Discussants:
Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez
When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he struck a chord in the public imagination. As soon as the article went up, the Strike! website went down for too much traffic. The article quickly became viral and was translated into at least a dozen languages. Before long, quotes from the piece appeared in the form of guerrilla posters on the London Underground with messages such as: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”. The essay’s main thesis was that work had become an end in itself to sustain the logic of neoliberal capitalism, thereby contradicting the myth of capitalist productivity. In 2018, David decided to turn this brief essay into a fully-fledged book with the intention to flesh out the argument more systematically. In this final instalment of the series, Massimilano Mollona and Andrew Sanchez move beyond the buzz sparked by the essay to sift through the conceptual and empirical claims presented in the book. Weaving personal working experience with anthropological theories of work and value (Sanchez), and considering it from the lens of Weberian and Marxist understandings of capitalism (Mollona), they show where the book succeeds and where, in their view, it is found wanting.
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.
Massimiliano Mollona is
Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University
and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths
College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and
political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently
working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in
collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de
Janeiro.
Andrew Sanchez is Associate
Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has
published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital:
Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in
an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the
Imaginationco-edited with Catherine
Alexander.
David
Graeber’s wide-ranging – and, appropriately, sometimes wildly swashbuckling –
set of essays sketches his anarchist utopia by default, as a social world free
of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he writes, is “stupid” and “absurd.” Stupid or
otherwise, it represents the effect of a vast and powerful set of forces
operating through the mechanisms of the modern state, of which the United
States is both example and exceptional case. Its goal, in Graeber’s gloomy
vision, is to destroy the stability and viability, both social and economic, of
entire populations, while congealing ever larger portions of the world’s wealth
into ever fewer hands; its stupidity lies in refusing all alternative
interpretations to official Diktat (see especially pp. 80-81). Graeber
largely ignores bureaucracy’s many non-state versions, a choice that reflects a
bias toward current American uses of the term. Instead, he plays creatively and
contrastively with the British self-view as anti-bureaucratic (p. 13). This
distinction nevertheless entails excessive generalization and elides differing
historical trajectories. It is hard now to write critically of Graeber’s
provocative thought, grounded as it was in an uncompromising search for social
justice and a becoming modesty about the originality of his own ideas, without
sounding petty. The significance of his many projects, however, demands both
generosity and critique.
To
that end, it seems useful to begin by asking whether stupidity rather than (perhaps
deliberate) tautology or ritualism, the latter explicitly acknowledged by
Graeber (p. 50; see also Hinton 1992; Herzfeld 1992), is the basis of bureaucracy.
In many societies, a clear distinction is made between sly cunning and
intelligence of morally neutral (or even foolishly innocent) stamp (e.g., Schneider
1969). In his eagerness to debunk the crasser versions of pseudo- or
meta-Foucauldian analysis, which at least attribute agency to state operators, Graeber
seems to discount the slyness of those bureaucrats who realize that getting
people to monitor themselves furthers the state’s rather than the public’s interests.
As I have recently noted, the complexity and unpredictability of the various
national COVID-19 testing requirements force nervous international travelers to
monitor their own actions with ever-increasing unease (Herzfeld 2022a). Graeber
also overlooks the helpfulness of some bureaucrats, who may even – indeed,
often do – collude with their clients by shifting the interpretation of the rules.
Image 1: Book cover of The Utopia of Rules
Graeber does distinguish between the system and its operators, but one might wish for a more detailed exploration of where the two diverge. He tells us very little about how agile operators actually bend the system to meet their own and their clients’ exigencies – apparent exceptions that may actually confirm his argument since, by generating a sense of the obligatory gratitude of client to patron, they further weaken resistance to encompassing bureaucratic structures. This is implicit in his argument, but his broad generalizing prevents readers from seeing how the wiliness actually works. Within the utopia of rules, continual adjustment occurs in the form of supposed illegality lurking in the very implementation of legality (see, e.g., Little and Pannella 2021). Graeber’s observation (p. 214) that legality is born of illegal actions is also historically consistent with the crisis of legitimacy posed by the persistence of rebellious forces claimed as heroic forebears by nationalistic state regimes (see Herzfeld 2022b: 39-40). Graeber does nevertheless expose some real cunning, notably when he points out the discrepancy between the virtually flawless operation of ATMs and the deeply flawed operation of American voting machines (p. 35). It is hard to believe, he suggests, that such a glaring discrepancy could be unmotivated; both trajectories serve the same general politico-financial interests.
Graeber
is on firmer (because more explicit) ground when he suggests an analogy, albeit
an inverse one, between bureaucracy and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism: whereas
bureaucratic logic suppresses insight, the equally narrow and schematic analyses
of the structuralist master open up exciting new paths. This is surely a more
productive comparison than dismissing one system as stupid and the other as
genial. Both systems are concerned with classification, one to impose it and
the other to decode it. But Lévi-Strauss would never have dismissed indigenous
taxonomies as stupid; nor would any anthropologist since Malinowski have
considered such a characterization as other than the expression of a colonial
and racist contempt for “the Other.” In rightly up-ending power by treating
bureaucracy as the Other, Graeber nevertheless refuses it the minimal respect that
he surely would have demanded of his students for the taxonomies of other
cultural traditions.
It
is here that his activism seeps into his anthropology and exposes, as he surely
must have desired, the difficulty of trying to do anthropology, especially activist
anthropology, in one’s own milieu and at such an inclusive level. While calling
bureaucracy stupid seems epistemically retrograde, it may eventually facilitate
new political insights – if, that is, someone undertakes the necessary ethnographic
labor. The gap between insight and demonstration is one of several tensions exposed,
but not necessarily resolved, in Graeber’s book. Some of his more speculative
leaps of faith are persuasive – but I found myself wondering whether that was
simply because I was already predisposed to agree, and what unexpected
subtleties a more ethnographic approach might introduce.
Graeber’s
claim that technological advances were deliberately advanced by a capitalist
cabal evilly intent on reducing humanity to a collective serfdom does appear to
be on target for the period he describes. He provides convincing examples of
how specific technologies, poised to take off in directions anticipated by
science fiction and other fantasy literatures, have clearly faltered. Whether
this remains true – whether his account is more than a conspiracy theory – has
perhaps become more questionable even in the short time since his death. More
problematic still is his confident attribution of collective intent on the part
of neoliberal capitalists to condemn the entire world to servitude. While it is
apparently true that during the current pandemic the super-rich have vastly increased
their wealth while the numbers of the truly poor in the U.S. alone have soared
(see Luhby 2021), the idea of a concerted intentionality risks reproducing
precisely the kind of conspiracy theories that favor right-wing panic-mongering
(although, unlike the latter, it stands a reasonable chance of eventual
vindication). Here, too, he implies an unprovable ability to read collective
minds. Moreover, I am unsure that animals are incapable of “creating
self-conscious fantasy worlds” (p. 171). Indeed, how can he be so sure?
Such
problems typically arise when anthropologists shift from familiar engagements
with ethnographic detail to grapple with the big picture. Graeber, an anarchist
activist for social justice, was skilled in both practices, but in this book
the big picture, along with the speculative reasoning that it tends to generate,
predominates. Although educated in the U.S. in what is there called cultural
anthropology, and despite his scathing (and largely well-conceived) critique of
“globalization,” Graeber does not attend to cultural differences that may
affect bureaucratic habits. While too generously acknowledging my own study of
bureaucracy, he complains that virtually all the anthropologists who have
written about bureaucracy “almost never describe such arrangements as foolish
or idiotic” (pp. 237-38n42; cf. Herzfeld 1992). There is, as I have just
indicated, good reason for this apparent omission.
With
regard to mind-reading, anthropologists do often report on a range of emotional
reactions, from astonishment to contempt, that their informants display toward bureaucratic
arrangements. It is expressed attitudes that they describe, not
innermost thoughts. Indeed, they often also note their informants’ reluctance
to read minds (Robbins and Rumsey 2008). The reported reactions and the
accompanying skepticism are ethnographically revealing to a level that
Graeber’s broad-brush descriptions of capitalism, bureaucracy, and globalization
do not always achieve. His description of globalization, in particular, sweeps
over cultural differences that – as, for example, James L. Watson (2006) argued
so lucidly for consumption in Asian McDonald’s restaurants – may significantly affect
how we understand the local significance of apparently global phenomena.
In
this sense, all bureaucratic practices must be understood in terms of cultural
values shared by bureaucrats and their clients. That argument also fits
Graeber’s excellent debunking (pp. 166-174) of bureaucracy’s claim to pure
rationality. When one side makes excuses that its interlocutors might indeed
view as lamentably stupid, the other side accepts them, not necessarily because
they are believable, but because they are conventional. They are a means for
both sides to manage otherwise difficult situations, their effective
performance always, from one situation to another, mediated by the tension
between the conventions for excuse-making and the inventiveness of those involved.
This illustrates what I have called “social poetics” (e.g., Herzfeld 2016), a
concept that in some respects fits nicely with Graeber’s focus on imagination
(see especially his illuminating analogy with the structure and playfulness of
language, pp. 199-200, a passage that beautifully exemplifies the important but
often-forgotten principle that an explanation based on language does not
necessarily reduce all social phenomena to discourse).
An
effective bureaucrat – though not necessarily a good one – manages, while
appearing to insist on rigid adherence to the rules, to operate them with
considerable ingenuity and, yes, imagination. Graeber barely considers the
extent to which bureaucrats must deploy the unspoken local social rules in
addition to the “stupid” requirements of the official system. While such
seesawing between convention and invention is apparently common to all state
bureaucracies, the specific modalities may vary enormously. The unfinished task
Graeber has bequeathed to his successors is the ethnographic exploration of
high-end bureaucratic management. Cultural specificities will loom large in
such studies – all the more critically inasmuch as the managers invoke
supposedly universal principles to justify their actions.
Let
me illustrate with a simple example. During early sojourns in the Netherlands,
I found an unsmiling bureaucracy that seemed obsessed with observing the rules.
Gradually, however, I learned that, if I met the initial refusal to make an
exception or interpret the rules creatively with polite sadness rather than
anger, I would subsequently discover that the functionaries had done exactly
what I wanted even after declaring it to be impossible; they were experts at identifying
exceptions that ultimately validated the system of rules while allowing them to
satisfy their clients’ needs. This pattern, I soon discovered, extended from
relatively highly-placed officials to restaurant staff members. Other
foreigners subsequently confirmed my impressions; some Dutch friends, perhaps bemused,
nevertheless also largely agreed.
Despite
such assurances, so sweeping a characterization of Dutch bureaucratic practices
is unquestionably over-generalized. If that concern holds for a few sentences
about one country, however, how much more it must apply to the Graeber’s far
larger claim that bureaucracy is invariably stupid. Stupidity does not inhere
in a system; it describes the alleged capacities of those who operate the
system or the capacities they would like to produce in others (p. 95). To blame
the stupid system is an almost proverbial excuse, in many cultural contexts,
for failures of both bureaucrat and client. Adroit management of excuses may
signal the exact opposite of stupidity.
Graeber’s
image of bureaucracy is largely based on the American experience; he posits
Madagascar contrastively as, for historical reasons, a place where bureaucracy
has little impact on everyday life. But there are vast numbers of intermediate
cases (as he recognizes, p. 22). While it is true that the American model
threatens to dominate much of the world for reasons that Graeber ably lays out
for us as he documents its seemingly inexorable, creeping expansion, it
sometimes blinds us to the potentiality for pragmatic variation concealed within
its systemic similarity. Hence the unresolved tension in Graeber’s text between
the fine ethnographer-historian’s sensitivity to local detail and the political
activist’s tendency to universalize local experience.
Some
of the generalizations hold true for demonstrable historical reasons. Even then,
however, the pandemic-like spread of bureaucratic practices – what Graeber
(p.9) calls the Iron Law of Liberalism – is filtered through widely differing sociocultural
expectations. Graeber’s Iron Law bears an uncanny (and unacknowledged)
resemblance to “Parkinson’s Law” [Parkinson 1958], a similar elaboration of
common knowledge; while Graeber may be right to argue (pp. 51-52) that
anthropologists have been reluctant to tackle the boring paperwork aspects of
bureaucracy, writers like Parkinson can perhaps be read as ethnographers if not
as anthropologists in the strict sense. Yet the differences among bureaucratic
systems are also important, even with regard to the paperwork (see Hull 2012). Anyone
who has experienced the Chinese version of the academic audit culture, which
superficially appears to follow the American model in its schematic numerology,
quickly apprehends the huge difference in application and impact. Local actors
play by local understandings of the rules, as Watson’s observations on
globalization would lead us to expect.
