In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major contemporary critics of our current economic paradigm. Around the same time, he contributed to the creation of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that made the book all the more timely and important. Debt is a sweeping historical account of ‘human economies’ and an exposé of the moral foundations of modern economics. In dialogue with a range of influential economic thinkers, Keith Hart critically assesses the significance of the book as an exemplary work of ‘anthropology of unequal society.’ Maka Suarez weaves the theoretical insights of Debt into her own ethnography of Spain’s largest movement for the right to housing (La PAH), analysing how La PAH exposes the kind of politicised debt relations that are the historical focus of David’s book.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at
LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute
and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s
Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE, Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and co-director of the Human Economy Programme. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. His latest book is Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes.
Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.
The last two decades in
anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given
David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and with the Western
Left more generally, this is even true for the Western world at large. With the
publication of his debt book (Graeber 2010) – also exactly a decade ago – as
Keith Hart once said, David became the most famous anthropologist among the
general public of our age, taking that long empty seat next to Margaret Mead
(and Levi Strauss perhaps). With the launch of the ‘Society for Ethnographic
Theory’, the HAU journal and the turn towards Open Access publishing, David,
now world famous, once more stirred up anthropology as well as academia more
broadly. It feels a bit weird to say this about an anthropologist of the gift,
but David literally made history by attacking established centers and practices
of power and wealth.
While some in this series of
seminars knew him well as a direct colleague or friend, I only ran into David a
couple of times. I felt it was not easy to get to know him. He seemed a bit
solipsistic, drawn into conversation with himself, sometimes mumbling and
laughing privately about the sudden insights he seemed to run into while doing
so. If you had not been introduced to that intimate conversation before, it was
not so easy to enter it, I felt. He and I never had the time to get to that
point, for which I am sorry.
I remembered these few moments
of mutual awkwardness while rereading Toward an Anthropological Theory of
Value (Graeber 2001). Its style of writing reminded me of David’s internal
conversations and his moments of private enjoyment. The narrative of this book
meanders, feels sometimes elliptic (as it does in all his books). The flow of
the argument regularly gets punctuated. Jolts of joyful energy seem to pull the
author in multiple unexpected directions. The possible connections that emerge
from the words that he happened to choose, seem to seduce him to leave the path
and get into the bush around it. David, who celebrates creative freedom, is
certainly the Zizek of anthropology. As with Zizek, things can become very
detailed within a narrative that was already far from linear. As a reader you may
feel you are being unduly slowed down, even taken advantage of. But David can also
take you by the hand while making a reckless jump, allowing you for a moment to
tower over a conceptual landscape where most people would normally be lost, and
you are struck by the sudden clarity of perception. I now imagine that such apparently
reckless jumps produced his moments of private enjoyment.
My discussion here of Toward
an Anthropological Theory of Value must be short. I will leave the bush aside
– the book has long chapters on gift giving societies in Melanesia, Madagascar
and among Amerindians, some of it very interesting, some of it less compelling
for non-specialists – and I will focus on the landscapes that emerge during those
conceptual jumps. This book is not just representative of his writing style and
his counterintuitive rhythm of discovery. It also partly lays out the tool kit
of concepts, perspectives, and issues that was going to dominate his later work.
In fact, it offers in embryo his full program of research. What is then David’s
theory of value? How do Marx and Mauss cohabit in it? How do his very outspoken
Chicago teachers, Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, figure? What are its
possibilities and blind spots?
David developed his
‘anthropological theory of value’ against the intellectual and political
background of what he calls ‘the bleak 1990s’. He is very explicit about it:
neoliberal hegemony, globalized capitalism, economics as dominant social
imaginary, post-structuralism, and the reduction of politics to ‘creative
consumption’ and identity, both in anthropology and other social disciplines.
While structure and history had gone out of fashion, he writes, action and
agency had become cynically equated in social theory to mere individual market
choices. Before 1989, Bourdieu had worked out ‘habitus’ as the connecting
concept between structure and agency (and Giddens had been busy with similar
issues). Graeber swiftly passes him by for the focus on dominance and power games
that underlie Bourdieu’s project, in David’s eyes another symptom of the
cynicism that he saw around him. For David, at this point in his career, it
still seemed paradigmatic that anthropologists are dealing with people in relatively
egalitarian societies and with people who desire (a core concept for him) to precisely
escape such power games. David proposes ‘value’ as the point where structure
and agency meet. After an interesting interlude on Roy Bashkar (and critical
realism) and his thinking in terms of forces, tendencies, and processes rather
than objects he emphasizes that his value does exactly that: setting open-ended
dialectical processes in motion. What is this value and what are the
anthropological traditions that help him shape it up?
The shortest way to answer
that question is to bring in that concept that is all but foundational for David’s
work: ‘constituent imagination’. While he borrows that term from Italian
autonomous Marxism (Virno and Negri), he links it to a long anthropological
pedigree that connects Klyde Kluckhohn, Marshall Sahlins, Terence Turner, Louis
Dumont, and others, all of whom are discussed in interesting and original ways
here. Value then emerges as what people tell themselves they find important in
the realization of their lives, not very different from the common-sense
meaning of value in various European languages. David’s value is emic,
idealist, and dynamic. While his notion seems initially not very different from
let’s say Talcott Parsons, David wouldn’t be Graeber if he didn’t loudly refuse
the implied structural functionalism: David’s value emphatically doesn’t work
to solidify stable social reproduction. On the contrary, it feeds the social
imagination, both collectively and individually, and it is both agonistic and
liberating. In the social processes that it sets in motion people die, strive,
love, compete, believe, pray, moralize, estheticize, sacrifice, fetishize, and
whatnot. Value is about making differences, and about ranking and proportioning
them. De Saussure’s structuralism may be essential for how our language and imagination
works, but David, following his teacher Terence Turner, adroitly embraces Vygotsky’s
‘generative structuralism’ and shifts the weight from langue to parole
and towards ‘signifying material action’. Hence his interest in ethnohistory
and the telling and remembering of histories. Stories become part of
‘constituent imagination’ in action, the practiced struggle for individual and
collective autonomous becoming and in how these struggles are being remembered.
In the end he concedes that his
foundational notion of value is perhaps not that different from Dumont, a student
of Levi Strauss and the ultimate theorist of hierarchy, except for its emphasis
on process, action, and agency. And while the structure of our social
imagination is certainly ‘a totality’ of the Saussurian kind and as such fully embedded
in the existing structuration of our societies, as well as fundamental for how
we teach our children and reproduce ourselves, it is clear to David that this
is a totality ridden by ambivalence and contradiction. There are inevitably
contradictions between desires and pragmatic realities. ‘Constituent
imagination’ often seems more the property, desire, and practice of individuals
or groups and moieties within societies than of societies as a whole.
Where is Marcel Mauss here,
David’s most basic theoretical and political inspiration? Mauss appears at all
levels of David’s approach. David spends some very interesting pages introducing
him as the key thinker for a non-cynical anthropology and for a humanist Left,
who famously rejected the Bolsheviks for their recourse to state terror,
authoritarianism, and bureaucratic diktat. In the book, Mauss of course appears
as the quintessential theorist of the gift and of egalitarian societies, which,
as I said, are for David at this point still the self-evident object of
anthropology. David may criticize him for his romanticism, but he fully embraces
his notion of ‘everyday communism’ as the glue of human sociality. Then there
is also the basic methodological notion of the ‘total prestation’ where the
full quality, the core values, of a whole society are reflected in each and
every of its parts, including the imaginations and actions of its members.
David does not discuss it explicitly, but if I’m not mistaken, he does seem to
think that Mauss’ approach may be too static for his purposes. The constituent values
for which people once congregated as a distinct group or society, may become corrupted
over time and people seek repair, interpretations will differ, agonistic and
liberating conflict will ensue. Holism, for David, therefore, does not take
away the dialectics. On the contrary, it feeds them and is fed by them.
In all this Graeber seems to
follow Terence Turner closely. And indeed, in a much later preface to a
collection of Turner’s essays (2017) David remarked that he wrote his value
book to make the notoriously complex texts of Turner understandable for a wider
public. The book was thus originally intended as a gift to Turner.
But Turner was strong on Marx,
indeed perhaps the most outspoken Marxist in the anthropology of the 1990s. And
Marx was strong on totality and dialectics too, but of a less idealistic kind. David
in this book sets a Turnerian Marx into a dynamic conversation with Mauss. How
does that work out? A Marxist will immediately wonder how the thoroughly
idealist concept of value as constitutive imagination that Graeber is on to
will relate to Marx’s similarly dialectical but certainly not idealist
conceptions of (use, exchange, and surplus) value. Most importantly, how does
it relate to Marx’s ‘law of value’, which is Marx’s short formula for talking
about the social relations of capitalist accumulation.
