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Chris Knight: Wrong About (Almost) Everything

December 22, 2021 focaal_admin

A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021.

The Dawn of Everything’s central idea is challenging. We are told that humans are politically adventurous and experimental – so much so that after a spell of freedom and equality, people are inclined to choose oppression just to make a change. History takes a rhythmic form, oscillating between one extreme and the next. In recent times, however, we’ve all got stuck in just one system and we must try to understand why.

All this is new and refreshing but hardly credible. I prefer the standard anthropological view that the political instincts and social emotions that define our humanity were shaped under conditions of egalitarianism. To this day, all of us feel most relaxed and happy when able to laugh, play and socialize among companions who are our equals. But instead of building on this experience so familiar to us all, Graeber and Wengrow (henceforth: ‘G&W’) oppose the whole idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were egalitarians. In their view, they would just as likely have chosen to be oppressed.

As they put it: ‘If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history?’ Among these possibilities, as the authors readily acknowledge (pp. 86-7), were abusive dominance hierarchies like those of chimpanzees. G&W seem to be arguing that if our ancestors were so adventurous, then surely, they would have experimented not only with egalitarianism but also with harassment, abuse and domination by aggressive, bullying males.

**Image 1:** Dawn or teatime? The new book by David Graeber and David Wengrow (photo: Chris Knight, 2021)

G&W make these points in the context of a consistent attack on any idea that we became socially and morally human during the course of a revolution. All my academic life, I have been exploring the idea that human language, consciousness, kinship and morality evolved in a process of gradual evolution which culminated in an immense social and political revolution. My motivation was always to challenge the popular prejudice that socialism is impossible because by nature we humans are selfish and competitive – and ‘not even a revolution could change human nature’.

I would always answer this way. Yes, we are a species of great ape. Yes, like our primate cousins, we have competitive, selfish, aggressive and often violent instincts. But these were not the ones responsible for our success. Everything distinctively human about our nature – our capacity to be brilliant mums and dads, to care for one another’s children and not just our own, to establish moral rules, to see ourselves as others see us and to use music, dance and language to share our dreams – these extraordinary capacities were precisely the products of the greatest revolution in history, the one that worked.

Chris Boehm’s theory of the human revolution

Nearly a decade after the appearance of my own book detailing the complexities of this ‘human revolution’ (Knight 1991), the anthropologist Christopher Boehm (1999) published a version of the theory that, despite its insights, played safe in political terms by omitting any mention of the most important element – the dynamics of sex and gender. It is this abstract, unisex version of human revolution theory that G&W consider safe enough to mention explicitly in order to discredit it.

Boehm points out that our earliest ancestors were neither one-sidedly cooperative nor one-sidedly competitive. Instead, they were psychologically disposed to dominate others while forming alliances to resist being dominated in turn. This collective resistance from below eventually culminated in everyone coming together to prevent any would-be leader from dominating the group. Our ancestors’ chimpanzee-style dominance was now turned on its head, culminating in ‘reverse dominance’ – rule by a morally aware community committed to an egalitarian ethos.

G&W go along with the idea that humans ‘do appear to have begun … with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do’ (p. 133). In this context, they agree that extant hunter-gatherers display ‘a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning …. none of which have any parallel among other primates’ (p. 86). What they’ve no interest in is the idea that such tactics played a crucial role in shaping human nature during our evolutionary past.

Summing up their objection to Boehm’s account, they describe any suggestion that hunter-gatherers consistently preferred egalitarianism as an ‘odd insistence’ that ‘for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened’. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors were consistently egalitarian, their political lives must have somehow been frozen, stuck in time. G&W conclude with these words: ‘Before about 12,000 years ago, Boehm insists, humans were basically egalitarian . . . according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years [these] political animals all chose to live just one way.’ (p. 87)

The only problem is that this isn’t what Boehm wrote. His actual words are worth quoting:

‘Once one band, somewhere, invented an egalitarian order, this radical change in social ways of doing things would become visible to its neighbors. The advantages would have been evident wherever subordinates were ambivalent about being dominated, particularly in bands with very aggressive bullies…. One would expect a gradual cultural diffusion to take place, with attractive egalitarian traditions replacing despotic ones locally. … Over time, migration patterns over longer distances could have fairly rapidly spread this political invention from one continent to another.’ (Boehm 1999: 195)

This is how successful revolutions work. Plainly, Boehm’s argument was not simply that until 12,000 years ago ‘humans were basically egalitarian.’ Instead, he suggests that early humans developed a variety of different political systems while gradually converging around one particularly successful model – egalitarianism.

The Teatime of Everything

Quite unfairly, The Dawn of Everything conflates modern evolutionary theory with social evolutionism – the nineteenth century narrative of a ladder of stages progressing from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’. Darwinism claims to be scientific, we are told, but in reality, is pure myth. Quixotically, G&W expect readers to give serious consideration to a perspective on human origins that does not acknowledge evolutionary theory at all.

The only science these authors do recognize is ‘archaeological science’, and then only if the archaeology doesn’t go too far back. They justify dating ‘the dawn of everything’ to a mere 30,000 years ago on the basis that nothing about politics or social life can be gleaned from archaic human ‘cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint’(p. 81).

This excuse no longer works in the light of recent evidence that our species’ most unique trait – art and symbolic culture – emerged in Africa three or four times earlier than was previously thought. By no means limited to bones and stones, this evidence consists of beads, geometric engravings, burials with grave goods and artefacts such as grindstones and paint pots, all invariably found in association with red ochre (Henshilwood et al. 2009, 2011). G&W do notice one or two of these discoveries (pp. 83-4) but show little interest – despite the fact that when cutting-edge Darwinian theory is applied to the ochre record, the possibilities for generating predictions about social dynamics, patterns of ritual performance and gendered alliances become very real (Power 2009, 2019; Power et al. 2013; Power et al. 2021; Watts 2014).