In
keeping with his critique of its reductionism and reliance on schematization, Graeber
sees bureaucracy as the antithesis of imagination, which he identifies with
revolution (pp. 92-93). This insight echoes the conventional understanding that
bureaucracy often does repress imaginative practices. In reality, however, considerable
inventiveness may go into bureaucratic management – something that Graeber
repeatedly acknowledges, by showing how “interpretative labor” is carried out
largely by the subaltern classes, including lower-level bureaucrats, since
those with power feel no pressing need to interpret anything their supposed
inferiors do. (The wealthy often don’t even bother to pay taxes; let the
minions sort all that out – and, if fines are levied, they will only affect a
tiny fraction of the offenders’ wealth.) It is not only the surveilled who must
master interpretative techniques; those conducting the surveillance must do the
same inasmuch as they will have to file reports with their superiors. This emphasis
on the hierarchical positioning of bureaucrats accords with Graeber’s view –
generously and convincingly attributed to feminist inspiration – of where
interpretative labor occurs.
Ethnographic research on policing (e.g., Cabot 2018; Glaeser 1999; Haanstad 2013; Oberfield 2014) complicates – but does not entirely invalidate – Graeber’s generic intimations that police (whatever other goals they may pursue) rarely tackle crime directly (p. 73) and that bureaucracy precludes the exercise of intelligence. Graeber might have argued, reasonably enough, that it is not bureaucrats who are stupid but the bureaucracy. Eliding the actors into the abstract category, however, is a dangerous source of confusion – actually, in Graeber’s own terms, a bureaucratic one.
Graeber’s
treatment of police is consistent with his anarchism. There can be no question but
that in the American and British contexts it is, sadly, borne out by acts of
racist and sexist brutality only recently acknowledged by the media and by the
law. Here, however, we might ask whether the turning of the tide (if what we
are seeing is more than a mere flash in the pan) parallels a potential recovery
of technological mastery and inventiveness. If so, Graeber’s dystopian vision
of a world increasingly dominated by a few ruthless, super-rich men, bent on
thwarting scientific advances and socio-economic equality alike, might be an
overstatement or, at least, a genuine insight into a situation that has nonetheless
already begun to change. Agreed, evidence for a return to a more imaginative
world is still remarkably thin. Graeber presumably entertained hopes, however,
that the world might be re-enchanted, even, perhaps, acquiring a reconfigured
and tamed bureaucracy (see p. 164). Only by means of such a conviction could he
have sustained his passionate activism.
Here
I am struck by the accuracy of the distinction he draws between his concept of
imagination and Benedict Anderson’s (1991). While some contest his criticism of
Anderson as too narrowly concerned with newspapers and nationalism, the
difference is striking. Anderson’s use of imagination has more in common with
the semiotic concept of iconicity (we imagine our co-nationals to resemble ourselves),
whereas Graeber saw in imagination the recognition of radical difference and
innovation. Here again, however, I worry that Graeber’s monochromatic portrayal
of bureaucracy – its lack of cultural specificity – overlooks pre-existing and
sometimes highly localized cultural predispositions as well as the presence of
skilled and sympathetic actors.
Anthropology
handed a poisoned chalice to the bureaucratic apparatus of the state in the
nineteenth century: the concept of reified, bounded cultures. Historically, our
discipline should be taking more responsibility than it has usually admitted
for providing the instrument of ideologies that too easily morphed into racism
and fascism. By talking about “the state,” Graeber skates around the deployment
of the concept of national identity and the threat that this poses to the
masses who get dragged into wars and humiliating labor conditions in the name
of national redemption – a story that largely confirms his understanding of how
capital works on the global stage. The ease with which the idea of the state
gets fused with that of the nation-state has recently led me to express
a preference for the intentionally clumsier term “bureaucratic ethnonational
state” (Herzfeld 2022b). Ethno-nationalism is one of the dirtiest tricks
perpetrated against the poor by a self-indulgent leadership. It both deploys
local cultural features and is inflected by them; its appeal, framed as
liberation, can reinforce local warlordism and global domination at the same
time. Anthropological analysis threatens it precisely because it leads us back
to the cultural specificities that give the global structures of power their
local traction; it also shows that a unidirectional model of globalization is
as facile as unidirectional models of social evolution (see, e.g., Tambiah 1989).
Graeber
does display some affection for evolutionary conceptions of political life, as
when he displays fascination with “heroic” histories. His historical vision of
the heroic, however, has more in common with Vico than with Darwin; he does not
see heroic societies as representing a single stage of past evolution. Rather, he
seeks to recuperate from these exceptional historical moments the power of
imagination, now divorced from aristocratic control, as an antidote to the
numbing regularities of bureaucracy and as a path to the resuscitation of
technological ingenuity.
Graeber
describes vast areas of bureaucratic mismanagement with impressive, terrifying
accuracy. He is at his best when he ethnographically describes the area of
bureaucratic activity that he knows best, that of the academic world. Some
other autobiographical moments are ethnographic gems in their own right,
notably the sad account of his tussles with the health bureaucracy as his
mother lay fatally stricken – a striking disproof of his contention (p. 52)
that bureaucratic procedures cannot be subject to lively thick description. Moreover,
no academic could seriously dispute his engaging account of how increasing
amounts of scholars’ time, as well as that of doctors and other health professionals,
are gobbled up by deadening, useless audits (Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern
2000).
Yet
resistance remains possible. Graeber correctly observes that no matter what we write,
the rest of the world barely even notices. We should nevertheless try to find a
way to make the world care; the effective suppression of our calling stifles
an important and useful commentary on the state of the world at large. If that
were not the case, why would Graeber have written this book? Why would anyone
not simply down tools and give up? (Of course, some have; but theirs is a
dispiriting surrender to what I call “vicarious fatalism” – the apparently
axiomatic ascription of passivity to the underdog by those with power in
virtually every social inequality known to humankind.)
Resistance
is not easy; some of the impediments are present in our own educational and
cultural backgrounds. Graeber’s use of classical Greek (and more generally
European) history, for example, hints at the difficulty that all Western
anthropologists experience in standing back from their own assumed intellectual
and cultural heritage, as well as the intellectual rewards of making that
effort. Note, for example, his Vichian emphasis on etymological links between
the ancient Greek polis and the modern word “police” and its cognates in
multiple languages (not, however, including modern Greek, in which the police is
astinomia, the controller of urban space; see also Cabot 2018). The
Latin-derived terms “civility” and “civilization” hold similarly rich and
ambiguous implications.
“Polite,”
on the other hand, probably does not, pace Graeber, share the Greek
derivation of “police,” but from a Latin word denoting “cleansing” (with sinister
echoes of Mary Douglas’ [1966] perennially useful analysis of purity and
pollution). It, too, has a richly ambiguous etymology. “Civility” suggests, as
does the Italian use of the adjective civile (see Herzfeld 2009: 182) or
even the English “civil society,” that sometimes being civil demands facing the
police down when they overstep the boundaries of decency. The polity (classical
Greek politeia) may not be a polis or a police state. It may
represent an archaic structure pushed aside by violent modernity or it may be a
completely novel one such as those imagined by intentional communities. But the
possibility of resistance to the bureaucratic ethnonational state, with its
police enforcement of conformity to repressive cultural norms, is essential to
ensuring a bearable future and is the best way of ensuring civility.
The
bureaucratization of morality is decidedly uncivil. An example of audit culture
that constrains civility (not to speak of academic freedom!) appears in the bureaucratization
of research ethics – a confusion of true ethics (Graeber’s scathing discussion
of value-free ethics, pp. 166-67, is especially pertinent here!) with its
simulation (a term Graeber usefully derives from Baudrillard and Eco). This perversion
of ethics is especially painful for anthropologists because the very
unpredictability of their research defies the scientistic logic of bureaucracy
(“proposal design”). That logic also ignores the cultural specificity of ethics
– an instance of what Graeber (p. 75) calls “ignoring all the subtleties of
real social existence” – and now, through the imposition of rules backed by fear
of legal consequences, bids fair, if we fail to resist, to make ethnography
itself impossible. Occasional revolts against the centrality of ethnography because
of past ethical errors risk collusion in perpetuating the injustices of the
present, much as segments of the Left, in Graeber’s account (p. 6), have
sometimes colluded in spreading the miasma of bureaucracy-speak and its
oppressive effects. Intensified bureaucracy is no solution to ethnography’s
ethical dilemmas. On the contrary, here as much as anywhere it conforms to
Graeber’s striking insight (p. 103) that bureaucratic violence is less about
making people talk than forcing them to shut up. Ethnographers, too, must
resist being silenced by the avalanche of paperwork.
Ethnography,
in fact, can expose abuses of power. It therefore poses a genuine threat to the
powerful; ethics regulations not only protect universities from being sued but
provide a potential shield for powerful bureaucrats should the anthropologists
get too nosy. These authority figures also have resources of their own. A few
hardy anthropologists have nevertheless pushed forward with pathbreaking
ethnographic studies of dominant financial institutions. Among these, Douglas
Holmes (2013), examining the management practices of central banks, offers a clear
demonstration of why, as Graeber saw (p. 20), the bourgeoisie so passively
obeys the financial bureaucracy. Such studies usefully complicate Graeber’s
claim that the weak necessarily perform more interpretative labor than the powerful;
they also pierce the iron shield of ethics, with its talk of confidentiality,
transparency, and impartiality (otherwise, significantly, called indifference;
see p. 184). Holmes, for example, examines the methods with which bank
officials study the public – all of them virtual anthropologists, and with nary
an ethics committee to restrain them.
Graeber’s
book is in every sense a tour de force. I have focused this discussion on
a set of interlocking points that strike me as particularly timely for the
discipline and for the current state of the world. The book’s main provocation lies
in Graeber’s critical reading of both the dominant economic system and the
mass-produced and imitative critiques of it that sometimes pass muster as
serious academic commentary (or at least satisfy audit-culture assessments for tenure
and promotion). Its potential weaknesses lie in his avoidance of specificity where
critics could easily find counter-factual examples in local contexts. Offsetting
its occasional narrowness of cultural focus is the corrective that it offers to
assumptions about universal value and globalization. A good ethnography is
always more than simply a description of a local society. The Utopia of
Rules is much more – and at times rather less – than an analysis of
bureaucracy. It is a challenge still waiting to be taken up “in the field” –
wherever that may be. It retains the potential to contradict its own pessimism
and affect the trajectory of human society in the years, even decades, ahead.
Michael Herzfeld
is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department
of Anthropology at Harvard University and IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage
Studies Emeritus at the University of Leiden, is the author of
twelve books, most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling
Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, and also including Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology
and The Making of Modern Greeceand The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic
Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of
crypto-colonialism.
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Watson, James L. 2006. Introduction: Transnationalism, Localization, and Fast Foods in East Asia. In James L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, (2nd edition; Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 1-38.
Cite as: Herzfeld, Michael. 2022. “The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/09/michael-herzfeld-the-slyness-of-stupidity-a-commentary-on-david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules/
If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy. The first instalment of David’s thought on the topic came in his 2006 Malinowski lecture at the LSE – ‘Dead zones of the imagination’ – where he described a fundamental link between the blindness of bureaucracy and the nature of structural violence. The lecture later became an essay in ‘The Utopia of Rules’ (2015). The book significantly expanded the discussion to cover technology and popular culture, making a case for the stupidity of bureaucracy that anticipated his later work on bullshit jobs. Here, Michael Herzfeld dissects the merits and flaws of Graeber’s thought-provoking ideas on bureaucracy and examines whether they hold up to ethnographic scrutiny. For this week only, we have the papers, but not the videos, of the seminar. On the scheduled day of the seminar, the LSE faculty went on strike to fight against poor working conditions in academia that are compounded precisely by the kind of bureaucratic structures that David attacked in the 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.
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus at the University of Leiden, is the author of twelve books, most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, and also including Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology and The Making of Modern Greeceand The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of crypto-colonialism.