Graeber is sympathetic to the
young Marx who wrote on behalf of the emancipation of humans from their
self-constructed religious fetishes which he wanted them to begin to see as the
mere products of their own powers of creative imagination rather than as the gods
that they had to obey. This indeed corresponds perfectly to David’s own agenda
as his long and interesting discussions of fetishism show. But the post 1848 Marx
of capital and labor receives rather short shrift. David repeatedly complains
about the ‘convoluted language’ of Marxists. He does not like the Marxian
vocabularies and prefers for example to talk about ‘creative powers’ rather
than about labor (a concept that hardly appears in this book on value). Marx
for David is mainly interesting, he says, for his approach to money – and here
we find an early announcement of the coming book on debt. So, not capital, not
labor, but money. He emphasizes that for Marx value and money are not the same,
but in the next pages Marx’s value disappears and David gets stuck with money
and prices, which are of course a holistic system too. With Terence Turner, he
embraces the idea that ‘socially necessary labor time’ – a core element of
Marx’s ‘law of value’ – is also inevitably a cultural construct but the
discussions about that centrally important concept for Marx are not referenced
in this book as they are by Turner (2008). Nor does David seem aware that this concept
helps Marx to discover a particular relational form of value under capitalism
that consistently operates behind people’s back and is therefore ontologically
something rather different than a self-conscious ‘constituent’ value choice. In
Chicago David was apparently not exposed to Moishe Postone. He also does not seem
aware of the important value debates among Marxist theorists of the 1970s (in
particular Diane Elson 1979, whom Turner had read closely). Considering the
number of pages dedicated to such discussions in this book, Marx’s value appears
intellectually far less compelling then Kluckhohn’s, Parson’s or Dumont’s
value. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in David’s handling is then in the next
moment reduced to a rather static cultural concept for determining, via prices,
how important we find particular items of consumption as compared to other
items of consumption (cars: 7% of yearly consumer expenditures in the US in the
late nineties). David’s Marx, surprisingly, seems in the end not to be about
capital and labor but primarily about consumption, not unlike the way David’s
teacher Marshall Sahlins looked at capitalism in ‘Culture and Practical Reason’
(1976).
It is also as if David at once
forgets about his discussion of Roy Bhaskar and his own declared embrace of
forces, tendencies, and processes. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in Marx is a
dynamic dialectical relation between abstract capital and abstract labor that
produces immanent tendencies and is indeed also a dynamic dialectical cultural
construct. It is the basis for Marx’s ‘law of value’, which Marx knew well was
not a law but a tendency. As labor does its daily work for capital, labor productivity
would systematically be driven up because of the competition among capitals and
of the class struggle with labor, via mechanization, automation, and the
overall capitalization of life. Over time labor would lose any sovereignty over
its own conditions of life and social reproduction. Apart from being
disciplined in its wage claims and lifestyles, lest capital would move to
cheaper and more hardworking places, labor would also be forced into (paying
for) ever more education or face devaluation and degradation. And of course, it
would have to face the inescapable uncertainties of life and status. The same
would be true for cities, regions, and states that failed to compete within a
globalizing capitalism and would therefore literally be up for grabs. All of
this, including the geographically uneven and war-mongering repercussions, is a
logical part of Marx’s ‘law of value’. David could have used Mauss and the gift
to give a deeper anthropological and relational twist to Marx’s rather flat
notion of use value. But Marx is never allowed in this book to play on his own
unique strengths: in the end both capital and labor, the two elementary
positions whose combination produces not just use values and exchange values
but, crucially, surplus value, the very returns to capital that are the key
driver of social change in a capitalist world, simply disappear. According to
David Harvey (2018), Marx sees capital as ‘value on the move’. But in this book
that sort of value is just moved out – only to be rediscovered big time and with
‘anarchist concreteness’ in David’s later work on debt and bullshit jobs.
Constituent imagination is
David’s core concept. It was a concept that came from Italian Marxist
post-operaismo authors who were impressed by labor’s refusal to work for
capital in the Italy of the seventies and eighties after they had lost a series
of violent confrontations. Young workers now preferred to seek the creation of
autonomous worlds of life and labor outside the wage nexus. This is shortly
mentioned by Graeber, and he imagines, like James Scott, that his egalitarian kinship
groups similarly refused to further engage with hierarchical power centers and simply
moved out to constitute their own desired societies inspired by constituent
egalitarian imagination. Clearly, this is a further radicalization of the
original concept, which talks about evading the wage nexus but does not carry any
hint at a mass exodus out of Egypt towards a promised land and a new separate
society, to use an image. David even argues that all societies at some point
were formed out of such mass rejection of earlier power centers and were
therefore always founded on constituent imagination. This to me seems like an
extravagant claim, largely untestable, and suspiciously supportive of David’s
theoretical purposes. However, Italian Marxists such as Antonio Negri always
kept the development of capital and the state in dynamic tension with the
autonomous desires of his multitudes, which were indeed urban subjects rather
than spread out kin-groups in marginal spaces. In Graeber’s Value book that dynamic
tension disappears. David’s egalitarians are on their own, engaging in a
similar constitutive mytho-praxis that has inspired Marshall Sahlins’s work
(see also Jonathan Parry’s discussion of Lost People for a similar
disappearance of the IMF and therefore of global capital in David’s analysis of
recent Malagasy histories).
Image 2: Screenshot of David Graeber’s tweet responding to Arjun Appadurai’s critique of his book on debt.
David in this book firmly dismisses Appadurai’s ‘regimes of value’ notion (1986) for his neoliberal fixation on consumption. Appadurai recently returned the compliment by claiming that David’s anthropology was an entirely traditional one. David did a fantastic job in giving 21st century anthropology a new pride in focusing on egalitarian desires and popular values of autonomy in rejection of the rule of capital. But Appadurai is unfortunately right in one way: the values David envisions are emic, singular, particular, idealist, and deeply place-based and return us to classic bounded fieldwork and a bounded notion of culture. The book has no references to Wolf, Wallerstein, or anyone else dealing with space and multiscalar dynamic analysis of the dialectical value processes associated with globalized capital and the ensuing popular counter politics and desires. Except for a journalistic type of political economy, there is in fact hardly any serious political economy at all here, not even an anthropological political economy – a school that traces itself back to leading scholars like Wolf, Mintz, and Leacock, always largely ignored by both Graeber and Sahlins. David later improved marvelously on that lack with the Debt book (but see for example Kalb 2014), which, importantly, also brought long run and deep global histories back into anthropology. But while that book appears to have been incubated during the writing of this text on value via David’s interest in Marx and money, it is not yet conceptually or methodologically anticipated, and I do wonder how David later looked back on this very traditional anthropological theory of value he develops here.
David was a magnificent and
creative utopian and moralist. He was uniquely in tune with the resistant
Western mood of the times, from the alter-globalists to Occupy, including in
his embrace of the ethos of the mass refusals and moral outcries that we have
seen in the last twenty years, often driven by the desire for autonomy and the
condemnation of the overall bleakness of things. But he did not at all
anticipate the rise of the populist right, which is also very much about value
and values, and indeed loudly proclaims a desire for the resurrection of
(white, male, majoritarian etc.) hierarchy (see Kalb 2021 for further
discussion). The rise of the right in many places after the failed rebellions
of 2011 must be understood from within the failures of the ‘horizontalist’
mobilizations of which David and many of us were a part and which at that point
seemed to have an elective affinity with the anthropology of egalitarianism. Nor
does David’s book on value anticipate a situation where core central bankers
and enlightened economists write books about the economics of the green
transition with ‘value’ prominently in the title while making a claim to the
heritage of the value-driven popular risings that David sees himself part of (Carney
2020; Mazzucato 2019). And finally, in the excitement of retrieving some pride
for the traditions of the discipline, in David’s book on value we also seem to
have forgotten some of the earlier advances in ‘the anthropology of complex
societies’ and of ‘world society’, including some Marxist ones which are very precisely
about value.
Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and FocaalBlog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986.
“Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-36. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Carney, Marc. 2020. Value(s):
Building a better world for all. William Collins: Dublin.
Elson, Diane. 2015 (1979). Value:
The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: Verso
Graeber, David.
2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our
own dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David.
2010. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House.
Harvey, David. 2018. Marx,
Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. London: Profile books
Kalb, Don. 2014. “Mavericks:
Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world
anthropology.“ Focaal 69: 113-134.
Kalb, Don. 2021. “The
neo-nationalist ascendancy: further thoughts on class, value and the return of
the repressed.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 316-328.
Mazzucato, Mariana. 2019. The
Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London:
Penguin.
Sahlins, Marshall.
1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Terence Turner.
2008. “Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.” Anthropological Theory 8 (1): 43-56.
Turner, Terence. 2017. The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago: HAU Books.
Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2021. “Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’.” FocaalBlog, 13 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/13/don-kalb-constituent-imagination-versus-the-law-of-value-on-david-graebers-anthropological-theory-of-value.
I confess that the
first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in
Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to become his Debt
book. He covered 5,000 years in 50 minutes, and this was in an era when the
Grand Narrative was very much out of fashion. His presentation struck me as
rambling and incoherent.
Over the past 15 years
I have come to change my mind about him completely. I have just published an
article (Gregory, 2021) where I have argued that Sahlins and Graeber should
have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. For many, this is high praise,
but I can’t be sure that David would accept it. His approach to the theory of
value stands opposed to everything the so-called ‘Nobel Prize’ for Economic
Science symbolises.
My brief today is to
discuss his book Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001). I
shall keep to that brief as best I can. I must say, however, it was only after
reading his books on Anarchism (2004), Direct Action (2009), Debt
(2011), and Bullshit Jobs (2019) that I began to get my head
around the central arguments of his Value book, by far his most difficult
book. What struck me about all these books was the extraordinary unity of theme
and content. I see them as a five-volume study of the value question. I am not
saying that this is the best way to interpret what he has done. There are many
ways to approach his work. This is the one I find most useful.