Unfortunately, these authors won’t go near Darwinism in any shape or form. They concede that someone whom they term a ‘feminist’ (actually the highly respected founding figure in primate and human sociobiology Sarah Hrdy) has come up with a ‘story’ about the critical role of collective childcare in shaping our human instincts and psychology (Hrdy 2009). Commenting that ‘there’s nothing wrong with myths’, they describe this particular myth as ‘important.’ They then immediately cast doubt on it by quipping that ‘such insights can only ever be partial because there was no garden of Eden, and a single Eve never existed’ (p. 82). Tricks of this kind – in this case ignoring the fact that Hrdy’s groundbreaking work is focused on the emergence of the genus Homo some 2 million years before the dating of our common mitochondrial DNA ancestor – are clearly aimed at undermining the very idea that human origins research is worth pursuing at all.

Readers interested in Mesolithic and Neolithic archaeology will find plenty of intriguing speculations in this book. But if you are interested in how we became human – how we developed our unusually revealing eyes, our extraordinarily large brains, our distinctively social emotions, our laughter, our innate capacity for music and language – you won’t find anything at all!

The title is seriously misleading. The Dawn of Everything? ‘Teatime’ would be more accurate. The story begins with the European Upper Paleolithic, best known for those spectacular cave paintings in Ice Age France and Spain. According to the authors, by that stage the archaeology is at last getting interesting because it indicates the emergence of an economic surplus allowing elites to arise. For the first time, we begin to see evidence for social complexity, hierarchy, sumptuous burials etc.

‘Tiny hunter-gatherer bands’

For G&W, the fact that our hunter-gatherer ancestors established an egalitarian lifestyle much earlier in Africa is of limited interest. They concede that extant hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania share their resources, but instead of admiring this, they complain that resistance to accumulation obstructs the emergence of ‘social complexity’, using this term where others might have spoken of ‘class’. The authors, it seems, are averse to the concept of social class.

So, hunter-gatherers obstruct complexity – i.e., prevent class society from arising – by resisting the accumulation of wealth. G&W invoke the authority of the hunter-gatherer specialist James Woodburn here. They conclude from his work that ‘the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all’ (p. 128). This, they argue, rules out social complexity and – with it – the full richness of human cultural and intellectual life.

Woodburn (1982, 2005) certainly did argue that deliberate resistance to accumulation underpins hunter-gatherer egalitarianism and represents a political choice consciously made. He observed that such egalitarianism was a feature only of non-storage hunter-gatherers, concluding that ‘immediate return’ was the original type of human economy. But Woodburn did not argue that such egalitarianism was lacking in complexity. In fact, he viewed the binary contrast between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ social forms as damaging and misleading. For Woodburn, maintaining egalitarianism was a supremely sophisticated achievement – demanding far greater levels of political intelligence and complexity than simply allowing inequalities to arise. The Hadza, he explained, have the intelligence to realize how dangerous it would be to let anyone accumulate more wealth than they need.

Wealth inequalities not OK

According to G&W, however, wealth inequalities are unproblematic. In support of their position, they invoke Kandiaronk, the seventeenth century First American critic of European ‘civilization’ to whom they devote an inspiring chapter. Somewhat unconvincingly, they assure us that Kandiaronk and his First American co-thinkers ‘had trouble even imagining that differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of power’ (p. 130).

G&W accept that immediate-return hunter-gatherers refuse to allow wealth inequalities to develop. But surprisingly, they regard this whole situation as disappointing:

‘This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store?’ (p. 129)

What kind of future? They answer this by suggesting that activists who take inspiration from African hunter-gatherers are inviting modern city-dwellers to become ‘stuck,’ like the unfortunate Hadza, in the repetitive simplicity of life in tiny nomadic bands.

To be clear, I am no primitivist. I am in favor of technological, social and political development. The Hadza illustrate that it is fulfilling and enjoyable to share wealth on demand, to laugh and sing, to ‘waste time’ in play, to resist letting anyone dominate us – and to prioritize caring for each other’s children over all other concerns. When it comes to development, these politically sophisticated bow-and-arrow hunters can teach us a lot.

In the beginning … private property?

G&W argue that private property is primordial because it’s inseparable from religion. By way of illustration, they refer to the trumpets and other paraphernalia used in some indigenous traditions during boys’ coming-of-age ceremonies:

‘Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist… It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts…, so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.’ (p. 159)

Note how ‘absolute’ here gets translated as ‘private.’ The claim seems to be that if ritual property is sacred to an ‘absolute’ degree, then it qualifies by definition as ‘private property’.

The conflation is reinforced when the authors seek authority for their association of religion with private property. At this point G&W (p. 159) invoke Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’:

‘Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning “not to be touched”. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?’

The authors then describe how ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonians discovered ‘that almost everything around them has an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars, liana groves and animals.’ (p. 161) A spiritual entity’s sacred ownership of a species or resource sets it apart from the rest of the world. Similar reasoning, write G&W, underpins Western conceptions of private property. ‘If you own a car’, they explain, ‘you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it’ (p. 159).

It is quite breath-taking to find G&W conflating traditional notions of spiritual ‘ownership’ with ideas about owning your own car. On what planet are they when they view modern private ownership as ‘almost identical’ in its ‘underlying logic and social effects’ with a supernatural being’s ‘ownership’ of natural resources?

When indigenous activists tell us that a lake or mountain is sacred to a powerful spirit, they are not endorsing anything remotely equivalent to ‘private property’. If the ‘Great Spirit’ owns the forest, the clear implication is that it is not for sale, not to be privatized, not to be claimed by a logging company.

One of the most powerful of Durkheim’s insights was that when people invoke Divinity, they are envisaging the moral force of their community as a whole. So, if a mountain belongs to God, that’s a way of declaring that it cannot be privatized. When G&W turn that round – claiming that the concept of ‘private property’ emerged inseparably from the very idea that some things are sacred – you can see what a crude misrepresentation this is.

What Durkheim really said

For Durkheim (1963, 1965), ‘setting apart’ was the antithesis of private appropriation. In his quest to explain the origin of the world-wide cultural taboo against incest, he puzzled over traditional beliefs investing women ‘with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the masculine population at a distance…’ (1965: 72). In such belief systems, Durkheim wrote, women’s segregating power is that of their blood, bound up intimately with notions of the sacred. If divinity becomes visible in women when they bleed, it is because their blood itself is divine. ‘When it runs out, the god is spilling over’ (Durkheim 1965: 89).