I would never have expected
Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this
past year has been somehow unexpected, from the coup itself, in the early hours
of 1 February, to the scale of the popular reaction. Friends who expressed little
interest in politics or protest during my fieldwork, only a few years ago, have
been in the streets. Striking has been the role of young women—women like Ruth,
a Christian born in the Chin Hills, who works at a church in Yangon where I did
much of my research.
As the uprising grew through
February, Ruth’s posts filled my Facebook feed: selfies in Covid-19 masks amid
swelling crowds around the Sule Pagoda; memes mocking the generals behind the
coup; photographs of victims shot by security forces. One thing not surprising has
been the brutality of the crackdown. As it intensified in late February and
early March, Ruth’s posts showed her wearing not just a face mask, but also a
helmet and goggles.
As Pentecostals, believers
like Ruth have also been praying. One video streamed via Facebook Live had
about twenty members of her church engaged in a session of collective prayer,
entreating God to protect Myanmar. Such prayers were commonplace during my fieldwork.
But this one resonated with the revolution then building momentum in the
streets: put to the rhythm of a familiar call-and-response chant made famous in
the 1988 uprising, the prayer replaced the usual rejoinder “do ayei! do ayei!”
(“Our cause! Our cause!”) with “Amen! Amen!”
What draws these Christians so fully into the revolution through protest and prayer? There’s been much said about how a decade’s experience of a more open public sphere makes return to military rule impossible to countenance. Many have also remarked on how this moment has transcended lines of difference that have long animated Myanmar’s politics, with Chin Christians and even Rohingya Muslims manning barricades alongside majority Burman Buddhists.
But maybe part of an
answer also lies in the imagination.
I say this, in part,
because of another question I’ve had, watching Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
unfolding from afar over social media: What would David Graeber make of this?
Graeber never wrote about Myanmar, but he was, of course, deeply interested, intellectually and practically, in revolution. And for him, the question of revolution was tied to the question of imagination. In one essay (2007), he distinguished a “transcendent” form of imagination, the terrain of fiction and make-believe, of “imaginary creatures, imaginary places … imaginary friends”, from an “immanent” form, one not “static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world … ”. It was the latter, for Graeber, that had revolutionary potential.
While Graeber never wrote
about Myanmar, had he not died in September 2020, that might not have remained
true for long.
Some years ago, he agreed to write the foreword to a new edition of Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma. The foreword was never finished, so we can’t know what Graeber would have written. We can’t know how he would have engaged with Raymond Firth’s original, laudatory foreword. We can’t know how he would have dealt with Leach’s later reappraisal, when he acknowledged that he had somewhat essentialised gumsa and gumlao, the Kachin categories famously at the heart of his analysis. We can’t know how he would have situated the book in relation to debates in anthropology in the decades since, or how he would have dealt with critiques that have been directed towards it, including from Kachin scholars (e.g., Maran 2007), and especially amid growing calls to meaningfully decolonise the study of Myanmar.
What we do know is that Graeber was a fan. “Edmund Leach,” he once wrote, “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Leach was, for Graeber, “a model of intellectual freedom”. References to Leach appear across Graeber’s body of work, including citations of the younger Leach and the older Leach following his so-called “conversion” to structuralism—a break which, as Chris Fuller and Jonathan Parry note, has probably been overdrawn. “Not only are there striking continuities in the sort of questions Leach asked of data,” they write, “and the sort of answers he offered, but more importantly he kept faith throughout his career with one broad vision of the anthropological enterprise” (1989: 11).
If the same might be said of Graeber, it’s not the only way in which the two men were similar. Both thought across relatively long stretches of time: 140 years in the case of Leach’s study of the oscillations in Kachin political systems; millennia in the case of Graeber’s work on debt and his recent collaboration with David Wengrow. Both were also prolific and lucid writers, eager to engage audiences beyond anthropology—including, incidentally, via the BBC, which broadcast Leach’s Reith Lectures in 1967 and Graeber’s 12-part series on debt in 2016.
What James Laidlaw and
Stephen Hugh-Jones (2000:3) write about Leach could just as easily be said of
Graeber, that “the lessons of anthropological inquiry were relevant to the
everyday moral and political questions that were being debated all around him …”.
Both were interested in the micro and macro forces that impacted the production
of knowledge in anthropology, and both reflected on how their own biographies
and albeit very different insider/outsider positions in the discipline shaped
the work they produced (Leach 1984; Graeber 2014).
There are, however, few
references to Political Systems in Graeber’s corpus, which raises another
question: What would he have written in this foreword?
It’s impossible to attempt
a definite answer. Graeber was far too creative for that. But it’s probably not
going too far out on a limb to suggest that imagination might have been a
central theme. For what are the political categories of gumsa and gumlao
analysed by Leach if not products of the “immanent” mode of imagination that
interested Graeber? One reference that does appear at several points in
Graeber’s writing is to a point Leach made in his short 1982 treatise simply
titled Social Anthropology. There, Leach suggests that the distinction
between humans and non-humans is not that the former have a soul, but that they
are able to conceive—or imagine—that they have one, and thus, that it is
imagination, not reason, that sets humans apart. On this point, Graeber also
(e.g., 2001: 58) cites Marx’s observation that, unlike a spider weaving its web
or a bee building its nest, “the [human] architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality.”
If imagination is, for
Leach and Graeber, a general feature of the human condition, it’s also one
thrown into relief at certain moments, like moments of revolution. “When one tries to bring an
imagined society into being,” Graeber wrote, “one is engaging in revolution”
(2001: 88). It’s maybe
not too much of a stretch, then, to also imagine that, if he had been writing
the foreword to Political Systems this past year, Graeber would be
attending to the revolution underway in the valleys and the highlands that
feature in Leach’s book: a revolution whose participants, like Ruth, imagine
not just a political system in Myanmar with the military no longer in charge,
but a society transformed in myriad other ways.
Image 2: Book cover of Political Systems of Highland Burma by Edmund Leach
Around 2011, as Myanmar started to emerge from five decades of military rule, Ruth’s church and other Pentecostals intensified their evangelism efforts, seeking to win converts in a country where about 90 percent of the population are Buddhist. Taking advantage of the political opening, and with an eye to the spiritual rupture it was thought to herald, these Christians began to preach more energetically than they had in years.
But even before the coup, there was evidence that the rupture might not be forthcoming: a sense that liberalisation was benefitting only well-connected cronies; new forms of censorship impinging on what was supposed to be a newly open public sphere; an ascendent Buddhist nationalism rendering increasingly precarious the position of minorities, and playing out horrifically in the treatment of the Rohingya. There were also few signs that Buddhists were suddenly interested in Jesus. This did little to dent my friends’ commitment to evangelism, however. “God works in his own time,” was the frequent refrain.
How, in this understanding,
to make sense of the coup?
The immediate days after the military seized control, detaining elected leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, were strangely quiet. Healthcare workers and teachers were among the first to go on strike. Garment workers followed soon after. As the civil disobedience movement took shape, more people took to the streets. By the middle of February, tens of thousands of protesters were assembling each day in Hledan, a busy commercial neighbourhood near Yangon University.
Ruth was among them. We’d
been in touch since the hours following the coup. She sent photos and videos of
the swelling crowds. In one image her white sneakered foot stamps on a poster
of the face of Min Aung Hlaing, the general behind the coup, taped to the
pavement for protesters to walk over. In another she holds up a placard with
the words #justiceformyanmar alongside an image of Aung San Suu Kyi, the
imprisoned NLD leader. “Young people will not be turning back,” she wrote in one
message.
The spokesperson for the
parallel government established by the parliamentarians deposed by the coup has
been a prominent Chin Christian doctor, Dr Sasa. At certain points protest signs
featuring his face seemed to eclipse those featuring Aung San Suu Kyi’s. In
late February Ruth posted an old photo of her with Dr Sasa, with the caption,
“May the Lord bless you and use you for our nation and His kingdom.” Dr Sasa’s
role has been particularly important to my Chin friends, accustomed, like other
ethnic minorities, to being treated like second class citizens, if citizens at
all, by a state whose leadership has been dominated by Burman Buddhists.
The literature on ethnicity
in Burma has often been in dialogue with Leach, for better and for worse. His
arguments in Political Systems are so well known to anthropologists that
they barely need repeating. His analysis of oscillations between political
categories—the hierarchical gumsa and the egalitarian gumlao—is
deployed to attack the equilibrium assumptions of his structural-functionalist
colleagues, and their allied tendency to treat ethnic groups as bounded units. Social
systems, Leach argues, do not correspond to reality. They are models used, by
the anthropologist and those they study, to “impose upon the facts a figment of
thought”.
Such models find their
clearest expression, for Leach, in myth and ritual, which present the social
order in its ideal form, conjuring it by acting “as if” it already existed. Such
a model, importantly, does not float freely from the messy world of social facts;
it “can never have an autonomy of its own” (1964: 14).
Critics of Leach have homed
in on his nonchalant confession, toward the end of the book, that he is
“frequently bored by the facts” (1964: 227). This attitude, they charge, means
that his analysis floats more than a little too freely. “[O]ne might with
justification,” write Mandy Sadan and Francois Robbine, “accuse Leach of
reducing the Kachin sphere to a kind of intellectual laboratory without any
expression in reality because of the way in which he moulded his case study to
a theory, rather than the other way round” (2007: 10-11).
I’m sure Graeber would
have dealt with these criticisms in his foreword, but less certain what he
would have said about them, or how his own view of the relationship between
facts and theory would have shaped his assessment. My main hunch, though, is
that Graeber would have devoted much of his foreword to what Leach tells us
about the “as if”—the otherwise glimpsed in ritual and myth but still tethered
to social action. Such an otherwise, the space of the immanent imagination,
drew Graeber’s attention throughout his anthropology, even when he wasn’t using
the term.
Consider his foreword to
another book, The Chimera Principle by Carlo Severi, which deals with
the relationship between ritual objects, memory, and the imagination. Graeber praises
the book for showing that “imagination is a social phenomenon, dialogic even, but
crucially one that typically works itself out through the mediation of objects
that are … to some degree unfinished, teasingly schematic in such a way as to,
almost perforce, mobilize the imaginative powers of the recipient to fill in
the blanks” (p. xv). When communicated in the subjunctive mood of myth or
ritual, such an imagination can, to use a term of which Graeber was fond, prefigure
realities to come.
The crackdown in Myanmar grew more brutal through March. Protesters like Ruth continued to be in the streets. By late February, we’d shifted our conversation from Facebook Messenger to Signal because of the safer encryption that app offered. Still, Ruth continued to post on Facebook, using a private VPN to access the site in the face of the junta’s effort to block it, and, periodically, the internet altogether. Her content grew more graphic. In early March she posted a widely circulated video of three paramedics being beaten by security forces. Videos of shootings followed daily. Posts were often accompanied by the slogan, “The revolution must succeed”.
It’s now been one year since the coup, and Myanmar’s revolution has continued to evolve. Just as the country ought to be considered world historical, so those involved in the uprising continue to make history, through their ongoing resistance amid a military assault that has been especially vicious in Chin State and other ethnic areas.
What would Graeber have
made of this unfolding revolution?
Unfolding is the operative term. “Every real society is a process in time,” Leach famously writes in the introduction to Political Systems. And, as Tambiah (2002: 443) suggests, there is much in Leach that resonates with—prefigures, perhaps—Fabian’s (1983) critique of anthropology’s routine “denial of coevalness.” There’s an irony, then, that many of the strongest critiques of the book focus on Leach’s elision of the historical circumstances in which his study occurred, something about which Graeber would have no doubt remarked, especially if his treatment of another major figure in British anthropology, Evans-Pritchard, is anything to go by.
There are certainly important
differences between Graeber and Leach, political and otherwise, but one other
thing they had in common is that they were not just prolific writers, but
prolific readers too. There’s been much said about the place of the imagination
in the writing of anthropology, but less, perhaps, about imagination’s role in
its reading. If all ethnography is “fiction”, as Leach claimed in one of his
final lectures, and even if it isn’t, what imaginative faculties are engaged in
reading it?
What modes of speculative reading do we pursue, though gaps, from afar, of Facebook posts, of texts that don’t, really, exist? In his foreword to Severi’s book, Graeber pushes against the “utopian ideal” of a text produced by a “single, unique” genius. Instead, he argues, “everything turns on a tacit complicity, whereby the author leaves the work, in effect, half-finished so as to ‘capture the imagination’ of the interpreter” (2015: xx-xxi).