In the acknowledgements to his Value book David thanks everyone at Palgrave except the editor who made him switch around his title. If we restore the order he wanted, the main title of his book becomes, The false coin of our own dream, and the subtitle, Toward an anthropological theory of value. This inversion gives us a different angle on his work. The word ‘toward’ suggests a movement, not yet completed, from an old theory to a new one. It also brings the expression ‘the false coin of our dreams’ to front and centre. The origin of this expression can be traced back to Mauss and Hubert in their General Theory of Magic (1902-03; 1972), but David gives the metaphor a 21st century twist. As I see it, the phrase false coin of our own dreams defines a paradox that is the central organizing metaphor of all five volumes of his books on value. But what does he mean by this paradox?
My short answer to this
question is that he is referring to the political battle over those big ideas
that can change the world. For him the value question is, first and foremost,
the battle over competing images of wealth. The false coins are the images
of wealth produced by the dreamers of yesterday, the false coiners of an image that
has become adulterated and debased through excessive use over time. David the dreamer
wants to recoin these debased images of wealth to create a new image of what
could be. His dream is not a fantasy. It is a real possibility grounded in
economic history, cultural geography, and the political present. Graeber the dreamer,
then, is a political activist who wants to appropriate the false coins of the
ruling elite, melt them down, and forge something new in collaboration with
those who have a hopeful image of the future. He wants to join them in the
streets as they ‘shout, clamour and make joyful noises’ in the now obsolete
sense of the word ‘dream’ (OED).
What is this new image
of wealth?
David, we must never
forget, was born in New York and raised in Chelsea, just four miles from Wall
Street. He has a New York-centric view of the world he has never lost. This
visual image captures the essence of his approach as I understand it. It shows
the Charging Bull sculpture that artist Arturo Di Modica secretly
installed near Wall Street in 1989 in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock
market crash. In 2017 Kristen Visbal installed her sculpture of Fearless
Girl facing down the Charging Bull, but following complaints, the Fearless
Girl was relocated to a different part of Wall Street, totally transforming
Fearless Girl’s symbolic power. She now represents, Google Maps tells
us, the fight for female equality inside the boardrooms of Wall Street. The
original juxtaposition of images admits of a very different interpretation,
especially when we overlay with the lyrics of the ‘blah, blah, blah’ song the
rebellious young sing.
Image 1: Fearless girl statue by Kristen Visbal, New York City, Wall Street, by Anthony Quintano is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Greta’s ‘blah, blah, blah’ is a quote from a song very popular among the young. The other line of the song goes ‘Ja, Ja, Ja.’ The language of this song is not double Dutch, even though the elite might think so given that the composer, Armin van Buuren, was a Dutchman. A Dr Sev from Poland has mixed Greta’s speech and Armin’s song. It was premiered on YouTube 30 September 2021. The sonic image, created to excite the passions of the young, raises a serious question: What does ‘No more blah, blah, blah’ mean? What is the message the young are trying to convey to those in power with lyrics of this kind?
Enter David Graeber,
the bilingual Wall Street ethnographer. Not only has he has learned the
language of the bulls and the bears inside the offices of Wall Street, but he
has also learned the language of the young protestors on the streets outside in
New York, London and elsewhere. In May 2019 he attended the Extinction Rebellion in London. He duly
recorded what they said and reported it (Graeber 2019). The following is my
very brief gloss on how he might re-present their point of view.
‘No more blah, blah, blah’ is a polite way of saying: ‘tell us the
truth about climate change. Stop lying. Stop talking bullshit. Don’t give us
bullshit jobs to do. We, too, are capable of imagining different possibilities
for life on earth. If you old folks in power don’t listen to our dreams, we are
all finished (one imagines that the protestors may have used different F-words
in this final sentence).
The distinction here
between the liar and a bullshitter, which David (2018: Ch 1, fn 10) notes but
does not develop, is very important
one. The bullshitter, Frankfurt (1986) notes in his classic essay, is one who
exaggerates or talks nonsense to bluff or impress. The liar, by contrast,
deliberately sets out to mislead with falsehoods. In other words, it is one thing for an academic to talk
nonsense unintentionally to impress, but quite another for a politician like
Trump who knows the truth to deliberately propagate falsehoods. Bulls can also
produce manure, which is to say that the academic bullshitter can produce
something very useful.
We are dealing here with two quite distinct values. The ambiguous
quality of academic bullshit requires that it be handled with the greatest of
care and respect. David does precisely this in his writings. However, his
unique meandering rhetorical style takes some getting used to. I can now see
some virtues in it, but it is not one that I would urge my students to imitate!
Let me now move to
David’s analysis of the language of those on the other side of the barricade.
The bulls and the bears of Wall Street who excite the emotions and imagination
of academics and well as sculptors, singers, and other creative artists. On the
one side we have academics from the schools of business and economics who
crunch the numbers and give advice, for a price, to the politicians and
shareholders who run the show. On the other side, we have academics like David
who occupy the streets and call for radical change, often at some cost to their
careers.
Academics, then, can be
divided into three categories: those who work for Wall Street, those who work
against it, and those interested in other questions. It is a quaint feature of
the English language that those who work for Wall Street are called ‘policy
advisors’ whilst those who work against it are called ‘political activists.’
Henceforth I shall refer to both as political activists. It is obvious, then,
that the schools of business and economics and law are full of political
activists whilst anthropology has very few. This raises the uncomfortable
question for us non-activists of the political implications of our inaction.
Activists in the
schools of Economics and Business come in many different stripes and political
persuasions defined by their approach to the theory of value: Neo-Smithian,
Neo-Ricardian, Neo-Marxist, Neo-Keynesian and Neo-classical among many others. Most
belong to the mainstream neo-classical school epitomised by the work done by
the economists of the Chicago School of Economics, a school that has produced
ten Nobel Prize winners, two short of Harvard, the top school.
The image of wealth
that informs the thought of these people, I assert, is the false coin of
David’s dream, the anti-thesis that defines his thesis. Let me be clear. When it
comes to an image of wealth, there is a sense in which David is opposed
to the whole history of European economic thought from Adam Smith in 1776 to
the Nobel Prize winners of 2021. Everyone. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevon, Keynes,
Friedman. It is a different matter when it comes to concepts of value
and specific theories of value and, especially those of Marx. Some fine
conceptual distinctions between images, concepts and theories
are at stake here. I will come back to this trichotomy below. In the meantime,
it suffices to note that when a theory of value uses concepts to
make an argument it presupposes an image of wealth as a moral
precept.
What does this ‘false
coin’ of European economic thought look like? What image of wealth does
it excite in the mind of its beholders?
In 1895 Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to be awarded to those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.’ Five prizes are given each year: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace. In 1968 the Swedish Central Bank donated money for a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel. This award, which is administered by the Nobel Foundation, it not a Nobel Prize. However, by the operation of the Law of Contagious Magic, it is falsely called the Nobel prize in Economics when in fact its real name is the Swedish Reserve Bank [Sveriges Riksban] Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobel’s descendants are very unhappy about this situation. ‘Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being,’ said Peter Nobel, a great grandnephew. In 2001 they demanded, without success, that the Nobel name be dropped from the Swedish Reserve Bank award because, they said, Alfred Nobel was highly sceptical of economics and as such the existence of this award was an insult to his legacy.
David Graeber and Alfred Nobel obviously shared certain
assumptions about the ability of economic science to confer wealth and
happiness upon humankind. I feel, therefore, that while he would reject the
Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science, he would happily accept the Nobel
Prize for Peace. As Don Kalb (2014: 115) has correctly noted, David is a
political activist in the Gandhian tradition rather than the Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary tradition. Music, dance, and discussion are his preferred
weapons, not guns.
David has a very
interesting discussion of ‘dream tokens’ in his Value book, but I fault
him for not including a discussion of the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science as a token of
value. This is the true coin of the economic scientist’s dream, but the false
coin of David’s dream. For David, the token is a ‘false coin’ because it
epitomises an impoverished and debased Eurocentric image of wealth, one whose
use-by date has long passed.
David’s life’s work has
been the search of a better image. For inspiration he raided the cabinet of
ethnographic curiosities, the historical archives, and of course spoke to the
young. He has no new answers to old questions. His concern is to identify the
constraints that economic history and cultural geography impose on our capacity
to imagine new possibilities for life on earth. This enables him to pose new
questions and to change the terms of debate. He has no manifesto, no
commandments, just difficult questions that get to the root of the matter. He
is primarily concerned to excite creative debate about issues of pressing
importance for the human condition. If you are looking for simple answers to these
questions you will not find them in David’s work. He is no messiah. He teaches
us how to think, not what to think. He takes a few steps toward an
anthropological theory of value. He has not arrived at the final destination.
The theory of value is the most hotly disputed subject in economics. If you ask ten economists to define money, for example, they will give you ten different answers. However, when it comes to the question of an image of wealth, there is remarkable agreement. This can be found in the image they have selected for themselves to distinguish their discipline. I refer to the image of the horn of plenty, the symbol of abundance and nourishment found in European mythology that appears on the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science but not the real Nobel Prizes. All 89 Economic Science laureates have all proudly accepted this token as a symbol of the true coin of their dreams.
Image 2: Nobel Prize vs. The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize
David correctly notes that modern European economic thought has its origins in the secularisation of European economic theology. This image of the horn of plenty, which has its origins in a Greek myth, could not be a better illustration of his thesis.
For the economic
scientist the horn of plenty conjures up images of Adam Smith, their revered
founding ancestor, whose book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776) serves as the creation myth of their science. The
very first line of his classic text introduces the image of wealth that his
concepts and theories presuppose.
“The
annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all
the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which
consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is
purchased with that produce from other nations.” (Smith, 1776: 1)
What students in
Economics 101 don’t learn is that Adam Smith had a labour theory of value, one
that excited the thoughts of Karl Marx. Marx’s revised version of Smith’s
labour theory of value was published in 1867. Like Smith, the very first line
of Marx’s classic work introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and
theories presuppose.
