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Blog, Bureaucracy, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Michael Herzfeld: The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s “The Utopia of Rules”

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.

Image 2: Guns forbidden sign, © Michael Herzfeld

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 Greece and The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of crypto-colonialism.

This text was supposed to be presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bureaucracy”, but the seminar was canceled by the LSE faculty strike for better working conditions in academia.

References   

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso.

Cabot, Heath. 2018. The Good Police Officer: Ambivalent Intimacies with the State in the Greek Asylum Procedure.” In Kevin G. Karpial and William Garriott, eds. The Anthropology of Police (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 210–29.

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Glaeser, Andreas. 1990. Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haanstad, Eric J. 2013. Thai Police in Refractive Cultural Practice. In William Garriott, ed., Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Police in Practice (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillian), pp. 181-205.

Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Oxford: Berg.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2009. Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2016. 2016. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions. 3rd edition. New York: Routledge.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2022a. Pandemia, panico e paradossi della politica di salute pubblica. Atlante, Storie corali. https://www.treccani.it/magazine/atlante/societa/Storie_corali_Pandemia_panico.html

Herzfeld, Michael. 2022b. Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Hinton, Peter. 1992. “Meetings as Ritual: Thai Officials, Western Consultants and Development Planning in Northern Thailand.” Pp. 105–24 in Patterns and Illustrations: Thai Patterns of Thought, edited by Gehan Wijewewardene and E.C. Chapman. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2013. Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan.  University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley.

Little Walter E., and Cristiana Panella, ed. 2021. Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington.

Luhby, Tami. 2021. “As Millions Fell into Poverty during the Pandemic, Billionaires’ Wealth Soared. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/07/business/global-wealth-income-gap/index.html

Oberfield, Zachary W. 2014. Becoming Bureaucrats: Socialization at the Front Lines of Government Service. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Parkinson, C. Northcote. 1958.  Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. London: John Murray.

Schneider, Peter. 1969. Honor and Conflict in a Sicilian Town. Anthropological Quarterly 42: 130-54.

Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 1999. Audit Culture and Anthropology: The Rise of Neoliberalism in Higher Education. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5:557–75.

Strathern, Marilyn, ed., 2000. Audit Culture: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. London: Routledge.

Tambiah, Stanley J. 1989. Ethnic Conflict in the World Today. American Ethnologist 16:335–49.

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/

Blog, Bureaucracy, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Uncategorized

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bureaucracy

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussant: Michael Herzfeld

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 Greece and The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of crypto-colonialism.

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Myth

Michael Edwards: Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar

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!”

Image 1: A town in Chin State, © Michael Edwards

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.

Image 3: Protestors and police at Hledan, Yangon, 2021, by Maung Sun (CC BY 4.0)

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.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Myth and Imagination’. A longer version of this essay will appear in a volume organised around David Graeber’s anthropology, edited by Holly High and Joshua Reno.

References

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/

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Myth

Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws: Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity

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.

Image 2: Akha swing, © Giulio Ongaro

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.  

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Myth and Imagination’.

References

Biesele, Megan. 1993. Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/’Hoan. Bloomington: Witwatersrand University Press.

De Martino, Ernesto. 1973. Il mondo magico: 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.

Turner, Terence. 1973. Review of Piaget’s Structuralism, by Jean Piaget. American Anthropologist 75 (2): 351–373.

Turner, Terence. 2017. The Fire of the Jaguar. 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/

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Myth

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Myth and Imagination

Chair: Alpa Shah

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.

Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Ayça Çubukçu: On “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”

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.

Black and white photo of a man and woman sitting together at a table, smiling, with a skull on the table between them.
Image 1: David and Ayça in Harringay, London, 2017 © Elif Sarican

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.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Anarchist Anthropology’.

References

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/

Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Keir Martin: Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on 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.

Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music standing in front of a mountain, arms outstretched as she twirls happily. Meme text reads "This is me quitting my job."
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 Debt of 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.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Anarchist Anthropology’.

References

Appadurai, A. 1986. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.

Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. 2021. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.

Gregory, C. 1982. Gifts and commodities. London: Academic Press.

Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

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/

Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Anarchist Anthropology

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Keir Martin & Ayça Çubukçu

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.

Blog, Debt, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Maka Suarez: Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH

Let me begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and I find useful.

