorrow. Ed. by A. Dobrowolsky and F. MacDonald, Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 240-257.

Thompson. L. 1936. Toward a Brighter Dawn. In Viewpoint Magazine (2015), available at https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/toward-a-brighter-dawn-1936/ (accessed April 18, 2021).

Cite as: Mezzadra, Sandro. 2021. “Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class.” FocaalBlog, 21 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/10/22/sandro-mezzadra-intersectionality-identity-and-the-riddle-of-class/

Blog

Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy

David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his scholarly legacy is slowly emerging. I want to contribute to such a critical assessment of his oeuvre by concentrating on his book “Utopia of Rules” published in 2015. This assessment has resulted from my participation in the roundtable “On David Graeber’s Work: Potentialities for a Radical Leftist Anthropology” at the conference of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA) in Bremen on 28.9.2021, the stream of which can be watched on Facebook.

I propose that a scholarly book can be evaluated according to three criteria:

  1. Does it present new facts—that is, results of research according to accepted research protocols, be they ethnographic or others?
  2. Does it engage with theory, and the body of existing knowledge, in a novel way?
  3. If that is not the case, does it present new ideas, even if only in a more essayistic way, e.g. without the necessity to give evidence; or does it present old ideas in a better way than they have already been presented elsewhere.

Even if a book is written for a larger audience, as this book clearly is, it should still stand the test of at least one of these criteria. This is in fact in line with what Graeber himself (in a highly unusual six-page response to a five-page negative review of his book) demanded—i.e., that the book should be judged “according to the actual arguments and the evidence assembled to support these arguments” (Piliavsky 2017; Graeber 2017: 118). These criteria can be summed up in the question of whether I would put the book, or parts of it, in a list of core readings, say for a course on the anthropology of bureaucracy.

I will limit myself to the introduction to the book and the central essay on structural stupidity (ch. 1). The chapter – the only one with an anthropology pedigree – first came into being as the 2006 LSE Malinowski lecture under the title “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity” (https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos). Later, however, Graeber did not want the lecture to be cited any longer. He replaced it by the text “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture,” which he published in HAU (a journal that he co-edited) and which, in a strangely bureaucratic turn of phrase, he declared “the official one” (Graeber 2012: 105 fn. 1; https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau2.2.007). It finally turned into a 2015 book chapter. Each time the text became longer. I have found lots of praise of the book, but predominantly from outside anthropology (but see Piliavsky 2017) and mainly from journalists (see the praise page of the book).

The central argument seems to be that the world is faced with an increasing bureaucratisation whereby public and private bureaucracies, as well as neoliberal capitalism melt into each other and form a total structure of oppression and exploitation which furthermore relies on technology and sheer physical violence. This over-bureaucratisation of the world stifles creativity and imagination, in particular revolutionary imagination, so the left needs to reflect on how to get out of this trap (which according to Graeber it has not done, therefore the need for his intervention).

I say this “seems to be” the argument, as Graeber’s writing is not very structured. He writes more by way of analogy, and about whatever comes to his mind. His style of writing has been called “ruminative” by a reviewer; the author resembles a happy deer strolling across a sunny alpine meadow, picking a weed here, plucking a shamrock there, and then chewing the whole thing several times over. So, to give the reader a selection of topics touched upon: the two chapters jump from huge generalisations on « the » Germans, Americans, and British (p. 13), to Graeber’s experiences as a customer of an American bank (p. 15), student debt, again in the US (p. 23), chats with a World Bank economist at a conference (pp. 25-26) as well as with a British bank employee at another occasion (note 15 p. 231), newspaper opinion pieces which he presents as results of ethnographic research (p.22), the shape of bank buildings “when I was growing up” (p. 33), surprising but unsubstantiated references to Goethe as a supporter of Prussian bureaucracy (p. 39), similarities between refugees and female applicants to London music schools (p. 41), a visit to an occupied factory in Marseilles (p. 43),  his mother’s death (pp. 45-50), problems of registering his car in New York (p. 48), to academics complaining about too much paperwork (pp. 53-54), why a thick description of a bureaucratic document is impossible (p. 52, but see Göpfert 2013), violence as the weapon of the stupid (p. 68), gender roles in American situation comedies of the 1950s (p. 69), stories about American teenagers that somebody told him but he doesn’t remember who it was (note 59 p. 242), to what a friend told him about degrees in library science (note 26 p. 233), what “most of us” think about the police (p. 73), to vampires (p. 77), Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (p. 78), and American prisons (p. 102).

Now my criterion 1: where is the evidence, and what about new knowledge? Graeber has a remarkably cavalier use of what is habitually called evidence. I can only give two examples here: In the beginning of the introduction, he claims that “we” (a pronoun, like “us” and “ours”, he frequently uses but never defines) are increasingly faced with paperwork. He then presents three graphs to prove his point (pp. 4-5). At closer inspection, however, the graphs – presented without any source – rather show how often “paperwork” or associated terms like “performance review” have appeared in English language books over time, which of course is different from the thesis it is supposed to illustrate, and rather refutes his other thesis, that “nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy” (p. 3). In fact, Graeber admits that he is purely “imagining” graph no. 2 (his words, p. 4; see also p. 15) which supposedly shows that people spend ever more time filling out forms. In any case, he has a penchant, throughout the text, for terms like “apparently”, “I suppose”, “we all know that”, “most of us believe”, “apparently”, the subjunctive form of the verb, and what “everybody knows” (p. 27).

Apart from these imagined figures, Graeber’s main type of evidence are personal anecdotes, which for him apparently assume the function of explanations. He starts off chapter 1 with the problems he had when, after a life mostly spent as a “bohemian student” (p. 48), he was suddenly faced with different bureaucratic hiccups when his mother had a stroke, the problems being caused by a particularly incompetent notary. Like this coming-of-age story, all the other anecdotes are also taken from his immediate personal experience, almost exclusively concern the US and the UK and not rarely relate to narcistic insults he suffered from some apparently stupid bureaucrat who did not recognize his, Graeber’s, intelligence (e.g., p. 48, p. 64). In fact, he also has six pages on Madagascar where he essentially says that outside the capital city, state bureaucracy is practically absent, but then immediately nuances this statement with respect to schools (pp. 61-66; one would wonder what this evaluation would say about health centres, for example, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and more generally, also). As an Africanist, that doesn’t surprise me (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1997), but Graeber does not consider the fact that this widespread absence of state bureaucracy in the highlands of Madagascar might in fact invalidate his general thesis of total bureaucratization as a planetary phenomenon.

A bureaucratic travel document related to the author's research. The form is officially signed and stamped.
Image 1: A utopia of rules? The bureaucratic embeddedness of ethnographic research (Photo: Thomas Bierschenk, 2009)

What about criterion 2, the engagement with existing knowledge and theory? Graeber clearly is somebody who does not like reading but prefers writing up and sharing with the world whatever comes to his mind. In the introduction, he claims that despite the increasing importance of bureaucracy, nobody is interested in analysing it, so that is why he must do it. This sounds a bit overly self-confident, as there is a huge body of social-science literature on bureaucracy and organisation since the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in sociology, but from the 1980s increasingly also in anthropology (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2021). Graeber simply does not know this literature. And when, here and there, he does mention selected topical works, he does not engage with them (e.g. note 44 p. 238).

What about theory? The book cover claims that we are faced with “a powerful work of social theory in the traditions of Foucault and Marx”. This might be discounted as commercial overselling but then Graeber himself sees his book as “an exercise in social theory” (p. 75). However, throughout the book, he is very eclectic in his theoretical references. He likes neither Weber nor Foucault, but dislikes Foucault more than Weber, and sees both as intellectual frontmen of neoliberal bureaucratic capitalism, in passages on the history of ideas, which he himself qualifies as “caricaturish” (p. 57). On the other hand, and surprisingly, Graeber likes Lévi-Strauss, and structuralism in general (pp. 76 seq.). As for Marx, he prefers to lie low, but stresses repeatedly that he was a man of his times (e.g., p. 88). Many of his renderings of theorists, say Weber, appear somewhat crude to the educated reader, if not outright wrong. In the passages where that is the case, and when you turn to the footnotes, you are then puzzled to read from Graeber’s pen a sentence like: “I am aware this (i.e., his own [Graeber’s] claim about Weber in the main text, p. 74) is not really what Weber said.” (fn. 64 p. 243). Elsewhere, he admits that his reflections are not new but have already been formulated somewhere else, and possibly better (e.g., by feminist standpoint theory or critical race theory, p. 68). But he admits to this only in passing and shares his inspirations with the reader anyway. It is also interesting to reflect upon what social theory Graeber leaves out. To name only a few authors who immediately come to my mind as they clearly resonate with Graeber’s concerns but are absent from his book: Hegel’s and Sartre’s theorem on the dialectics of the master-servant relationship, Gramsci’s writings on hegemony, the whole Frankfurt school of critical theory, and in particular Herbert Marcuse’s One-dimensional Man, or the sociology of critique of Boltanski. So, in sum, the happy ruminator, in this book, has confidently waded into areas where he didn’t have many bearings, and not surprisingly, he got lost.

I do not think I need to dwell much on criterion 3 as the reader will not be surprised by my negative answer. One could ask why, after all, the book has been rather successful even if much less successful than the Debt book (Graeber 2011). I have two answers to that, one of which I will present later. My main charge against the book is that it essentially confirms middle-class readers and fellow academics from the Global North, in particular the Anglo world, in their clichés about and grudges against bureaucracy. In fact, in Germany which remained rather untouched by the hype around Graeber, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), a left-wing daily, titled its review of the book “cliché as scholarship” (Klischee als Wissenschaft) and notes the author’s “love of the commonplace” (Walter 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/). It is true that there are interesting ideas in the book, which are not, however, developed (for example, was Foucault a neoliberal thinker? In fact, I wonder if Graeber is not a neoliberal thinker himself.). Other propositions are pure reinventions of the wheel. How many books and articles have been written about the bureaucratisation of the world? (See for example the solidly researched Hibou 2015). Other statements are truisms, like that all banks are regulated (p. 16) or commonplaces like “most human relations … are extremely complicated” (p. 58). Again others are outright wrong. All this is woven into a text with no discernible structure, and basically from a perspective, which implicitly makes the claim that a middle-class perspective from the Anglo-academic world describes the global default situation.

In sum, I would not give the book to anthropology undergraduates to read. It would be embarrassing if they got the impression that this is what anthropology is about, and it would be wasting their time. Anthropology is, I propose, about creating new, and preferably counterintuitive knowledge. It is about discovering the unknown, putting question marks behind common sense, and not about confirming what “we” anyway believe we know. The book may have clicked with many people because it resonates with widespread uneasy feelings especially among fellow academics that “we” are wasting our time in meetings and with paperwork. However, that a book confirms common sense is certainly not a sufficient criterion for its scientific quality.

We should realize (Graeber does not) that criticism of bureaucracy is as old as bureaucracy itself; since its invention in 18th century France, it has been criticised from the left (not acknowledged by Graeber), but more prominently from the right (Fusco et al. 1992). This criticism from the right came in two kinds, and not just one, as Graeber claims: there was and is indeed the bourgeois right which is concerned with red tape over-regulating the market and thereby diminishing profits. But there also have been aristocratic critics who were more concerned about being restricted by rules, rules which may be appropriate for the lower classes, but which inhibit the freedom of the gentleman to do whatever he pleases. Graeber’s critique is dangerously close to the latter position; as he admits himself in passing, it is a critique from the positionality of somebody who likes to see himself as a bohemian.

Which brings me to Graeber’s theory of revolution, as far as it can be ascertained from this book. Graeber is an anthropologist who is not only interested in what is, but also how to make the world a better place “without states and capitalism” (p. 97). In other words, he aims at an emancipatory theory of revolution. The classic model here is Marx, who analysed not only the way capitalism functioned – after having spent years in the British library reading the whole body of political economy of his time – but also the internal contradictions of capitalism, which in the long run would lead to its transformation, and, most relevant for the point I want to make, which the social actors were best positioned to bring about these transformations. Graeber is silent, at least in this book, on the first point (the transformational dynamics of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism) and very short on the second (the social carriers of revolution). He only speaks of “social revolutionaries” who profess immanent—i.e., practically grounded—conceptions of utopianism, and who act “as if they are already free“, in alliance with avantgarde artists (p. 89, 97). There is nothing about the class positions of these revolutionaries. Who are they? US-American and European anthropology students under the guidance of their enlightened teachers? Here, again, the figure of the bohemian lurks in the wings. Neither do we read much about realistic strategies, necessary for any successful revolution, of how to seize the masses, to paraphrase Marx (“The weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons; material violence must be overthrown by material violence; theory alone also becomes material violence as soon as it seizes the masses”, Marx 1843/44, p. 385). The catchy phrase “we are the 99 percent,” which Graeber is often said to have coined (regarding whether that is true or not, see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html), is not very helpful in this respect. It is pure populism, coupled with a nostalgic over-reading of the impact of the global justice movement of his youth.

Finally, I want to come back to why the book has sold well. I think the cover explains that. I have already referred to the über-promotion on the back cover, while on the front cover, Graeber is presented as the author of a previous, highly successful book. As Wikipedia explains, after the success of the previous book (Graeber 2011), the same editor quickly entered into a new contract with the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules; see also Walther 2016). Obviously, both the commercial editor and author were trying to capitalize on Graeber’s acquired reputation and his having “captivated a cult following” (Roberts 2020). The mechanism is well known, and thereby the book is a very good example of the capitalist economics of reputation, which govern the academic book market and which function according to a winner-takes-all logic (similar to international soccer, social media, and investment banking). The expression of this logic is the star cult, which in the academic world takes the form of the cult of the genius, and it explains how an altogether, from a scholarly perspective, bad book becomes a required citation. One may detect a slight contraction here between the anti-capitalist substance of the book and its capitalist form. So, while I do not recommend the book for an undergraduate course on the anthropology of bureaucracy, it would make fascinating case material for a postgraduate course on the political economy of the academic world.

Thomas Bierschenk is professor emeritus at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz/Germany. He has worked on development, the state, bureaucracy, and the police in Oman, Central and West Africa, as well as Germany, and has co-edited, together with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill 2014). More about his work at: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/prof-dr-thomas-bierschenk/

References

Bierschenk, Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 1997. Local powers and a distant State in rural Central African Republic. Journal of Modern African Studies 35(3): 441-468, https://www.jstor.org/stable/161750.

Bierschenk, Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 2021. The anthropology of bureaucracy and public services. In Guy Peters and Ian Thyme, eds., Encyclopedia of Public Administration (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2005.

Fusco, Sandro Angelo, Reinhart Koselleck, Anton Schindling, Udo Wolter, and Bernhard Wunder. 1992. “Verwaltung, Amt, Beamter (Administration, office, functionary).” In Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-historischen Sprache, vol. 7, pp. 1-96. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt. The First 5000 Years. London: Melville House.