“The wealth of
those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevail presents
itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.” (Marx, 1867:1)
What separates these
two images of wealth was, of course, the industrial revolution. This revolution
not only excited the thinking of radicals like Marx, but it also excited the
thinking of more conservative thinkers such as William Stanley Jevons and two
others who were independently working on a new theory of value that turned
Smith’s objective labour theory of value upside down. This was a subjective
marginal utility theory of the value based on the mathematical calculus of the
pleasure and pain derived from the differential consumption of goods. It
provided different answers to questions about wages, prices, and profit. Instead
of a class-based historically grounded theory of profit as exploitation,
Jevon’s theory was based on the figure of the abstract, ahistorical individual
making free choices in the marketplace. In came Smith’s doctrine of laissez
faire, out went his labour theory of value. This new theory of value was
informed by a radically new paradoxical image of the horn of plenty. As Robbins
(1932:47) put it, “wealth is not wealth because of its substantial
qualities. It is wealth because it is scarce.” Thus, wealth for the
conservative economist is not the material abundance produced by industrial
wage labour, but the subjective scarcity as perceived by the universal consumer
of consumption goods.
Marx’s political economy inspired the dreams of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others; Jevon’s economic science the dreams of the heretic Keynes, the true-believer Friedman, and others. At one extreme a very negative Smithian-inspired image of wealth as historically specific surplus value, at the other extreme a very positive Smithian-inspired image of wealth as universal scarcity value. The rest, as they say, was the history of the 20th century.
David concern is the quest for a 21st century image of wealth that enables us to put this Eurocentric image in its place and to imagine something that goes beyond it. David’s thinking was inspired by the comparative ethnographic literature which revealed to him the common ground of both sides of the debate between economists. Like Sahlins, he rejects the idea of universal scarcity and strives to extend Marx by looking at the ethnographic evidence on non-capitalist and pre-capitalist images in the quest for a 21st century post-capitalist image.
“Political economy”,
David (2007: 47) notes, “tends to see work in capitalist societies as
divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always
factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to
women.” Political economy gives primacy to abstract labour time on the
factory floor. David wants to turn this upside down and give primacy to the
creative thoughts and actions of people engaged in the process of reproducing
their society and their children in a culture of their own making.
As a contribution to thinking about the value
question in general, David’s work in not original. He is careful to acknowledge
his debt to the many anthropologists who have inspired him, especially his
teachers at Chicago: Terry Turner and Nancy Munn. He also acknowledges the work
of many others whose work he has critiqued such as Marilyn Strathern and me. Since
he published his book, many other anthropologists, such as Hart and Hann, have
developed important new approaches to economic analysis that put human beings
at the centre.
What distinguishes David’s contribution, it seems
to me, is that his five-volume study of value is the most radical and the most
ambitious. David’s life work—which now amounts to some fifteen books by my
count—is nothing less than a whole socio-economic history and cultural
geography of the human condition.
A defining characteristic of David’s approach is
his interest in the economic theology as well as the political economy of
wealth. He finds much economic theology in European political economy, and much
political economy in non-European economic theology. He is concerned with what
our image of wealth has become and with signs of hope of what it can become.
One of David’s projects, for example, was the deep cultural history of the secularisation of European economic theology, and the extent to which the secularisation was unfinished business. European political economy from Petty in 1662 to Marx in 1867, for example, is full of talk about Father Labour and Mother Earth as the creators of Wealth, but no mention of God the Son in the form of a wheat-God named baby Jesus or baby Zeus suckling their mother’s milk. This partial secularisation of the horn of plenty myth not only devalues women as mothers, but it also devalues males as sons as the supreme form of wealth. This is a truly great revolution in human thought, one whose English history the OED lexicographers have documented in painstaking detail. I know of no male-centric economic theology of wealth from the non-European world that goes this far. In 21st century India, for example, the quest for wealth in the Smithian laissez faire sense reigns supreme, but so too does the ideology of the son as a supreme form of wealth. As the census data on the sex ratio shows, this ideology is strongest in those areas of Northwest India where capitalism is the most advanced. Where I work in east-central India, by contrast, the economic theology of wealth assumes the ritual form of a rice goddess named Lakshmi, the daughter of Mother Water, not Mother Earth. The 31,000-line sacred poem priestesses sing celebrates Lakshmi as fearless daughter rather than dutiful wife. Indeed, her wedding to a wife-bashing husband leads to her demise. The story has a happy ending when wife-beating husband, and jealous co-wives realise the error of their ways. As political economy this theology is womb-centric, daughter-centric, rice-centric, and water-centric. But as David notes, comparisons like this enable us to perceive the phallo-centric, wheat-centric European images of wealth of Political Economy for what they are.
Concluding remarks
Theories of value
present themselves as descriptive accounts of the world that use a limited set
of concepts—such as ‘use-value’ ‘exchange-value,’ ‘reciprocity,’ and the
like—to develop general theories about what is. The flip side of these
descriptive accounts is a prescription of what should be. The difference
between a description and the prescription are the policy conclusions needed to
bring about the changes necessary to close the gap. When it comes to Political
Economy and Economic Science, the prescription is a very simple image of
wealth, one that has its origins in Adam Smith’s version of the Greek myth of
plenty. On the one side, an historically specific image of the abundance of
commodities, on the other side a universal image of scarce goods.
This Eurocentric dream, which has enabled millions of people the world over to escape from the material poverty of their forebears, has become the nightmare of us all. It has led to obscene wealth here, dire poverty there, and environmental destruction everywhere. David rightly identifies the image of wealth that informs Political Economy and Economic Science as the false coins of our dreams today. The anthropologically and historically informed concepts and theories that he develops in all his books are all concerned to reveal the debased and worn-out nature of this false coin. He wants to encourage collective thought about how to forge a new image of wealth. The concepts and theories in his Value book, his Debt book and his Bullshit Jobs book present us with alternative images of wealth from non-European, non-capitalist economies, pre-capitalist economies, and 21st century capitalist economies respectively.
The image of wealth
that informs David’s dreams, like all images of wealth, is very simple and
possible to achieve. He wants to move the focus of attention from the
production of commodities, and the consumption of goods, to the reproduction of
people, one where the children of today have a say in the world of tomorrow.
The task of re-imagining a world where people can reproduce themselves has
become a very urgent one. His writings reveal the huge gap between what is and
what could be. His non-violent political actions, and his optimism, remind us
that scholarly work is a necessary but not a sufficient means to achieve this
end. Political activists in the schools of Business, Law, and Economics who
give ‘policy advice’ to governments and the captains of industry have long
recognised this fact. The Fearless Girl who used to oppose the Charging
Bull on Wall Street reminds us that anthropology for David is not just
about taking a point of view, it is also about taking action. Anthropologists,
he might say echoing Marx, have only interpreted the world; the problem,
however, is to change it.
Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.
Gregory,
C. (2021). On the Spirit of the Gift that is Stone Age Economics. Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, LV (1), 11-34. doi: DOI: 10.26331/1131
Hubert,
H., & Mauss, M. (1902-1903). Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. L’Année
sociologique, 7, 1-146.
Kalb,
D. (2014). Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and
Marxism in world anthropology. Focaal:
Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (69), 113-134. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2014.690108
Marx,
K. (1867). Capital. Vol. I: A Critical
Analysis of Capitalist Production: Moscow: Progress.
Mauss,
M. (1972). A General Theory of Magic,
with a foreword by D. F. Pocock (R. Brain, Trans.). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Robbins,
L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and
Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.
Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1970.
Cite as: Gregory, Chris. 2021. “What is the false coin of our own dreams?” FocaalBlog, 9 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/09/chris-gregory-what-is-the-false-coin-of-our-own-dreams.
David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in
Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis. It was
not for some years that it appeared in print. That was 2007, and by then he had
already published a considerable amount of other work, including a couple of
significant books. To my shame, I have to admit that I hadn’t read Lost
People until Alpa signed me up to comment on it today and that I should
never have accepted her invitation. I am neither a specialist on Madagascar,
nor expert in the literature on slavery or on narrative and history. But it’s
worse than that. Something I have always especially admired about David’s
writing is its clarity; his ability to state propositions that seem blindingly
obvious once he has set them out but were never obvious before. Several of Lost
People’s reviewers comment on its literary qualities, so I guess it’s just
me. For my part, however, I found it uncharacteristically heavy-going, its
narrative labyrinthine and its detail overwhelming. I was often unsure that I
was getting the point.
David himself describes its style as experimental, “a kind of
cross between an ethnography and a long Russian novel.” The aspiration was to
produce a ‘dialogic ethnography’ that would do away with the distance between
author and informants created – as David sees it – by so much social science
writing. As I’ll later explain, he here draws a sharp distinction between
social scientists and historians, and he identifies himself squarely with the
latter. His sympathies are with what he represents as old-style ethnography
where the objective is to provide a window on a way of life rather than to
deploy ethnography – as is currently usual – as a prop for some single
theoretical argument. He wants his Malagasy interlocutors to emerge “as both
actors in history, and as historians” (Graeber 2007, 379).