In this talk I’d like to propose an approach to Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011) that connects the book to David’s earlier work on Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Graeber 2004) and his latest work—with David Wengrow—on The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow 2021). I think there are many different readings of the book on debt. My own reading of David’s work is in light of ten years of ethnographic research with Latin-American migrants in Spain, who became involved in the country’s largest movement for the right to housing—the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages—or La PAH for its short Spanish acronym (Suarez 2017, 2020). My research focuses on the relationship between political mobilization, mortgage debt, and transnational migration.

My interlocutors were being foreclosed and evicted from their homes, which were bought during the housing bubble. On average they owed over 250,000 euros. They joined La PAH in despair and out of guilt for not paying their debts. The movement helped them transform their guilt into outrage by shifting the grand narrative from individual failure into a counter-narrative on massive financial fraud.  

In what follows I engage with David’s concepts of debt and freedom, as I try to illuminate some of the challenges I ran into while theorizing what debt meant to my interlocutors and fellow activists. 

It was January 11th, 2012. I had just returned to London from a preliminary field visit to Barcelona. David was on leave that year and in New York but was on a short visit to London. His mind, however, was still in New York, where he had inspired and was collaborating with the Occupy movement. As we ate delicious Thai food, one of his favorite activities, David detailed his time with Occupy. Meanwhile, I was trying to get a word in to figure out my own research.

In between dishes of prawn panang, charcoal duck, lots of white rice, and Thai iced tea, David turned around and said: “What’s interesting here is not only why has debt become the focus of this movement, but why it has been so effective. It’s notorious that debt is very hard to organize around. We keep talking about debt strikes, debt this, debtors that… and everybody keeps trying to come up with a formula but it’s incredibly difficult. Part of the reason why is because this sort of old morality is very hard to, like, convince people it’s not their fault … What’s interesting here is you have a really effective broad grassroots movement focusing on [debt]. You could ask: why debt becomes a focus and why it’s worked in a certain way?” (In discussion with the author, January 2012). The question is: in what way?

So, let me begin with Fragments and its relation to Debt. In Fragments, David describes several “invisible spaces” where direct forms of democracy are already taking place. To him, it is in these spaces that “the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments actually comes” (Graeber 2004, 34). In Debt, on the other hand, David defines the principle of communism as “the foundation of all human sociability” (2011, 96). Communism implies spaces free of debt in which all people can contribute to a common project given the abilities they already have. Unlike hierarchy, communism is not based on relationships of precedent or status, but of cooperation. And, unlike exchange, communism does not intend to end relationships by paying back what is owed, but rather builds a sociality in which one aspires to live in. Communism would then be the moral principle of economic life operating at the heart of the “invisible spaces” suggested by David in his anarchist anthropology.

Now I want to give you an ethnographic vignette to analyze how this moral principle organized the everyday realities lived by Latin American migrants to complicate David’s theorizing. 

Hector was forty-eight at the time of our interview and his family was able to get what many families desired at La PAH: cancelling their mortgage debt after being foreclosed. In Spain, mortgage law dictates that a mortgaged home is not the sole collateral to a debt. A bank can collect on any remaining debt after the house is auctioned. The predatory nature of this law translated into debts in the hundreds of thousands for my interlocutors after having lost the property. So, full cancelation of a mortgage debt felt, indeed, like a “victory”—as Hector put it. Oddly then, most Latin-American migrants end up celebrating losing their house to the bank in exchange for a full debt cancellation. However, Hector came to another realization right at the same time: he and his family had no place to live. His wife’s monthly income of 600 euros could not pay for a place to rent, not if they wanted to pay the bills and have enough to live. They were left with one option: La PAH’s Obra Social, a project based on the re-occupation of buildings belonging to banks rescued with public funds and which sat empty for years. The idea was to relocate families like Hector’s. The name of La PAH’s project is a play on words. Every large bank in Spain has an ‘Obra Social’, a philanthropic entity supporting cultural events or alleviating social problems. In Catalonia for instance, they often funded Catalan language promotion or similar social events. La PAH thought it would establish its own strategy for solving real social problems by occupying empty buildings and using them for what they saw as its intended purpose: to house people.

Image 1: La PAH’s Obra Social, © Maka Suarez

La PAH’s Housing Reoccupation project for evicted families was criticized by both the left and the right. For leftist and long-term squatters, it was not radical enough because the strategy was not a permanent reappropriation. For conservatives, occupation was a crime and a threat to private property. For my interlocutors, it was a respite but not an optimal solution. Hector’s family is just one example. There were a significant number of single-mothers and their children, unemployed or in low-paid jobs, which constituted the greater portion of subprime mortgages in Spain (and other places like the US). When I interviewed Hector and his family, they had been living in the occupied building for four months. The experience had been very difficult for them, and they hoped to buy an apartment again in the future. Hector was just one case among many people for whom homeownership was still the preferred housing option and a marker of success.  