Hibou, Béatrice 2015. The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era: An International and Comparative Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Göpfert, Mirco. 2013. “Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie.” American Ethnologist 40(2): 324-334, doi: 10.1111/amet.12024.

Graeber, David. 2006. “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity. LSE memorial lecture.” https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos).

Graeber, David. 2012. “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor.” The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 105–28, doi: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau2.2.007.

Graeber, David. 2015. The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. London: Melvin House.

Graeber, David. 2017. “A Response to Anastasia Piliavsky’s The Wrong Kind of Freedom? A Review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 30(1): 113-118, doi: 10.1007/s10767-016-9248-0.

Marx, Karl. 1843/44. Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts-Philosophie, 1843-1844 (Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels – Werke. Band 1), Berlin/DDR 1976, pp. 378-391, http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me01/me01_378.htm#S385.

Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2017. “The wrong kind of freedom? A Review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 30: 107-111, doi: 10.1007/s10767-016-9246-2.

Roberts, Sam. 2020. “David Graeber, caustic critic of inequality, is dead at 59.” The New York Times, 4 September 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html.

Walther, Rudolf. 2016. “Klischee als Wissenschaft” (“Cliché as scholarship”). TAZ (Die Tageszeitung), 6 March 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/.

Cite as: Bierschenk, Thomas. 2021. “On Graeber on bureaucracy.” FocaalBlog, 19 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/10/19/thomas-bierschenk-on-graeber-on-bureaucracy/.

Blog

Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos: The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%

In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the climate change argument makes sense, at the same time Greece has experienced wildfires for many decades now. In the post-dictatorial Greek popular imaginary, fire represents the creative destruction process of a violent disjunctive modernization, led by a quasi-illicit capitalism based on the construction boom. Across Greece, one can hear stories about great wildfires that flattened forests and green mountainsides only to see villas, casinos and tourist resorts growing in their place some years later. Tied to the monolithic emphasis on an economic growth strategy based almost entirely on tourist services, wildfires over the last decades have facilitated the expansion of tourist infrastructures and the built environment. The systematic exploitation of gray areas (parathirakia/παραθυράκια) in Greek environmental law and urban planning law have facilitated these opportunities (see Dalakoglou and Kallianos 2019). Factual or not, such arguments have been enhanced during the recent wildfires, as many informants of the infra-demos project are noticing that during the early years of the financial crisis (2010-2016) when real estate, tourism and infrastructures investment saw a drop, one also witnessed a noticeable decrease in wildfires, for the first time in decades. Although we cannot confirm such datasets on wildfires, if one takes as case study the ways that the state protects archaeological sites from wildfires and other risks, there is arguably an implied link with specific shifts in the Greek state’s touristic growth strategies.

Antiquities on Fire

In one of these usual wildfires in August 2020, some shocking news came to the attention of the Greek public. The famous Lion Gate of Mycenae, erected in 1250 BC, was set ablaze as the Greek civil protection agencies failed to protect it from a wildfire that had flared up in the area. The Greek government downplayed the issue, stating that no real damage had been done. Many local informants of Poulimenakos claimed that during the previous years there had been fire-brigade forces near the site for its protection, but they were not present that summer.

In August 2021, Greece faced perhaps the most destructive wave of wildfires in its recent history, with more than a million acres of forest turned into ashes. During this wave, the archaeological site of ancient Olympia in Peloponnese was almost eradicated, with people on the site talking about the pure luck in the guise of a change in the wind direction, which ultimately prevented that catastrophe. The official policy of the Greek state was to evacuate the area and protect human lives, with saving the forest or the archeological sites seen as less of a priority. A few weeks earlier, the most important archaeological site in the Attica region outside the Athens metropolis, Poseidon Temple in Sounio, saw a wildfire next to the monument. It was extinguished thanks to its proximity to the town of Lavrio, where sizeable forces of fire brigades are stationed, yet many locals mention to Dalakoglou that if it was not for the five-star hotel that was between the ancient temple and the fire, they would not have saved it in time. Another wildfire entered the national park of Sounio later in August 2021.

Figure 1: Remains of fire 1km away from the ancient temple of Sounio (on the background). Photo: D. Dalakoglou.

The Archaeology of Greece 2.0

Earlier in 2021, the Ministry of Culture caused outrage among archaeologists of the country with its actions. To mention a few, a large public construction project was carried out in the Acropolis of Athens to create a large concrete walkway, which was built near the monument during the lockdown. Many compared the construction to a fashion show stage. And the truth is that a few months later, a luxury clothing brand arranged a show on the new cement corridor with the Parthenon as the background for the videos and photos. A few weeks later, Sounio was booked by the same brand for another fashion show. The indifference that the current Ministry of Culture has shown towards ancient sites has other facets. For example, in the summer of 2021, the Minister announced that the entire Byzantine high street in Thessaloniki that was discovered during the public works for the construction of Thessaloniki metro will be removed. The Minister, an archeologist herself, would not consider the proposals to exhibit and integrate the findings within the metro infrastructure, which was promoted by various archaeology associations. The promise that 92% of the site will be reconstructed on the site after the works for the metro are completed did not convince the archaeologists. The metro and the gentrification it will bring to various parts of the city were more important priorities than the findings, which are significant even for a nation with as much archaeological wealth as Greece.

Figure 2: The announcement that the Sounio temple will not be open to the public due to the photoshoot. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
Figure 3: The Acropolis after the cement walkway was built. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.

“Greece 2.0” was what Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, leader of the neoliberal New Democracy party, named the country’s post-covid recovery plan. Greece 2.0 suggests a plan oriented to all-inclusive hotels, casinos and hip new neighborhoods, signifying a shift to a new tourism model to appeal to different kinds of customers. The city branding and the emphasis on this new type of tourism has been going on for some years now at the behest of Greek tourism policymakers, targeting so-called “high quality” tourists with big wallets. These new categories of tourists are expected to be rich enough to buy cheap metropolitan properties to rent out on airbnb when they are not staying there, thus gentrifying the cities, or to afford the high prices of 5-star tourist accommodation. To put it simplistically, there seems to be a transition from the stereotypical history-aware tourist in socks and sandals wandering around the acropolis, to new categories, with little interest in archaeology (e.g. Western yuppies, Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and upper classes from emerging economies).

Before the pandemic, there was a widely held idea that Greek tourism is no longer affordable for Greeks and is thus only open to foreigners. The drop in the real income of many Greeks since the crisis of 2010 and the unaffordability, for most Greeks, of tourist products, especially accommodation, has caused this gap. To put it simply, until the early 2010s, there was expensive luxurious accommodation in the islands of Greece, but it was not rare to also find local small units with a cost of 40-50 EUR per night, even in the high session. Today, however, such prices are nothing but a fantasy for many millions of Greeks, who have seen a decrease in their income since 2010. Many people in Greece wait for the state-sponsored ‘social tourism vouchers’ in order to get a few days in one of the many touristic destinations of the country. Yet this affects international tourism too, as the Greek tourist product is addressed increasingly to wealthier classes who look for five-star tourist experiences.

The Resetting of Popular Greekness

As the anthropological preoccupation with infrastructures has taught us, things like social and cultural identities, the relation between the state and its citizenry, and even ideology itself, are not abstract, immaterial ideas installed in the hearts and minds of the people. A very concrete, material basis that shapes particular socio-cultural environments is a prerequisite for social contracts and imagined communities to be shaped. The archeological sites in Greece served in many ways as such infrastructures, as they secured the ideological and, in many instances, also the economic integration of an emerging Greek middle class. As many people (not just the wealthy elites) were profiting from the commodification of the national identity within the touristic industry. Restaurants, hotels, stores selling souvenirs, local and international tour operators, guides, airports, and port infrastructures all relied to a great extent on that same materiality. The creative imagination often has depicted with humor the image of the Greek islander holding a ‘rooms to let’ sign in the port of their island, with museums and archaeological sites having a significant role in this industry. Much of the material basis of the national identity was simultaneously the main axis of the touristic industry.

Of course, Greece is not the only polity that is abandoning its archeological infrastructures and by extension abandoning a classic liberal need for a minimum of social cohesion based on a common sociocultural identity. The destruction of the Notre Dame in Paris some years ago, with the French state failing to secure one of the most acknowledged material symbols of the continent, marked probably the end of the western need to produce relations and continuities with a timeline and a purpose that make sense.

What can this seeming abandonment of a certain kind of archaeological tourism infrastructure tell us about Greece today? As the neoliberal model deepens, the tourist industry is “liberated” from the need to link with a collective identity. This identity traditionally functioned by economically and socio-culturally integrating the lower classes inside Greece, and by addressing mass tourism outside. As this link was inextricably connected with certain material infrastructures, the indifference towards them signifies an era in which the tourist model, and perhaps the very structure of Greek society, will no longer be based on gaining consensus from the lower strata, but in aggressively serving the 1%.

The neoliberal management of the world is sending collective identities and the sense of history or geography into a state of limbo. The aesthetics of a 5-star all-inclusive hotel on a beachfront are almost context-free, a tourist could be pretty much in any of the 5 continents, and in any recent decade, and have a very similar, if not the same, experience. Similarly, the aesthetics of a New York loft, which preoccupies much of the renovation for airbnb purposes in apartments in downtown Athens (even quoting ‘New York style loft’ in the airbnb ad), could be almost anywhere else in the Americas or Europe. What is needed for neoliberalism is a culture of the present expressed in constant transactions. Everything else can be surrendered to the merciless critique of entropy.

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.

Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He will be researching the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.

References

infrademos.net

Dalakoglou, D., & Kallianos, Y. (2018). ‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’: Disjunctive modernization, infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece. Political Geography, 67, 76-87.

Poulimenakos G. & Dalakoglou D. (2018). Airbnbizing Europe: mobility, property and platform capitalism. Online publication or Website, Open Democracy

Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Georgos Poulimenakos. 2021. “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/

Blog

Steven Sampson: Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism

QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever so reflective anthropologists are being inundated with one conspiracy theory after another. A May 2021 survey reveals that 15% of Americans and 23% of those who call themselves Republicans believe that ‘the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation’ (PRRI 2021). The evil conspirators are often termed a ‘cabal’ (a word derived from the Hebrew ‘kabbalah’/esoteric teachings). This subversive cabal is viewed as embedded in our governments, collaborating with the global financial elite and the Davos crowd, within the US and European Left, the Hollywood elite, the mainstream media, and with transgender activists and Critical Race Theory proponents, even with the West European welfare states with their Covid-19 lockdown/vaccine policies. Cabals are the secret agents of conspiratorial plots. To study conspiracy theory is to do cabal anthropology.

Conspiracy theories are stigmatized knowledge. This has led some anthropologists to view conspiracy theorists as ‘contesting’ power. Conspiracism becomes a form of resistance by the powerless against the arrogant elites and elite institutions (Pelkmanns and Machold 2011, Dean 2000, Fassin 2021). So, what do we anthropologists do about the kind of stigmatized knowledge promoted by the QAnon believers? Who assert that America is threatened by a Satanic, pedophile cult from which only Donald Trump can save us? What do we do about the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who say that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by the U.S. government, or the ‘birthers’ who assert that Obama (whose mother was an anthropologist!) was born a Muslim in Kenya? Should we view Holocaust deniers, the Stolen Election crowd and the racist Great Replacement adherents as ‘contestation’?

We all like ‘speaking truth to power’, but what about those who speak untruth to power? Are there good and bad forms of contestation? Are we anthropologists in danger of becoming what the philosopher Cassam called ‘conspiracy apologists’? What, in fact, can we anthropologists add to the now frantic discussion of conspiracy theories?

Theories of conspiracy versus conspiracy theory

In the ordinary forensic sense, a conspiracy is simply a secret plot to do something bad, such as robbing a bank or political subversion. Conspiracies require secret plans, malevolent motives and a group of conspirators. Forensic conspiracies are commonplace. Some succeed, others are discovered and in most cases the plotters exposed, caught and punished. The bombing of the World Trade Center garage in 1993, and the suicide plane hijackings of September 11, 2001 were both forensic conspiracies.

What we call ‘conspiracy theories’ are also secret plots, to be sure, but the plotters tend to be all-powerful, sophisticated, and diabolical. Their project is more than robbing a bank, tapping phones or a terrorist attack. It is nothing short of total control and world domination. Conspiratorial plots of this kind do not occur alone. They are connected to other plots over space and time (Illuminati, Freemasons, Jews, Communists, Trilateral Commission, Icke’s ‘lizard people’, alien abduction, ‘New World Order’, the Neocons, the Deep State, etc.).

Because the conspirators are considered to be so deeply embedded among us, the work of a conspiracy theorist is to expose their deception. The 9/11 truthers, for example, believe that the Bin Laden-based, ‘Official Conspiracy Theory’ is one such deception, what they call a ‘false flag operation’. They believe that the World Trade Centers collapsed because U.S. military/intelligence organs, perhaps helped by the Mossad, planted explosives in the buildings. Somehow, these explosives detonated precisely when the planes flew into the buildings, and it is assumed that a third building close by, Building no. 7, also collapsed not due to fire but due to explosives. How and why this was done remains unexplained.

Of course, no conspirator has ever been found. The truthers believe that the U.S. government decided to murder thousands of its own citizens in order to achieve some nefarious end, presumably connected to domination of the Middle East and its oil and to create a military/security state in the U.S. The QAnon conspiracy theory is even more elaborate, with narratives of child kidnapping and blood libel in a plot that has long anti-Semitic roots, but which now brings together the Clintons, the Democratic party left, and their Hollywood friends. Whether 9/11 truth or QAnon, conspiracy theorists see themselves as ‘truth tellers’ or ‘truth-seekers’ (Toseland 2018). They are not just propounding theories; they are on a mission.

Conspiracy theory: the state of research

Conspiracy theory research has focused on the logical structure of conspiratorial explanations and why these are so attractive to so many. For the cultural theorist Michael Barkun (2014), all conspiracy theories revolve around three premises: Nothing happens by accident, Nothing is at it seems, and Everything is connected. Conspiracy is thus the reverse side of transparency. Anything on the surface is false or misleading. Hence the need to look deeper in search of the real, more significant truth. According to the philosopher Karl Popper, who was the first to coin the idea of a ‘conspiracy theory of society’, conspiracy theory begins with the death of God. When God was around, all disasters and misfortunes could be attributed to this higher power. With the Enlightenment, however, disasters and misfortunes are now blamed on human actors (secret cabals in the King’s court), newly powerful social groups such as the Freemasons, or outsider groups such as Jews or Roma. During the Enlightenment, conspiratorial thinking becomes a theory of total agency (Wood 1982). Bad things happen because secret sinister groups of people intend them to happen.