For Durkheim, then, the primordial concept of ‘setting apart’ had nothing to do with private property. The issue was what happened to a young woman on coming of age (1965: 68-96). Alerted by her menstrual onset, her kin would assemble as a body to lay claim to her – that is, to ‘initiate’ her – setting her apart from male company and from the world. Her seclusion was accomplished through a special ritual – her coming-of-age ceremony. This established that her body was sacred, her choices with respect to it accountable to her sisters and other kin. In association with such collective action, the emergence of human consciousness, language and culture, for Durkheim, was the point at which a new kind of authority – that of the community – first came into being.

If only G&W had shown an interest in modern evolutionary science, they would have recognized how these Durkheimian insights anticipated the most recent and authoritative modern archaeological explanation for the ochre record in human evolution, based on the idea that blood-red ochre was used by women as cosmetic ‘war-paint’ to alert men to the newly-established sacredness of the female body (Watts 2014, Power 2019, Power et al., 2021).

Seasonal or lunar?

Now we come to The Dawn of Everything’s central idea. It is that we were all once free because we could choose how to live, experimenting now with one political structure and now another – sometimes even oscillating between utterly different social states.

Anyone who has studied anthropology will have come across the Eskimo seal-hunters who traditionally practiced sexual communism throughout the winter months, only to switch over to patriarchal family life throughout the summer – returning suddenly to communism on a particular day announced publicly as the onset of winter. G&W apply this pendulum or oscillation model to the Ice Age cultures of the European Upper Paleolithic, arguing that these complex hunter-gatherers deliberately set up vertical hierarchies of elite privilege and power – only to enjoy the pleasure of tearing them all down as the old season gave way to the new.

Because they enjoyed this revolution so much, these Ice Age political geniuses realized that they shouldn’t hold on permanently to their revolutionary gains. They understood that in order to keep enjoying successive revolutions, they would have to fill the intervals with transient counter-revolutions – doing this by allowing ‘special’ individuals to establish dominance so as to present a nice target for the next revolutionary upsurge.

I love this idea. As it happens, it uncannily resembles the oscillatory principle that we in the Radical Anthropology Group have analysed as the inner secret of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism ever since Blood Relations was published three decades ago (Knight 1991). On the other hand, my oscillation model was not quite the same. Because we evolved not in sub-Arctic conditions but in Africa, there were good ecological reasons why monthly periodicities should take precedence over seasonal rhythms. So, if power was seized and surrendered in the way G&W imagine, then social life would have been turned upside-down on a monthly schedule, oscillating with the waxing and waning moon (Knight 1991: 327-373).

A pendulum of power

G&W’s history is bursting with oppositions and alternations among hunter-gatherers but its periodicities are one-sidedly seasonal. Don’t they know that hunter-gatherers follow not just the sun but the moon? Their most important rituals, bound up as these are with women’s menstrual ebbs and flows, are scheduled by the moon.

In the rainforests of the Congo, writes Morna Finnegan (2008, 2009, 2012), women deliberately encourage men to display their courage and potential for dominance – only to defy them in an all-female ritual known as Ngoku before yielding playfully in a ‘pendulum of power’ between the sexes. G&W (pp. 114-15) allude to this but then claim that:

‘… there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alternation, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for “the origins of social inequality” really is asking the wrong question.
If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be “how did we get stuck?”’

This final question is a truly profound one. It can only be answered, however, once we have developed some realistic notion of the situation that previously prevailed. Was there ever a time when our prehistoric ancestors were truly free, truly ‘unstuck’?

When marriage became permanent

Among the Central African Bayaka forest people, the Moon is said to be ‘women’s biggest husband’ (Lewis 2008). From the standpoint of any man, his wife in effect abandons him for her celestial husband each time she bleeds. The reality behind this ancient metaphor (Knight and Lewis 2017) is a tradition in which women playfully ‘seize power’ for some part of the month before willingly handing over to men once they have made their point, establishing what Finnegan (2008) has termed ‘communism in motion’. Patterns of kinship and residence in such societies set up a pendulum swinging between menstruation and ovulation, brothers and lovers, kinship and marriage, communal solidarity and the intimacies of sex.

Given the probable antiquity of such patterns, G&W are right to view some kind of block on political oscillation as something which really did happen during the course of history. But accounting for the blockage will require us to deal with a topic that G&W will not touch. It will mean respectfully approaching indigenous peoples’ practices around menstruation (Testart 1985, 1986. Knight 1991. Lewis 2008. Power 2017). It is also important to understand variability in kinship patterns and post-marital residence – again a critically important topic that G&W scarcely mention in their book.

Among non-storage hunter-gatherers, women generally insist on living with their own mother at least until after she has had a couple of children (Marlowe 2004). Genetic studies have shown that in Africa where our species evolved, this pattern extends far back into the past (Destro-Bisol et al., 2004. Verdu et al. 2013. Wood et al. 2005). In place of life-long marriage, ‘bride service’ typically prevails, each African hunter-gatherer woman accepting her chosen lover while continuing to live in her mother’s camp. Her temporary husband must make himself useful by bringing back hunted meat to his bride and her household. If he doesn’t measure up – he is out! Under such arrangements, everyone alternates between kinship and marital life, in that sense switching between utterly distinct worlds.

Living with mum is a resilient pattern, but pressure from the husband can compel her to switch residence and live permanently with him and his kin. Where this happens, a young mother with her children may find it difficult to escape. As she loses her former freedom, her husband’s care for her may then morph seamlessly into coercive control. It was this disastrous outcome which Engels (1972 [1884]) described so eloquently as the ‘world-historic defeat of the female sex’. Across much of the world, the patriarchal forces that transformed marriage into a fixed bond correspondingly imposed fixity on social life as a whole.