Why did my interlocutors want to own a house or an apartment rather than occupying one or even renting it? To answer this question, I’d like to connect Debt with The Dawn of Everything. One of David’s most important invitations in Debt is to move away from an omnipresent language of debt. Thinking with David means questioning why people narrate their lives in the idiom of debt and examining whether and how an alternative approach is even possible. David goes to extraordinary lengths to illuminate the very mechanisms that prevent us from living without debt. The biggest endeavor of this book—to my mind—is showing us a path to freedom, real freedom we can already access if we choose to recognize that many “big theories” are in fact forms of reproducing a ruling class or the legitimacy of the state. David knew wholeheartedly that anthropology is uniquely well placed to document these sites of moral and monetary indebtedness.

In The Dawn of Everything, David along with David Wengrow, characterize freedom as the potential for doing things otherwise (something they see taking three primary forms). First, freedom to move or relocate, the idea of being free to leave a place in the face of danger or otherwise. Then, freedom to refuse orders or how not to be bound by hierarchy. Finally, freedom to shape new social realities by choosing what is at the center of our existence. I’m interested in following here the first freedom, freedom of movement, as it is key in understanding why Latin-American migrants became indebted in the first place and why they would consider doing it again today. There are two key moments in Latin Americans’ migratory journey in which debt is essential for moving. First, when they decide to travel (irregularly) to Spain. The trip required anything between 4,000 and 5,000 US dollars which were almost invariably a debt acquired in their countries of origin to move to Spain. The second moment is buying a mortgaged property. To bring their families from Latin America to Spain, migrants needed to show adequate proof of housing, buying a home was the fastest route to reunifying with their loved ones, mainly moving children from Latin America to Spain. Let me illustrate this with another ethnographic vignette.

“The thing is I didn’t even want to buy a flat, I was trying to rent one,” said Juan. He had been trying to rent a flat in order to bring his wife, Paulina, and their three children from Ecuador to Spain under a family reunification scheme. They had been apart for nearly two years. It was his reunification application that pushed him to look for a new place to live since he needed to demonstrate to immigration services proof of suitable accommodations for his family in Spain. Like many other migrants, Juan was aware that it was not possible to accommodate family life in small bedrooms that were often no more than lined, adjacent mattresses on the floor, or a few bunked beds in a room. Migrants’ usual shared rentals were legally (and physically) inadequate for bringing families to Spain.

Juan wanted to rent a flat because he thought he would not qualify for a mortgage loan. To him, private property was a superior form of housing. But in addition, he was aware of the ease private property meant when faced with Spanish immigration services. Each autonomous community has its own process of showing proof of adequate housing. In Catalonia, the regional government, through its Department of Family and Social Wellbeing, was responsible for providing a report asserting the quality of housing. According to Juan, if one had a rental agreement, the Department sent someone to check your home to know that it was indeed as you described, that no other people lived with you, and that you were able to house others—particularly children. However, as Juan explained, if one had proof of property, they never sent anybody to check anything at all.

Reading David’s three books together allows me to reflect upon this double-bind of debt as the absence of freedom and its condition of possibility. I want to circle back to David’s initial question: why was this movement so effective in organizing around debt? As an activist of La PAH but also as an anthropologist, I believe the movement was effective because it stuck with the problem of debt. It never tried to solve it but showed when it became excessive and violent. The basic requirements that the movement has long advocated for include stopping home evictions without proper rehousing, making mortgaged properties the sole collateral to a loan, implementing rental caps, and increasing social housing availability.

Although the Spanish movement for the right to housing does not seek a debt jubilee, which David advocated for in his book, it offers us a space to politicize debt relations. David never dismissed the PAH as a bunch of reformists, which several leftist activists and scholars did and continue to do. David was more interested in how people organized around debt collectively than what people did with debt individually. It’s important to highlight that in over a decade, La PAH has gone from a small group of activists meeting weekly in 2009 to becoming the largest movement for the right to housing with over 220 nodes around Spain, and weekly assemblies that gather—to this day—thousands of individuals to discuss mortgage debt and political mobilization. La PAH is an effective intervention into a growing reality of financial predation, a movement that has learned to respond to injustice collectively, and a socially diverse space where ideological conceptualizations (of debt or occupation and others) can change.