Social psychologists have speculated on the attraction of conspiracy theory, based on the premise that conspiratorial beliefs are a danger to society. Clearly, conspiracy theories give believers a simple, all-encompassing explanation for adverse developments or disasters. We obtain a ‘who’ behind a complex or chance event. For ardent conspiracy believers, this also gives them a mission, and the chance to enter a community of fellow believers seeking to expose the sinister cabal. The Trump ‘stolen election’ conspiracy – whose culprits are corrupt inner city Black voting officials, Democratic Party swindlers and evil voting machine companies with ties to Venezuela – has now become the latest ‘cabal’. In this narrative, political power was stolen from the American people, and Mr. Trump will help them get it back.

Part of the conspiracists’ mission is to connect the dots. For conspiracies do not occur alone. The death of JFK junior, Covid-19, faked moon landings,  the ‘stolen election’ plot, transgender activism, Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory can now be related to a secret elite and their lackeys in government, in Silicon Valley, in the media, etc. This is the QAnon project. Outside observers have described this mission as falling down the ‘rabbit hole’. Hence, a recent book on QAnon adherents invokes the ‘rabbit hole’ imagery no less than 22 times (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021).

The work of the conspiracy theorists is to uncover and interpret ‘evidence’, to discover the truth. They are truth-seekers who do research (googling) by ‘connecting the dots’, interpreting the evidence and communicating their interpretations to others in meetings, forums and chat rooms.  Like others involved in political advocacy projects, conspiracy theorists – be they truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, anti-Covid activists —  are emotionally engaged and articulate. They are ready, willing and able to promote their views and defend the most minute points, armed with ever more evidence along. This is because conspiracy theorists are not simply propagating ‘theories’. Their explanatory theories are ‘unlikely’, their premises are ideological, and their mission is political, as the philosopher Quassim Cassam has argued (2019).

The QAnon community, heavily overlapping with ardent Trump supporters and right-wing extremist, is typical. QAnon revolves around the cryptic tweets, called ‘drops’, issued every few weeks by ‘Q’, someone supposedly deep inside the U.S. government (for a discussion of who Q might really be see Bloom and Moskalenko 2021, ch. 1; on QAnon see also CBS News 2020, Quandt 2018, and further references below). These texts are then interpreted, and often associated with tweets by Trump or his followers, and connected to signs of an impending ‘storm’ or ‘awakening’ that will come but never does (that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, that Trump would assume power in March, now in August). The QAnon narrative is continually expanding, with any attempts at refutation viewed as part of the plot to destroy its followers.

Populist expertise as Latourian matters of concern; but why?

The 9/11 truthers and QAnon are forms of ‘populist expertise’. Imitating experts, they assemble facts, assess evidence, pass on newly found explanations for enigmatic or troubling events (Marwick and Partin 2020). If Latour and STS described the ‘social construction of scientific facts’, we now have a populist construction of ‘alternative facts’.  Latour’s ‘matters of concern’ have outrun us (Latour 2004).

QAnon, the 9/11 truthers, the birthers, the 5G telephone protesters, the antivaxxers who believe a chip is being implanted in their bodies, they are Foucault run wild. To the extent that QAnon followers and other conspiracists question established knowledge regimes and authorities, they are certainly ‘critical’. This generates some sympathy among those who see conspiracists as performing a valuable function for society, what Cassam calls ‘conspiracy apologists’. But the conspiracists’ critique is based upon a profound and yet naïve distrust of established institutions, a resistance to any kind of falsification or data that would contradict their ‘findings’, and a vicious anti-Semitism and racism that the apologists tend to overlook (Byford 2015). Conspiracy theorists may be naïve or sympatico as individual human beings, but conspiracism is a pernicious masquerading as science.

With the rise of QAnon pedophile blood libel conspiracy, the Trumpian ‘Big Lie’ and anti-Covid protests, we now face a presumed ‘rise of conspiracism’. The fear of conspiracism, a veritable ‘conspiracy panic’ is nothing new (Bratich 2008, Thalmann 2016). Past or present, one overarching question takes center stage, a question posed by the media and addressed by various experts who view conspiratorial thinking as dangerous: Why do people believe this stuff? 

The search for an answer forms the basis for the entire conspiracy research industry, from ERC research projects to panels among our own tribe of anthropologists (including a panel that I co-organized at EASA in 2018), to EU policy papers and government reports proposing various counter-conspiracy measures (Institute for Public Affairs 2013, European Commission 2021; Önnerfors 2021). My own fascination with conspiracism began with my research in Romania, long before 1989, where I noticed how people believed in all kinds of outlandish rumors and conspiracies about domestic and foreign enemies (including me as spy; Sampson 1984). I then followed conspiracies about the EU, the Soros Mafia and the Western NGO industry, which led me to years of following the 9/11 truthers, many of whom are older male, end-of-career academics, taking similar positions in society as myself and other anthropologists.

Indeed, the 9/11 truther activists share with us in anthropology that they search for ‘evidence’. Many are familiar with the protocols of the peer reviewed journal article; as I have argued for  the pretentious Journal of 9/11 Studies and its truther editorial board (Sampson 2010). Indeed, conspiracy producers, consumers and conspiracy entrepreneurs are not just lonely ‘losers’ sitting in a basement staring at a screen all day. They are active members of a community who ‘produce content’, and keep abreast of events, even in mainstream media. So why indeed do people believe this stuff?

A spread of book covers about conspiracy theories
Image 1: How important is it to be paranoid? A selection of readings (photo by the author)

Conspiracism as epistemology

Early theorizing on the ‘why’ question begins with Hofstadter (1964), who depicted conspiracy believers as acting out a ‘paranoid style’, perhaps socially disoriented, isolated and even cognitively disabled. Recent surveys of those arrested in the January 6th riots at the U.S. Capitol finds that a sizeable percentage of participants have (had) a variety of mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression and PTSD, and estrangement from their children (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021, who also highlight the propensity of ‘truther’ women for some of these sufferings). Along with the mental instability argument, Sunstein and Vermeule (2009) argue that conspiracism is based on a ‘crippled epistemology’. This individualized understanding, based on the psychological or cognitive characteristics of ‘the conspiracy believer’, or the conspiratorial mind-set, focuses on conspiracists as somehow irrational, as overly fearful as frantically searching for someone to blame for their personal troubles or social deroute.

Their anxiety both reflects and results in an intense distrust of institutions, authorities, or established science and thus a susceptibility to conspiratorial explanations of suspicious events, disasters or other misfortunes, ranging from 9/11 to Covid-19 to Trump’s election loss. Moreover, since they trust no institution, imploring them to ‘believe the science’ is useless. Scientific experts and institutions are themselves suspect. Conspiracists must do the research themselves, on the internet, encouraged by like-minded conspiracy theorists and amateur experts who can parlay their academic expertise from one field into another: the leading 9/11 truther, David Ray Griffin, is a professor of religion. This distrust of authorities has a derivative effect: conspiracists can be easily manipulated by populist politicians (Bergmann 2018).

The conspiratorial mindset was also depicted in a famous study by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (1956) when they described how a UFO cult that predicted the end of the world was only more reinforced in their belief when the disaster did not happen. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance approach seems to be supported by the hardcore support for Trump and his ‘stolen election’ theory, culminating in Trump supporters’ invasion of the U.S. Congress on January 6th 2021, and the election of QAnon supporters to political office. The consensus among conspiracy theory researchers is that conspiracy theorists cannot be combatted by any kind of fact-checking enterprise. People do not get converted, nor do they see the light, simply because they are confronted with contradictory evidence, new facts or sophisticated counter-arguments. The conspiracy mindset is not about facts and evidence. It is about social engagement, political projects, and belief.

The problem with explanations of conspiracy followers as people who are somehow socially, emotionally or cognitively disabled is that these explanations are far too general. After all, who among us does not at times feel disempowered, confused, uncertain, insecure or distrustful of institutions and science, most especially in this Covid-19 era? How much should we ‘trust science’ when scientific explanations are contested or change? If we all suffer from ‘confirmation bias’ or other such psychological syndromes, then why aren’t we all conspiracy theorists? Could it be that a healthy scepticism about the scientific enterprise is a core theme in the work of STS and anthropologists of policy? Are the conspiracy theorists just another form of institutional critique? Do we regard Holocaust deniers, Great Replacement adherents or QAnon activists as fellow compatriots ‘contesting authority’? What indeed is the difference between an outrageous conspiracy theory and hard-hitting critique of subtle powers and hidden agendas in state institutions and global capitalism?

What is belief?

Let me come back to the question of “Why people believe this stuff”?

Anyone who has argued with a conspiracy theorist, a religious zealot or political true believer of any kind knows that refutation of their evidence is fruitless. You point out contrary facts or illogical arguments and your remarks are simply cast aside as irrelevant or confirmation of the conspiracy. This is because the conspiratorial narrative is in fact an expression of belief. The problem, then, is not about the facts but about belief. Conspiracy theorists do not assert claims. They express beliefs. What does it mean to believe, for example, that Trump won the election with 70% of the vote or that the US military blew up the World Trade Center? What is belief all about?

I decided to re-read a bunch of anthropological analyses of belief. Virtually all of these were written to explain religious beliefs, as when Evans-Pritchard wrote that the Nuer ‘believe’ that twins are birds. I think that we can fruitfully apply the discussion of religious belief to secular, conspiratorial beliefs as well. There are obvious overlaps between religious and conspiracy belief systems: grand forces of good and evil; an apocalyptic reckoning some time in an imminent future; scriptures and texts that provide clues; esoteric interpretations and discussions of what the clues mean; struggles over orthodox and deviant interpretations; and an institutional practice in which communities of believers seek out converts, debate skeptics, and ex-communicate apostates and perceived heretics. The conspiratorial universe thus contains conspiracy producers, conspiracy consumers, and even conspiracy entrepreneurs (David Icke, Alex Jones, etc.). It includes not only true believers and former believers  (read QAnon causalities on Reddit), but also anti-conspiracists, the debunkers.

Being in a conspiracist community involves work, or ‘research’. The 9/11 truthers, for example, include many students and retired academics who do internet googling, organize evidence and hold conferences, even selling truther merchandise. The QAnon community has gatekeepers who run the web portals, moderate chatrooms, assemble narratives, sell merchandise, and retweet the preferred interpretations. Like any religious community, conspiracy communities have their rites and rituals. Long before January 6th, QAnon followers were appearing at demonstrations, recruiting followers and arguing with skeptics and debunkers. We need to recall the very banal, anthropological insight that conspiracy theory is not just about a bunch of random facts and a set of outlandish, unfalsifiable beliefs. It is also a set of practices. Conspiracists do not just stare at a screen. They do things with the screen and in real life. They search for confirming evidence, they connect the dots, they discuss their findings with like-minded others, they try to unmask provocateurs, etc. It’s the doing that creates that passion and the commitment behind conspiracism. The conspiracist ‘rabbit hole’ is not a place of isolation, it is a community. This passionate community explain the sense of exhilaration common to many true believers. It’s so wonderful to know the truth and to share it with others, especially after having experienced an adverse life event or a traumatic experience (as so many QAnon followers have, according to surveys; see Jensen and Kane 2021).

So perhaps the anthropological discussion of beliefs can help us understand the power of beliefs in the conspiratorial universe of truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, New World Order proponents, Holocaust deniers, alien abductionists and similar groups.

Back to Needham

In 1972, Rodney Needham published Belief, Language and Experience, a long philosophical treatise on belief, much of it inspired by Wittgenstein. What do we mean, asked Needham, when we say that members of tribe X ‘believe’ something? Needham stressed that ‘statements about belief’ made by our informants should be distinguished from belief itself. Ethnographers love eliciting such statements, but for Needham these are the result of informants’ effort at introspection. For Needham, statements about belief are not belief. Belief is an inner state. This inner state may be articulated as an accepted doctrine (‘I believe that…’), as knowledge (‘I know the truth about…’) or as an emotional conviction (‘I believe in …’). Needham concludes that we just cannot know what is inside people’s heads. We can elicit statements, listen to what they say, we can observe what they do, and at best try to infer some kind of inner state that we call ‘belief’. Yet Needham is skeptical: the concept of belief is so vague that it should be thrown out. Needham does not believe in belief.

Pouillon (1982), in a widely cited essay, reminds us that we must distinguish between believing in something versus believing that something. Expressions of belief in reveal whom we trust, who has legitimate authority, in whom we have faith.  In contrast to ‘believe in…’ believing that is about a coherent doctrine of propositions. If belief is ultimately about faith, the project of debunking beliefs, e.g., showing conspiracy theories to be based on incorrect facts or illogical arguments, is beside the point. Conspiracies are not about facts or evidence. They are about ‘beliefs in’. And we cannot disprove beliefs. People can articulate, adjust or renounce beliefs. As such, beliefs are tied more to emotional commitment rather than facts. Conspiracy theories, despite the quasi-scientific label of ‘theory’, are clearly of this kind. They are beliefs, not theories in the scientific sense.

We often assume that conspiracy theorists articulate a coherent, fundamental set of propositions. Yet anthropologists have shown us that people can operate with overlapping, fragmented, alternative and contradictory belief systems, what we now euphemize as ‘syncretism’. Hence, J. Mair reminds us that ‘[not] every believer […] is a fundamentalist or a systematic theologian’ (2012, p. 45). Our analysis should therefore focus not so much on what people believe but rather how they believe. We should focus on what Mair calls ‘cultures of belief’. Studies of religious groups reveal how people can comfortably maintain two or more sets of beliefs that are complementary or even logically contradictory. Numerous studies of the anthropology of Christianity describe people who are sincerely converted Christians, but who also interact with spirits, react to witchcraft accusations or believe in reincarnation (Stringer 1996, Robbins 2007). While these studies have been applied largely to religious believers and converts, they are equally valid to those who have fallen down the ‘rabbit hole’ of  QAnon, 9/11 truther, Holocaust denial, Great Replacement, alien abduction or other conspiratorial narratives. Like religious groups, conspiratorial communities are also full of dual, overlapping, contrasting and conflicting belief systems.  An ethnographic approach to conspiracy theories might therefore profit from a ‘situational belief’ approach (Stringer 1996). The focus here should be less on who assents to certain propositions (‘I believe that…’;) and more on what kinds of truths and authorities people commit themselves to  (‘I believe in….’ ‘I have faith in…’).

Practicing conspiracism

The QAnon belief system has its logical fallacies. Some may fully believe in the pedophile plot, while others focus only on the Deep State. However, they are united in their sources of authority (Q ‘drops’ and Trump statements, supplemented by various authoritative interpretations that are then retweeted and discussed). Exposing the cabal is both ‘research’ and an act of faith.

Anthropological approaches to religious belief have always included descriptions of religious practices, rites and rituals. Conspiracy adherents are no different. They also have their rites and rituals. They meet on line, in hundreds of web communities. They recruit followers and argue with debunkers. And they meet in real life at demonstrations, political meetings, in anti-vaccine gatherings, and of course, on January 6th. Conspiracists have been busy trying to expose the Covid vaccine chip insertion plot (led by Bill Gates). They have been digesting the shock of Trump’s defeat; promoting the narrative of the Stolen Election and his imminent return; reading and interpreting the  QAnon clues; and fighting the regulations to wear masks. They do the work of textual interpretation. They re-tweet and add comments. They discuss these messages with family members, argue with skeptics, and end up in echo chambers of like- minded conspiracists who can confirm and reinforce their ideas.