How do we read with an imagination
that is a “social phenomenon, dialogic even,” one that works through the
mediation of things unfinished and incomplete?
Unfinished, unfolding, incomplete—like
Myanmar’s revolution. Ruth is also working in the presence of something that
doesn’t, really, exist, and didn’t even in the years of so-called transition: a
democratic Myanmar that is both politically—and, for her, spiritually—saved. But
in continuing to defy the military, just as she continued to evangelise in the
face of indifference, she and others act “as if” they live in a world not just where
“the revolution must succeed,” but in which it already has, and in imagining
that world, they work to bring it into being.
Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research
fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism in
the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.
Fuller, Chris and Jonathan Parry. 1989. “Petulant
Inconsistency? The Intellectual Achievement of Edmund Leach”. Anthropology
Today 5/3: 11-14.
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward
and Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New
York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David. 2007. Revolutions
in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. London:
Minor Compositions.
Graeber, David. 2014. “Anthropology and the rise of
the professional-managerial class”. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
4/3: 73–88.
Graeber, David. 2015. “Concerning Mental Pivots and
Civilizations of Memory.” Preface to The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology
of Memory and Imagination. Chicago: HAU Books.
Laidlaw,
James and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 2000. The Essential Edmund Leach, Volume 1.
Anthropology and Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Maran, La Raw. 2007. “On the continuing relevance of
E. R. Leach’s political systems of Highland Burma to Kachin studies”. In M.
Sadan and F. Robbine (eds.) Social Dynamics in the Highlands of South East
Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden:
Brill
Leach, Edmund. 1964
[1954]. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press.
Leach, Edmund.1984.
“Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology”. Annual
Review of Anthropology 13: 1-23.
Sadan, Mandy and Francois
Robbine (eds.) 2007. Social
Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems
of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden: Brill.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 2002. Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cite as: Edwards, Michael. 2022. “Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar.” FocaalBlog, 27 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/27/michael-edwards-graeber-leach-and-the-revolution-in-myanmar/
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part of the Frontlines of Value research group at the University of Bergen. The workshop, featuring participants of different generations, academic fields and geographic specializations, was educating and revealing in a number of ways (see below for the full programme). In what follows, I will not try to do justice to the presentations or the engaging debates, but to pick out a few themes which seem to me to be of abiding importance for anthropology and related disciplines, and to make some tentative suggestions of my own.
As many have remarked, the Marxism now
resurgent in certain sections of the academy, including European social
anthropology (Neveling and Steur 2018),
seems much more preoccupied than preceding generations of the tradition with
questions surrounding the relations between this mode of production and its
“outside” – whether conceived of in temporal terms, as pre-capitalist (or, much
more rarely, post-capitalist); in spatial terms, as subsisting in regions
outside the control of global capital; or in more complex theoretical terms.
The concept of “primitive accumulation,” used by Marx himself to describe the
events leading up to the flowering of capitalism in England, has been applied
and even stretched (Glassman 2006), up to
a point which some consider excessive. Accumulation by unequal exchange, backed
up by the threat of force, certainly exists in our late-late capitalist
society; but what do we gain, ask theorists like Henry Bernstein, by calling
that accumulation “primitive”? (Agrarian
Questions JAC 2019)
Additional questions regarding the relations
between capitalism’s putative “inside” and “outside” are raised by the concept
of the surplus population, which stood at the center of the workshop. As with
other of Marx’s terminological choices, there is an easily missed irony at play
here: proletarian populations can only be “surplus” from the point of view of
capital itself, insofar as it does not find it profitable to exploit them as
laborers. Furthermore, people deprived of access to their own means of
production but denied the opportunity to participate in production by selling
their labor-power to others are not necessarily superfluous to capital’s needs
in every sense: they may be useful as consumers, as soldiers and guards, or
indeed as a “reserve army” of strikebreaking laborers. They are only “surplus” in
the specific sense that the ability of capital to absorb labor-power is limited
on the one hand by aggregate effective demand – which grows sluggishly, due to
the lopsided distribution of the fruits of capitalist development – and on the
other by the productivity of labor, which grows swiftly as a result of capitalist
competition. This is Marx’s “general law of capitalist accumulation”: the number
of laborers required by the demands of profit-making enterprise, as a portion
of the total proletarian population, will tend to fall (Marx 1990, chap. 25).
Anthropologists, who have always been curious
about the lives of people outside Europe and outside wage-labor, have good
reason to be interested in the concept of the surplus population. However, as
the contributors to the workshop highlighted, operationalizing this concept for
the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems. The most
obvious of these is that most people who lack access to “proper jobs” (Ferguson and Li 2018) do, after all, work.
Some of them retain some access to land and other means of production, and engage
in “petty commodity production”; others labor in the ill-defined “informal
sector,” for example as petty merchants; still others do sell their labor-power,
but not under conditions considered viable or legal by national and
international institutions (Campbell 2020; Cowan 2019). All these people purchase
at least some of their means of subsistence on the market, and are thus tied
into capitalism as consumers, if nothing else. To be truly outside of
capital, as one participant at the workshop remarked, one would need to be
“undiscovered,” a member of one of those mythical, self-sufficient tribes of
whose non-existence anthropologists are well aware. Hence, surplus populations
are at best “inside-outside,” taking on a painfully ambiguous role.
The “functionality” of surplus populations is a
related issue. Is the emergence of such populations a side-effect of the rise
in the productivity of labor, primarily caused by capitalists’ desire to gain
short-term “super-profits” by producing more efficiently than their
competitors, or is it actively encouraged by these capitalists and their
agents, such as the state? My own contribution to the workshop came down on the
“functional” (if not functionalist) side of the debate. Setting aside the ample
empirical evidence which could be used to make the case, I argued on purely
theoretical grounds that exclusion from the labor market should not be
understood as diametrically opposed to exploitation within it. It is easy
enough to understand why lack of choice should force those at greater threat of
exclusion to accede to greater exploitation, thus exposing the same individuals
to the cruelest brunt of both processes.
There are, however, some important objections
to this account. By all estimates, the surplus population is far vaster than
capital could ever be expected to absorb into standard employment – perhaps
around three quarters of the world’s total population (see Neilson and Stubbs 2011). Thus, most “surplus” workers have no
hope of ever entering the army of labor, even as “reservists” or scabs, and any
question of how they might behave given such a chance is moot. But the
ethnographic evidence, which shows that many such people do in fact work and
consume in quite recognizably capitalistic ways, casts doubt over such a
formulation. Perhaps the calculations of scholars like Neilson and Stubbs are
over-hasty? If surplus populations are only surplus from the point of view of
capital, perhaps this perspective is less singular and unambiguous than the
assumptions of such quantitative exercises require?
Image 1: Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea, heading from Turkish coast to the north-eastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016 (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe; Wikimedia Commons).
I would like to suggest one way of getting at the problem, through a category that remains under-theorized despite its crucial role in Marx’s labor theory of value: the value of labor-power. One of Marx’s greatest theoretical discoveries was the distinction between the value of labor-power and the value which labor can produce: in other words, the difference between what human beings need in order to live and work, and what they are capable of producing with their life and their work. It is only with the total commodification of life (and work) under capitalism that these two quantities become commensurable, as both the needs and the capacities of the worker can now be measured with one yardstick: money. At the same time, capitalism disguises the difference between the two quantities by insisting that after the costs of living and working are deducted and transferred to the worker as her wage, the remnant is not the product of her labor but a special sum called “profit,” which the employer is legally and morally entitled to appropriate.
But the value of labor-power is
underdetermined. Even ignoring changes in productivity – we shall get to these
in a moment – the needs of a worker, of the working family, and of the
proletariat as a whole, are eminently contestable. Indeed, everyday class
struggle consists to a great degree in disputations over the value of
labor-power in the broad sense, which includes the wage itself as well as the
length of the working day, “social wages” like health insurance and pensions, and
so on. But despite this underdetermination, the value of
labor-power can only fluctuate between two limits: at the top is the point
where the wage begins to eat into profits to an extent unacceptable to
employers, and at the bottom is the minimum of biological reproduction, below
which the workers would begin to die off.
But even given a particular level of needs, the value of labor-power will shift with changes in the productivity of the types of labor which produce the essentials of life, however these are defined. The most obvious of these necessities, and the one which preoccupies Marx above all, is food. If the amount of labor necessary to produce the standard food basket goes down, for example through the introduction of agricultural technologies such as those of the Green Revolution, then so does the value of labor-power (Moore 2010). But many other technologies also play a role: for example, the great advances in hygienic and epidemiological science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also lowered the value of labor-power by drastically reducing infant mortality and raising life expectancy. Here then is one of those paradoxical ironies of capitalism: the more we invest in improving the quality of life, the cheaper human life becomes, in a very literal sense.
The relation between the value of labor-power
and surplus populations now becomes clear. Marx insists that there is no general
“law of population” in capitalist societies, and specifically rejects (against
Malthus) any tendency to exponential increase in population (Foster 2000). If anything, long-term trends appear
to demonstrate that human populations adjust their birthrates to prevailing deathrates,
such that population tends to increase quite slowly. The boom in world
population over the last century, as Aaron Benanav (2019) shows, can be interpreted as following from an easily understandable
lag between the introduction of the hygienic and medical reforms which lowered
deathrates and the subsequent adjustment of birthrates. Thus, experts expect world
population to stabilize by the end of the current century (United Nations 2015), while the environmental
preconditions of cheap labor-power may be under threat from climate change and
related environmental crises (Moore 2015),
potentially triggering a secular rise in the price of food. Nevertheless, the minimum
value of labor-power – the amount of work required to produce the basket of
goods absolutely necessary to keep the proletariat capable of working and
reproducing, per capita – has decreased drastically since the publication of Capital.
Of course, the global working class is not satisfied with this level of bare
subsistence: even in poor countries, workers demand additional goods, like
electronics and education. But this only points to the growing extent to which the
value of their commodity is not reducible to physical constraints, but determined
by the outcome of political processes. So long as the supply of labor-power
tends to outstrip demand – that is, for the next few decades at least – the
pressure of competition over jobs will tend to push the value of labor-power
toward the minimum. Only proletarian resistance can counter this trend.
But the agency of proletarians cannot be
reduced to the extent to which capital needs them as laborers. Even the most
outcast of populations have means of putting pressure on capital, and maintenance
of global hegemony requires that their demands be dealt with in one way or
another. One way is, of course, violence: when people are not needed as
workers, the global power structure is happy to countenance their warehousing,
and if need be, their mass death (Mbembe 2003).
But since the necessities of life have become so cheap, maintaining them in a
sort of social death while providing them with the means of bare existence
through humanitarian aid or debt is also an option (Sanyal 2014). With regard to these populations, global capital has
become something like the Calvinist God, capable of arbitrarily granting or
denying their every wish yet devoid of any need for their labors and
supplications.
Regardless of how precisely we parse the concept of the surplus population, its continuing and even growing relevance shows that the analytic categories of Marx’s Capital are as relevant to our world as they were to those of the 19th century. The workings of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” have produced a world in which even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions. This certainly necessitates a rethinking of political strategy, one to which anthropology is particularly suited to contribute. However, the final goal of that strategy – a world in which each contributes according to her abilities and receives according to her needs – remains the same.
Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His article “Saving the Arabah: Thai migrant workers and the asymmetries of community in an Israeli agricultural settlement” is forthcoming in American Ethnologist. He is a member of Academia for Equality and LeftEast, among other political initiatives.
Benanav, Aaron. 2019. “Demography and
Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce,
1950-2000.” Social Science History 43 (4): 679–703.
Campbell, Stephen. 2020. “Debt collection
as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement.” Social
Anthropology 28 (3): 729–742.
Cowan, Thomas. 2021. “The Village as Urban Infrastructure: Social
Reproduction, Agrarian Repair and Uneven Urbanisation.” Environment and
Planning E 4 (3): pp. 736–755. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619868106
Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018.
“Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of
Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s
Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Glassman, Jim. 2006. “Primitive
Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’
Means.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 608–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506070172.
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of Political Economy (Volume I). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Middlesex:
Penguin.
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Culture 15 (1): 11–40.
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Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1450–2010.” Journal
of Agrarian Change 10 (3): 389–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00276.x.
———. 2015. “Cheap Food and Bad Climate:
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This article is linked to a research workshop that was held at Bergen University in December. The full workshop program is below.
Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory From the Peripheries 13-14 December 2021, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Frontlines of Value Research Program
Monday 13 December 10.00 – 10.15 Welcome and Introduction Don Kalb (University of Bergen)
10.15 – 11.00 Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory from the “Peripheries” Stephen Campbell (Nanyang Technological University) and Thomas Cowan (University of Nottingham)
11.00 – 11.45 Surplus Labour, Surplus Population, Primitive Accumulation: Notes for Discussion Henry Bernstein (SOAS, University of London)
11.45 – 12.30 New Exploitation of an Old Form of “Work”: Exploitation of Tenant Shopkeepers’ Livelihoods in South Korea Yewon Lee (University of Tübingen)
14.00 – 14.45 Violence of Abstraction, Violence of Concretion: Surplus Population as an Element of a Marxist Theory of Racialization Matan Kaminer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
14.45 – 15.30 The Death of the Proper Job? Aspiration, Class, and Labour in Urban Brazil and Egypt Harry Pettit (Northumbria University) and Mara Nogueira (Birkbeck, University of London)
15.30 – 16.15 Surplus Population/Surplus Labour: Past and Present Marcel Van Der Linden (University of Amsterdam)
Tuesday 14 December 10.00 – 10.45 From Assumed Reluctancy to Enforced Redundancy: The Changed Depreciation of Labour in the Transition Towards Global Capitalism Jan Breman (University of Amsterdam)
10.45 – 11.30 Land/Ocean Grabs and the Relative Surplus Population in Ghana Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno (University of Development Studies, Tamale)
11.30 – 12.15 ‘Productive’ Migrants and ‘Dependent’ Left-behind Brothers Hadia Akhtar Khan (University of Toronto)
13.30 – 14.15 Surplus Population In-Situ: Brick Kiln Labour and the Production of Idle time Pratik Mishra (King’s College, University of London)
14.15 – 15.00 The Social Reproduction of Pandemic Neoliberalism: Planetary Crises and the Reorganization of Life, Work and Death Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS, University of London)
15.00 – 15.45 A Surplus Population? The Making of a Racialized (Non) Working Class in a Former Romanian Mining District Sorin Gog and Enikö Vince (Babes-Bolyai University)
15.45 – 16.30 Comment and General Discussion Gavin Smith (University of Toronto)
Cite as: Kaminer, Matan. 2022. “Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop.” FocaalBlog, 26 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/26/matan-kaminer-marxist-anthropology-in-a-world-of-surplus-population-reflections-on-a-frontlines-of-value-workshop/
David Graeber’s work is
often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David
Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of many of
the most entrenched Enlightenment myths about human history and the origins of
social inequality. But what makes his way of myth-busting particularly
compelling is that it is informed by a theory of myth itself – of what myth is,
what it does, and how it stands in relation to human creativity and social
transformation. The study of myth, for Graeber, was not an arbitrary
indulgence. It was central to his overall take on the scope of anthropology.
For him, anthropology was most valuable as a comparative inquiry into human
possibilities – one that throws our own contemporary myths into sharp relief,
thereby revealing our own creative potential and possibilities for social
transformation.
Though Graeber never
published specifically on myth, the theme emerges in a variety of guises
throughout his work: in the Value book (2001), in the essays collected in Possibilities
(2007), and of course in The Dawn of Everything
(2021). He often taught courses on myth and ritual.
Before his death, he had prepared a series of lectures focused on Gregory
Bateson’s Naven mythic and ritual complex. Most importantly, in 2017 he wrote a
long foreword to Terry Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar (2017), a detailed structural analysis of the
Kayapo myth on the origin of cooking fire. We learn from this not only the
value that Graeber saw in the anthropological study of myth, but also the huge
influence that Turner had on his thinking. Turner was for Graeber what Graeber
is for many of us, someone with “a remarkable ability to make … (still
extremely complicated) ideas sound like matter-of-fact common sense, and even
to render them fairly straightforward.” (Graeber 2017:xxi). Graeber lamented that what Terry
Turner could do in person in no way corresponded to his written work. He admitted
that, initially, he could not understand a word of it. Once he understood it,
however, he came to regard Turner as “the most underrated social theorist of
the last 50 years” (pers. comm.) and The Fire of the Jaguar “one of the
greatest achievements of anthropological theory, […] that should deserve a
place among the classics” (ibid:xxxix).
Image 1: Book cover of Fire of the Jaguar by Terence Turner
Given Graeber’s political
life, his interest in myth seems surprising. In a pedigree that goes from
Mircea Eliade to Jordan Peterson, the study of myth has traditionally been the
province of the politically conservative. Though approaches to the subject vary
widely, for the great majority of theorists, myths either reflect archetypal structures
of the human mind or resolve contradictions related to individual experience.
They have no direct relationship to social organisation, let alone social
transformation. What Graeber saw in Turner was quite the opposite: a rare
progressive theory of myth, where the latter emerges as the embodiment, if not
as the paragon, of human social creativity. In what follows, we examine these
connections, we show how this argument originates from a radical rethinking of
structuralism, and we consider how it came to fashion Graeber’s way of doing
anthropology.
First, though, a few words
on The Fire of the Jaguar.
Myth, action and dynamic
structuralism
The Fire of the Jaguar is the most prominent myth of the Kayapo, an Amazonian group whom
Terry Turner researched for over fifty years. The myth recounts the story of a
young boy who is adopted by
jaguars, who then teach him how to use cooking fire – knowledge that he brings back
to the Kayapo community. In essence, the myth explains how Kayapo attain full
sociality out of nature, a process that is reflected both in the maturation of
the boy and in the manipulation and replication of fire.
To our knowledge, Turner’s
analysis of this myth is the most detailed analysis of a single myth in the
anthropological literature. It is structuralist in character but very different
(and, in Graeber’s view, more compelling) than the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss.
Turner embeds his analysis of myth in Kayapo socioeconomic organisation (which
he knew very well) and is not concerned with comparing it with other myths to
reveal an underlying code. He suggests instead that the maturation of the boy
in the myth reveals a model not only for the socialisation of youth but also
for the consolidation of Kayapo society as a whole. In Kayapo matriuxorilocal
communities, men must undergo an emotionally disruptive process of detachment
as they move from their natal home to the communal men-house, and finally to
the house of their in-laws. By recounting parallel processes of detachment, the
myth of the fire of the jaguar reframes the tensions and contradictions of this
experience. Myth thus functions as an important means whereby societies are
able to shape behaviour into collectively prescribed organizational patterns.
Ultimately, Turner argues that Kayapo myth and social organisation stand in a
relation of circular causality with one another, i.e., they influence each
other in non-linear fashion.
He arrives at this
argument by making a fundamental move away from Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism:
the minimal units of myth in his analysis are not categories (types of beings
or types of objects), but actions. The difference between categories and
actions is that actions, when repeated, force the subject to consciously
acknowledge a pattern. This is ultimately what structure is for Turner: it is a
pattern of action, or, in his words, a “group of transformations bounded
together by invariant constraints” (2017:207). This type of structure is always
dialectic. As soon as a pattern shows change and diversification, the acting
subject is forced to create a higher level of abstraction in order to account
for and compare differences, which in turn can lead to yet another higher
level, and so on.
Understanding what Turner
means by all this requires some minimal familiarity with the concepts of
‘dynamic hierarchical system’ and ‘self-organisation’ that he takes from Piaget
and cybernetics (Turner 1973) (were he to write today, Turner would
probably find a more compelling treatment of these concepts in the field of
complexity science (e.g., Thompson 2007 or Deacon 2012)). His adaptation of these theories into
anthropology might be at times counterintuitive. For Graeber, the
cross-disciplinary move he accomplishes is central. To exemplify Turner’s application
of dynamic structuralism to the social domain, Graeber asks us to consider the
action of feeding a child (Graeber 2017:xxxii). The moment we do this twice but
with the understanding that it
is the ‘same’ action we performed before, we generate, through repetition, a
kind of hierarchy since there is a higher level at which those actions are both
tokens of the same type. But the moment we say a different kind of repeated
action is not the same – say, feeding a husband or feeding a rival at a feast –
we are generating a third level, where different types are being compared. At
the same time, by defining certain types of action in this way, we typically generate
certain identities (child, husband, rival), kinds of person who typically
perform such actions, which in turn lead us to consider, on yet a higher level of
analysis, how these identities relate to one another, and so forth. Structure,
in short, is always dynamic and open-ended, and always develops from
lower-level actions.
Turner applies this analysis to both Kayapo social
organisation and the myth of origin. The plot of the myth proceeds through a
sequence of apparent tensions (e.g., a boy growing up in a matriuxorilocal
society, which implies eventual separation from the natal family), which it overcomes by transposing them
onto a higher level of structural differentiation of the same pattern. For
instance, the detachment from the boy’s original family in the myth reflects an
initial distancing from ‘nature’, which is then reproduced on a higher level in
the boy’s manipulation of fire. Similarly, in Kayapo society, the actions that
produce sociality at the lower level of family organisation level are structural
variations of actions that produce sociality at the upper level of moieties and
communal organization in the village. Overall, Turner claims to have demonstrated that, at least among the
Kayapo, the dynamic structures of myth and social organisation parallel one
another.
Turner’s central theoretical argument in The Fire of
the Jaguar is that what we usually consider ‘mythical thought’ – the
central message of the myth that is subjectively experienced by people – consists
in the highest level of social
self-organisation. Myth, essentially, places a cap on an otherwise ever-evolving
dialectical process that would make social organisation impossible. At some
point, the complexity of social reality – of why we treat one another the way
we do, or why we value certain actions over others – becomes such that we are
unable to form a higher level of abstraction to account for it. What myth does
is pre-empting the need to construct that level, because it treats
contradictions in the structure of society as playing out within the terms of
that structure itself. For Turner, this also explains the reason why
most myths are about the origins of social institutions: in order to avoid
having to consciously create a higher level, we attribute the origin of social
institutions to a mythical power in the distant past. And this is why the
Kayapo, for example, regard the very power to create and maintain their social
order – the fire – as originating from an extra-social source – the jaguar (see
also Graeber 2020).
In sum, Turner’s
structuralism makes a radical departure from Lévi-Strauss’ because 1) it takes
actions, rather than ideas, as starting points. ‘Nature’ and ‘society’ are not
static orders of classification but contrastive modes of actions continuously
in tension with one another. 2) It takes the perspective of the subjects,
rather than that of the analyst. These are tensions and processes lived by the
Kayapo, which shape their values and subjectivity and the reproduction of their
society. 3) It does not assume that myth simply evokes contradictions and then
mediates them. This is only half of the story. The other half of the story is
that myth is equally concerned with the differentiation of ambiguous situations
and with their transformation; it is the end-product of a dialectical process.
On alienated consciousness
and social creativity
It is challenging, of
course, to give justice to the complexity of Turner’s thought on myth in the
space of a few paragraphs. We hope it is clear, however, how these ideas might
have had a profound influence on David Graeber: the causal significance of
myth, the emphasis on action, the focus on social production, the conscious
creation of structure, the very idea of a ‘dynamic structuralism’… Graeber
endlessly reworked these ideas throughout his writings. The aspect we are most
interested in focusing on here is that of social creativity.
Turner saw myth as the
creative result of a dialectical process that enables a system of social
relations. By virtue of their capacity to support different types of social
organisation, the constellation of myths we find across cultures could be seen as
a vast compendium of human creativity. Yet (and this is something Graeber finds
particularly curious) myth is also creativity turned against itself: most of
them are about how latter-day humans can’t be genuinely creative anymore. They
often appear to be all about fixing either natural differences or social
relations. The Kayapo myth of cooking fire is a good example of this. The
creation myths of Ju|’hoan (or !Kung) speakers, among whom I (Megan Laws) did
fieldwork, are another good example. They speak of a time when different beings
had no fixed form, and of how (and this is significant) humans then ‘branded’ the animals with fire to give them their
distinctive characteristics (Biesele 1993: 116-123) and set in place the relationships
between them.
It is natural, here, for
both Turner and Graeber to turn to Marx’s (1964) idea of alienation, because, so defined,
myth does appear to be a form of alienated social consciousness (“we create our
physical worlds, but are unaware of, and hence not in control of, the process
by which we do so”, Graeber 2005: 409). As Turner puts it (2017: 202), myths seemingly
present us with the “form of the natural universe”, which is “seen as
self-existing prior to any particular instance of human social activity”
(2017:202). We appear to be presented with the way things are, not with how they
came to be. In the process, we confer power upon that which we have ourselves
created. There is clearly a potential dark side to this. As Marx argues so eloquently,
there is a necessary link between humans’ misunderstanding of the process of
their own creativity and forms of authority and exploitation.