Despite the difficulties of his text, it’s relatively easy to say
what it’s centrally about and to summarise its main narrative. In case there
are people present who haven’t read it, or whose memories need refreshing,
that’s what I’ll do. It’s centrally about slavery, about its local history, and
more especially about its post-abolition legacy. Above all, that is, it’s about
the past in the present, about the ways in which history impinges on
contemporary relations between people of free and of slave descent in a rural
area in the western highlands of Madagascar, an hour or so drive from the
capital, Antananarivo. Betafo (his fieldsite) is in Imerina, the old kingdom of
the Merina people, who ruled most of the island in the nineteenth century, and
of whom Maurice Bloch has written with such distinction. David’s main window on
these relationships is through the narrative of an ordeal held in 1987, that
provoked the ancestors, resulted in disaster for the principal protagonists, and
ended by dividing the community even more deeply than formerly between people
of slave descent and the “nobles” who had been their erstwhile masters. This
narrative threads through the book with new interpretations, new perspectives
on it, and new details piling up over 400 pages.
Betafo, something like a parish, is made up of around fifteen
scattered hamlets which in total have a floating population of 300-500. It’s
locally notorious for witchcraft and sorcery, and for the hostility of relations
between its inhabitants – a major reason for selecting it, David reports. In
the 1980s, it experienced an epidemic of petty thefts. The village assembly
decided to hold an ordeal to identify the culprit(s). The villagers were to
drink water in which earth from the ancestors’ tombs had been dissolved. But
since they were not all of the same ancestry – there were nobles and ex-slaves,
who were in principle totally separate groups between whom marriage was
theoretically impossible – the earth should come from two separate tombs. And
even that was a political fudge because the ex-slaves weren’t in fact a single
descent group, though that is how the procedure adopted for the ordeal
represented them. Nor was this provocative mixing of earth the only dangerous
blunder. It turns out that both elders who had instigated and organised the
ordeal – one noble, one slave – had recently taken a wife from the other group.
They were guilty of mixing bodily fluids and bloods as well. No wonder disaster
followed. The rice had just been harvested and was still in the fields. A flash
flood swept it away. Actually, it later transpired that it was only the crops
of the two elders that were completely destroyed. This was 1987. David started
his research three years later and witnessed the aftermath. What had been
intended to reassert communal solidarity had provoked a definitive rift. Now
‘blacks’ (slave descendants) were avoiding ‘white’ (‘noble’) parts of Betafo
and were exploiting their reputations for magical powers and knowledge of local
taboos to harass and constrain Betafo nobles who had moved to the capital but
were now threatening to return and to resume their lands.
In parenthesis, it should perhaps be said that by standards
elsewhere, the levels of antagonism seem muted. Returnee nobles might be told
that there was a taboo on taking water from a particular spring. They weren’t
physically attacked or forcibly prevented from moving back home. Intermarriage
was anathematized, but we nevertheless hear of quite a few instances. None had
resulted in murder, nor even in serious boycott. Compare rural Bihar or Haryana
where couples who have contracted such serious misalliances could never be
sure of their safety.
Even in eighteenth century Madagascar, slavery and slave-trading
had a prominent role in many local economies. In the nineteenth, however,
slavery took off spectacularly in Imerina after the British did a deal with the
Merina king by which he agreed to halt the international trade of slaves for
guns on the understanding that the British would supply him with guns anyway
(and would not supply his rivals). That enabled the Merina state to dominate
most of the island and to capture more and more slaves. They were deployed on
public works and in agriculture in the Merina heartlands from where more and
more Merina went as soldiers. Later in the century, perhaps as many as half
Imerina’s population were slaves, according to Bloch. It was in any event an
enormous proportion and that had a profound impact on Merina society and
cultural representations.
The French annexed Madagascar in 1895. Slavery was abolished in
1897. From Betafo many nobles moved off to the capital to join the civil
service, a few to Paris. Their former slaves became their sharecroppers and
generally thrived. That was widely attributed to their manipulation of their
magical powers. The downward mobility of many nobles was put down to the sins
of slavery – even by nobles themselves. Nobles were increasingly deeply divided
between a rich elite (who largely moved out) and the poor (who largely
remained). David offers a vivid picture of just how opulent and aristocratic
these rich nobles were in the early years of the colonial period with their
twilit parties, music and dancing, and their colourful silk garments and golden
diadems. Still at the time of his fieldwork, émigré nobles would descend on
Betafo in numbers to collect a share of the harvest or to bury some kinsman in
their ancestral tomb. When a corpse was flown in from Paris, the paths were
jammed with cars and vans, and in their hundreds ‘everywhere around the tomb
were knots of grave-looking men in three-piece suits with expensive watches,
ladies in silk dresses, pearls, gold and silver jewellery.’ Within village
society itself, however, the most fundamental division – regardless of class –
remained that between andriana (nobles) and andevo (slaves).
Though the topic of slavery was avoided, nobody could ever forget it, and
slaves were still associated with pollution and ideas of contamination.
Crucially, however the situation of many of these émigré nobles became seriously precarious after the 1972 revolution. Subsequent to it, the peasant sector was badly neglected. The government took vast loans for development which it could not service, resulting in insolvency, dependence on the IMF, structural adjustment, the slashing of state budgets, the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside, a catastrophic collapse in living standards and widespread pauperization. The state largely withdrew from places like Betafo, leaving them as “temporary autonomous zones.” At the same time, many metropolitan civil servants were badly impoverished and were tempted to move back to their ancestral villages to resume the land that their ex-slave sharecroppers had been cultivating. And that, of course, is the essential background to the tensions that resulted from the Betafo ordeal at the heart of Lost People.
What that background significantly qualifies, as it seems to me,
is David’s claim to represent his informants as both actors in history and as
historians. Of course, they are the first in a limited sense, but as
actors they are highly constrained and have little autonomy. By that I mean to
suggest that the most important part of the story that explains why Betafo’s andriana
and andevo are at each other’s throats takes place off-stage between
the Malagasy state and the IMF in Antananarivo’s corridors of power. That is
what really drives the story and that bit of it is pure Graeber. It has no part
in his informants’ narratives, which are as it were epiphenomenal. They are a
derivative discourse that is somehow beside the main point. As historians, they
were severely limited by having no access to sources that would give them a
proper handle on that crucial background. That’s a no doubt rather crude way of
introducing a more general reservation about David’s preoccupation with
narrative. Nobody could possibly doubt its importance for history and politics,
but Lost People repeatedly seems to claim that that’s what history and
politics are. I worry that that leaves an awful lot out. If history is “mainly
about the circulation of stories,” what of all the ecological, epidemiological
and demographic influences on our lives of which we are often unconscious. If political
action “is action that is intended to be recorded or narrated or in some way
represented to others afterwards,” what kind of action is all the effort that
goes into ensuring that so many of the deeds and misdeeds of rulers are never
recorded. Representations, discourses and narratives are unarguably important,
but they should not in my view be allowed to occupy all the space in an
anthropological analysis.
In a podcast discussion of David’s Debt book chaired by
Gillian Tett sometime after his death, one contributor acutely observed that if
there is any one value that informed his work it is freedom. That made me
wonder how Lost People fits in. Though it says little about freedom
explicitly, the ethnography overwhelmingly suggests its absence. This is a
society that seems entirely unable to escape its past. In David’s other
writings, there is usually some possibility of escape from oppression that is
provided by other ideological alternatives. Here the past seems almost
inescapably tyrannical. The Merina are condemned to continually renew the
legacy of guilt and resentment that stems from the history of slavery. And
whether or not David intended us to put the two things together, his
ethnography shows that the burden of the past goes well beyond that. The Merina
ancestors play a significant role in the lives of their descendants, and in
Bloch’s writings their influence seems mostly benign. In Lost People
they come over as much more threatening. They are always telling the living
what they cannot do and they regularly attack them. That provokes the
resentment and hostility of the living, which are dramatically expressed in the
secondary burial when the ancestral remains are assaulted, their bones crunched
up, their dust bound tightly in wrappings, and they are securely locked up in
their tombs once more. History, it seems, is some kind of prison against the
walls of which the living can only bang their heads. Marx had already summed it
brilliantly: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare
on the brains of the living.”
All that prompts a series of comparative questions that I think are
important, but which David passes by – largely I suspect because they fall
outside the narrative frame of his informants. Crucially, why – well after a
century since manumission – are the Merina still so obsessed by slavery? Partly
no doubt on account of its scale and its cruelty, but there must be more to it.
Recent contributions to the regional literature have drawn attention to wide
variations between Malagasy societies in the degree to which slave descent
remains stigmatised, in the extent to which they appear haunted by its history
and in whether they are willing to speak of it at all. Margaret Brown (2004),
and Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda (2018, Regnier 2020), make brave stabs at
specifying the conditions that might explain that variation (differences in
social structure, resources, ethnic mixing and migration, and according to
whether the slaves were Malagasy or of African origin), while Luke Freeman
(2013) writes illuminatingly about the mandatory silence on the subject of his
Betsileo informants and of how that re-entrenches the stigma of slavery by
making it literally unspeakable.
Moving right across to the other side of the Indian Ocean, the
legacy of slavery in Sri Lanka is dramatically different. According to Nira
Wikramasinghe’s (2020) recent book, the collective memory of it has been all
but entirely obliterated. True, it was never on the same scale and was
abolished some decades earlier than in Madagascar, but on her analysis, on the
Ceylon side, the comparison would have to include the way in which the
creolization brought about by slavery seriously challenged doctrines of racial
purity in the south, and the way in which the enslavement of Tamil Untouchables
by high-caste Tamil Vellalars subverted later political projects of Tamil
nationalism in the north. But questions of that comparative order are not part
of David’s enquiry.