What all this means is that we need to show how conspiratorial belief and conspiracist practice interact, as we have done with the study of religious beliefs and practices. Regrettably, conspiracy theory research has tended to focus on the psycho-social vulnerabilities of the most radical believers. Certainly, these committed conspiracists have from emotional ‘baggage’, social isolation or violent tendencies (as the recent QAnon studies show). But most conspiracy adherents are only partially or borderline committed; many view conspiracy theory adherence as more of a social activity than an all-out ideological commitment, much like church attendance can be more a social obligation than a religious act. Second, the focus on individual vulnerability assumes some kind of coherent ideology among conspiracists. It ignores the way people use religious belief in creative ways, amalgamating, adapting and converting it to strategic ends. Conspiratorial ideas have a political message: the evil plot by the sinister outsiders, but it is also a personal project, a voyage of discovery that gives people new meaning in their lives as they become part of history. Both religious and conspiratorial practice are more than acting out an ostensibly coherent set of beliefs. Our understanding of conspiracists is best served by observing what they do: how they are recruited, how they participate, how they recruit others, and even how they often exit or even express regret (see again the Reddit thread for ‘QAnon Casualties’; or the testimonies of ex-Truthers).

From how to why

Let me close with the question of why does one become a believer? Robbins (2007) described how some converts to Christianity are truly sincerely converted, but we also have examples of conversion for purely strategic reasons. This distinction between sincere and instrumental conversion may be simplistic, but it is worth recalling when observing why people might join the QAnon, truther, anti-vaxx or alien obduction community. We join groups for many reasons: to resolve existential problems, to gain some control over the world, to obtain social contacts or to re-affirm our political beliefs. Conspiracy groups seem to solve all these tasks at the same time. Moreover, joining one conspiratorial community seems to lead to others: QAnon people form the core of Covid denial and anti-vaccination resistance, as well as 5G-telephone skepticism and of course, they are enthusiastic supporters of the stolen election theory. Since belief is an inner state that we can never really know, the best we can do as ethnographers is to listen to statements and observe behaviors.

What then, is a believer? Believers here don’t just read tweets. They save them, comment on them, retweet them, discuss them, embellish them, delete them, switch platforms, go to meetings, participate in demonstrations, buy merchandise, and spend hours of their day looking for further clues and reinterpret these. Their closed groups can decide to ban or unfriend others. They may have fallen down a rabbit hole but they are also actively exploring new paths, routes, tunnels and dead ends. Conspiracy is not just about belief; it is also about community.

If we are to understand conspiratorial movements like QAnon or those following the Deep State conspiracy, we anthropologists need to promote our own insights about what belief is all about.  While Needham argued that the concept of belief was useless for anthropology, we still need to explain what it means to be a believer. We need to go beyond the conventional wisdom that every conspiracy theorist suffers from some kind of cognitive deficiency, emotional damage or social isolation. The leaders and mobilizers may be emotional, committed, even fanatic (as so many leaders of social movements are), but the followers and adherents are much more like us than we’d like to admit. Resorting to a psychological explanation is not sufficient. Who among us has not suffered from anxiety, depression, loneliness or a traumatic event that might lead us to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole? Who among us has not spent hours on line immersed in some incessant search to solve a puzzle? The conspiracy followers are hardly exotic. Take away their beliefs, and they suddenly become just like us, ordinary men and women with family obligations, precarious jobs, worried about their future and their place in it. They are both strange and familiar at the same time. And it is this contrast that makes them the perfect object of anthropological scrutiny. The task of anthropology, after all, is to show that the strange is actually familiar, and that the familiar has its exotic elements. We need more cabal anthropology.

Cabal anthropology might therefore provide a corrective to the journalists, psychologists and political commentators who so often classify conspiracy theorists as lonely, alienated souls. The narratives being promoted by conspiracists (QAnon anti-pedophiles, Deep State, Obama birther, 9/11 truth, stolen election, New World Order, Covid anti-vaxxers) are clearly false and pernicious. But the issue not just about the kind of evidence they use or the doctrines they promote. They reflect new forms of commitment. We need to understand how ‘believe that…’ interacts with ‘belief in …’

In this sense, QAnon and other conspiracy theories are secular forms of religious revival. The search for Satanic forces, and the premonitions of a great reckoning led by Trump are obvious parallels with religion. Alongside this are the conspiracy theorists’ profound mistrust in our financial institutions, elite universities, government institutions and in scientific expertise. Lack of trust in these institutions is why the ‘stolen election’ discourse has stayed with us. No amount of fact checking or debunking will solve the conspiracist wave. This is because conspiratorial thinking is not about incorrect facts or crippled epistemologies. It’s about the power of belief and the communities of believers. What beliefs did QAnon replace? What bonds of trust have been dismantled in order for QAnon to move in? How could these bonds be reconstructed? How are conspiracy communities being manipulated by unscrupulous conspiratorial entrepreneurs and political actors? Here is an agenda for cabal anthropology. The rabbit hole awaits.

Steven Sampson is professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, Lund University (Steven.sampson@soc.Lu.se). He has done research on Romania and the Balkans, NGOs, the anti-corruption industry, conspiracy theory and business ethics. For a list of his publications with open access see: https://www.soc.lu.se/steven-sampson.

Bibliographic Note: For a longer version of this article and a more extensive bibliography on conspiracy theory see my working paper at https://www.soc.lu.se/en/steven-sampson/publication/3ec05ab0-528f-40bb-92bd-7e7c3e47a8f2

References

Astapova. A. E. Bergmann, A. Dyrendal, A. Rabo, K. G. Rasmussen, H. Thorisdottir and A. Onnerfors (2020) Conspiracy Theories in the Nordic countries. London: Routledge.

Aupers, Stef (2012) ‘Trust no one: Modernization, paranoia and conspiracy culture. Europ. J. of Communication 27:22-34. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0267323111433566

Barkun, Michael (2003)  A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic visions in America. Berkeley: Univ of Calif. Press.

Bergmann, Eirikur (2018) Conspiracy and Populism: The politics of misinformation. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Brown, Hal (2020)  Bibliography: Understanding why people believe in conspiracy theories like QAnon. Daily Kos, August 23.  https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/23/1971595/-Bibliography-Understanding-why-people-believe-in-conspiracy-therapies-like-QANON23.

Bjork-James, Sophie (2021) QAnon hasn’t gone away – it’s alive and kicking in states across the country. The Conversation, April 26. https://theconversation.com/qanon-hasnt-gone-away-its-alive-and-kicking-in-states-across-the-country-154788.

Bloom, Mia and Moskalenko, Sophia (2021) Pastels and Pedophioes: Inside the Mind of Qanon. Standord, CA: Redwood Press.

Butter, Michael and Knight, Peter (2020) Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. London: Routledge.

CBS News, (2020) The QAnon effect. Documentary. 24 November. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/qanon-conspiracy-theory-believers/

CNN Business (2020) How this former QAnon believer escaped the virtual cult. 16 October. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/10/16/qanon-reformed-believer-orig.cnn-business  and https://www.wlfi.com/content/national/572773261.html

Dean, Jodi (2000) Theorizing Conspiracy Theory. Theory & Event 4(3) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32599/.

Dyrendal, Asbjørn, David G. Robertson and Eigel Asprem (eds) (2019) Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion Leiden: Brill.

Fassin, Didier., 2021. Of plots and men: the heuristics of conspiracy theories.  Current Anthropology 62(2)L: 128-137. DOI: 10.1086/713829

Garry, Amanda, Samantha Waltherb, Rukaya Mohamedc, and Ayan Mohammedd (2021). QAnon Conspiracy Theory: examining its evolution and mechanisms of radicalization. J. of Deradicalization. Spring, no. 26. https://journals.sfu.ca/jd/index.php/jd/article/view/437/265

Gardner D (1979) The analysis of ‘belief’ and the avoidance of ethnocentrism. Canberra Anthropology 2(1): 30–43.

Drazkiewicz, Elzbieta and Rabo, Annika (2020). Conspiracy Theories. Int. Encyc. of Anthropology ed. By Hillary Callan.  Doi: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2449.

Dyrendal, Asbjørn, Robertson, David G. and Asprem, Eigil, (eds)  (2019) Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion.. Leiden: Brill.

European Commission (2021) https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-response/fighting-disinformation/identifying-conspiracy-theories_en

Fassin, Didier 2021. Of plots and men. Current Anthropology. April.

Festinger, L. , Riecken, H. and Schachter, S.,  (1956)When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Gardner, Don. 1979. The analysis of ‘belief’ and the avoidance of ethnocentrism. Canberra Anthropology 2: 30-43. https://doi.org/10.1080/03149097909508634

Guffey, Robert (2020a). What is QAnon. A not-so-brief introduction to the conspiracy theory that’s eating America. Salon.com, August 16.  https://www.salon.com/2020/08/16/what-is-qanon-a-not-so-brief-introduction-to-the-conspiracy-theory-thats-eating-america/

Guffey, Robert (2020b) The deep, twisted roots of QAnon: From 1940s sci-fi to 19th-century anti-Masonic agitprop. Salon.com August 23. https://www.salon.com/2020/08/23/the-deep-twisted-roots-of-qanon-from-1940s-sci-fi-to-19th-century-anti-masonic-agitprop/

Hagen, Kurtis (2018) Conspiracy theorists and social scientists.  In M. R. X. Dentith (ed.), Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously. London: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 125-14.

Hofstadter, Richard (1964) The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Harpers, November.

Jensen, Michael and Sheehan Kane. 2021. “QAnon Offenders in the United States,” START: College Park, MD (May). https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united-states.

LaFrance, A. (2020) The prophecies of Q. Atlantic Monthly, June. https://rb.gy/1abo5n

Latour, B. (2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30:225-248.

Lindquist G and Coleman S (2008) Against belief? Social Analysis 52 1–18.

Lindholm, C. (2012) ‘What is bread?’ The anthropology of belief. Ethos 40:341-357.

Mair J (2013) Cultures of belief. Anthropological Theory 12(4): 448–466.

Marwick, A., and  Partin, W. (2020, October). The Construction of Alternative Facts: ‘Qanon’ Researchers as Scientistic Selves. Paper presented at AoIR 2020: The 21st Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Virtual Event: AoIR. https://rb.gy/8alnnm.

Moskalenko, Sophia (2021) Many QAnon followers report having mental health diagnose. The Conversation, March 25. https://theconversation.com/many-qanon-followers-report-having-mental-health-diagnoses-157299

Needham R (1972) Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Önnerfors, Andreas 2021 Konspirationsteorier och covid-19: mekanismerna bakom en snabbväxande samhällsutmaning Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB)  Enheten för skydd mot informationspåverkan. https:// www.msb.se/contentassets/555542e57381475cb26d6862dc7a543a/msb-studie.pdf

Önnerfors, Andreas and Krouwel, Andre (2021). Europe, Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe. Abingdon, UK and New York, NY: Routledge.

Pelkmans, Mathijs  and Machold, Rhys(2011) Conspiracy theories and their truth trajectories. Focaal 59:66-80. DOI: 10.3167/fcl.2011.590105

Pouillon, J. (2016 [1982]) Remarks on the verb ‘to believe’. Reprinted in Hau 6:485-492. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.034. Orig. In Between belief and transgression: Structuralist essays in religion, history, and myth, edited by Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, translated by John Leavitt, 1–8. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) (2021) Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption. 28 May.  https://www.prri.org/research/qanon-conspiracy-american-politics-report/

Quandt, T. (2018) Dark Participation. Media and Communication 6:36-48., https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/1519/1519. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i4.1519

Qanon Casualties https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/.

Qanon anonymous 2020-2021. https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous. Podcast, episodes 1-143.

Räikkä, J. (2018) Conspiracies and conspiracy theories: an introduction. Argumenta 3(2):205-216. Doi 10.23811/51.arg2017.rai.

Robbins J (2007) Continuity thinking and the problem of Christian culture: Belief, time, and the anthropology of Christianity. Current Anthropology 48(1): 5–17.

Ruel M (1982) Christians as believers. In: Davis J (ed.) Religious Organization and Religious Experience, A.S.A. Monographs 21. London, UK: Academic Press, pp. 9–31.

Russonello, Giovanni 2021 QAnon is now as popular in America as some major religions, poll suggests. New York Times 28 May. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/28/us/biden-news-today#qanon-is-now-as-popular-in-america-as-some-major-religions-poll-suggests

Saglam, Erol (2020). What to do with conspiracy theories? Insights from contemporary Turkey. Anthropology Today 36(5) 18-21.

Sampson, Steven (1984). Rumours in socialist Romania. Survey: A Journal of East-West Studies 28(4): 142-163.  (www.stevensampsontexts.com and  https://rb.gy/swtuit).

Sampson, Steven (2010) Truthers: The 9/11 truth movement and the culture of conspiracy. Ms. Lund Univ. https://portal.research.lu.se/portal/en/publications/truthers-the-911-truth-movement-and-the-culture-of-conspiracy(93961933-47ce-4624-ac47-b2826dbec0c1).html#

Sanders, Todd and West, Harry G. (2001). Power revealed and concealed in the new world order. In Transparency and Conspiracy : Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Stringer, M. (1996) Towards a situational theory of belief. JASO 27:217-234

Sunstein, C. and Vermeule, A. (2009). Conspiracy theories: causes and cures. J. of Political Philosophy 17:202-227. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2008.00325.x

Thalmann, Katharina (2016) The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory since The 1950s:  A Plot to Make Us Look Foolish. Ann Arbor, MI: Milton Routledge.

Toseland, Nicholas R. E. (2018) Truth, ‘Conspiracy Theories’ and Theories: An Ethnographic Study of ‘truth-seeking’ in Contemporary Britain. Ph.D. Thesis, Dept of Theology and Religion. Durham Univ. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/13147/

Wood, Gordon A. (1982) Conspiracy and the paranoid style: causality and deceit in the eighteenth century, William and Mary Quarterly, 39: 401-41.