La PAH is not an example of how David thought we should deal with debt, and yet David was always ready to learn from other people’s experiences and strategies. This was very much David. A self-absorbed but incredibly generous activist, mentor, scholar, and friend. While at Goldsmiths and the LSE, I often thought I had gone in for a supervision but came out knowing about Occupy, Rojava, or his friendship with Anton Newcombe—the lead singer from the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, upon listening back to each one of our conversations – I recorded many – I found detailed guides for thinking differently about what I was working on. They didn’t seem terribly evident at the time because he was never telling me how to think. Rather, David was thinking with me based on his own ethnographic examples and political aspirations. This, I believe, is a perfect reflection of how he thought and wrote. He was never trying to tell people how to think but was inviting us into his own way of connecting seemingly disconnected phenomena, often going back several thousand years to do that.

Image 2: Alpa Shah, Maka Suarez and David Graeber, © Maka Suarez

I’d like to thank Jorge Núñez for thinking with me about many of the ideas advanced here, and Alpa Shah for the opportunity to engage with David’s legacy at a time when his ideas are greatly needed, and he is so dearly missed. To everyone here today thank you for choosing to do exactly what David said occurs in mourning and other acts of memorialization, these are an essential part of the labor of people-making. Let’s continue making our relationships to each other matter in ways that shape the futures we want to build. Thank you!

Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos, Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Debt’.

References

Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press: Distributed by University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.

Suarez, Maka. 2017. “Debt Revolts: Ecuadorian Foreclosed Families at the PAH in Barcelona.” Dialectical Anthropology 41 (3): 263–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9455-8.

Suarez, Maka. 2020. “‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona.” Ethnos, February 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687539

Cite as: Suarez, Maka. “Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH.” FocaalBlog, 21 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/21/maka-suarez-thinking-about-debt-with-david-graeber-and-la-pah/

Blog, Debt, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Keith Hart: Comment on ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year, he took part in the first New York City General Assembly that formed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Much of the contemporary world revolves around claims we make on each other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and payment of taxes, wages, rents, fees etc. David addressed these through a focus on debt in broad historical perspective. It is a central issue in global politics today, at every level of society. The class struggle between debtors and creditors to distribute costs after the long credit boom went bust in 2008 is universal.

David held that the social logic of debt is revealed most clearly when money is involved (Hart 2012). Following Nietzsche, he argued that money introduced the first measure of unequal relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Indeed, one school of thought holds that “money is debt”. This includes the French and German traditions. Money was always both a commodity and a debt-token, giving rise to much political and moral contestation, especially in the ancient world. Whereas Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he located the roots of human bondage, slavery, tribute, and organized violence in debt relations. The contradictions of indebtedness, escalating class conflict between creditors and debtors fed by money and markets, led the first world religions to articulate notions of freedom and redemption, often involving calls for debt cancellation.

The book contrasts “human economies” with those dominated by money and markets (“commercial economies”). These societies are not necessarily more humane, but “they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings”. They use money, but mainly as “social currencies” which maintain relations between people rather than being used to purchase things.

“In a human economy, each person is unique and of incomparable value, because each is in a unique nexus of relations with others”. Yet money forms make it possible to treat people as identical objects in exchange and that requires violence. Brutality is omnipresent. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most “human” of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is commonplace. This is taken to another level when they are drawn into systems like the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery and freedom — a pair driven by a culture of honour and indebtedness — culminate in the ultimate contradiction of modern liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially isolated.

David Graeber then organizes the world history of money in four stages: the first urban civilizations; the “axial age” of world religions; the Middle Ages; and “the great capitalist empires” that ended in 1971 when the US dollar abandoned gold. Money oscillates between two broad types, “credit” and “currency” (bullion), between money as a virtual measure of personal relations, like IOUs, and as impersonal things made from precious metals. The recent rise of virtual credit money may indicate another long swing in money’s central focus. Ours could be a multi-polar world, more like the Middle Ages than the last two centuries. It could offer more scope for “human economies” or at least “social currencies”. The debt crisis might provoke revolutions. Perhaps the institutional complex based on states, money, and markets (capitalism) will be replaced by forms of society more directly responsive to ordinary people and their reliance on “everyday communism”. David’s historical vision has no room for a Great Transformation in the nineteenth century.