The broader terrain on which he does locate his study, my final observation, concerns rather the relationship between history and the social sciences. I confess I find his pitch a bit puzzling and am hoping that somebody might help me out. What he postulates is a broad contrast between the concerns of social science, which have primarily to do with patterns of regularity and predictability, and the concerns of history which deals with the irregular and unpredictable. It’s “the record of those actions which are not simply cyclical, repetitive, or inevitable.” Anthropology should align itself with history. That seems to be above all because it is “the very concern with science, laws, and regularities that has been responsible for creating the sense of distance I have been trying so hard to efface; it is, paradoxically enough, the desire to seem objective that has been largely responsible for creating the impression that the people we study are some exotic, alien, ultimately unknowable other.” Personally, I don’t believe any of that, but what interests me more is whether you will be able to tell me whether this disciplinary opposition has resonances in David’s other work. Or is it, as I suspect, an opportunistic answer to the requirement to justify and explain the literary style he adopted in writing this book? Certainly, Debt seems to be larded with “social science”-type propositions about repetitive, predictable patterns: slavery played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere; bullion currency predominates in periods of generalised violence; coinage, slavery, markets and the state go inexorably together. . . and so it goes on.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Brown, Margaret L. 2004. Reclaiming lost ancestors and
acknowledging slave descent: insights from Madagascar. Comparative
studies in society and history, 46(3), 616-645.
Freeman, Luke. 2013. Speech, silence, and slave descent in
highland Madagascar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3),
600-617.
Graeber, David. 2007. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in
Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
———. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
Regnier, Denis. (2020). Slavery and
Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition. New
York: Routledge.
Regnier, Denis, and Somda, Dominique. (2019). Slavery
and post-slavery in Madagascar: An overview. In T. Falola, D., R. J. Parrott
& D. Porter Sanchez (eds.), African
Islands: Leading Edges of Empire and Globalization. Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press. Pp. 345-369.
Wickramasinghe, Nira. (2020). Slave in a Palanquin. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cite as: Parry, Jonathan. 2021. “The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.” FocaalBlog, 7 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/07/jonathan-parry-the-burdens-of-the-past-comments-on-david-graebers-lost-people-magic-and-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-madagascar/
‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris Gregory delves into the core of what David meant by ‘false coin of our own dreams’, Don Kalb casts a critical lens of his conception of ‘value’ and the constituent imagination. As the first considers David’s work in relation to the economists and their images of wealth, the second looks at its place among the Marxists, drawing a combined picture that situates David’s most challenging book in a refined comparative perspective.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at
the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the
award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at
the University of NSW. He specialises in the political and economic
anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.
Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.
Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s colleagues at the LSE and engaged readers of David’s work. They carry us through the complexity of David’s arguments about history and narrative and raise important questions about whether he engages deeply enough with the socio-economic realities that Malagasy people faced at the time of his research.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at
the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the
award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Maurice Bloch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He has carried out long-term ethnographic research in Madagascar, is the author of In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theories of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, and writes more broadly on power, history, kinship, ritual, and cognition.
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In a little restaurant in the
midst of a foggy day, Talita served me chicken, rice, salads and a glass of
local wine. She said I was the only customer, the only person around. The
mountain area in the Viseu region in northern Portugal usually attracts tourists
for its special landscape; the granite and slate of the mountain as well as the
lush flora, interlaced with moss and lichens. But with the lockdown during the
COVID-19 crisis people stopped coming. There are not many other industries
here, the only other ones are the wine and the wind businesses, the latter of
which is huge. Talita points to the turbines on display on the top of the
cliffs, surrounding us —an infrastructural crown that towers over the valley.
“You see, we have so much wind here, it is our secret resource.” Talita explains that wind is the special,
often unknown ingredient of Portuguese wine. It plays a role as a natural
antibiotic, preserving the integrity of the vineyards without the need for preservatives
and it dries out the plants after it rains. “You can feel it in the wine.” I
sip from the glass, seeking the taste of the wind. It is not just a sensorial attempt.
I am in Portugal to trace how wind has been harnessed, and how an instrument like a green bond has served as both a financial and an energy source. As part of a larger project which looks at the development and impact of green finance from an anthropological perspective, I followed the first Chinese green bond to be issued in Europe as an ethnographic object of research. This not only sheds light on the way a green bond can be traded across boundaries but also on what its impact is on the ground. Green bonds result from the recent development of green finance, which promises to tackle the current ecological crisis with debt instruments. Similarly to conventional “vanilla” bonds, green bonds are fixed-income debt instruments whose risk is bound to the issuer profile but whose proceeds are earmarked in green infrastructure/projects that the issuer pledges to invest in (Jones et al. 2020).
Green bonds bring cheaper capital
for issuers and lower risk returns for investors by offering projects that decarbonize
infrastructures and favor energy transition. Green bonds exemplify how the
financial and the material are deeply interconnected. As I will show, this is
demonstrated by the way the auditing and certification practices that create
and “provoke” the value of the bond as a financial asset (Muniesa 2014; Birch
and Muniesa 2020) intersects with specific material conjunctures and power
hierarchies in which the bond is embedded.
Thus, this analysis explores the
way finance capital valorization is increasingly interwoven in the process of
assetization of nature, and how this is deeply implicated with the political
role of energy infrastructures as both local connective and collective devices.
It shows how at the bottom of this new green financial pyramid lies the
invisible and infinite potential of wind as energy resource (Franquesa 2018).
As green bonds are proclaimed to have an increasingly important role in
harmonizing the often-antithetical duality between sustainability and finance,
an investigation of how they unpack and are deployed on the ground seems
increasingly urgent.
Image 1: Turbine in the Portuguese countryside, Viseu. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
China’s Three Gorges in Portugal
China Three Gorges (CTG) is the state-owned enterprise behind one of the largest dams in the world, the “Three Gorges Dam”; a giant hydroelectric dam celebrated as a triumph of Chinese modern technopower. As the Chinese leader in energy provision, CTG sought ways to penetrate Europe under the encouragement of the Chinese state’s “Go Out” expansion strategy. China not only started to look beyond its borders for sources of energy and natural resources (Mohan and Urban 2019, 248), it also adopted processes of green securitization as a way to boost its position to the world’s most powerful green financial system (Bruckermann 2020) and promoted its ecological civilization (shengtai wenming) outside its borders.
CTG landed in Portugal in 2011
when the country was under the scrutiny imposed by the Troika (the
International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central
Bank) for its high government deficit. Among
other reforms, Portugal was then compelled to eliminate the country’s
growing feed-in tariff debt that compromised Portugal’s path to renewable
energy transition. If a few years earlier Portugal adhered to the EU’s 2009
renewable directive, the aim of which was toachieve 60 per cent of its
electricity generation from renewable energy sources (Andreas et al. 2019), now
it was forced to repay the debt. In the void left by the convoluted austerity
measures promoted by the Troika, Chinese state capital intervened, with CTG
obtaining a stake in the Portuguese energy sector: 21.35 per cent of shares of
the main Portuguese public utility Energias de Portugal (EDP) and 49 per cent
of EDP Renewables (a subsidiary of EDP). Effectively, CTG benefited from this forced privatization, and contributed to a new path in
Portuguese renewable energy transition, a process that the EU had encouraged
but to which it then denied support.
Thus, the CTG became the first
Chinese issuer to release a green bond denominated in Euro and certified and
listed in Europe. However, despite the layers of compliance with the EU
regulations the issuance process does not provide much information about the
nature, the location and the impact of the turbines refinanced by the bond.
Formally, the documents of the bond—the necessary dispostif for the
issuer to certify the truthfulness of its projects and to thus validate the
greenness of the bond—do not specify the location of the wind plants, but name
only the destination countries of the investment. In the case of this specific
bond, the equation of estimated reduced CO2 in wind power in
megawatts is the only formula that speaks of the sustainability of the wind
farms (Sullivan and Hannis 2017). While it is necessary to quantify the
specific number of reduced emissions through wind power, the extent to which
this equation effectively abstracts the essence of the turbines is striking, as
it de-territorializes CTG’s operations in a prospectus which was consequently
validated and certified with no assessment on the location in which these were
implemented.
The green bond, however,
effectively gave consent to CTG to inherit a government permit on the land the
windfarms were built upon, while also benefitting from the previous normative
and labor regime that built them (including the EU feed-in-tariff). In other
words, it allowed CTG to extract a rent from previously funded infrastructures,
with financial capital accruing through the expropriation of a common good in a
process of enclosure of natural resources. The municipality of Viseu had its
benefits, earning central state funds in exchange for land permits, but these
were not extensive. The clausula regulating the funds discounts the price for
land rights if the scope is to build for public interest. Furthermore, the
windfarms refinanced by CTG were just repowering old infrastructure. This
refinancing does not bring much “additionality” at a local level. As many other
large wind infrastructures in marginal areas, the ones in Viseu tended to
reproduce, if not exacerbate, relations of uneven development between rural and
urban areas, as well as public and private investments (Franquesa 2018; Bigger
and Millington 2019).
Image 2: Village surrounded by windfarms, Torres Vedras. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
On the Connectivity and
Collectivity of Green Infrastructures
Infrastructures are political entities and as such “a vantage point for rethinking politics” (Opitz and
Tellmann 2015; Larkin 2013). They determine how the green bond “hits the
ground” at a local level. Taking inspiration from Opitz and Tellmann’s (2015)
reflections on the politics of connectivity and collectivity of
infrastructures, I argue that the technological connectivity of energy
infrastructures enables relates to a notion of collectivity, which explains
their impact at local and social level. If windfarms are essential in
guaranteeing connectivity (as a source of energy provision) with the world,
they are at the same time alien to local forms of collectivity. In fact, the
specific rationalities of programming infrastructures that the green bonds
convey doesn’t have anything to do with the local and political space these
infrastructures establish. Often encouraged by austerity measures, green bonds
can become “the conduit of large capitals, often originating from afar, which
lands in local contexts with little clue on their history and specificity”
(transl. Lipari 2020; Scotti 2020). As
noted above, in their making, green bonds often do not include any information
on where the infrastructures are located, and if and how these will impact
collective communities.