Cite as: Sampson, Steven. 2021. “Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism.” FocaalBlog, 13 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/13/steven-sampson-cabal-anthropology

Blog

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer: Siberia, Protest and Politics: Shaman Alexander in Danger

In 2021 a modest long-haired Sakha man named Alexander Gabyshev was arrested at his family compound on the outskirts of Yakutsk in an unprecedented for Sakha Republic (Yakutia) show-of-force featuring nine police cars and over 50 police. For the third time in two years, he was subjected to involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Some analysts see this medicalized punishment, increasingly common in President Putin’s 4th term, as a return to the politicized use of clinics that had been prevalent against dissidents in the Soviet period. Alexander’s hair was cut, and his dignity demeaned. By April, his health had seriously deteriorated, allegedly through use of debilitating drugs, and his sister feared for his life. A private video of his arrest (possibly filmed by a sympathetic Sakha policeman) shows police overwhelming him in bed as if they were expecting a wild animal; he was forced to the floor bleeding, and handcuffed. Official media claimed he had resisted arrest using a traditional Sakha knife, but this is not evident on the video. By May, a trial in Yakutsk affirmed the legality of his arrest, and a further criminal case was brought against him using the Russian criminal code article 280 against extremism. Appeals are pending, including one accepted by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

What had elicited such official vehemence against an opposition figure who had dared to critique President Putin but whose powers and influence were relatively minor, compared to prominent Russians like Aleksei Naval’ny? How did a localized movement in far-from-Moscow Siberia become well-known across Russia and beyond? 

In his 2018–2019 meteoric rise to national and international attention, Alexander Prokopievich Gabyshev, also called “Shaman Alexander,” “Sasha shaman,” and “Sania,” came to mean many things to many people. For some, he is a potent symbol of protest against a corrupt regime led by a president he calls “a demon.” For others, he has become a coopted tool in some part of the government’s diabolical security system, set to attract followers so that they can be exposed and repressed. Some feel he is a “brave fellow” (molodets), “speaking truth to power” in a refreshingly articulate voice devoid of egotism. Others see him as misguided and psychologically unstable, made “crazy” by a tragic life that includes the death of his beloved wife before they could have children. Some accept him into the Sakha shamanic tradition, arguing his suffering and two–three years spent in the taiga after his wife’s death qualify him as a leader and healer who endured “spirit torture” in order to serve others. Others, including some Sakha and Buryat shamans, reject him as a charlatan whose education as an historian was wasted when he became a welder, street cleaner, and plumber.

These and many other interpretations are debated by my Russian and non-Russian friends with a passion that at minimum reveals he has touched a nerve in Russia’s body politic. It is worth describing how Alexander, born in 1968, describes himself and his mission as a “warrior shaman” before analyzing his significance and his peril.

Alexander’s Movement

Picture Alexander on foot pushing a gurney and surrounded by well-wishers, walking a mountainous highway before being arrested by masked armed police for “extremism” in September 2019. Among over a hundred internet video clips of Alexander’s epic journey from Yakutsk to Ulan-Ude via Chita, is an interview from Shaman on the Move! (June 12, 2019):

I asked, beseeched God, to give me witness and insight….I went into the taiga [after my wife had died of a dreadful disease ten years ago]….It is hard for a Yakut [Sakha person] to live off the land, not regularly eating meat and fish….I came out of the forest a warrior shaman….To the people of Russia, I say “choose for yourself a normal leader,… young, competent”….To the leaders of the regions, I say “take care of your local people and the issues they care about and give them freedom.”…To the people, I say “don’t be afraid of that freedom.” We are endlessly paying, paying out….Will our resources last for our grandchildren? Not at the rate we are going… Give simple people bank credit.. . Let everyone have free education and the chance to choose their careers freely.. . There should not be prisons….But we in Russia [rossiiane] have not achieved this yet, far from it…Our prisons are terrifying….At least make the prisons humane…. For our small businesses, let them flourish before taking taxes from them. Just take taxes from the big, rich businesses….For our agriculture, do not take taxes from people with only a few cows….Take from only the big agro-business enterprises.[1]

In this interview and others, Alexander made clear he is patriotic, a citizen of Russia, who wants to purify its leadership. “Let the world want to be like us in Russia,” he proclaimed, “We need young, free, open leadership.” While he explains that “for a shaman, authority is anathema,” he has praised the relatively young and dynamic head of Sakha Republic: “Aisen [Nikolaev] is a simple person at heart who wants to defend his people, but he is constrained, under the fear of the demon in power [in the Kremlin].” Alexander acknowledges the route he has chosen is difficult, and that many will try to stop him. Indeed he began his “march to Moscow” three separate times, once in 2018 and twice in 2019, including after his arrest when he temporarily slipped away from house arrest in December 2019, was rearrested and fined.

Alexander’s 2021 arrest, described in the opening paragraph, was hastened by his refusal to cooperate with medical personnel as a psychiatric outpatient, and further provoked when he announced he would once again try to reach Moscow, this time on a white horse with a caravan of followers. His video announcement of the new plans, with a photo of him galloping on his white horse carrying an old Sakha warrior’s standard, mentioned that he would begin his Spring renewal journey by visiting the sacred lands of his ancestors in the Viliui (Suntar) territories, “source of my strength.” He encouraged followers to join him, since “truth is with us.”[2] A multiethnic group of followers launched plans to gather sympathizers in a marathon car, van and bus motorcade. Their route was designated to pass through the sacred Altai Mountains region of Southern Siberia. What had begun as a quirky political action on foot acquired the character of a media-savvy pilgrimage.

At moments of peak rhetoric, Alexander often explained that “for freedom you need to struggle.” Into 2021, he hoped to achieve his goal of reaching Red Square to perform his “exorcism ritual.” But his arrests and re-confinement in a psychiatric clinic under punishing “close observation” conditions make that increasingly unlikely, especially given massive crackdowns on all of President Putin’s opponents, including Aleksei Naval’ny and his many supporters. One of Alexander’s most telling early barbs critiqued the “political intelligentsia,” who hold “too many meetings” and do not accomplish enough. He told them: “It is time to stop deceiving us.” Yet he repeated in many interviews that numerous politicians in Russia, across the political spectrum, would be better alternatives than the current occupant of the Kremlin.

Among Alexander’s most controversial actions before he was arrested was a rally and ritual held in Chita in July 2019, on a microphone-equipped stage under the banner “Return the Town and Country to the People.” After watching the soft-spoken and articulate Alexander on the internet for months, I was amazed to see him adopt a more crowd-rousing style, asking hundreds of diverse multiethnic demonstrators to chant, “That is the law” (Eto zakon!) even before he told them what they would be answering in a “call and response” exchange. He bellowed, “give us self-determination,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” He cried, “give us freedom to choose our local administrations,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” His finale included “Putin has no control over you! Live free!” Only after this rally did I begin to wonder who, if anyone, was coaching him and why. Had he changed in the process of walking, gaining loyal followers, and talking to myriad media? The rally, with crowd estimates from seven hundred to one thousand, had been organized by the local Communist Party opposition. Local Russian Orthodox authorities denounced it and suggested that Alexander was psychologically unwell. Alexander himself simply said, after his arrest, “It is impossible to sit home when a demon is in the Kremlin.”

How and why was Alexander using discourses of demonology? He seemed to be articulating Russian and Sakha beliefs in a society that can be undermined by evil out of control. When he first emerged from the forest, he built a small chapel-memorial in honor of his beloved wife and talked in rhetoric that made connections as much to Russian Orthodoxy as to shamanic tradition. He wore eclectic t-shirts, including one that referenced Cuba and another the petroglyph horse-and-rider seal of the Sakha Republic. Once he began his trek, he wore a particularly striking t-shirt eventually mass-produced for his followers. Called “Arrive and Exorcise,” it was made for him by the Novosibirsk artist Konstantin Eremenko and rendered his face onto an icon-like halo.

Image 1: Shaman Alexander in t-shirt called “Arrive and Exorcise” by K. Eremenko, December 16, 2019. Used with permission by Konstantin Eremenko.

Another popular image depicts Alexander as an angel with wings. He has called himself a “Holy Fool,” correlating his brazen actions and protest ideology directly to a Russian iurodivy tradition that enabled poor, dirty, beggar-like tricksters to speak disrespectful truths to tsars. His appeals to God were ambiguous—purposely referencing the God of Orthodoxy and the Sky Gods of the Turkic Heavens (Tengri) in his speeches. During his trek, and in some of his interviews, he has had paint on his face, a thunderbolt zigzag under his eyes and across the bridge of his nose that he calls a “sign of lightning,” derived from his spiritual awakening after meditation in the forest. He has claimed, as a “warrior shaman,” that he is fated to harness spirit power to heal social ills. While his emphasis has been on social ills that begin with the top leadership, he also has been willing to pray and place healing hands on the head of a Buryat woman complaining of chronic headaches, who afterwards joyously pronounced herself cured.

During his trek, on camera and off at evening campsites, Alexander fed the fire spirit pure white milk products, especially kumys (fermented mare’s milk), while offering prayers in the Sakha “white shaman” tradition that he hoped to bring to Red Square for a benevolent ritual not only of exorcism but of forgiveness and blessing. He chanted: “Go, Go, Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin]. Go of your own free will . . . Only God can judge you. Urui Aikhal!” He expressed pride that some of the Sakha female shamans and elders have blessed his endeavor.

Resonance and Danger

Russian observers, including well-known politicians and eclectic citizens commenting online or on camera, have had wildly divergent reactions to Alexander, sometimes laughing and mocking his naïve, provincial, or perceived weirdo (chudak) persona. But some take him seriously, including the opposition politician Leonid Gozman, President of the All-Russia movement Union of Just Forces. Leonid, admiring Alexander’s bravery, sees significance in how many supporters fed and sheltered him along his nearly two-thousand-kilometer trek before he was arrested. Rather than resenting him for insulting Russia’s wealthy and powerful president, whose survey ratings have plummeted, Alexander’s followers rallied and protected him with a base broader than many opposition politicians have been able to pull together.

As elsewhere in Russia, civic society mobilizers, whether for ecology protests, anti-corruption campaigns or other causes, are becoming savvy at hiding and sharing leadership.  By 2021, Alexander had become one of many imprisoned oppositionists, whose numbers throughout Russia have swelled beyond the prisoners of conscience documented when the great physicist Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky in 1985.[3]

Alexander, despite being subdued beyond recognition after multiple arrests, has affirmed that he was hoping for “neither chaos nor revolution, [since] this is the twenty-first century.” He advocates for his followers an “open world, [of ] peace, freedom and solidarity,” one where all people believing in benevolent “higher forces” can find them. His significance is that he is one of the credible politicized spiritual leaders to emerge from Russia in the post-Soviet period, when in the past twenty years the costs of independent leadership have become increasingly dire, self-sacrifice is increasingly necessary, and multi-leveled community building with horizontal interconnections is increasingly risky.

Whether or not defined as religious or shamanic, the bravery and force of individuals willing to risk everything to change social conditions is awesome, transcending and human wherever we find it. Far from insane, these maverick societal shape-changers, tricksters and healers may represent our best power-diversifying hopes against systems that pull in directions of authoritarian repression. Perhaps once-populist power consolidating leaders like Vladimir Putin, who warily watch their public opinion ratings, are insecure enough to understand the deep systemic weaknesses that oppositionists like Alexander Gabyshev and Alexei Naval’ny expose, using very different styles along a sacred-secular continuum. President Putin’s insecurities magnify the importance of all political opposition, creating vortexes of violence and dangers of martyrdom in the name of stability.

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is a Faculty Fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. At Georgetown since 1987, she is co-founder of the Indigenous Studies Working Group https://indigeneity.georgetown.edu and has taught as Research Professor in the School of Foreign Service and anthropology departments. She is editor of the Taylor and Francis translation journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia and is author or editor of six books on Russia and Siberia, including Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Notes

[1] Many Alexander videos have disappeared from the internet, and others are private access. The series “Shaman idet!” [Shaman on the Move], and “Put’ shamana,” [Shaman’s Path] are especially relevant, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1jE71TAqZw, July 22, 2019 (accessed 6/18/2021). Shaman idet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPrb_1nWXtE, June 12, 2019 was accessed when released and 3/19/2020. See also “Shaman protiv Putin” [Shaman vs. Putin], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfTEtiqDf6U, June 24, 2019 (accessed 7/3/2019); “Pochemu Kremlin ob”iavil voinu Shamanu—Grazhdanskaia oborona” [Why Did the Kremlin Fight the Shaman- Civil Defense] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7OVy2ROASQ  (accessed 3/15/2020); and Oleg Boldyrev’s BBC interview September 24, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0LaLhkKj2g  (accessed 3/15/2020).

[2] Alexander described plans for the aborted 2021 journey: youtube.com/watch?v=YK0LlFAjx3E (accessed 1/15/2021).  See also https://meduza.io/en/news/2021/01/12/yakut-shaman-alexander-gabyshev-announces-new-cross-country-campaign-on-horseback (accessed 6/4/2021).

[3] This Soviet and post-Soviet imprisonment comparison comes from brave opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, himself poisoned twice, in a human rights review for the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/heightened-political-repression-russia-conversation-vladimir-kara-murza (accessed 6/18/2021).  

Cite as: Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 2021. “Siberia, Protest and Politics: Shaman Alexander in Danger.” FocaalBlog, 21 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/21/marjorie-mandelstam-balzer-siberia-protest-and-politics-shaman-alexander-in-danger/.

Blog

Paul Stubbs: Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina

A man at a microphone speaking to a crowded room.
Image 1: Shows Tuzla Plenum, 2014 (Photograph by Tamara Opačić from H-Alter, 17 February 2014, http://h-alter.org/vijesti/plenum-je-uvijek-korak-ispred, Used with permission).

The space where I live and work is described and prescribed by its past, by what it no longer is: post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, post-conflict, some even claim post-colonial. This world is rarely framed in terms of what it is or what it might become. Stef Jansen in his ethnography of residents in a block of flats in Sarajevo wrote of „yearnings in the Dayton meantime“ (Jensen, 2015), capturing a liminal space framed by a craving for the possibility of hope and the seeming impossibility of ‘returning to normal’ within the dystopian governance arrangements in Bosnia-Herzegovina deriving from the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995. In focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina here, I reflect on the temporalities of (failed) external political engineering, the proliferation of (failed) projects and the performative practices of everyday life, refusing a deterministic narrative of the absence of hope without talking up the possibilities of repoliticisation.

The governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton, drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a sovereign federal state, with a three-person Presidency and a rotating President, based on what is referred to as “the ethnic key” with members elected from Serbian-Orthodox, Bosniak-Muslim and Croatian-Catholic constituencies. It remains a kind of semi-protectorate with many powers vested in the Office of the High Representative, merged in 2009 with the EU Representative’s office. It has a Central Bank that is carefully regulated and there are a small number of symbolic Ministries and agencies at Federal level albeit with very little power. Most power is vested in the two entities Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina – there is also an autonomous Brčko District (total population 93,000) with its own foreign administrator as the parties could not agree which entity the town should belong to. The Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina is itself divided into ten Cantons each of which has a Cantonal Governor and a full cabinet of Ministers. If we just take health and social policy as one example, there is no Federal Law, there are entity laws, and each Canton also passes its own Law. Furthermore, financing is a municipal responsibility so that rights can vary from one small part of the country to another. This means there are some 140 Ministries across the country, each with a Minister, a deputy, a couple of Assistants, a large staff, many advisors, and a large number of official cars.