How humanity got ‘stuck’

This looks like a promising answer to the question, ‘How did we get stuck?’ So, what answer do G&W give to this question? Their final chapter is so meandering that it is difficult to know. They mention how care for a person may morph seamlessly into coercive control – but for some reason don’t connect this with changes in postmarital residence or family life. The nearest they get is when describing spectacles of execution and torture in seventeenth-century Europe and among the North American Wendat. We are reminded that the King’s right to punish his subjects was modelled on the patriarch’s duty to discipline his wife and children. This political domination was publicly represented as his duty of care. By contrast, when the Wendat subjected a prisoner to prolonged torture, it was to make the opposite point – publicly distinguishing dominance and control from loving care. Since the prisoner was not part of the household he needed to be tortured, not loved.

And so it is that G&W find in the distinction between care and domination their long-awaited explication of how we got stuck:

‘It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by re-creating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck….’

Instead of exploring hunter-gatherer research and gender studies, then, G&W confine their horizons to the experiences of First American military leaders, torturers and European monarchs, exploring how we ‘got stuck’ by imagining these peoples’ psychological conflicts. If the bewildering words quoted above mean anything, they seem to suggest that we got stuck because certain power-hungry figures confused caring for people with violently dominating them.

Is this a serious explanation? Did people really get confused in this way? In place of an answer, G&W themselves seem to have got stuck. We are just offered the same question in slightly different words:

‘Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck?’

No further effort is made to answer the most crucial question of the entire book.

Morgan and Engels

What is missing here is any real understanding of human evolution. In Chapter 3, G&W criticize what they describe as the mainstream anthropological consensus for likening our foraging ancestors to extant African hunter-gatherers – simple folk living in ‘tiny mobile bands’. Then in Chapter 4 they change their mind. The mainstream anthropological consensus, they now tell us, is that hunter-gatherers such as Aboriginal Australians:

‘… could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as “brothers” and “sisters” (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners.’

It was Lewis Henry Morgan (1877, 1881) who founded our discipline on the basis of his discovery of so-called ‘classificatory’ kinship. Its principle can be summed up as the ‘equivalence of siblings’. Two brothers, for example, will step into one another’s shoes with respect to their relationships. A woman will say to her sister: ‘Your children are mine and mine are yours’. So, there’s no concept of ‘private property’ with respect to children. Family life is not ‘nuclear’. Every child will be free to move between her numerous different ‘mothers’ and other supportive kin, and she will continue to enjoy such freedom throughout her adult life.

When life is structured in this way, the result is extraordinary. Everyone can expect hospitality from ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ treated formally as equivalents to one another in chains of connection stretching across vast areas. One consequence of this is that the state has no soil in which to grow. When people are self-organized, allied to one another and where the joys of childcare, sex, dance and domestic life are more communally experienced, then there are no dead spaces – no social vacuums – for the state to enter and fill. You can’t abolish the state without replacing it, and communal family life – in today’s world, self-organised neighborhoods and other wider communities – is one way of doing this.

Curiously, Graeber and Wengrow say almost nothing about kinship in their long book. Instead of critiquing the Morgan-Engels paradigm, Graeber and Wengrow turn Engels’ vision in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels 1972 [1884]) upside-down. In the beginning, they say, was private property, religion and the state. To quote the concluding words of Chapter 4, ‘If private property has an “origin”, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself.’ In an earlier book with Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (2017), Graeber even suggested that since imagined supernatural agents such as divine kings and forest spirits have always exercised authority over people, the principle of the state is an immovable feature of the human condition.

It may seem paradoxical for an anarchist to accept the inevitability of private property and the state. But The Dawn of Everything adds weight to that message. Yes, say the authors, anarchist freedom can be implemented, but only in precious moments or enclaves. Personally, I find it hard to imagine what kind of ‘enclave’ might be found in a planet already beginning to burn up. Graeber and Wengrow seem to have abandoned the revolutionary slogan that ‘another world is possible’. Instead, they offer only the sobering message that ‘hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together, as complements to one another’. (p. 208) They seem to be saying that we cannot have freedom in one place without accepting oppression somewhere else.

Where do we go from here?

Despite these criticisms, the one important point about this book is its advocacy of oscillation. All living things have a pulse. They live and they die, wake and sleep, breathe in and out in ways driven by the changing seasons and the many other periodicities of our life-friendly, earth-sun-moon orbital system.

We need to get Planet Earth turning once more, not just physically but socially and politically, too. This will not be done by telling people to stop confusing care with dominance and control. It will be done by supporting the school strikes, singing on their picket lines, extending the action to workplaces, dancing in the streets, blocking traffic, bringing capitalism to a complete halt.

But once we’ve taken control, what next? If we stay on strike too long, we’ll soon starve. So, let’s oscillate. Those weekly school strikes, for example, could, perhaps, be lengthened, joined up and staged once a month, spreading across the world until we’ve released all humanity from wage-slavery. Carbon emissions immediately cut by 50 per cent. Then we go back to work, re-organizing it as necessary. We can risk returning to work only once we’re sure it won’t lead back to capitalism. And we can be sure of that only once we’ve all sworn to be back with our children on their picket line next New Moon. We keep doing this, seizing power and surrendering it, until the world is rocking and breathing once more. Reclaim the future. Neither patriarchy nor matriarchy but, something like, rule by the moon.

That would be to repeat the class and gender dynamics of the original human revolution, but this time on a higher plane. Might any of this be possible or practical? Let’s open up the debate to everyone and see what we can do. That surely is what the activist-anthropologist, David Graeber, would have wanted.

Chris Knight is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London, where he forms part of a team researching the origins of our species in Africa. His books include Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991) and Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016).

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Power, Camilla. 2009. Sexual selection models for the emergence of symbolic communication: Why they should be reversed. In The Cradle of Language R. Botha and C. Knight (eds). Oxford: Oxford University press, pp.257-280.

Power, Camilla, Volker Sommer and Ian Watts. 2013. The seasonality thermostat: Female reproductive synchrony and male behaviour in monkeys, neanderthals and modern humans. PaleoAnthropology 2013: 33-60. doi:10.4207/PA.2013.ART79

Power, Camilla. 2017. Reconstructing a source cosmology for African hunter-gatherers. In C. Power, M. Finnegan and H. Callan (eds), Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology. New York & Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 180-202.

Power, Camilla. 2019. The role of egalitarianism and gender ritual in the evolution of symbolic cognition. In T Henley, M Rossano, E Kardas (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology. Routledge, pp.354-374.