Talita shows me her electricity
bill. A chart on it shows that most of her energy power comes from wind power.
She is happy about this. However, she is also angry and frustrated about
struggling to pay her bills; these are way too high. She doesn’t attribute the
high cost of her energy bills to the source of energy, which is wind, but to
the management and distribution of it. Portugal, and Viseu in particular, is
one the EU regions with the highest rate of energy poverty in the EU. Some
locals I met told me that they only use wood stoves to keep warm in winter;
electricity is too expensive.
People hold contradictory
feelings about the wind farms in their area—a mix of indignation and
appreciation. The appreciation stems from the fact that now the turbines are
considered the banner of Portugal’s success in achieving nearly 80 per cent of
renewable energy. Talita tells me she quite likes them as part of the landscape
and some tourists see them as an attraction. They signify that Portuguese
people care about their land and their country’s path to sustainability. They
also reflect a renewed “energy consensus,” which finds roots in the path
dependency between democratic power and electricity provision (see Mitchell
2017; Boyer 2019) that in Portugal partially guaranteed political legitimacy
from the Carnation revolution onwards. The indignation towards the wind farms
instead emerges in the cleavage between the wind blowing on their land and the
infrastructure that harnesses it now. While wind was once a resource people had
used for generations, benefitting the vineyards and fueling local windmills that
still dot the landscapes of Portuguese countryside—and thus directly
contributing to the community’s economic benefit—people now see the externally
financed and technologically advanced wind turbines next door as something
financially distant and out of reach.
Giulia
Dal Maso is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. She
currently works on the topic of impact/green finance. Her earlier research was
on financialisation in postsocialist contexts; in China and Eastern Europe. She
has published in in Journal of Cultural Economy; Historical Materialism;
Social and Cultural Geography; South Atlantic Quarterly, and has a book out
on Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Financial Labor within the
Chinese state-finance nexus. This
article is based on research contributing to the project ‘The Hau of Finance’,
funded by ERC consolidator grant number 772544.
Bibliography
Andreas, Jan-Justus,
Charlotte Burns, and Julia Touza. 2019. ‘Portugal under Austerity: From
Financial to Renewable Crisis?’ Environmental Research Communications 1
(9): 091005. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ab3cb0
Birch, Kean, and
Fabian Muniesa.2020. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in
Technoscientific Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bigger, Patrick, and Nate
Millington. 2019. “Getting soaked? Climate Crisis, Adaptation Fiance, and
Racialized Austerity.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and
Space 3, no. 3: 601-623.
Boyer, Dominic. 2019.
Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Bruckermann,
Charlotte. 2020. “Green Infrastructure as Financialized Utopia: Carbon offset
forests in China.” In: Chris Hann and Don Kalb (eds) Financialization:
Relational Approaches, pp. 86-110. New York; Oxford: Berghahn.
Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy
frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Larkin Brian. 2013. The Politics
and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:
327-343.
Lipari, Samadhi. 2020. “L’Impatto Territoriale
della Transizione Energetica: un’indagine sulla filiera dell’Eolico nel
Mezzogiorno.” Le Parole e le Cose.
http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=40083
Opitz, Sven, and
Ute Tellmann. 2015. “Europe as infrastructure: Networking the operative
community.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1: 171-190.
Scotti, Ivano. 2020. Vento forte. Eolico e Professioni
della Green Economy. Salerno: Orthotes.
Mitchell, Timothy.
2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso
Books.
Mohan, Giles, and
Frauke Urban. 2019. “China and Global Resources.” In The Palgrave. Handbook
of Contemporary International Political Economy, 245–61. Springer.
Muniesa, Fabian.
2014. The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn.
Routledge.
Jones, Ryan, Tom
Baker, Katherine Huet, Laurence Murphy, and Nick Lewis. 2020. “Treating
Ecological Deficit with Debt: The Practical and Political Concerns with Green
Bonds.” Geoforum 114: 49-58.
Sullivan, Sian, and Mike Hannis. 2017. “Mathematics Maybe, but Not Money.” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. 10.1108/AAAJ-06-2017-2963.
Cite as: Dal Maso, Giulia. 2021. “The Landing of a Chinese Green Bond in Portugal.” FocaalBlog, 13 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/13/giulia-dal-maso-the-landing-of-a-chinese-green-bond-in-portugal/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after
Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)
the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.
The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs.
Renewables
between liberalization and water-grabbing
The
Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy
market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European
capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries
is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU
standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation.
From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should
become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote
renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy
transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In
the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES
market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers
and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12
years. FITs are the means of
subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through
their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of
subsidized electricity prices
If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.
Investors
and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources.
The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist
technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported
by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were
lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists
since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and
dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This
combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low
and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside
the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people
with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the
new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies
that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs
would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned
wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not
to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national
electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through
FITs.
Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).
In
this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were
hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and
international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards,
allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University
of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for
fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the
rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level
of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to
the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018).
This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic
transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially
in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.
Struggles
against SHPPs
I
first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while
the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months
to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing
through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale
agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water
that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers
for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many
visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil
both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes
through room rentals.
Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)
Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).
“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.
Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)
I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.
Unlike
in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the
Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local
communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to
make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for
some Serbian communities.
Whose
market, whose energy transition?
SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.
These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.
While
the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and
regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better
markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market
distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big
investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the
public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources.
This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the
EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national
markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in
Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large
foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.
Such
investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space
to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of
market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs
through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition
to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space
for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and
just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the
Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.
Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.
Bibliography
Franquesa,
Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier
in Spain. Indiana University Press.
Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara
Mountain].
Ristić, Ratko, Ivan
Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane
derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA,
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unmeasurable ecological damage].
Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass renewable energy generation in order to meet the continent’s targets for electrification and forecast growth for energy demand. With a population expected to increase by 800 million by 2040 with rising urbanisation, the most pressing challenge for the continent in the next 20 years will be to meet growing energy demand in a context of partially-present and unreliable infrastructure (IEA 2019). Renewables have been positioned as a technological messiah of development, enabling the continent to “leapfrog” traditional models of centralized grid-based electricity distribution and to radically green its economies (IRENA 2015). The IRENA 2030 roadmap for Africa’s renewable energy, for instance, suggests that renewables could in the next 20 years constitute half of Africa’s total energy mix (IRENA 2015) – pending an estimated USD $70 billion investment a year. Yet current solar PV installed capacity on the continent only accounts for 5GW, or one percent of the global total (around 600GW) (IEA 2019). Visions of a renewable “energy renaissance” (Olopade 2015, 15) in Africa remain blighted by the current reliance and increasing dependence of African countries on imported oil and fossil-based energy use, and of the continued (and new) opportunities for oil and gas extraction. In turn, discourses of energy transition and leapfrogging, with their unilinear trajectories and singular vision of a low-carbon future, tend to obscure the local specificities and histories of energy systems like Ghana’s, for whom renewable energy, in the form of hydropower, has long been its main source of energy generation.
Image 1: Akosombo Dam. Akosombo, Ghana. 2016. Photo by author
In this post, I look at the contested politics of renewable energy in Ghana through a focus on the rise of “corporate solar” during an energy crisis. Ten years ago, shortly after the country discovered oil in large quantities along the coast of the Western Region, it embarked on an ambitious renewable energy path by passing the Renewable Energy Act (2011) (Act 832). The Act aimed to promote and develop the country’s renewable energy resources to ensure the country’s energy security, indigenous capacity and sustainable development. Ghana’s initial target was to increase the renewable electricity generation share, currently at less than one percent, to ten percent by 2020 (Sakah et al. 2017). Ghana thus positioned itself as West Africa’s new “energy frontier”, ushering in a resurgence of fossil extractivism paired with ambitious support for renewable energy technologies (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). In the midst of oil and gas discoveries, renewables have become a strategic, moving target conveniently reformulated to fit political agenda and rhetoric (Obeng-Darko 2019). For reasons of space, I will not elaborate on the ways in which new oil production came to stymie the growth of renewables. Instead, I provide a snapshot of solar power’s new corporate contours of energy privilege in Accra. I identify the emergence of a “renewable divide” in urban Ghana through the rise of “green enclaves” mostly enjoyed by corporate bodies and wealthy individuals. Building on the recent literature in the anthropology of energy challenging the “fantasy” of solar as a promise of democratic energy access (Szeman and Barney 2021), I consider how energy disparities endure under the transition to cleaner and renewable energy sources.
Moratorium
on the Future: Renewables as Stranded Assets
In
2019, at an event on renewable energy opportunities for the private sector, a
representative from the Renewable and Alternative Energy department at the
Ministry of Energy made an unpopular announcement. Referring to the 2011
Renewable Energy Act, he declared that Ghana was not only on track to meet its
target for 10% of total energy generated by renewables, but that it had met its
target “long ago”, since the Akosombo Dam, which was built in 1966 by Kwame
Nkrumah and accounts for 27% of the country’s total capacity, was technically a
source of renewable energy.