Bosnia-Herzegovina remains something of a ‘crowded playground’ in which we find a proliferation of diverse actors – Sarajevo was often referred to as ‘acronym city’ as all manner of international organisations, NGOs, think tanks, agencies, consultants (‘insultants’ in local parlance) and policy entrepreneurs had a presence there (Stubbs, 2015). Indeed, as post-conflict aid money dwindled, the Sarajevo central office would usually be the last to close, existing on scraps from the donor table. Sometimes, as what became euphemistically known as an ‘exit strategy’, an international NGO would create its own FrankeNGO, a local spin-off, with no certainty as to what kind of monster might emerge. The distortions of an immediate post-conflict economy could be observed at both a macro-level (estimates of donor aid making up 15% of total GDP were being sprayed around a while ago) and at the micro-level. You would be significantly better off as, say, a university professor if you could retreat to your weekend house full-time and rent your inner-city apartment to an NGO for an office or a flat for its staff. You could also make ends meet by receiving honoraria from all manner of agencies for writing reports, even those of questionable quality and originality. Still, today, the crowded playground is populated and dominated by all manner of flexians, in Janine Wedel’s terms (Wedel, 2009), blurring boundaries between the public and the private, the national and the international, the state and the non-state, and more. In crowded flex land, it is the army of intermediaries, brokers, translators (literal and metaphorical), operating in the cracks and interstices of governance, and almost completely non-transparent, that possess the real power.

Central to failed futures is ‘the project’ as an organizational form; a managerial-bureaucratic process; a funding modality and a practice of governmentality. ‘Projectification’ is a peculiar assemblage of repertoires, processes and practices, drawing together material, human, and non-human resources, calculative logics, consisting of temporalised stages that, whilst highly contingent, serve to technocratise and depoliticise the lifeworld and, in mundane ways, reproduce the everyday techniques of neoliberalism (Scott, 2021). Projects operate at variegated speeds across multiple sites and scales. They also come in waves or clusters: in Bosnia-Herzegovina the first wave of ‘stand-alone’ projects was notable for their sheer arbitrary diversity, short time scales, and rapid shifts from one theme or target group to another.  The second wave were ‘pilot projects’ – as I was told in the late 1990s “Bosnia has many pilots but no aeroplanes”. ‘Pilots’ were meant to have the potential to be ‘scaled up’ and become sustainable; that is to become long-term or permanent features of the governance landscape. In a third wave, more explicit systemic reform was prioritised, through ‘projects of strategic support’, aiding Ministries and agencies to plan, implement and evaluate reforms, and introduce new laws and regulations. Such projects were brought closer to centres of policy making whilst also keeping a distance through sub-contracting arrangements, a range of ‘implementing partners’ and, not unusually, the creation of new parallel agencies, often with a chameleon-like character, to ‘drive reform’ and ‘bypass’ those likely to stand in the way of ‘progress’. A number of donors invested a great deal in agencies that, often, became empty shells, literally and figuratively.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is marked by the absence of the kind of statecraft that provides what Jansen refers to as ‘grids’, institutional frameworks that calibrate and order individual, household and community concerns, providing a modicum of basic orientation in terms of what to expect from the authorities. The state, along with the family, is ‘semi-absent’, with state practices highly uneven, often indifferent, or else over-punitive (Hromadžić, 2015). A study of mothers of children with disabilities points to the erratic, ambiguous, fraught, provisional, contingent, unpredictable, even ‘mysterious’ nature of care services. Surviving, for anyone reliant on state support, is a constant struggle to gain access to the right people who, if you are lucky, if all the pieces fall into place, might offer help that is as far away from a structured, system-based, ‘right’ as it is possible to get (Brković, 2017). One conceptual entry point here is the ‘semi-periphery’, a deeply contradictory space, promoting ‘rapid modernization’ in conditions of deindustrialization, desecularisation, repatriarchalisation and anti-intellectualism (Blagojević, 2009). Reforms are simultaneously accepted and opposed, imitated and rejected, in thin, degridded, structural conditions.

Quite deliberately, I want to end this essay in two alternative ways. In one, the longing for normalcy breeds a kind of passivity, a resignation if you wish, an erosion of the capacity to aspire and, at best, an ironic dismissal of the absurdity of governing practices. The phrase bit će bolje can often be heard uttered by South Slavic speakers but it means the exact opposite of its literal translation – ‘things will get better’. This is captured in a quote from Ivo Andrić’s novel Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina), published in 1945, describing local responses to attempts by the Austro-Hungarian Empire to modernise the town of Višegrad in the late 19th century:

“The newcomers were never at peace; they allowed no one else to be at peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable but ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life … and to change and alter everything … Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. … The people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived.” (Andrić, 1995: 135)   

Nebojša Šaviha Valha (2013) discusses the phenomena of raja, referring to one’s interlocking circles of trusted friends, often based around an activity (coffee raja, skiing raja, hiking raja, …), where one can be oneself and practice zajebancia, enjoying oneself in an uninhibited way. For Šaviha-Valha, raja is seen by many Sarajevans, and Bosnians more generally, as that which was held onto against all odds during the conflict and subsequently becomes a kind of auto-ironic way of both critiquing the absurdities of the political elite but, in the end, resting on that critique and settling for raja as quotidian survival.      

For my alternative ending, it is worth noting that as of 8 June 2021, Bosnia-Herzegovina had the third highest rate of COVID deaths per million population in the world, behind only Peru and Hungary. The first wave of the pandemic was marked by a corruption scandal in which a fruit-processing company with close links to political leaders secured a lucrative contract to import ventilators from China that proved to be deficient. Today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina is also policing the border with the EU and is a major holding centre for refugees and asylum seekers held in appalling conditions, many of whom have been violently pushed back by Croatian and Bosnian authorities. Localised acts of solidarity with the asylum seekers do still occur but not on the scale of responses along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ in 2015, when a kind of inter-generational geopolitics of solidarity saw grassroots activities offering practical and political support to migrants from Libya, Syria and elsewhere.

These actions followed on from protests in February 2013, termed bebalucija when, after a law on personal identification numbers was declared unconstitutional, politicians from the major nationalist parties failed to reach agreement on a new law meaning that new-born babies could not obtain a passport nor a health insurance number. In a sense, it was precisely the absurdity of an impasse over personal IDs that triggered the anger of the protesters, reaching a crescendo when a three-month old child died in June 2013 because she was not allowed to enter neighbouring Serbia for treatment. Later, several days of rioting began in the industrial city of Tuzla in February 2014 when workers from several factories who had lost their jobs clashed with police outside the Cantonal Government building. The unrest spread to many other towns and cities, mainly in the Federation and, although widely reported to have ‘run out of steam’ they remain important for the experiment of direct democracy through plenums that lives on today across the post-Yugoslav space. I will not try to formulate some principles regarding the relationship between the everyday and the political in terms of which ending is more likely. As Stuart Hall remarked (Hall, 2007: 279), such things are always “open to the play of contingency”.

Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in the post-Yugoslav space since 1993. He is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb and a former Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association. His edited book on Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement is due to be published in 2022.

References

Andrić, Ivo. 1995. The Bridge Over the Drina. London: Harvill.

Blagojević, Marina. 2009. Knowledge Production at the Semi-Periphery: A Gender Perspective, Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research.

Brković, Čarna. 2017. Managing Ambiguity: How Clientlism, Citizenship and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, New York: Berghahn Books.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: through the prism of fan intellectual life,” in Brian Meeks and Stuart Hall (eds.) Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: the thought of Stuart Hall, London: Laerence & Wushart: 269-291.

Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. “Loving Labor: Work, Care and Entrepreneurial Citizenship in a Bosnian Town,” in Stef Jansen et al. eds. Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Farnham: Ashgate.

Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex, New York: Berghahn Books.

Scott, David. 2021. (Dis)assembling Development: Organizing Swedish Development Aid through Projectification, Doctoral Thesis, Karlstad University, Sweden, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1509382/FULLTEXT02.pdf

Stubbs, Paul. 2015. “Performing Reform in South East Europe: consultancy, translation and flexible agency”, in John Clarke et al Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage, Bristol: Policy Press: 65-94.

Šaviha Valha, Nebojša. 2013. Raja: Ironijski aspekt svakodnevne komunikacije u Bosni i Herzegovini i raja kao strategija života. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk.

Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite, New York: Basic Books.

Cite as: Stubbs, Paul.  2021. “Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” FocaalBlog, 17 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/17/paul-stubbs-liminal-temporalities-of-hope-in-bosnia-herzegovina/.

Blog, Right-wing Populism

Abram Lutes: Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador

For the first time since El Salvador’s mid-20th century military dictatorship, a single political party dominates both the legislative and executive branches of the government, and by all accounts aims to control the judiciary soon as well. The Nuevas Ideas or “New Ideas” party, the political vehicle of populist president Nayib Bukele, recently used its new supermajority in the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to unconstitutionally expel five supreme court judges. It will soon replace them with new appointees, presumably picked by Bukele, in a move that social movement activists are denouncing as a “technical coup.”

Unlike the military dictatorships that dominated El Salvador up until its bloody civil war, however, Bukele’s government is nominally democratic. Bukele was elected president in 2018 and will serve a five-year term, after which he is supposed to leave office for good. Legislative and municipal elections in El Salvador delivered his party, branded distinctively with a bold “N” the stands for both “Nuevas Ideas” and “Nayib”, a resounding majority.

The elections marginalized both the centre-left FMLN, former communist guerrillas, and the traditional right ARENA, anti-communists organized by former military junta members. Bukele claimed to have “turned the page” on the postwar two-party system that characterized El Salvador’s political reality following the 1992 Peace Accords. Bukele has repeatedly claimed that he is “neither left nor right” and described both sides of the country’s bloody civil war as equally criminal, despite evidence to the contrary.

Yet in spite of a nominal democratic mandate (problematized by mass abstentionism in recent Salvadoran elections) and a post-ideological veneer, Bukele has much in common with other right-wing authoritarians in the region, such as Jair Bolsanaro – whose son and advisor tweeted supportively of the sacking of the supreme court. The instrumentalization of legislative proceedings to consolidate power also bears similarity to the tactic of lawfare used in Brazil and elsewhere by the Latin American far right. Bukele’s tendency to both issue government decrees and launch harassment campaigns against his perceived enemies via twitter has also prompted comparisons to Donald Trump.

Bukele has political power, and all signs suggest that the repressive elements of the state stand behind him – in some cases, literally, as when he stormed the legislature last year, attempting to force the assembly to approve his Territorial Control Plan and secretive US$109 million loan to upgrade the country’s police armaments. Yet in the name of security and order, he needs to consolidate more.

Speaking in the aftermath of the move to overturn the judiciary, a participant told me, “This is a strategy that could be regionalized.” The move is consistent with the strategy of “autogolpe” or “self-coup” used by other civilian governments with close military ties to kneecap and paralyze opposition, often in the name of rooting out designated enemies. Turkish president and fellow right-wing populist Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have attempted a similar strategy in 2016, and if Eduardo Bolsanaro’s comments are any indication, there is potentially appetite for it in Brazil.

Bonapartism, Bukeleism

Bukele’s personalist leadership, claims to be post-ideological, and appeals to an abstract Salvadoran people, all reflect what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called “caesarism,” or what Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, called Bonapartism. Like these historical regimes, Bukele’s rise was precipitated by a crisis. El Salvador is a microcosm of the global economic, ecological, health, political and social crises that have prompted a meteoric rise of right-wing populism around the world.

Gramsci called these conditions, which can precipitate reaction or revolution, organic crises. Organic crises usually lead to a rejection of established political parties, economic policies, and value systems. Such crises are transnational in their origins but also intimately local. El Salvador’s domestic crisis reflects global and regional trends of collapsing party systems, increased securitization, and growing disaffection with globalization and accumulation-by-dispossession. Using the framework of an organic crisis, my research situates the rise of right-wing populism in Central America within the global rise of populism.

For populism experts in the liberal tradition, like Cas Mudde and Cristobal Kaltwasser, populism signals a degeneration of the health of liberal democracy and liberal institutions. Populism’s emphasis on majoritarianism leaves little room for liberal pluralism and reduces politics to a Schmittian dichotomy of “friends” and “enemies.” On the other hand, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, some on the Left see the rise of populism as a positive, calling for socialists to seize the “populist moment” to rally “the people” to a left-populism. 

Both these perspectives focus on the ideological anatomy of populism, tracing its political reasoning and descriptive effects. This is insufficient to explain Bukele. On the one hand, if we rely on liberal accounts of populism, we end up reproducing simplistic narratives of democratic backslide and the Latin caudillo. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive analysis fails to make a link between the “superstructural” language of nation, sovereignty, order, and belonging that we find in right-wing populism, and the world of production, finance, and recessions.

El Salvador’s organic crisis

Bukele and his party, Nuevas Ideas, emerged out of the 2011 indignados protests, named after the Spanish mobilizations of the same name. While initially buoying the left, middle-class Salvadoran indignadosquickly became disillusioned by the FMLN. Bukele, an ex-FMLNista himself, in many ways capitalizes on the unfulfilled anti-corruption demands of the indignados. His response in office to this crisis, though punitive, also reflects this popular disillusionment with the postwar Salvadoran political system.

Out-migration has for the past three decades acted as a kind of release valve for social pressures in Central America, pushing peasants and workers dispossessed by capitalist development north towards the United States and buoying Central American economies with billions in remittances. But as William Robinson points out, mounting ecological, social, and economic dispossession, combined with slumping economic growth and rising foreign debt (even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only made the slump worse), and a labour market unable to absorb the remaining dispossessed population, have pushed the region towards implosion.

Organic crises lay bare fundamental contradictions in the system that the ruling classes are unable to resolve, provoking resorts to open force. Central American countries, aided by the United States through the Alliance for Prosperity and Regional Security Initiative, have responded to simmering unrest and growing social movements with escalating violence and repression. Military and police aid nominally supports anti-gang efforts and the regularization of immigration—favourite talking points of Bukele.

While in neighbouring Guatemala this stewing crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has escalated into anti-systemic protests, Bukele has kept a lid on the pot through a mix of emergency welfare provisions and increasing militarization. Bukele’s mixing of highly-publicized social supports and punitive populism is again a consistent Bonapartist strategy of weathering the interregnum by attempting to simultaneously reconcile and repress social conflict.

Seen from the audience, a man speaks from an official podium with a uniformed officer and four El Salvadorian flags behind him.
Image 1: Bukele receives the baton of command from the Armed Forces of El Salvador at an official event. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Crisis, protection, and sovereignty

Even as they are assailed by COVID-19 deaths, right-wing populists in Latin America are rebounding, signaling a potential future for right-wing populism in the ‘post-COVID’ world. Sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo recently argued that post-COVID politics will be defined by the theme of ‘protection’ – from epidemics, from climate change, from crime and instability. Don Kalb has argued on this blog that current protection measures are facilitating the formation of a new ‘techno-capital’ post-COVID regime of accumulation with new kinds of contestations.  