One of the problems in
seeing things this way is that, from an anthropological perspective, one risks
being condescending to people like the Kayapo. Are we really prepared to say
that the Kayapo live under a form of alienated consciousness? Graeber reflects
on this dilemma on several occasions, most explicitly in his criticism of the
‘ontological turn’ (Graeber 2015).
His take is twofold. Firstly,
he writes, the dilemma changes as soon as we realise that we frequently
criticise our colleagues’ own assumptions about the workings of society.
Denying the possibility of saying that the Kayapo are wrong in their own
assumptions would amount to denying their status as potential intellectual
peers. But, secondly, though certainly capable of questioning the foundations
of their own thought and actions, we should not assume that people like the
Kayapo are questioning the
foundations of their own thought and actions, or that there’s any particular
reason why they should.
As Turner points out, the Kayapo “are fully conscious of constructing themselves and their society” (2017:203) through myth. We see the same awareness in the phenomenon of fetishism examined by Graeber (2005). Drawing upon ethnographic research from West Africa from the 17th to the 19th century, he writes that fetishes, from the African viewpoint, are not simply objects that are presumed to have power over us. They are objects recognised as creations, as embodiments of intentions and actions that have power over us. Likewise, the Akha people of highland Laos where I (Giulio Ongaro) did my fieldwork are known to build their villages around three features (a swing, a well, a gate) that are imbued with spiritual force. These spirits both protect and afflict Akha people with illness, but they can also be torn apart every time Akha move village. Besides, Akha know that they are the only people in their multi-ethnic region to have those features, which suggests that they are also aware that these spirits do not exist out there independent of their own minds. Like myths, these objects can embody social creativity because they have the power to establish new social relations. Yet, it would be a stretch to consider them as products of alienated consciousness because people are ultimately conscious, on some level, of the fact that their power has a human origin.
The danger comes when we
take this power as natural, “when fetishism gives way to theology, the absolute
assurance that the gods are real.” (Graeber, 2005:431). The assurance, in other
words, that such power is immutable. Similarly, with myth, the danger comes
when we elevate myth as fact. When we do so, we risk losing sight of those
moments when the forms we take as natural or given are a product of the
activity of human agents (and to this end, might be transformed).
In many of his writings, Graeber
states that this is the condition we find ourselves in at this historical
moment. We forget, as his popular line puts it, that “the ultimate, hidden
truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as
easily make differently”. He and David Wengrow reflect at length on this point
in The Dawn of Everything. They show how our own Enlightenment myth of
origin takes the linear growth of social complexity and hierarchy as natural. If
there is something peculiar about this Enlightenment myth of origin is that,
unlike virtually all other origin myths, which start with a creative event (with
the branding of animals or the mastery of fire), it starts with nothing and
seems to negate the possibility of social creativity altogether. This brings us
back to Graeber’s overall vision of anthropology and his scholarly efforts to question
our own contemporary myths and their social effects.
Creative refusal
Graeber saw anthropology
as a dialogic enterprise, driven by the willingness to turn to ‘others’ to
challenge the value-laden assumptions – or myths – that colour our own
experience of the world. He knew that anthropologists cannot take a ‘view from
nowhere’, as philosopher Thomas Nagel (1989) puts it. As all social scientists, they
labour under the weight of their own culturally specific assumptions. Some of Graeber’s
contemporaries, most notably those aligned with the ‘Writing Culture’ turn (as
well as post-structuralist and post-humanist scholars), saw this as a damning
indictment of the impossibility of anthropology as an objective science (Graeber
2007b). For Graeber, it was its main strength. It
is precisely by turning to ethnography, specifically to comparison, that he saw
it possible to challenge our own myths, and it was in this guise that
anthropology was most valuable for him.
How does the ‘dynamic
structuralism’ of Graeber’s mentor, Terry Turner, fit into this? As we have
examined, an important difference between the structuralism espoused by
Levi-Strauss and ‘dynamic structuralism’ is that the former takes myths to have
no direct link to social and material reality. The latter, to the contrary,
takes myths to not only grow out of “the
structure of social relations” and appeal in concrete, affective terms to those
who listen to them; they are, as Turner puts it, “powerful devices for
supporting a given form of social organisation” (2017:134). If we assume a
relation of non-linear dynamic co-causality between myth and social
organisation, then the political implications are clear: by changing one, one
can change the other. Whether this circular causality between myth and social
organisation is actually in place can be questioned. Graeber certainly assumes
it and turns to our contemporary myths to both draw attention to their
consequences, and to attack them.
Ernesto De Martino once
wrote that “the task of anthropology lies in the possibility of positing
problems whose solution leads to an expansion of the self-consciousness of our
civilization. Only then can anthropology help the formation of a wider humanism”
(De Martino
1973:3; translation from Italian original). With some reservations on the term
‘civilisation’, Graeber would surely embrace this spirit. Once he said on
Twitter: “I am bored of post-humanists. I think I am a pre-humanist. Humanity
is something we aspire to achieve at some point in the future”. But Graeber
would also add that, though anthropology is uniquely placed to fulfil this
role, the aspiration to achieve a wider humanism is by no means exclusive to
the society that invented anthropology. In one way or another, it has been the
primal moving force of all cultures.
This was the key point of
his Marilyn Strathern lecture, where he suggested that what we call ‘cultures’
should be seen as examples of successful social movements, particularly as the
outcome of a creative process of refusal (Graeber 2013). Indeed, it is not a coincidence that many
ethnonyms – the names a culture gives to itself – actually mean ‘human’,
suggesting perhaps that they see themselves as having achieved such status. The Dawn of Everything considerably elaborates
on the argument of the Strathern lecture. Graeber and Wengrow not only engage
in their own process of creative refusal – challenging enduring Enlightenment
myths and their socially deleterious effects – they show the role that creative
refusal and conscious social experimentation has played throughout human
history. Some early criticisms of the book have contended that Graeber and
Wengrow “demythologise the past” (Vernon 2021) and take our ancestors to be rational
political actors who believe that “mythical narratives and religious
sensitivities are inferior bases for organising society” (Shullenberger
2021). This should certainly call for an unpacking
of the term ‘conscious social experimentation’. Perhaps, in and of itself, the
term does evoke the idea of a group of people getting together and rationally
imposing their will on the world. In light of what we have discussed in this
paper, we suggest that the rubric of ‘conscious experimentation’ can – without
contradictions – involve forms of myth and mythmaking.
Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in
the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo
Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in
highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.
Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology.
She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted
ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on egalitarianism,
sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia.
Biesele,
Megan. 1993. Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the
Kalahari Ju/’Hoan. Bloomington:
Witwatersrand University Press.
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prolegomeni a una storia del magismo. Torino:
Bollati Boringhieri.
Deacon, Terrence W. 2012. Incomplete Nature: How Mind
Emerged from Matter. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory
of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David. 2005. “Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or,
Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction.” Anthropological Theory
5 (4): 407–438.
Graeber, David. 2007a. Possibilities: Essays on
Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Graeber, David. 2007b. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy
of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Graeber, David. 2013. “Culture as Creative Refusal.” The
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31 (2): 1–19.
Graeber, David. 2015. “Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way
of Saying ‘Reality’: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 1–41.
Graeber, David. 2017. “At Long Last. Foreword to Terence
Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar.” In The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago:
HAU Books.
Graeber, David. 2020. Anarchy–In a Manner of Speaking –
Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia
Turquier–Zauberman. Zurich, Paris, Berlin: Diaphanes.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity. S.l.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Marx, Karl. 1964. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844. Vol. 333. New York City: International Publishers.
Nagel, Thomas. 1989. The View from Nowhere. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Shullenberger, Geoff. 2021. “Archaeology of Freedom.”
Washington Examiner. December 31, 2021.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/archaeology-of-freedom
Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology,
Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
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by Jean Piaget. American Anthropologist 75 (2): 351–373.
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Chicago, IL: HAU.
Vernon, Mark. 2021. “Mark Vernon Reviews The Dawn of Everything.” Idler. 2021. https://www.idler.co.uk/article/mark-vernon-reviews-the-dawn-of-everything/
Cite as: Ongaro, Giulio and Megan Laws. 2022. “Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/24/giulio-ongaro-and-megan-laws-towards-a-progressive-theory-of-myth-turner-and-graeber-on-social-creativity/
Discussants:
Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws & Michael Edwards
In a short essay published after his death, David writes that “Good ideas rarely, if ever, emerge from isolation… I have no idea, for instance, the degree to which many of the ideas attributed to me are the product of me, or some of my graduate student friends with whom I spent long hours hashing out the meaning of the universe twenty years ago, and ultimately I think it’s a meaningless question: the ideas emerged from our relation.” This week considers David’s ‘relations’ with two of his anthropological forebears, Terence Turner and Edmund Leach. For David, Turner was “the most underrated social theorist of the last 50 years” and Leach “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Together, they inspired, in big and small ways, much of his thinking around myth and imagination, respectively. David’s contributions to the study of myth and imagination are scattered throughout his work. As Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws (on Turner) and Michael Edwards (on Leach) show, they are key to David’s thinking about possibilities for social transformation.
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.
Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in
the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo
Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in
highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.
Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology.
She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted
ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on
egalitarianism, sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia.
Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research
fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of
Cambridge. He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and
Buddhism in the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.
Published
in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around
the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of
an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments)is a tiny and
mighty, genre-defying text. Graeber calls it a pamphlet, “a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories,
and tiny manifestos” (Graeber 2004: 1). The pamphlet is impossible to summarize
and discuss fully in twenty minutes, especially since in hindsight, it bears
the seeds of many of the major arguments Graeber was to develop later in life. I
will therefore limit myself to sketching some basic elements of the kind of social
theory that Graeber is proposing in this spirited text. Broadly, Fragments seeks to outline a body of
radical theory that would, in Graeber’s words, “actually be of interest to
those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to
govern their own affairs” (Ibid: 9). This is characteristic of Graeber: the
desire to render social theory—particularly anthropology—usefully interesting to
radical movements, and radical movements—particularly anarchism—useful and interesting
to social theory.
In
Fragments, Graeber explores what he names
the “strange affinity” between anarchism and anthropology (Ibid: 12). He observes
“there was something about anthropological thought in particular—its keen
awareness of the very range of human possibilities—that gave it an affinity to
anarchism from the very beginning” (Ibid: 13). Graeber himself was fascinated
by this, the range of human possibilities in the past and the present, which could
unravel the seeming inevitability of our current social and political institutions,
while grounding hope for living collectively with greater freedom in more egalitarian
arrangements.
Graeber
is able to observe the strange affinity between anthropology and anarchism in Fragments because in his version,
anarchism is not about a body of theory bequeathed in the 19th
century by “founding figures” such as Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon that one
would have to adopt wholesale. Instead, it is more about a particular attitude,
even a faith that is shared among
anarchists (Ibid: 4). Anarchism can be thought of as a faith, Graeber asserts, which
involves “the rejection of certain types of social relations, the confidence
that certain others would be much better ones on which to build a livable
society, [and] the belief that such a society could actually exist” (Ibid: 4). Likewise,
the “founding figures” of anarchism did not think they invented anything
new—they simply made a faithful assumption that, in Graeber’s words, “the basic
principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual
aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about
as long as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all
forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.” (Ibid: 3) Arguably,
it is this assumption about human history that Graeber sets out to prove valid
in his latest book, The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he co-authored with the
archeologist David Wengrow: Humanity has always practiced anarchistic forms of human
behavior and social organization—since the Ice Age.
In Graeber’s vision, in any case, anthropology as a discipline could strengthen faith in the possibility of another world by offering an archive of alternative ways of organizing social relations, of reconstituting them consciously, or of abandoning them altogether. But to be able to strengthen this faith in the possibility of another world free from “the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance” (Ibid: 10), social theory itself would have to assume another world is possible. In fact, Graeber asserts this as the first assumption that any radical social theory has to make. “To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith,” he finds, “since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible” (Ibid: 10). In a move that resembles a sophisticated theological argument about the existence of God, he then declares, “it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative” (Ibid: 10). I wonder, however, if anthropologists or others can be drawn into such faithful optimism by argumentation. Perhaps one could be inspired to have faith in the possibility of another world and inspire David Graeber did along with the radical movements he dearly treasured.