Power, Camilla, Ian Watts and Chris Knight. 2021. The Symbolic Revolution: a sexual conflict model. In N Gontier, C Sinha, A Lock (eds) Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution Oxford UP, 2^nd edition. Online Publication Date: Mar 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198813781.013.13

Testart, A. 1985. Le communisme primitif. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Sahlins, Marshall and David Graeber, 2017. On Kings. London: HAU Books.

Testart, A. 1986. Essai sur les fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Townsend, Cathryn, 2018. The Evolution Egalitarianism. In Hilary Callan (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London: John Wiley.

Verdu, P., et al., 2013. Sociocultural behavior, sex-biased admixture and effective population sizes in Central African Pygmies and non-Pygmies Mol Biol Evol, first published online January 7, 2013 doi:10.1093/molbev/mss328

Watts, Ian. 2014. The red thread: pigment use and the evolution of collective ritual. In D. Dor, C. Knight and J. Lewis (eds), The Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 208-227.

Watts, Ian., Michael Chazan and Jayne Wilkins 2016. Early evidence for brilliant ritualized display: Specularite use in the Northern Cape (South Africa) between ~500 and ~300 ka. Current Anthropology, 57(3).

Woodburn, James. 1982. Egalitarian Societies. Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(3): 431-451.

Woodburn, James. 2005. Egalitarian societies revisited. In T. Widlok and W. G. Tadesse (eds), Property and Equality, vol. 1: Ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 18-31.

Wood, E. T et al., 2005. Contrasting patterns of Y chromosome and mtDNA variation in Africa: evidence for sex-biased demographic processes. Eur J Hum Genet 13: 867-76

Further Readings

‘The Evolution of Egalitarianism,’ in The International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)

‘Did communism make us human? On the anthropology of David Graeber,’ Brooklyn Rail, June 2021, Chris Knight (https://brooklynrail.org/2021/06/field-notes/Did-communism-make-us-human)

‘A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history”,’ Libcom.org, Camilla Power (https://libcom.org/history/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-cou)

‘What is Politics’ reviews of ‘The Dawn of Everything’, YouTube, (https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featured)

Cite as: Knight, Chris. 2021. “Wrong About (Almost) Everything.” FocaalBlog, 22 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/

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

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

December 21, 2021 focaal_admin

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

Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne and James Taylor: State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world

December 20, 2021 focaal_admin

Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by authoritarianism. This parallel cannot be explained as simply due to both countries being Theravāda polities. Nevertheless, dominant politics in both countries express elements of conservative ethno-Buddhism, within the cultural markers of national identity and contested political discourse. The political economy of political Buddhism in both countries can best be apprehended as genealogical problems in the context of an emergent new space, which heralds the inexorable logic of the future foretold: new hegemonic, populist/ultra-nationalist forms of governance, influenced by Chinese capital investment.

The Thai and Burmese generals are cooperating to ensure democracy and liberty are crushed in both countries. This unholy alliance goes back to the days when current General Min Aung Hlaing, chair of Myanmar’s ruling junta, regarded Thailand’s ultra-royalist now-deceased undemocratic General Prem Tinsulanonda as his adopted father and inspiration. Prem, as Chief Privy Councillor, was always close to the Thai palace and the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Their combined strategy was to use the military to restrict freedom and human rights, while appearing democratic. Military coups, along with violence, have been repeatedly carried out. Thailand has had some thirty coup attempts since 1912. Nicholas Farrelly notes, “Thailand’s 19 modern military coups and attempted coups distinguish its elite political culture from those of other so-called ‘coup-prone’ states. Since a bloodless military coup in 1932 [apparently] ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy, Thailand has failed to consolidate a democratic culture among its elites that would make coups inconceivable. Instead, episodic military interventionism – supported by persistent military influence in politics – is now part of a distinctive Thai coup culture that has been reproduced over many decades.” The 1932 military coup to overthrow the absolute monarchy never actually obliterated monarchical absolutism; it only masked the autocratic authority held by the military-monarchy alliance (Taylor 2021) behind limited parliamentary democracy (with senators handpicked and political leaders sanctioned by the palace). The current situation in Thailand can be referred to as “neo-absolutism” (Streckfuss 2014). This arrangement has endured under a façade of democracy maintained by mass propaganda and military control over the judiciary, apparatuses of state, and commerce.

In Sri Lanka, certain coup dynamics are not discernible given that the Rajapaksas and the armed forces are at one. Tellingly, Sri Lanka’s British-inspired constitutional traditions show an ability to withstand and counter the worst excesses of Sinhalese authoritarianism. But the militarisation of both the civil administration and public life continues. The consequence is the on-going strangulation of civic space, a dynamic we also discern in Thailand.

In the pre-European and colonial history of Sri Lanka and Thailand, there were Buddhist missions between Kandy and Siam. Indeed, the Kandyan Sangha was repurified by a mission that saw the Thai monk Upali Thera carry out upasampada for a small group of Sinhalese monks. So came into being the Siyam Nikaya in Kandy. Other missions followed. But from the late nineteenth century urban Theravāda Buddhism in both Sri Lanka and Thailand underwent modernisation and a concomitant fashioning of a thoroughly individualist ethic wholly consistent with the logic of capital. The ideological conservatism that characterises the urban Sangha in both Sri Lanka and Thailand is thus a consequence of this modernisation, or what Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988) characterised as “Protestantisation.”

**Image 1:** Sri Lankan Theravāda Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala Apadanaya (1864 – 1933) (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Here we look at the varied consequences of Buddhist modernism in Sri Lanka and Thailand in two shared registers: First, marginalisation, ethno-chauvinism, and ethnic palingenetic ultranationalism (Roger Griffin’s term) with its re-interpretations of a conservative Buddhist ideology; and, second, an alliance between political elites (i.e. Sinhalese senior public servants, military leaders, and a Sinhalese political class, and, in Thailand, a monarchical regime with serving officer corps) and a Westernised bourgeoisie, which sustains an ethno-historical prism of nationalism, hierarchy and order. The more recent intervention of Chinese capital has impacted these domestic social, political, and economic arrangements, while creating neo-colonial regional dependencies.