Bukele’s El Salvador foreshadows a possible post-COVID political environment dominated by right-wing populism. Like his preceding controversial actions, Bukele’s autogolpe is being justified with a mix of militaristic and pseudo-religious language—demonizing his enemies and framing the fight against corruption and organized crime in terms of literal warfare to secure the sovereignty of the country.

Throughout the Global South, pandemic measures that prioritize repression over healthcare and bolster existing over-policing have led to the peripheralization of neighbourhoods and the stripping of meaningful citizenship from villainized populations. In the context of widespread dispossession in El Salvador, the state’s longstanding mano duro approach to crime, and now Bukele’s autogolpe, these measures signal an even more repressive kind of capital accumulation coming out of the COVID crisis.

Bukele also benefits from a demoralized left that has strained relationships with its base and social movements. El Salvador is thus also a cautionary tale when it comes to simplistic calls for a left alternative – be it to reclaim populism or reclaim the politics of protection. The marginalization of the leftist FMLN is not for lack of trying to appropriate populist or protectionist language – the outgoing FMLN government of Salvador Sanchez Ceren also attempted to combine punitive anti-crime legislation with progressive social programs, as well as symbolic gestures like refusing to take up residence in the presidential palace, converting it into a public venue.

The late Ralph Sprenkels and Hillary Goodfriend have both pointed out that the FMLN’s collapse was not due to being inadequately populist, but rather due to frayed internal organization, clientelism and corruption, and a strategy in power that prioritized pragmatism over a transformational program. Enthusiasm for left-populism or left-protectionism should thus be tempered by a serious diagnosis of the organizations, from grassroots to party leaderships, that are supposed to carry a left alternative to power.

Social struggles persist outside the FMLN, however. Bukele’s hostile attacks on public sector employees have prompted strikes, and at the time of writing, protests against the autogolpe, hunger movements and other mobilizations are beginning to make cracks in what Bukele insists is his popular mandate. Whether Bukele’s right-wing populism will totter like it has in neighbouring Guatemala or whether his autogolpe will consolidate a new authoritarian state remains an open question, one worthy of attention for anthropologists interested in the new contours and contestations of the present moment.

Abram Lutes is a graduate researcher at the Carleton University Institute of Political Economy in Ottawa, Canada. His research interests include Gramscian theory, world-systems theory, social movements, and populism. At the time of writing, he is conducting digital fieldwork on El Salvador and Guatemala.

Bibliography

AFP. n.d. “El Salvador Lawmakers Sack Top Prosecutor, Supreme Court Judges” Deutsche Welle. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.dw.com/en/el-salvador-lawmakers-sack-top-prosecutor-supreme-court-judges/a-57406228.

Alfonsi, Sharyn. 15 December 2019. “‘Our Whole Economy Is in Shatters’: El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on the Problems Facing His Country.” n.d. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/el-salvador-president-nayib-bukele-the-60-minutes-interview-2019-12-15/.

Antonini, Francesca. 2020. The Concepts of Bonapartism and Caesarism from Marx to Gramsci. Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004441828_002.

Arevalo, Amaral; Wenham, Clare. 13 April 2020. “Covid-19 in El Salvador: Safeguarding Public Health or Restricting Human Rights?” LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog (blog) https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2020/04/13/covid-19-in-el-salvador-safeguarding-public-health-or-restricting-human-rights/.

Batz, Giovanni. n.d. “Alliance for Prosperity?” CulAnth: Society for Cultural Anthropology. Accessed May 17, 2021. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/alliance-for-prosperity.

Brigida, Anna-Cat. n.d. “El Salvador Constitutional Crisis Ushers in ‘Period of Darkness.’” Al Jazeera. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/4/el-salvador-constitutional-crisis-ushers-in-period-of-darkness.

Bell, David A. 2020. “Fascism or Caesarism?” Public Seminar. August 27, 2020. https://publicseminar.org/essays/fascism-or-caesarism/.

Cameron, Maxwell A. 1998. “Self-Coups: Peru, Guatemala, and Russia.” Journal of Democracy 9 (1): 125–39. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1998.0003.

Caribe, Comisión Económica para América Latina y el. 2018. Centroamérica y la República Dominicana: evolución económica en 2017 y perspectivas para 2018. Balance preliminar. CEPAL. https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/43254-centroamerica-la-republica-dominicana-evolucion-economica-2017-perspectivas-2018.

Copeland, Nicholas. 16 December 2020. “In Guatemala, Resignations Are Not Enough.” NACLA. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://nacla.org/news/2020/12/16/guatemala-resignations-are-not-enough.

Cuellar, Jorge E. 2 March 2020. “Nayib Bukele and the Punitive Option in El Salvador.” 2020. The Abusable Past (blog). https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/nayib-bukele-and-the-punitive-option-in-el-salvador/.

Cuellar, Jorge E. 5 June 2020. “On Waving the White Flag.” Social Text. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/on-waving-the-white-flag/.

El Faro. 2020. Exigencias Feministas Contra Bukele y Sus Militares. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R9zbUAEmIE.

Gerbaudo, Paolo. 22 April 2021. “Why the Battle between Left and Right Protectionism Will Shape the Post-Covid World.” n.d. Accessed May 14, 2021. https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2021/04/why-battle-between-left-and-right-protectionism-will-shape-post-covid-world.

Gies, Heather. 2 November 2018. “Once Lush, El Salvador Is Dangerously Close to Running out of Water.” National Geographic. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/el-salvador-water-crisis-drought-climate-change.

Goodfriend, Hillary. 2019. “El Salvador’s Backslide.” Jacobin.  Accessed May 25, 2021. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/el-salvador-fmln-nayib-bukele.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American Ethnologist 44 (2): 209–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12469.

InSight Crime. 21 June 2019. “El Salvador Flirts with ‘Mano Dura’ Security Policies Again.” 2019. InSight Crime (blog). https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/el-salvador-flirts-with-mano-dura-security-policies-again/.

InSight Crime. 18 October 2011. “Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI).” 2011. InSight Crime (blog). https://insightcrime.org/uncategorized/central-america-regional-security-initiative/.

Kalb, Don. 1 June 2020. “Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations.” n.d. Accessed May 14, 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/.

Kitroeff, Natalie. 2020. “Young Leader Vowed Change in El Salvador but Wields Same Heavy Hand.” The New York Times, May 5, 2020, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/americas/el-salvador-nayib-bukele.html.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London ; New York: Verso.

Lagarde, Mylene; Masferrer, Manuel S.; Herl, Carlos. 16 October 2020. “El Salvador’s COVID-19 Response Is Storing up Health and Economic Problems for the Worse-off.” LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog (blog). 2020. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2020/10/16/el-salvadors-covid-19-response-is-storing-up-health-and-economic-problems-for-the-worse-off/.

Levenson, Z. 2020. “An Organic Crisis Is Upon Us.” Spectre Journal. Accessed March 26, 2021, from: (https://spectrejournal.com/an-organic-crisis-is-upon-us/)

Marx, Karl. 1937. 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852. Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers. Accessed May 17, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.

Mowforth, Martin, 28 December 2014. “Global Pressures on Central America.” 2014. The Violence of Development (blog). https://theviolenceofdevelopment.com/global-pressures-on-central-america/.

Mudde, Cas, and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Orozco, Manuel. 2018. “Las Remesas a América Latina y el Caribe en 2017” El Dialogo. Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue. https://www.thedialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Remesas-a-ALC-2017.pdf

Orozco, Manuel. 2018. Central American Migration: Current Changes and Development Implications. Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue.

Redacción Nacionales. 1 May 2021. “Se consuma el golpe de Estado a la Sala de lo Constitucional.” 2021. Diario Co Latino (blog). May 2, 2021. https://www.diariocolatino.com/se-consuma-el-golpe-de-estado-a-la-sala-de-lo-constitucional/.

Reuters. 3 February 2019. “Nayib Bukele gana presidencia de El Salvador y pone fin a 30 años de bipartidismo.” El Financiero. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/mundo/nayib-bukele-gana-presidencia-de-el-salvador-y-pone-fin-a-30-anos-de-bipartidismo/.

Rey-Araujo, Pedro. 2019. “Grounding Populism upon Political Economy: Organic Crises in Social Structures of Accumulation Theory.” Science & Society 83 (January): 10–36. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.1.10.

Robinson, William. 28 January 2019.“The Second Implosion of Central America.” NACLA. Accessed May 17, 2021. https://nacla.org/news/2019/01/28/second-implosion-central-america.

Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “Populism and the Economics of Globalization.” Journal of International Business Policy 1 (1–2): 12–33. https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-018-0001-4.

Shadi, Hamid. 2018. “Left Populism and the Rediscovery of Agonistic Politics.” American Affairs Journal 2 (4): 187–201. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/left-populism-and-the-rediscovery-of-agonistic-politics/

Stott, Michael. 2020. “Pandemic Politics: The Rebound of Latin America’s Populists.” Financial Times, September 23, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/3c24bf86-2c47-4939-9477-cefd655d4d48.

Sprenkels, Ralph. 2019. “The FMLN’s Electoral Implosion in El Salvador: A Fiasco Foretold?” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (blog). April 15, 2019. https://polarjournal.org/2019/04/15/the-fmlns-electoral-implosion-in-el-salvador-a-fiasco-foretold/.

Torres, Eder. 14 September 2019. “Salvadoran Unions Confront Right-Wing Populist Government.” People’s Voice. Accessed May 25, 2021. http://peoplesvoice.ca/2019/09/14/salvadoran-unions-confront-right-wing-populist-government/.

Torrez, Clara Guardado, and Ellen Moodie. 2020. “La Línea, Los Indignados, and the Post-Postwar Generation in El Salvador.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25 (4): 590–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12498.

Willis, Graham D.; Davis, Diane E. 2021. “Urban Sovereignty in the Age of Pandemics: Illicit Actors and the Crisis of Governance.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (blog). February 10, 2021. https://polarjournal.org/2021/02/10/urban-sovereignty-in-the-age-of-pandemics-illicit-actors-and-the-crisis-of-governance/.

Vinx, Lars. 2019. “Carl Schmitt.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2019. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/schmitt/.

Cite as: Lutes, Abram. 2021. “Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador.” FocaalBlog, 26 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/05/26/abram-lutes-anatomy-of-an-autogolpe-on-the-consolidation-of-nayib-bukeles-power-in-el-salvador/

Blog

Jaime A Alves: F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology

‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.

Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame 2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).

While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600 youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.

Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).

Police officer with a club forcibly restraining a Black man who lies face down on the pavement while two other officers observe.
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.

In this following, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).

This article should be understood neither as a literature review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead, I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg 2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global antiblackness. Enduring global colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020; Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).  

How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If, as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers] so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and abolishing the police state.

The Myth of Police Fragility

There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim, that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South, hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him, he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.

One may speculate: What led him to such an expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents?  The film and the scene in particular aroused heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity” (Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others blamed it for ‘going too far left in its implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).

The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”. Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020:  654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).

 By hijacking the meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?) in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality (e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure. Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.

Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing (I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s ‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015; Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,” an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally, there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788). 

These and many other works (too many to be listed in a commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel patrolling the streets.  By making ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making, statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin 2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).

My intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police (2018: 8).

In this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’ family and Christian values (Alves 2018). 

While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work. 

My analysis (and that of many of my colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror. Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali, Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.

Thus, my contention here is not so much to stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description, may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails.  If we do not want our work to end up fueling and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the police!’ in studies of policing.

Maroon Anthropology

In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.  

A Black woman speaks into a microphone in front of a crowd gathered outside at night. A sticker on her shirt and pamphlet in her hand read "Marielle."
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)

Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police – and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!

Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel 2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’, ‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes. Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of ‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (Spillers 1987: 68).

If the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s (incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police ‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James and Gordon 208:371).

I am not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph, 2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real) vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately, those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe 2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing.  As Siegel and others have shown, one of the most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still, both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska 2007).

This is not a peripheral point. One has only to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson 2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is insane.

How might anthropologists challenge the asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying black beings?  When one officer dies, it is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory violence by its victims.

There is no equivalence between blue lives and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false equivalency.

Based on her work with activists in the South African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see, how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).

If we consider current waves of demonstrations against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police?  Although an insurgent anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.

Thus, f*ck the police! is not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice. It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!

Acknowledgments: This paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel, Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series, University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb, Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors and omissions are of course mine.

Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia.  He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com

References

Abufarha, Nasser. 2009. The making of a human bomb: An ethnography of Palestinian resistance. DUhan: Duke University Press.

Adorno, Luis. 2020. Durante motim, 312 pessoas assassinadas no Ceará” [During riot, 312 people assassinated in Ceará]. Uol, 6 March, https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2020/03/06/durante-motim-da-pm-312-pessoas-foram-assassinadas-no-ceara.htm

Arias, Desmond 2006. The dynamics of criminal governance: networks and social order in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Latin American Studies 24(3): 293-325.

Alves, Jaime & João Vargas 2017. On deaf ears: Anti-black police terror, multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state. Identities, 24(3): 254-274.

Beaman, Jean. 2020. Underlying Conditions: Global Anti–Blackness amid COVID–19.

Best, Stephen, and Saidiya Hartman. 2005. “Fugitive justice.” Representations 92 (1): 1-15.

Bedecarré, Kathryn 2018. Doing the work: the Black Lives Matter Movement in Austin. Ph.D Dissertation. U of Texas, Austin.

Cobb, Charles E. 2014. This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed: How guns made the civil rights movement possible. Tuzcon: Basic Books.

Cooper, Frank Rudy 2020. Cop fragility and blue lives matter. University of Illinois Law Review, 2: 621-662.

De Souza, Raquel. 2016. “Cruel coexistence: Police violence and black disposability in Salvador/Bahia.” PhD dissertation. University of Texas, Austin.

DiAngelo, Robin 2018. White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. New York: Beacon Press.

Exame 2019. No Brasil, mais policiais se suicidam do que morrem em confrontos. Revista Exame, 26 August, https://exame.com/brasil/no-brasil-mais-policiais-se-suicidam-do-que-morrem-em-confrontos/

Fassin, Didier 2013. Enforcing order: An ethnography of urban policing. London: Polity.

FBSP 2019. Anuário brasileiro da segurança pública. FBS, 1 December.

Flauzina, Ana & Thula Pires 2020. STF e a naturalização da barbárie. Revista Direito e Práxis, 11(2): 1211-1237.

França, Fábio Gomez de 2019. “O soldado é algo que se fabrica”: Notas etnográficas sobre um curso de formação policial militar. Revista Tomo, 2(34): 359-392.

Hale, Charles R. 2008. Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harrison, Faye V. 1992. Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward and anthropology for liberation. Anthropology News,33(1): 24-24.