Graeber’s
second proposition is that any radical, particularly anarchist, social theory
would have to self-consciously reject vanguardism (Ibid: 11). To his mind,
ethnography as an anthropological method provides a particularly relevant, if a
rough and incipient model of how “nonvanguardist revolutionary intellectual
practice may work” (Ibid: 12). The goal of such a practice would not be to “arrive at the correct
strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow” (Ibid: 11), but to tease
out the implicit logics—symbolic, moral or pragmatic—that already underlie
people’s actions, even if they are themselves not completely aware of them (Ibid:
12). “One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that,”
Graeber writes in Fragments, “to look
at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be
the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those
ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts”
(Ibid: 12). Not prescriptions, but contributions, possibilities, gifts. That is
what Graeber offered in his work—particularly in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,Direct Action: An Ethnography (2008) and The Democracy Project (2013)—whether his gifts were accepted or
not by everyone he wrote about, thought and acted with, or, for that matter,
was read by. After all, gifts too can be rejected, and as Graeber recognized, not
much of what he proposed or practiced as an anthropologist had “much to do with
what anthropology, even radical anthropology, has actually been like over the
last hundred years or so” (Graeber 2004: 13).
Nevertheless,
in Fragments, Graeber turns to anthropologists,
most notably Marcel Mauss, to reflect on his influence on anarchists, despite
the fact that Mauss had nothing good to say about them. “In the end, though,”
Graeber writes as if speaking about himself as well, “Marcel Mauss has probably
had more influence on anarchists than all the other [anthropologists] combined.
This is because he was interested in alternative moralities, which opened the
way to thinking that societies without states and markets were the way they
were because they actively wished to live that way. Which in our terms means,
because they were anarchists. Insofar as fragments of an anarchist anthropology
do, already, exist, they largely derive from him” (Ibid: 21). In my
interpretation, Graeber’s own interest in developing an anarchist anthropology too
was driven by an appreciation of and fascination with “alternative moralities”
that underpin people’s self-conscious determination to live otherwise—in the
anarchist case, free from capitalism and patriarchy, free from the state,
structural violence, inequality, and domination.
“This
is what I mean by alternative ethics” Graeber explains in a critical section of
Fragments where he theorizes
revolutionary counterpower and foreshadows a core argument he co-authors in The Dawn of Everything (2021): “Anarchistic
societies are no more unaware of human capacities for greed or vainglory than
modern Americans are unaware of human capacities for envy, gluttony, or sloth;
they would just find them equally unappealing as the basis for their
civilization. In fact, they see these phenomena as moral dangers so dire they
end up organizing much of their social life around containing them” (Graeber
2004: 24). This is a remarkable proposition. First, it is determined to cast
ethics and morality as the constitutive, self-conscious grounds of social
organization. Second, it intimates this to be the case across human history, “modern”
or “pre-modern.”
In
fact, Graeber argues that “any really politically engaged anthropology will
have to start by seriously confronting the question of what, if anything,
really divides what we like to call the ‘modern’ world from the rest of human
history” (Ibid: 36). In Fragments, as
well as in the Dawn of Everything, he
passionately rejects familiar historical periodizations and evolutionary stages
such that the entirety of human history—along
with every society, people, and civilization across time and space—becomes populated
by examples of human possibility enacted by decidedly imaginative, intelligent,
playful, experimental, thoughtful, creative, and politically self-conscious
creatures.
For
Graeber, human history does not
consist of a series of revolutions (Ibid: 44)—be it the Neolithic Revolution,
the Agricultural Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Industrial
Revolution—that introduce clear social, moral, or political breaks in the
nature of social reality, or “the human condition” as he prefers to think of
it. If this is the case, and if anarchism is above all an ethics of practice (Ibid: 95), as he asserts, such an ethics
becomes available for anthropological study and political inspiration across
human history. It is important to note however that Graeber passionately
disagrees with primitivist anarchists inspired by his anthropologist mentor
Marshall Sahlins’ (1972) influential essay “The Original Affluent Society,” anarchists
who propose that “there was a time when alienation and inequality did not
exist, when everyone was a hunter gathering anarchist, and that therefore real
liberation can only come if we abandon ‘civilization’” (Graeber 2004: 55). In Fragments, and the Dawn of Everything, he instead draws a more complex history of endless variety where, for instance, “there
were hunter gatherer societies with nobles and slaves,” and “agrarian societies
that are fiercely egalitarian” (Ibid: 54). Graeber insists, in other words,
that “humans never lived in the garden of Eden” (Ibid: 55). The significance of
this finding is manifold. Among other things, it means that history can become
“a resource for us in much more interesting ways,” and that “radical theorists
no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of
revolutionary history” (Ibid: 54).
Writing
of revolution in Fragments, Graeber rejects
its commonplace definition which “has always implied something in the nature of
a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social
reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no
longer apply” (Ibid: 42). Instead, he urges us “to stop thinking about
revolution as a thing—‘the’ revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead
ask ‘what is revolutionary action?’” (Ibid: 45). He stresses that “revolutionary
action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some
form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social
relations—even within the collectivity—in that light” (Ibid: 45), without
necessarily aiming to topple a government, or for that matter, the head of an
anthropology department.
I
mention this possibility in the playful spirit of David to bring us back to the
here and now, and to the final section of Fragments
titled “Anthropology,” in which he “somewhat reluctantly bites the hand that
feeds him” (Ibid: 95). Graeber observes how, instead of adopting any kind of
radical politics, anthropologists have risked becoming “yet another clog in a
global ‘identity machine,’ a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and
assumptions,” whereby all debates about the nature of political or economic
possibilities are seen to be over, and “the only way one can now make a
political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions
about what identity is” (Ibid: 101), he laments. And bitingly, he declares, “the
perspective of the anthropologist and the global marketing executive have
become almost indistinguishable” (Ibid: 100).
But
what does Graeber propose for anthropology instead? Observing that “anthropologists
are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and
political experiments no one else really knows about,” he regrets that this archive
of human experience is treated by anthropologists as “our dirty little secret”
(Ibid: 94). Of course, it was colonial violence that made such an archive possible
in the first place as Graeber recognizes without reluctance: “the discipline we
know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and
mass murder—much like most modern academic disciplines,” he writes (Ibid: 96). Nevertheless,
he makes the daring proposition that “the fruits of ethnography—and the
techniques of ethnography—could be enormously helpful” for radical movements
around the world if anthropologists could “get past their—however
understandable—hesitancy, owing to their own often squalid colonial history,
and come to see what they are sitting on not as some guilty secret (which is
nonetheless their guilty secret, and no one else’s) but as the common property
of humankind” (Ibid: 94).
Towards
a conclusion, I would like to submit that anarchism, and the anthropological
knowledge of anarchist ethics, practices, and imaginaries across human history
are part of “the common property of humankind,” which now includes Graeber’s
own contributions to anarchist theory and practice along with his astounding
imagination of their possible pasts and futures. Allow me to end then with a
strikingly imaginative passage from Fragments,
which we could receive as an invitation to think and act towards an anarchist
future:
“[A]narchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. … [T]hey would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority.” (Ibid: 40)
In
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,
writing of Madagascar, Graeber observes how “it
often seems that no one really takes on their full authority until they are
dead.” To my mind, we now have to deal with David’s “full authority” in an anarchist spirit. The task at hand cannot be
petrification through idolization or canonization, but the extension of an
invitation to think, play, and experiment with his contributions to
anthropology and anarchism alike.
Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.
Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Graeber, D. 2008. Direct
Action: An Ethnography. California: AK Press.
Graeber, D. 2013. The
Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York City: Spiegel
& Grau, a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House.
Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint
of Penguin Books.
Sahlins, M. 1968. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Lee and DeVore (eds), pp. 85-9. Chicago: Aldine.
Cite as: Ayça Çubukçu. 2022. “On Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 18 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/18/ayca-cubukcu-on-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology/
Fragments
of an Anarchist Anthropology is a book that fizzes with a
multiplicity of ideas; so many that they seem on occasion to overgrow the
boundaries of the text. In the text, we see many themes that were to be
developed in more detail in later years, in other books such as Debt: The First
5 000 years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018)and his
posthumous magnum opus, co-authored with David Wengrow, The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). All of the different
overflowing themes share a common underlying thread, however; namely a desire
to learn from and explore the multiplicity of alternatives to hierarchy and
competition that are already in existence, often underneath our noses, rather than
lay down a fixed template for resistance. Rather than trying to re-solve the
Leninist question of What is to be done?, David continuously asked us to
reflect upon the implications of What is being done?. It is in this
regard that David’s anarchism and his anthropology most clearly complement each
other. By slowing down and paying attention to the variety of ways in which
people step outside and subvert hierarchy in order to live a life more worth
living, anthropology might become the liberatory discipline par excellence –
if only its practitioners were able to realise the potential power within their
practice.
Let me take one example from Fragments. On page 60, David discusses the Italian autonomist theory of “revolutionary exodus,” a theory itself inspired by a previous refusal of large numbers of young Italians to engage in wage-labour. David (Graeber 2004, 60) writes that, “[…] in all this Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratory for future social movements, anticipating trends that are now beginning to happen on a global scale.” If this was true when David wrote Fragments back in 2004, how much more is it today, when the so-called Great Resignation poses the greatest threat to the return of business as usual in the aftermath of Covid-19.
Image 1: Viral internet meme conveying the happiness of resigning
A quick scan of headlines on National Public Radio in the US tells the story. “Business should be booming – if only there were enough workers for the job”, or “As the Pandemic recedes, millions of workers are saying I quit”. And why are they quitting? “I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time,” says Jonathan Caballero, a 27-year-old software engineer who previously commuted 45 minutes each way to work on a daily basis. NPR reports that now he “believes that work has to accommodate life.” Alyssa Casey, a researcher for the federal government states that, “I think the pandemic just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want.” And NPR reports of 42-year-old restaurant manager Jeremy Golembiewski and his decision to join the Great Resignation:
“In the months that followed, Golembiewski’s life changed. He was spending time doing fun things like setting up a playroom in his garage for his two young children and cooking dinner for the family. At age 42, he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he didn’t have to put in 50 to 60 hours a week at the restaurant and miss Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas morning with his family. ‘I want to see my 1-year-old and my 5-year-old’s faces light up when they come out and see the tree and all the presents that I spent six hours at night assembling and putting out,’ says Golembiewski, who got his first restaurant job at 16 as a dishwasher at the Big Boy chain in Michigan.”
Golembiewski
apparently comes from humble origins, but even high-end executives are not immune
from the humanising influence of the lockdown. Will Station, a vice-president
at Boeing, is reported as becoming “emotional thinking about how much [of his
children’s lives] he’s missed and how much he’s getting to experience now.” “I
got to see my kids and see their world in a way that I’ve never experienced
before,” he says. “It’s very special.” “Even with all the chaos, this has been
a bonus year for me.”
NPR also reports in June that people quitting jobs in normal times would signal a healthy economy. But these are not “normal times”; the pandemic led to the worst recession in US history and still a record 4 million quit their jobs in April. The situation has continued in the months since. “The Great Resignation appears to be getting worse” complain Kylie Logan and Lance Lambert on the Fortune news website – who, for some reason, seem unhappy that thousands of working people such as Station and Golembiewski are discovering the joy of spending irreplaceable time with their growing children. In September, a new record of 4.4 million resignations were recorded.
The Great Resignation is one of those phenomena that shows most clearly the interconnection of aspects of life that are often kept conceptually separate. We see in the examples above not simply an individualistic “take this job and shove it” kind of mood, but also the ways in which the refusal of work seems to open the possibility for reimagining the possibilities of gendered relations of kinship and care, which anthropologists have long argued are intimately and unavoidably entwined with the world of paid employment. There was quite a bit of talk in last week’s seminar on Debtof the way in which David was sceptical of the kind of “great transformation” picture of the emergence of capitalist modernity that is an otherwise conventional framing for political economic anthropologists. And indeed, in Fragments (2004, 46), David is quite explicit about this scepticism, stating that,
“[…] almost everyone agrees that at somewhere in the sixteenth, or seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, a Great Transformation occurred, that it occurred in Western Europe and its settler colonies, and that because of it, we became ‘modern’. And that once we did, we became a fundamentally different sort of creature than anything that had come before. But what if we kicked this whole apparatus away?”