Most anthropologists of the last century conceived of a world safe for fieldwork-based ethnography; another minority interest co-existed with this. I call this “the anthropology of unequal society”. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754) launched modern anthropology as the critique of unequal society. Morgan (1877) and Engels (1884) were heavily indebted to him when they reconstructed human history as the evolution of society from a kinship matrix to states based on class divisions. This genre was continued by Lévi-Strauss (1949), Sahlins (1958) and Wolf (1982), but with less explicit political content. Overlapping the millennium, its main exponents have been Jack Goody (1976, 2013; Hart 2006) and David Graeber (2011).

Goody sought to undermine Western claims to superiority over the main Asian societies. He downplayed the industrial revolution that allowed Europeans to take over the world in the nineteenth century. Following Braudel (1975), Goody (2013) preferred to point to the similarities between industrial capitalism and the “merchant cultures” of pre-industrial civilizations. He claimed that Marx (1867) misread merchant capitalism, but did not address his case for treating industrial capital as strategic. Weber (1922) too gets short shrift for suggesting that modern capitalism differs from its predecessors. Given their common origins in the Bronze Age urban revolution, modern European capitalism diffused faster to Asia than the Italian renaissance to Northwest Europe.

Despite a barrage of propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization — territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism, bureaucracy, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion, and the nuclear family (Hart 2002). The rebellion of the bourgeoisie against the Old Regime was co-opted by “national capitalism” in a series of political revolutions of the 1860s and 70s (Hart 2009). This severely set back humanity’s emancipation from inequality. Consider the shape of world society today. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, “the men in suits”, rule masses who are predominantly poor, darker, female, and young. The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, vainly try to stem the inflow of migrants. Our world resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime in France before the revolution (Tocqueville 1859). Goody may have a point in asking us to reconsider how exceptional our societies are.

I have taken part in a conference and book, Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East (Weisweiler 2022), which was inspired by David’s Debt book. He drew attention to the political economy underpinning a sequence of ancient empires in western Eurasia from the Persians and classical Greeks through Alexander’s conquests to republican and imperial Rome and the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean. Its logic hinged on the need to provision vast armies on prolonged marches. That meant using precious metal coinage, sustained by a network of mines, states and mercenary soldiers, then converting conquered peoples into slaves to be sold for the money needed to complete the cycle. There seems little doubt that western empires from 1500 to 1800 relied on a similar logic. But they were unable to take over the world until industrial capitalism raised their technological competence to a far higher level than the rest.

Marxists and liberals agreed that a world-change was taking place in nineteenth-century Britain. Hegel’s (1821) historical model, however, was very different from Marxism’s successive stages (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism). His three phases were based on the family and the land, the market economy of urban civil society and the modern state respectively. These now co-existed under the coordinating guidance of the state. Both Polanyi (1944) and Marx missed the revolutions of the 1860s and 70s that installed a new class alliance in the leading countries, the partnership between capitalists and the traditional enforcers that I call “national capitalism”. This new alliance soon spawned the legal conditions for modern corporations, as well as a massive expansion of state property and a bureaucratic revolution at all levels of the economy. Mass production and consumption was the result.

Man speaking into microphone, as at a conference, with overlaid book cover of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," by Thomas Piketty.
Image 1: Book cover and economist Thomas Picketty, photo by Frontieras do Pensamento/Greg Salibian (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Thomas Piketty’s (2014) book on capital was the smash hit of our times. It was based on serious economics, up to two centuries of national income accounting for a few rich countries. An economist who can quote Balzac can’t be all bad. I identify three reasons for his success. First, Piketty brought inequality back onto the mainstream agenda, just as Occupy Wall Street did — “we are the 99 percent”; and this touched a nerve after three decades of neoliberal responses to the financial crisis that included bailing out the rich and making the poor pay. Second, Piketty’s argument rests on two simple equations describing the relationship between capital and labour over the last 200 years; he uses these to demonstrate that capital’s share of national income must always increase. It is unlikely that teeming historical diversity can be captured by timeless categories and equations. Third, against the notion that capitalists make their money by producing competitively for profit, Piketty claimed that property was a growing component of wealth; inheritance and rent are neglected factors in distribution today.

There is something special about the plutocracy built up in recent decades. The rise of modern corporations comes from their being granted the rights of individual citizens by the US Supreme Court in 1884; and they now combine those rights with their long held special privileges, like limited liability for debt (Hart 2005). Even the Romans, not noted as champions of democracy, limited the spending of the rich on political campaigns. The US Supreme Court recently refused to accept any restriction on corporate political spending since it would infringe their “human rights” and allowed companies exemption from government rules on religious grounds.