Kurtz, Donald. 2006. Political power and government: negating the anthropomorphized state. Social Evolution and History, 5(2): 91-111.

James, Joy & Edmund T. Gordon 2008. Afterword. In Charlie Hale, Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship, 371-382. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jauregui, Beatrice 2014. Provisional agency in India: Jugaad and legitimation of corruption. American Ethnologist, 41(1): 76-91.

Jucá, Beatriz 2020. Policiais amotinados aceitam proposta. El País, 1 March, https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-03-02/policiais-militares-amotinados-aceitam-proposta-do-governo-e-encerram-greve-no-ceara.html

Karpiak, Kevin G. 2010. Of heroes and polemics: ‘The policeman’ in urban ethnography. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33:7–31.

Karpiak, Kevin G. & William Garriott (eds.) 2018. The anthropology of police. London and New York: Routledge.

King. Noel 2019. Lena Waithe’s ‘Queen & Slim’ is an odyssey for the black lives matter era. NPR, 27 November, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/783223371/waithes-queen-slim-is-an-odyssey-set-in-the-era-of-black-lives-matter

Kraska, Peter B. 2007. Militarization and policing—Its relevance to 21st century police. Policing: a journal of policy and practice, 1(4): 501-513.

Kraska, Peter B. 1996. Enjoying militarism: Political/personal dilemmas in studying US police paramilitary units. Justice quarterly, 13(3): 405-429.

Larkins, Erika Robb 2013. Performances of police legitimacy in Rio’s hyper favela. Law & Social Inquiry, 38(3): 553-575.

Mães de Maio 2019. Memórial dos nossos filhos. São Paulo: Editora NósporNós.

Mbembe, Achille Necropolitics. Public culture, 15(1): 11-40.

McDowell, Meghan G. & Luis A. Fernandez 2018. ‘Disband, disempower, and disarm’: Amplifying the theory and practice of police abolition. Critical Criminology, 26(3): 373-391.

Miranda, Dayse & Tatiana Guimarães 2016. O suicídio policial: O que sabemos? Dilemas-Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social, 9(1): 1-18.

Mullings, Leith 2015. Anthropology matters. American Anthropologist, 117(1): 4-16.

Muniz, Jacqueline de Oliveira & Washington França da Silva 2010. Mandato policial na prática: Tomando decisões nas ruas de João Pessoa. Caderno CRH, 23(60): 449-473.

Muniz, Jacqueline, Haydee Caruso, & Felipe Freitas 2018. Os estudos policiais nas ciências sociais: Um balanço sobre a produção brasileira a partir dos anos 2000. Revista Brasileira de Informacao Bibliografica, 1(2):148-187.

Muniz, Jacqueline de Oliveria & Elizabete Albernaz 2017. “Moralidades entrecruzadas nas UPPs: Uma narrativa policial.” Cadernos Ciências Sociais, 3(2): 115–151.

NLEOM. Law Enforcement Facts. NLEOM, June 2020, https://nleomf.org/facts-figures/law-enforcement-facts

Nonini. Don. 2020. Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital, FocaalBlog, Jan 20, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/

Pauschinger, Dennis 2020. Working at the edge: Police, emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(3): 510-527.

Ralph, Laurence 2020. The torture letters: Reckoning with police violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1995. The primacy of the ethical: Propositions for a militant anthropology. Current Anthropology,36(3): 409-440.

Sclofsky, Sebastián 2016. “Policing race in two cities: From necropolitcal governance to imagined communities.”  Social Justice, 6 (2): 1-14.

Segato, Rita Laura 2007. El color de la cárcel en América Latina. Nueva Sociedad, 3(208): 142-161.

Seigel, Micol. 2018. Violence work: State power and the limits of police. Duhan: Duke University Press.

Shange, Savannah 2019. Progressive dystopia: Abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Salem, Tomas & Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2020. “Emergent Police States: Racialized Pacification and Police Moralism from Rio’s Favelas to Bolsonaro.” Conflict and Society 6(1): 86-107.

Souhami, Anna 2020. Constructing tales of the field: Uncovering the culture of fieldwork in police ethnography. Policing and Society, 30(2): 206-223.

Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Diacritics 17(2): 65-81.

Storani, Paulo.  2008. Vitória sobre a morte: a glória prometida: O ‘rito de passagem’ na construção da identidade dos operações especiais do BOPE. Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense.

Susser, Ida. 2020. Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?, FocaalBlog Jan 20, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser-covid-police-brutality-and-race-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries/

Umoja, Akinyele Omuja 2013. We will shoot back: Armed resistance in the Mississippi freedom movement. New York: NYU Press.

Vaughn, Kenya 2019. Queen & Slim, a well-acted interpretation of a tragically flawed story. The St. Louis American, 27 November.

Vianna, Adriana, and Juliana Farias. 2011. “A guerra das mães: dor e política em situações de violência institucional.” Cadernos Pagu (37): 79-116

Wilderson, Frank B. 2018. ‘We’re trying to destroy the world’: Anti-blackness and police violence after Ferguson. In Marina Gržinić Aneta Stojnić (eds), Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance, 45-59. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Willis, Graham Denyer 2015. The killing consensus: Police, organized crime, and the regulation of life and death in urban Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wooten, Terrance. 2020. Cities Under Fire: a public Forum. Santa Barbara: University of California.

Cite as: Alves, Jaime A. 2021. “F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 27 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/27/jaime-a-alves-fck-the-police-murderous-cops-the-myth-of-police-fragility-and-the-case-for-an-insurgent-anthropology/

Blog

Hege Høyer Leivestad, Johanna Markkula and Elisabeth Schober: Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences

Stuck

At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship stuck inside the Suez Canal seem to have provided more than just a welcome distraction. The vessel, unable to move one way or another, proved to be immensely relatable, if endless memes flooding the ether over the last few days are any indication at all. With the ship now figuring as a stand-in for every dilemma under the sun, cartoonist Guy Venables, in his work for Metro Newspaper UK, perhaps best summed up the phenomenon with a drawing of the stuck ship that has a voice emerging from the vessel saying, “This is terrible! We’re going to be used as a metaphor for everything!”

The popular fascination with the Suez blockage is not surprising. Ships, if we can be excused for anthropomorphizing them for a moment, are as charismatic as human-made objects can ever be. Standing next to a container ship of the dimensions of the Ever Given is an experience that is hard to shrug off, so massive and overwhelming to the human size are these new ultra-large vessels. At the same time, having over recent years done research among workers involved in producing, operating, maintaining and (un-)loading these ships, we found ourselves rather unsurprised by the events unfolding in the Suez. Among some maritime industry experts, the fact that container ships have gotten too big has been an open secret for quite a while (e.g. see Lim 1998; Merk 2015; Weisenthal and Alloway 2021). Laleh Khalili, for instance, has recently shown how the Suez Canal ironically played a key role in the acceleration of ship growth, when oil tankers rose in size as a response to the Suez crisis in the 1950s (e.g. 2021; see also Khalili 2020). The temporary cardiac arrest that the Ever Given has caused inside the Suez Canal, Khalili’s work and that of other excellent critical logistics scholars has shown (for an overview, see Charmaine Chua’s valuable list here), may only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage that ultra-large container ships are causing.

Image of containers on a ship passing through the Suez Canal.
Image 1: “Transiting through the Suez Canal.” Photo: Johanna Markkula.

But first of all – to the hard facts on the ground: For nearly a week, a 400-meter-long container ship has been stuck in the southern part of the Suez Canal, blocking all traffic, and causing an estimated loss of 400 Million US Dollars per hour to the global economy. On her way from Yantian in China to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and with room for 20,000 twenty-foot freight containers (TEUs) when fully loaded, on the morning of 23 March Ever Given was surprised by strong desert winds in shallow waters. Like the Straits of Malacca, the Panama Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal – built partially by forced laborers from 1859-1869 – is a vital vein in the bloodstream of trade. This is the shortest route between Asia and Europe. An average of 52 ships pass through the Suez Canal every day; 12% of international ship traffic and as much as 30% of global container traffic is routed via this narrow chokepoint. For ships that during the past week have been diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, a significantly longer journey awaits. As the queue of waiting ships grew to more than 300 by March 28, deliveries to Europe and beyond have suffered severe delays, while the currently cut-off ports are bracing themselves for a true onslaught of ships that will clog up their waterways once the blockage has been resolved. In a nutshell, this colossal mess will certainly take a while to sort out, even once the ship has become unstuck.

Container Economies on Overdrive

As we have recently summarized in a theme section of Focaal (“Container Economies”, Leivestad and Markkula 2021), global shipping is built on intricate logistical systems, systems that have come into place with the invention of the modern day intermodal shipping container, and where “Just in time” principles govern everything. With the development of new shipping systems and technological solutions from the 1950s onwards, it became cost-effective to transport goods and raw materials between continents, primarily from large production countries in Asia to markets in Europe and the US (see Levinson 2006). Container ships today transport 24% of all the world’s dry goods, and building ever larger ships seemed to be the obvious, cost-effective strategy to embrace. From the mid-2000s onwards, more and more shipping companies have begun to expand their fleets with larger ships. The world’s largest shipping company, the Danish Mærsk, proved to be a leader in this development, and the Asian-owned shipping companies – many of them state-controlled – followed suit over recent years. Between 2005 and 2015, container vessels doubled in size. Since 2017 alone, 77 additional mega-container vessels with a capacity of over 20,000 containers have been brought into use.

As we (Leivestad and Schober) also describe in an upcoming article in Anthropology Today, some maritime experts have long been skeptical about how sustainable these ultra-large box ships actually are – a debate that has certainly flared up again recently. Before the pandemic hit the world economy last year, shipping prices had temporarily fallen to a record low, which was partly due to the overcapacity created by nearly all major shipping companies simultaneously betting on the introduction of ultra-large container vessels. The spectacular 2016 collapse of Hanjin Shipping (see Schober 2021), then among the top 10 of shipping companies in the world, is often attributed as a direct outcome of this over-capacity. In our piece in AT, we discuss how the language of “Economies of Scale” used to justify these ships is more than just of a performative nature. It is, one can argue, part of a false economy in the sense that these ships mark a real redistribution of wealth from public funds to corporate elites, rather than the creation of new wealth that is their ostensible justification.

Size Matters

Through our research in one of Europe’s largest container ports in southern Spain, around South Korean and Philippine shipyards, and on board of various container ships, we have come across other negative effects that ultra-large container ships have caused over recent years. When not clogging up the Suez Canal, these increasingly larger ships are often causing new problems for maritime infrastructure, the environment, and negatively affect people’s working conditions. Fewer and fewer ports can actually accommodate the new ships. For those ports that can – of which many are struggling to survive in a highly competitive industry – major investments are required to build ever higher cranes, longer docks and larger container warehouses. Port work must be adapted to the megaships’ routes and schedules, and workers both at sea and on land fear that the growing ship sizes, together with ever smaller crew sizes on board, eventually will lead to serious accidents. The environmental aspects of shipping in general are significant. For instance, sea beds must be dredged at regular intervals, with major consequences for the marine environment above and below water (e.g. Carse and Lewis 2020).

Although the Ever Given is now about to be released from the canal, the drama is far from over. In many ports, maritime workers fear chaotic conditions when all waiting ships resume traffic – at a time when the pandemic has already caused much havoc across the industry. Hopefully, the incident in the Suez Canal will be a wake-up call. Escalating ship sizes have serious consequences, and large parts of the infrastructure that has enabled the megaship growth are financed by tax payer money. The price for the Ever Given, and the many ships of its kind that will continue to sail the oceans, may ultimately have to be paid by all of us.  

Hege Høyer Leivestad is Assistant Professor at Stockholm University, Sweden, and researcher in the ERC project PORTS at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research project, Frontier freight: Maritime logistics at the Strait of Gibraltar, is funded by the Swedish Research Council and deals with port life, labor, and global shipping in southern Spain.

Johanna Markkula is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is part of the research project Life cycle of container ships. Markkula is a maritime ethnographer with ten years of experience researching the maritime industry and global maritime labor. She has carried out ethnographic research onboard cargo ships with multinational crews as well as in the Philippines with maritime organizations and businesses ashore.

Elisabeth Schober is associate professor at the University of Oslo’s Department of Social Anthropology, Norway. Schober is currently the principal investigator at Life cycle of container ships (funded by the NFR), where she focuses on shipbuilding in South Korea and the Philippines. In 2019, she was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant for a project that will center on some of the world’s most important container ports.

References

Carse, Ashley and Joshua A. Lewis. 2020. “New horizons for dredging research.” In WIREs Water.Vol.7, issue 6 (November/ December). https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1485

Merk, Olaf. 2015. “The Impact of Mega-ships. Case Specific Policy Analysis. International Transport Forum.” https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/15cspa_mega-ships.pdf

Khalili, Laleh. 2020. Sinews of war and trade: Shipping and capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. London: Verso.

Khalili, Laleh. 2021. “Big ships were created to avoid relying on the Suez Canal. Ironically, a big ship is now blocking it.” In Washington Post. March 26. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/26/big-ships-were-created-avoid-relying-suez-canal-ironically-big-ship-is-now-blocking-it/

Leivestad, Hege Høyer and Johanna Markkula. 2021. “Inside Container Economies”. Focaal. 89: 1-11.

Levinson, Marc. 2006. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lim, Seok-Min. 1998. ‘Economies of scale in container shipping’, Maritime Policy & Management 25 (4): 361-373.

Schober, Elisabeth. 2021. “Building ships while breaking apart.” Focaal. 89: 12-24.

Weisenthal, Joe and Tracy Alloway. 2021.’Shippers saw a need for bigger vessels. They built them too big’. Bloomberg. 23 January 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-23/shippers-saw-a-need-for-bigger-boats-they-built-them-too-big

Cite as: Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula, and Elisabeth Schober. 2021. “Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/30/leivestad-hege-hoyer-johanna-markkula-and-elisabeth-schober-beyond-suez-escalating-ship-sizes-and-their-consequences/

Blog

Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn

On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced. The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.

The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.

Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.

Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.

In the context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation, political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no surprise that they are being attacked first.

The Neoliberalization of Higher Education and Law 4777/2021

The efforts to alter the public, free, and open character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017, Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article 16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education over the past two decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’ degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack the prestige of public universities.

However, when Nea Dimokratia came to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum. If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world, in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses – unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th. Interestingly, this law was not introduced by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in educational affairs is unprecedented.

To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.

The new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore, fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore, the law allows for many disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.

All of these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20 million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.

The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.

The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.

Towards a closed and authoritarian university

The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.

More generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship, and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in Parliament that, under the new law, “it is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.

Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.

References

Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera A., Heintz M. & A. Horolets (eds.), Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe: An Intricate Institutional and Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.

Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra 2000. “Disciples, Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp. 256–78.

Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online petition.

Screenshot of a petition header which reads "Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS. Email: NoUniPolice@gmail.com.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)

Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/