It’s
worth making the point however, that David’s argument was not, as he put it, “that
nothing important has happened over the past 500 years, any more than I’m
arguing that cultural differences are unimportant.” It was rather that once we
drop the assumption that this always has to be the starting framing of analysis,
and once we decide to “at least entertain the notion that we aren’t quite so
special as we like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has
changed and what hasn’t.” Alternatives to what we think we are can potentially
to be found in our present daily practice; not necessarily to be sought before
the total transformation of the rise of capitalism or after the great
transformation of the total revolution that is yet to come. David was concerned
with the way in which the fetishisation of something called the “market” or the
“economy” as separate from the rest of society prioritised particular
relational obligations over others – not least the way in which life accommodates
work not the other way round, as critiqued by Caballero. This is in many
regards an eminently Polanyian critique of the rhetorical disembedding of the
market economy from society and the consequent setting up of that market
economy as society’s driving institution. And he was always keen to point out
that in our daily practice market rationality relies upon – or is, in Polanyi’s
(1944) terms, still embedded within – other moral perspectives and practices.
Both David and Polanyi knew that any transformation that has occurred in recent
centuries – great or otherwise – could never create an economy with the people
left out, and that any attempt to do so was doomed to be nothing but a shallow
liberal utopia.
Although
the Great Resignation came as a surprise to many, one suspects it would not
have come as a surprise to David, nor to Polanyi, who might well have seen it
as an example of the famous “double movement” by which society, in this case in
the shape of Golembiewski, Station, and millions more like them, protect
themselves from a disembedded market morality and prioritise the reproduction
of persons over the production of objects and economic value. For David it
would have been further proof, if more were needed, that something radically
different to what we think we are now has been within us and in front of us all
along. We might well find radical differences before the great transformation,
after the revolution or at the end of a tributary of the Amazon River, but we
don’t necessarily have to. We’re as likely to find them in an Amazon
distribution centre – if we know how to look. David was fascinated by the grand
historical or reassuringly exotic ethnographic examples that have long been the
stock in trade of anthropology– he wouldn’t have spent so long conducting
fieldwork on magic in Madagascar or researching the role of wampum in early
American colonial contacts if he wasn’t. But he also pointed out that assuming
that these were the only potential points from which radical difference could
be observed meant that we likely overlook them in other spaces.
David
felt that the most common use of anthropology by radicals and anarchists, the
vision of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer paradise, was of limited value. “I do
not think we’re losing much if we admit that human beings never really lived in
the Garden of Eden,” he argues in Fragments, again presaging the more
fully worked out and demonstrated argument underpinning The Dawn of
Everything. Examples from different times and places are not necessarily to
be used as examples or templates of “anarchist societies” to contrast what
David calls “imaginary totalities” to our own. Whatever new forms of sociality
you and I and Station and Golembiewski and the rest of us will build, it is
unlikely to look much like !Kung San or the Baining. Such romantic
appropriations are vulnerable to a number of entirely reasonable conservative
objections. So, in order to give up hierarchy, we have to give up antibiotics,
central heating and clean water too? The alternative that you have to offer
Station and Golembiewski is that they establish an imaginary totality called an
“anarchist society” that goes endlessly wandering across the Orange County in
search of nuts and berries? If this is the only or the main use that radicals
and anarchists can make of the anthropological record, then doesn’t it
implicitly accept or at the very least strengthen the teleology that The
Dawn of Everything sets out to weaken – namely that even if our past might
have been a Rousseauian paradise rather than a Hobbesian nightmare – that
social complexity and technology by their very definition require ever more
complex and technologically developed forms of monitoring, control, discipline,
hierarchy and oppression? Instead, if, as David suggests in Fragments, we
“knock down the walls’ in our thought that separate complex from simple (or the
West from the Rest) than this “can allow us to see this history as a resource
in much more interesting ways.”
So,
when David introduces the example of the Italian autonomists’ “engaged withdrawal”
mentioned earlier, he does it immediately after a discussion of Kasja Eckholm’s
analysis of the Kongo monarchy as an empty shell that people simply withdrew
from. What relevance might this historical practice have for today, David asks?
Taking the walls of separation between Italian modernity and Kongolese
non-modernity as our assumed starting point means that we almost inevitably find
ourselves finding the essential radical difference that we assume they must express.
But knocking down the conceptual walls enables us to see the shared desire for
greater freedom and the reproduction of valued human relations that they
embody. Throughout Fragments, David uses such examples, but in a manner
designed to stress the ways in which they might, to some extent at least,
express such a common shared desire. Differences exist – differences of
perspective, power, and privilege. For an anarchist like David, this almost
went without saying. But they are differences that come in and out of being in
shifting contexts, not the expression of ahistorical essentialised cultural
difference that could only ever be understood by a small coterie of scholars
who would be able to see over the wall that separates West from Rest. They are
often the differences that emerge within and from oneself, such as the shift in
perspective when men such as those mentioned above see their children and their
own lives in a different light and attempt to withdraw from the obligations
that seek to nullify that new perspective. And if we can’t see how radical and
important that is, this is simply because so many of us have naturalised and
now fail to even notice the bizarre character of capitalist cosmology. It’s a
cosmology that insists that we must believe in the existence of a mysterious
cosmic invisible hand that will distribute goods in a fair and efficient manner
to us – at least if we worship it properly by (among other things) sacrificing
our children to it, in the form of giving up so much precious life-enriching
time with them in order to appease its demands, as made manifest in “the labour
market.” It’s a cosmology as wild and fascinating as anything else we find in
the ethnographic record. And David would point out that the rejection of it
that we see today is therefore a potentially profound and revolutionary one,
but one that is far less likely to be “taken seriously” in some corners of a
discipline still wedded to what Arjun Appadurai famously referred to as “sightings
of the savage” as its default mode of intellectual or political critique.
I should note in passing that David would not have been too pleased with me for wheeling out Appadurai in defence of his position. It is fair to say that David was not a great fan. Two weeks ago, Chris Gregory mentioned having initially thought that David was something of a “bullshit artist.” I can confirm the truth of this account. The first time I met David was at a conference in Cambridge about 10 years ago – Chris, David and I were billeted together at a college some distance from the other participants and so spent quite a bit of time together. Chris would complain to me after breakfast that it was bad enough having to listen to the man bullshit endlessly at the conference, but having to endure it first thing in the morning before he’d even woken up properly was another thing altogether. And then when Chris was out of the room, David started talking to me about how thrilled he was to be spending time with the author of Gifts and Commodities (1982), one of his favourite books,and how misguided and intellectually dishonest he felt that Appadurai’s critique of it in The Social Life of Things (1986)had been. It was a slightly awkward situation to manage, although I wasn’t surprised to hear that Chris had come round a few years later. David was on occasion a difficult man to converse with – especially over breakfast – but I knew that the quality and ambition of David’s work would prove irresistible to Chris in the long run.
In
following years, David would occasionally ask us rhetorically, “Why do they always
refer to me as ‘the anarchist anthropologist,’ why not refer to Appadurai as ‘the
neoliberal anthropologist’?” It’s just as accurate but doesn’t get constantly
attached to his name as a pejorative in the same way. Of course, David knew
that he was being slightly disingenuous here – Appadurai hadn’t authored a book
entitled Fragments of a Neoliberal Anthropology, so whether or not David
was correct to label him as such, it’s not surprising that such a label was
less easily attached to him than it was to David. But the underlying point that
David was making – that his own scholarship was endlessly and subtly sneered at
and undermined by repeatedly introducing him as such, even when it wasn’t
necessarily relevant – was valid and important to make. And it was typical of
David that rather than shy away from the association with anarchist theory –
that he knew would be used to belittle him and his work – he instead chose to
take the prejudice on head first, early in his career, before he had the
security of tenure.
Image 2: Book cover of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Fragments is a book that I found a little frustrating on first read. I found the way in which it jumped from point to point and back again a little – well – fragmentary. Much as I am sure that David was aware that there was a certain contradiction in the author of a book entitled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, complaining that people referred to him as “the anarchist anthropologist,” I was aware that I was kind of missing the point in my frustration at the fragmentary nature of a book with the same title. I felt myself to be in a similar position to the kind of American tourist one occasionally overhears in Copenhagen, loudly complaining that the statue of the Little Mermaid is kind of small. On second reading, however, it went a lot better. As with a conversation with David in real life, one simply had to allow oneself to go with the flow – and if one did, it was a conversational experience like no other. Like Chris, I felt David to be a little much on first meeting – particularly before I’d managed to get to the coffee machine. But in later years, as I got to know him better, I looked forward to those wonderful rambling conversations that went from Ray Davies, through Lukacs on to Rodney Dangerfield and then back home via a detour to discuss 18th century Madagascan pirates.
I
think David’s intellectual range sometimes irritated those who envied it and
wanted to pull him back into the narrow arid scripture scholarship of the
intellectual silos that they had settled for and claimed as their little
empires of dirt. The kinds of people who write things in peer-review such as “I
can’t believe that the author of this paper on value seems totally unaware of
Malinowski’s seminal footnote on Trobriand yam exchange from 1937.” I suspect
that what upset these kinds of people most about David was that they knew he
probably was aware of the precious little nuggets of knowledge that they
had devoted their lives to curating; it was just that – as he always did – he
had chosen to go his own way and make his own connections. And in many regards,
that was David’s greatest gift to the academy. This is a profession in which
success is often driven by networks, nepotism and ass-kissing more than the
alleged liberal values of free thought and intellectual inquiry. And in such an
environment, David stood out by his consistent refusal to do anything but his
own thing.
I’m
sure it made him a frustrating colleague at times. But as we all know the
category of “good colleague’ is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it means the
person who turns their marking in on time and I would not be surprised to hear
from colleagues that sometimes David’s contempt for what he might view as the “bullshit”
parts of his job left others picking up the pieces. But let us also remember
that all too often “being a good colleague’ means being the person who turns a
blind eye to bad behaviour and abuse on the part of senior or powerful
colleagues out of loyalty to the institution. After years in this profession,
my skin tends to crawl when I hear senior colleagues praise the virtues of
collegiality– my first instinct is to wonder whose body are we burying
or whose mouth are we taping up today? I remain immensely grateful to David for
consistently prioritising being a good person over being a good colleague – in
this regard at least – and I still, on occasion, miss him very much. His free
and sometimes disrespectful spirit is precisely what a profession that all too
often demands deference to status, rather than engagement and fresh ideas,
needs. And with Fragments we have something that keeps some of that
spirit alive – irreverent, bursting with ideas, and most of all principled –
whether we all agree with all those principles or not. There’s a spirit of
freedom in this short book that senior academics often tell us that we need to
squeeze out of ourselves as the price of admission. The greatest gift that
David gave us with Fragments is the enduring proof that we don’t have to
listen to them.
Keir Martin
is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was
previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His
work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and
their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He
conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This
work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The Death of the
Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain.
He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy
among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has published on the contemporary
global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets,
including The Financial Times and The Guardian.
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Paradigm Press.
Graeber,
D. 2021. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House
Publishing.
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D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of
Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.
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C. 1982. Gifts and commodities. London: Academic Press.
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Cite as: Martin, Keir. 2022. “Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 13 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/13/keir-martin-great-resignations-and-bad-colleagues-reflections-on-an-anarchist-anthropology/
Much to his frustration, David was often labelled ‘the anarchist anthropologist’. Aware of the way the term ‘anarchist’ was used to belittle him and his work, as Keir Martin tells us, David took this prejudice on head first. Anarchism is “not an identity”, his Twitter bio reads, it is “something you do”. In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David elaborates—challenging our traditional assumptions about ‘anarchists’ or ‘anarchism’, and urging us to apply anarchism to the way we do anthropology. As Ayça Çubukçu explains, David saw in anthropology and anarchism a natural fit: anthropology, with its “keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities”, and anarchism, with its confidence that a life more worth living could actually exist. Together, Keir and Ayça take seriously David’s invitation “to think and act towards an anarchist future”.
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.
Keir Martin is Professor of
Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in
Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has
focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in
shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He
conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New
Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The
Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East
New Britain. He is currently leading a research project on the spread
of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has
published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of
academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The
Guardian.
Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.