Invoking
the country’s proud history of electrification through the Akosombo Dam – a key
project in Nkrumah’s vision for African industrialization and self-sufficiency (Miescher
2014) – and its negligible contribution to global carbon emissions, he declared
the matter closed. Rather than seeking to please international conventions that
did not adequately capture Ghana’s place in the global responsibility framework
for climate change mitigation measures, he concluded that Ghana, like other
African countries, would do well to focus instead on providing enough power for
its people and industries.
Renewable energy companies’ representatives, entrepreneurs and analysts were shocked by the Minister’s backtracking commitment. That same year, as a result of overcapacity on the national grid, the government had issued a moratorium on PPAs (power purchase agreements), banning any addition to its grid until 2027. Since then, utility-scale renewable energy projects have come to a stall, leaving many with “stranded assets” and uncertainty about the future viability of large-scale solar PV and wind farms in the country. Of course, the Minister wasn’t technically wrong to claim the Akosombo Dam as a source of substantial renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation mix. To the renewable energy industry, however, it was perceived as a betrayal of the prevailing understanding that the target referred to additional capacity-building, mostly in the form of solar PVs and wind turbines.
Image 2: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by authorImage 3: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Corporate
Solar & The Renewable Divide
The
moratorium on renewable energy PPAs exacerbated the inequalities that solar
power has created in Ghana’s energyscape. Today, the largest clients for solar
companies in Ghana are banks, hotels and factories – corporate bodies that have
the capital for upfront costs. Following the frequent blackouts during the
energy crisis that best the country in 2014-2016 (locally known as “Dumsor”),
and the steep increase in electricity tariffs, many businesses, particularly
factories in the industrial zones, switched to distributed generation, adopting
solar as a “commercial strategy” to reduce their costs of manufacturing. “Dumsor”
is Twi for “off-on”, a shorthand for the power outages that have become
increasingly common in the country; today, the word has come to index a more
general situation of disenchantment with infrastructure delivery and political
expediency. Solar energy companies were quick to capitalise on the crisis as a
business opportunity. In 2016, when I was researching Dumsor for my PhD thesis,
I spoke to the representative of an Indian solar company with a large global
presence who told me that initial investments in solar energy in Ghana prior to
the crisis had been minimal because the power sector was “too good” and “too
stable” for profit, compared to countries like Nigeria or Egypt that had more
frequent power cuts and thus a bigger potential market.
In
the turn to solar as a panacea for crisis, large corporate bodies removed their
operations from the national grid, alternating between distributed solar and
diesel-powered generator sets. This commercialization of distributed solar has
further strained the financial situation of the national utilities, heavily dependent
on industrial consumers’ revenues to subsidize residential low consumers. This
has resulted in higher electricity tariffs for urban residential consumers,
making electricity increasingly unaffordable to many. The capacity to switch to
solar during a moment of crisis revealed new forms of energy privilege that
take place outside the grid. In turn, the adoption of solar by a select elite (cf.
Günel 2021) has further exacerbated the conditions of energy inequalities and precarity
that many Accra residents live under. In the low-income neighbourhood of
Western Accra where I have been doing fieldwork since 2014, this “renewable
divide”, as we may call it, crossed two types of association. My neighbours and
interlocutors perceived rooftop solar as a luxury item unaffordable to most, or as a humanitarian good reinforcing unequal
trajectories of transition between the global North and the global South.
Here,
“corporate solar” coexists with the “developmental” deployment of small-scale
solar (in the form of solar lanterns and mini-grids) introduced by NGOs and small
social enterprises in rural areas. The parallel trajectories of corporate and
non-profit interests may appear surprising, operating as they do in divergent moral
economies. Both types of solar projects, however, are driven by the same
material, political and economic advantages of solar, as a form of cheap,
reliable and distributed generation that offers autonomy from the
inefficiencies of state infrastructure (Cross 2019, 54).
In
effect, both “developmental” and “corporate” solar contribute to what may be
called the creation of “green enclaves” in the energy landscape of Ghana,
pockets of autonomous, renewable energy that serve both corporate and
humanitarian rationales. I borrow the term “green enclave” from an engineer of
the Volta River Authority (VRA) responsible for the hydropower generation plant
at the Akosombo Dam that provides a large part of Ghana’s generation capacity. At
a convention for renewable energy in Accra in 2019, he described to me plans to
install solar panels on the roofs of Parliament, ministries, and the
residential facilities at the Akosombo dam as “the greening of our enclaves”, a
term that fittingly describes the infrastructural model of renewable energy at
large in the country. It is not surprising that the Minister who had conveniently
re-adjusted Ghana’s renewable energy target himself had solar panels installed on
his house.
In
a context of widespread energy precarity, solar in urban Ghana has exacerbated inequalities of access to reliable
and affordable electricity, creating “green”
geographies of inequality, energy security, and privilege.
Image 4: Solar panel business. 2019. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Conclusion:
Energy Transitions in perspective
Ghana’s case-study
has important implications for understanding energy transitions around the
world. In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil
fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and
imperative. Calls for a renewable energy revolution in Africa are appealing,
but they too often assume that renewables come to fill a gap, a lack, or an
evidential need – in other words, that their benefits are too self-evident to
forgo. Renewables, in this case, belong to the future – and fossil fuels to the
past. In many ways, Ghana presents an inverse scenario of this dominant model
of transition. Having powered most of its electricity needs with hydropower, it
is now switching to increased reliance on thermal power plants and an oil
economy. Further, this past of renewable energy through hydropower is today
invoked to encourage a rush for oil and gas exploitation. In discussions with
energy officials, policymakers, and the general public, I am repeatedly
reminded that “Ghana is a low emitter”, bearing no responsibility to global
greenhouse gas emissions. For a country that relied until recently entirely on
hydropower for electricity, yet currently faces issues of reliability and
affordability (Eshun and Amoako-Tuffour 2016), “sustainability” appears as a
secondary concern to more pressing issues of overcapacity and improving access
to reliable and affordable power. In turn, the adoption of renewables may not
primarily be motivated by questions of environmental ideology, but also as a convenient
(if privileged) solution to crisis. Accounting for the political potential of
renewable energy futures around the world will demand that we grapple with the
contradictory, divergent and conflicted visions and temporalities of energy
transitions, and the relations between crisis and capital, privilege and
poverty through which they come into being.
Pauline Destrée is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She is a member of the ERC-funded research project Energy Ethics. Her research explores energy, extraction, climate change, gender and race in Ghana.
Cross,
Jamie. 2019. “The Solar Good: Energy Ethics in Poor Markets.” Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): 47–66.
Degani,
Michael, Brenda Chalfin, and Jamie Cross. 2020. “Introduction: Fuelling
Capture: Africa’s Energy Frontiers.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
38 (2): 1–18.
Eshun,
Maame Esi, and Joe Amoako-Tuffour. 2016. “A Review of the Trends in Ghana’s
Power Sector.” Energy, Sustainability and Society 6 (1): 9.
Günel,
Gökçe. 2021. “Leapfrogging to Solar.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1):
163–75.
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2019. “Africa Energy Outlook 2019.” Paris: IEA.
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2015. “Africa 2030: Roadmap for a Renewable Energy Future.” Abu Dhabi: IRENA.
Miescher,
Stephan. 2014. “‘Nkrumah’s Baby’: The Akosombo Dam and the Dream of Development
in Ghana, 1952–1966.” Water History 6 (4): 341–66.
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Nana Asare. 2019. “Why Ghana Will Not Achieve Its Renewable Energy Target for
Electricity. Policy, Legal and Regulatory Implications.” Energy Policy
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Dayo. 2015. The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern
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“Towards a Sustainable Electrification in Ghana: A Review of Renewable Energy
Deployment Policies.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 79
(November): 544–57.
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Cite as: Destrée, Pauline. 2021. “Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/pauline-destree-solar-for-the-few-stranded-renewables-and-green-enclaves-in-ghana/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.
Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian
and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically
associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of
workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes,
“contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble
oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more
capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted
not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009),
as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of
production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal
industry in the Rhineland region.
Despite this decrease of economic significance in the
region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably
involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its
mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers.
To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal
basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the
expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the
circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of
fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)
Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.
Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.
The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.
Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.
Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I
regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society
actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a
national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an
opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in
the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village
close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of
feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities.
Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry
for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal
politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’
capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.
Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy
transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by
actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond
institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous
participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some
of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining
activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy
company.
This carbon-democratic entanglement of political
institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the
Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation
in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my
interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers
to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way
to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other
actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective
legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the
power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous
situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific
path of options in their interest.
In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)
Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon. But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.
Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of
direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure
right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about
civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the
photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of
cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.
This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who
criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the
lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses
of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires
of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on
to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years
ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated
closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the
photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting
villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While
the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by
the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.
Around the same time, the energy company came to an
agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto
largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The
uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close
ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but
also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the
energy company is directly involved.
So instead of being perceived as a successful step
towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area,
the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas
as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation
between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this
instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my
interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete
infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation
are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to
consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the
face of impending coal exit.
While the lignite industry will disappear in the
foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main
reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area –
will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion
of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the
context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the
socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a
necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.
Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.
This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants
that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political
institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the
context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the
shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted
by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and
to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014)
to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.
A coalition of local actors more attuned to the
socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this
carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a
joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a
redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future
prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing
et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the
particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own
limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the
Rhineland.
Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de
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Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/