When the Burmese Generals launched a coup in February 2021 there was speculation in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese leadership of the Sri Lankan armed forces would do something similar. The objective would have been to ostensibly bolster the Rajapaksas cultural-constitutional state project – one inspired by the Chinese Communist Party’s mediation of Han culture. Influenced by Beijing, the Rajapaksas and the new Sinhalese elites have rejected the constitutional frame of the nation-state (originating in the colonial-bureaucratic reforms of the 1830s) in favour of that of the civilisation-state. This is reflected in a desire to align the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist history. The Burmese generals have pursued a similar strategy. That said, Sri Lanka, for all its ethno-religious extremism, has maintained the outward form of constitutional government. Myanmar, by contrast, left the Commonwealth after independence and, following the military coup of 1962, General Ne Win declared that parliamentary democracy was alien to Myanmar’s Buddhist history (Aung-Thwin and Aung-Thwin 2013, 27). The Myanmar military, like much of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese nationalist elites, simply misrepresented its own past. However, what these countries share is a process of either voluntary or enforced Sinification, which will have disastrous consequences for the region. This will lead to consequences such as an increased debt burden with China, the destruction of home-grown industries, and the assault on both individuals and civil society who oppose Beijing’s clients.

Modalities of violence in the periphery

The Rajapaksas came to power in 2019-20 with one stated objective: to restore good governance (in light of the shambles of the previous Sirisena/Wickremesinghe government). In this context, “good government” aligned with an ethno-nationalist ideology. The Rajapaksas came to power promising security for the majority Buddhist community, even if that entailed increased insecurity for non-Sinhalese communities, particularly in the minority-dominated hinterland. Indeed, the minor reforms of the Sirisena/Wickremesinghe period, such as reducing militarisation in the northeast, were swiftly reversed. Since coming to power, the Rajapaksas have spent much energy focusing on the margins of the nation-state, specifically the hinterland of the northeast where ethno-religious minorities are the majority.

Margins are defined as sites far from the centres of state sovereignty in which states have weak jurisdiction and political control and are unable to ensure implementation of their programmes and policies. To the extent that both the Sri Lankan and Thai states have sought to exercise control over their political and geographical margin, their respective practices have been over-determined. By this we mean that the state’s response to contradictory/antagonistic forces is reduced to a singularity – the monopoly of state violence. That is to say, violence that is both structural and “symbolic” (Žižek 2008) is necessary to mask the contradictions emanating from the margins and the multiplicity of meanings that the margins generate. Rather than confront the contradictions of the multi-ethnic/religious peripheries imaginatively, the state resorts to the singularity of structural violence.

In Thailand, the state’s periphery is defined along ethno-religious terms and in terms of the form that Buddhism and Buddhist practice takes, especially in the far north and northeast where charismatic monks have dominated public religious life since the nineteenth century. The political economy of space shows how the centre and periphery are contested domains of power. The Thai (and previously Siamese) state since the early twentieth century has, for example, pursued a policy of cultural assimilation directed at the ethnic Lao of northeast Thailand and the ethnic northern Thai (Khon Mueang) – a classic instance of symbolic violence. This echoes processes in Sri Lanka’s northeast borderlands that led those with hybrid ethno-religious sensibilities to increasingly identify as Sinhalese Buddhists. Such is the legacy of urban Protestant Buddhism and its ossifying logic with respect to identity, as H.L Seneviratne (1999, pp 105-120) documents in his monumental work on the processes of rationalisation in Sinhalese Buddhism initiated by the Theosophists in late nineteenth century Ceylon.

Religious nationalism and ethno-culturalism

In Seneviratne’s trenchant critique, the modernising turn in Ceylon associated with Dharmapala led to a form of political Buddhism that was culturally monistic; the Rajapaksas, the Sinhalese bureaucracy, and the military are merely completing the policy agenda of political Buddhism initially framed by the Vidyalankara in the first half of the twentieth century. Like all nationalist projects it will succeed and fail simultaneously; the more it succeeds, the more it will fail, for it will have to continually reinvent it’s other. Contemporary Sinhalese nationalism since the demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) shows flexibility in selecting its target – Muslims and Tamils, but also liberal-left Sinhalese, women’s rights activists, and wider civil society. Given this intimidating scenario, an exodus of educated middle-class Sri Lankans is likely (note the proliferation of private English tuition on the island simply for the purpose of aiding migration overseas).

In the meantime, the Rajapaksas are putting their wider mission into practice, focusing on transforming what remains of the resistant margins of the island’s northeast. The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the institutional weaknesses of the Sinhalese state, allowing for the renewal of Sinhalese nationalism and other forms of populism, although a resurgent Tamil populism remains elusive at this time. Wang observed in April 2021 that Covid-19 “had underscored how fragmented Sri Lanka’s domestic supply chains were, leading to inefficiencies throughout the logistics sector.” The impact was devastating on farmers trying to get their produce to markets and urban centres. However, in one domain the logistics of the state are very effective: the intensification of the Sinhalese state’s commitment to fashioning a homogenous vision of Sinhalese Buddhist cultural forms. N.Q. Dias in the 1960s first envisioned a policy designed to physically encompass the Tamils in the Jaffna peninsula, the Vannī, and the east. His plan initially was to be executed by the then Jaffna Government Agent (GA), the late Neville Jayaweera, whose task was to enforce the Official Language Act in Jaffna and assist Dias in developing a series of measures for dealing with an anticipated Tamil uprising against the impact of a discriminatory policy agenda pursued by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. To contain this future Tamil revolt, Dias staked his nationalist credentials by unfolding a plan to construct army camps encircling the Northern Province.