These corporations once built their wealth by producing industrial commodities for profit at prices cheaper than their competitors. Now they rely on extracting rents (transfers sanctioned by political power) rather than on producing for profit in competitive markets. Thus “Big Pharma” makes more money from patents granted by Congress than the entire Medicare budget. Sony makes 75% of its revenues, not from selling machines, but from DVDs which are reproduced, almost without cost, from movies sold in cinemas; they call duplicating movies “piracy” (Johns 2009). Goldman Sachs retrieved from the US Treasury at full face value the $90 billion lost by insurance giant, AIG in the 2008 crash. These rent-seekers are not punished for stealing from the public, but are bailed out by our taxes and held up as shining examples of super-rich consumption to a public that has exchanged equal citizenship for bread and circuses (reality TV). This is decadence: there are no longer any national political solutions to economic problems that are global in scope.

Marx held that industrial capitalist profit subordinated rent and interest to its logic. This is why he and Engels thought that Victorian England held the future of the world economy. New phases of capitalist development and decline have been identified ever since. The American macro-economist, Dean Baker (2011) provides much insight into rentier capitalism in the US today. Selling stuff for profit means adding value through production. Rent-seeking is “…an attempt to derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by adding value”. Rent and interest (banking) no longer take their scale, form, and function from industrial capitalist production for profit, as Marx insisted in Capital. Has the focus of political economy tipped away from industrial production (in the broadest sense) towards rents derived from political privilege? It is hard to see how the richest 1% could have done so well in the last four decades otherwise, given the overall stagnation of production and real wages in this period.

The digital revolution in communications is highly relevant, since many intangible commodities can now be copied easily at no cost. If you steal my cow, I can no longer milk it, but no-one loses out if I copy your song. Entertainment is the fastest-growing sector of the world economy after finance. National capitalism’s rise to dominance after the First World War is central to understanding today’s economic crisis, since it has been eroded since the early 1970s. Digital Retail Management regimes now being installed around the world illustrate the dominance of political and legal coercion in the economy now.

Rent-seeking now trumps value-added through production. The war over intellectual property escalates to ever higher levels of absurdity; and the rise of Big Tech, in extending corporate command and control, undermines our ability to make society in the interest of the American Empire. Like Marx and Engels, I believe that the machine revolution can be a force for greater economic democracy; but the open source and free software movements have lost the influence they once promised. Our main hope is to mobilise global networks to develop democracy, knowing that the multitudes are faster than they are. That was certainly David Graeber’s project.

Image 2: Economist Dean Baker, photo by CEPR (CC BY 4.0)

David’s book is or will be the biggest best-seller by an anthropologist, even over Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), the previous frontrunner. In 2011, he spent a sabbatical leave from Goldsmiths in New York where he was able to promote the book heavily before becoming a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was invited by the German President to debate on national television with the leader of the Social Democratic Party and Debt sold 30,000 copies there in two weeks. In the last two decades his books have been translated into many languages. He has a strong following in Japan, Korea, and China.

Debt’s phenomenal success was not an accident or freak of creative genius (Hart 2020, 2021). Anthropology narrowed its scope in the last century to meet the needs of academic bureaucracy and lost its public appeal in the process. David set out to write a big book with big ideas that allowed readers to place themselves in history. Anthropologists, in adopting fieldwork-based ethnography as their standard method, settled for narrow localism and a truncated version of their own history, finding in ethnography a replacement for racist colonial empire, while ignoring the fragmentation of world society into myopic nationalisms. David by-passed all this to resurrect the Victorian polymath and the world thanked him profusely for it. But there were other strings to his methodological bow, chief of them the ability to combine academic life with revolutionary politics when most of his colleagues were trapped in universities committed to bureaucratizing capitalism (Hart 2021). From the time he was a graduate student, he trained himself to write accessibly for the general public. He wrote each piece twice, once for himself and once for everyone else.

David’s intellectual success in a curtailed lifetime drew on self-conscious methods: vision, imagination and endurance through hardship, for sure; reading with no bounds; love of comparative ethnography; writing “to be understood rather than admired and not for knowing and over-acute readers” (Nietzsche); active participation in democratic politics; and returning to anthropology’s original mission as the study of humanity (Hart 2020). Call that genius, if you like; I prefer to call it a personal synthesis built on disciplined hard work over an extraordinary range of human activities. If only we could each aim to emulate him in some respects.

Keith Hart is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London and a full-time writer based in Paris and Durban. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes will be published in Spring 2022.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Debt’.

References

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Cite as: Hart, Keith. 2021. “Comment on Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/keith-hart-comment-on-debt-the-first-5000-years/