Jumping forward to 2021, the Rajapaksas are Dias reincarnated. In the Eastern Province the Rajapaksa brothers (President Gothabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa) have set about the task of completing the homogenization of the east in a Sinhalese Buddhist image. Ironically, homogenization is what the LTTE sought in the east when they were in the ascendency; more recently, Wahabi influenced Muslims in the east have exhibited similar objectives. The Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who have organized around the Rajapaksas may well succeed. To the task of making the dhammadīpa whole in the Sinhalese nationalist imaginary, the new President appointed an all-male and all Sinhalese Buddhist Presidential Task Force for Archaeological Heritage Management in the Eastern Province. The task force’s objective is to “build a Secure Country, Disciplined, Virtuous and Lawful society” (Groundviews 2021). It is hard to imagine how a body that is only comprised of retired and serving senior military and police chiefs could achieve this, other than in the most specious way imaginable – one that serves to further the Sinhalese nationalist dream of wholesale spatial reorganisation in the east (in which the Tamils and Muslims are reduced to permanent second-class status) in the name of a highly fetishized Buddhism. The secondary purpose of this mission is to embed the long-term dominance of the Rajapaksas, their kin networks, and their allies in the capitalist class and the military.

Thailand protests and the monarchy issue

In Thailand, protests against the monarchy-military alliance continue. Many observers thought the student-led protests and international support would bring the authoritarian leadership in Thailand to its knees and the monarch to the negotiating table. In this, they were mistaken. The response has instead been increased repression. The current student-led protests (with an increasingly broad social base) have a genealogy that stretches back to the red shirt protests of 2009-2010. Many of these students were too young to know the violence and injustices committed on protestors in 2010 but seem well informed through alternative free media and their well-informed seniors. Ironically, during the 2010 violence against protestors, the international and domestic media were reluctant to talk about the legitimacy of red shirt claims, or to expose the atrocities committed by ultra-royalists and the military on the streets in Bangkok. The persecution since that time has not stopped. Ann Norman of the Thai Alliance for Human Rights has compiled reports of the state sanctioned assassination of red shirt democracy activists and the plight of those individuals forced to flee to neighbouring countries since the 2010 crackdown. In contrast, we have seen in the past year live coverage of student-led protests beamed across the world in real time and witnessed increasing police brutality – especially a violent militarised faction trained under the auspices of the king, known as Ratchawallop Police Retainers, King’s Guards 904.

The student-led protestors have made three demands of the ruling regime: sack the junta’s self-appointed Prime Minister, Prayut Chan-Ocha; establish a new democratic constitution; and reform the monarchy into a more accountable and transparent institution under the constitution. The fear at present is the increasing evidence of monarchical absolutism under the current king. The latter demand does not imply “toppling” the monarchy (lom-jao), though semantics make little difference to die-hard ultra-royalists concerned that democratic reforms would weaken their patronage networks. Meanwhile, the junta has been using propaganda to encourage fascistic followers wearing yellow shirts to take to the streets. This rise of the New Right is seen not only in Thailand, but also in Sri Lanka, India, and elsewhere (Taylor 2021; Bello 2019). In Thailand, these developments are dangerous as we have seen in the past when pro-democracy groups took their grievances to the streets, only to have agents provocateurs and reactionaries mobilised to generate violence. This is the endgame in an authoritarian state-sanctioned ruse.

The transmission of knowledge these days is largely through social media and social networking or messaging apps. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued statements on the regime’s attempt to shut down conventional media broadcasting, other than the royalist-military media (i.e, the Manager [Phuujadkaan], Daily News, Bangkok Post and the Nation). But international NGOs have little influence in Thailand.

If the regime does not listen to the people, who does it listen to, other than the mostly Bavarian-resident monarch? Publicly, the Royal Household in Bangkok has maintained that the King’s public appearances during the year were cancelled owing to the third wave of Covid-19, which Thailand has not yet (at the time of writing) managed to get under control. As in Sri Lanka, the pandemic has become a cover for further curtailing civil liberties and targeting those engaged in democratic participation.

Regarding Thailand’s Covid-19 vaccine roll out, for the first year of the pandemic this was nothing short of a farce – the privileged pharmaceutical facility owned by the Thai king, Siam Bioscience, was supposed to manufacture the Astra Zeneca vaccine, but this proved to be a flop. As well, the country is now heavily dependent on China’s Sinovac/Sinopharm (not internationally peer-reviewed and showing low effectiveness), produced under a lucrative contract between a royalist-favoured company owned by the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) and the Chinese Government. Officially, 36% of the Thai population have been fully vaccinated, though this could be an overstatement. Meanwhile, those people who want a credible vaccine (where supplies are available) must buy their own.

Thailand’s shifting political economy mirrors developments in other Theravāda Buddhist majority states. Myanmar and Sri Lanka are exemplary of military-corporate states that have become heavily indebted (both financially and politically) to the Chinese state. The military in Thailand could also use a Covid-19 resurgence to further embed the dominant role of Beijing and mainland Chinese commercial interests in the Thai state, especially given that only Beijing has the financial capacity to distribute development largesse. The latter is a real possibility in Sri Lanka as Covid-19 community transmission increases and the most likely means to counter such resurgence is China’s vast currency reserves, the Sinopharm vaccine, and the patron-client dynamics emerging between dominant elements of Sinhalese capital in Sri Lanka and the corporate Chinese state. The corporate-military-royalist Thai state ought to see the dangers of lopsided development, trade, and commercial relations if they continue to cede economic sovereignty to China.

Political Buddhism and a third space

In Thailand, the country’s propaganda machinery has been at full steam to create further divisions in society, mocking the student-led protests as anti-monarchy and anti-statist. This could lead to violence, making military intervention appear necessary and justified, leading to another coup. In the sense of Henri Lefebvre’s “politics of space”, the royalist Thai state and its compliant capitalists and public sector servants are directed to ‘‘pulverise’’ democratic space into a manageable, calculable, and abstract grid and prevent diverse social forces from creating, defending, or extending contested spaces of social reproduction and autonomy.

In Sri Lanka, the struggle over the constitutional anchoring/grounding of space has been reclaimed by Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa have found a willing ally in the task of fashioning a Chinese inspired “civilisation state” (see Collins and O’Brien 2019, pp 36-49), a state model which aligns the future evolution of the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist historiography. Similarly, Thailand also has groups that have coalesced under the umbrella of the “Buddhism Protection Centre of Thailand” (sun phitak phraphuttasasana haeng prathet thai), advocating for a relatively ossified form of Thai Buddhist state, which intertwines the cultural identity of the Thai-Buddhist community with the identity of the Thai state (see Katewadee Kulabkaew 2019).

In Thailand, we may see the creation of a radical “third space” (Soja 1996) as a consequence of the 2020-2021 student-led protests. In following Soja’s reading of Lefebvre, the “third space” is defined as “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality” (ibid. p.57). This has involved some radical Buddhist monks, though not many compared to revolutionary Myanmar, as the Thai Sangha is highly regulated at all levels by monastic and lay conservatives and centre-state elites under the monarchy. There is little autonomy for Thailand’s Supreme Sangha Council as directives now come directly down from the king. If a radical “third space” opens up in Thailand it will be a turning point from a “feudal-like” (sakdina) (see Reynolds 2018, pp 149-170) social order towards greater democracy. Sri Lankan progressives can only dream of a future in which a civil-society-generated “third space” may emerge and re-energise the task of re-territorialising the ethno-Sinhalese state in an authentically pluralist direction.

As Thai society and culture changes, the need for a new democratic constitution to replace the current 2017 military-drafted constitution, has become an imperative. The 2017 constitution is a partisan “cultural constitution” that allows for the capture of (absolute) state power by a monarchy-military (“deep state”) alliance. Its logic and structure are being emulated by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka as President Rajapakse harnesses a modernist reconstruction of Buddhist historiography to fashion himself as a monarchical president channelling the energy of an absolutist and righteous (dhammiko rajadhamma) cakkavatti.

In Thailand’s militarised constitution, the “juristocracy” (Mérieau 2014) prospers on misuses and abuses of what is termed “judicial review”. A constitution is supposedly a mechanism for the organisation, distribution, and regulation of power. However, as a foundational law of the state, a constitution’s origins are always extra-legal, and yet it simultaneously constructs a normative framework for the organisation of the state and its institutions. Thailand’s 2017 constitution is so flawed that it should never have been validated by the Constitutional Court of Thailand (Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang 2017). In a democratic society, given broad social and cultural changes, a constitution will always need constant revisions at historical periods to reflect the concerns and cultural values of its citizens, as constitutional legitimacy depends on its cultural anchoring. But it ought not to be anchored in a highly fetishized conservative-elite Buddhist historiography. This historiography needs to be opened up to new possibilities that render it imaginable to think anew about the nature of the social and the political in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In both countries, but in Thailand in particular, it appears that the ruling political regimes and their state apparatuses hear, given the volume of the protests, but do not listen (Thai: phuak’khao dai’yin tae phuak khao mai-fang).

Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne is Senior Lecturer in Law at Liverpool Hope University.

James Taylor is Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Adelaide, South Australia and affiliate at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University.

References

Aung-Thwin, Michael and Maitrii Aung-Thwin. 2013, A History of Myanmar since Ancient Times: Traditions and Transformations, second edition. London: Reaktion Books.

Bello, Walden. 2019. Counter-Revolution: The global rise of the far right. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Collins, Neil and David O’Brien. 2019. The politics of everyday China Guidance for the Uninitiated. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gombrich, Richard and Gananath Obeyesekere. 1988. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Groundviews. 2021. “Shaping a Single Narrative, courtesy the Clergy and Task Forces,” 11 July. https://groundviews.org/2021/11/07/shaping-a-single-narrative-courtesy-the-clergy-and-task-forces/

Reynolds, Craig. 2018. “Feudalism in The Thai Past,” in Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Streckfuss, David. 2014. “Freedom and Silencing under the Neo-Absolutist Monarchy Regime in Thailand, 2006–2011,” in Pavin Chachavalpongpun ed., Good Coup Gone Bad: Thailand’s Political Development since Thaksin’s Downfall. Singapore: ISEAS.

Seneviratne, H L. 1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Taylor, Jim. 2021. “Thailand’s new right, social cleansing and the continuing military-monarchy entente.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 6(3): 253-273.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

Cite as: de Silva-Wijeyeratne, Roshan and James Taylor. 2021. “State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/roshan-de-silva-wijeyeratne-and-james-taylor-state-and-crisis-in-sri-lanka-and-thailand-hearing-but-not-listening-in-the-theravada-buddhist-world/

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

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

December 20, 2021 focaal_admin

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

Baker, Dean. 2011. The End of Loser Liberalism: Making markets progressive. Washington DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Braudel, Fernand. 1975. Capitalism and Material Life. New York: Harper Collins.

Engels, Friedrich. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: Pathfinder.

Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goody, Jack. 2013. Metals, Culture and Capitalism: An essay on the origins of the modern world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Hart, Keith. 2002. World society as an old regime. In: C. Shore and S. Nugent (eds.), Elite Cultures: Anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge, 22-36.

Hart, Keith. 2005. The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business, personal and impersonal. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Hart, Keith. 2006. Agrarian civilization and world society. In: D. Olson and M. Cole (eds.), Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 29-48.

Hart, Keith. 2009. Money in the making of world society, C. Hann and K. Hart (eds.), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91-105.

Hart, Keith. 2014. Jack Goody: the anthropology of unequal society. Reviews in Anthropology, 43(3): 199-220.

Hart, Keith. 2012. David Graeber and the Anthropology of Unequal Society. https://www.academia.edu/44225307/David_Graeber_and_the_Anthropology_of_Unequal_Society

Hart, Keith. 2020. David Graeber (1961-2020). https://www.academia.edu/44852890/David_Graeber_1961_2020_

Hart, Keith. 2021. Anthropology as a revolutionary project: David Graeber’s political legacy. https://www.academia.edu/48898491/Anthropology_as_a_revolutionary_project_David_Graebers_political_legacy

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2010 [1821]. The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johns, Adrian. 2009. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon.

Marx, Karl. 1970 [1867]. Capital Volume 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1964 [1877]. Ancient Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Polanyi, Karl. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984 [1754]. Discourse on Inequality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2004 [1859]. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weber, Max. 1961 [1922]. General Economic History. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.

Weisweiler, John. Ed. 2022. Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money and Social Obligation in David Graeber’s Axial Age (c.700BCE–700CE) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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/

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

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Debt

December 16, 2021 focaal_admin

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Keith Hart & Maka Suarez

In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major contemporary critics of our current economic paradigm. Around the same time, he contributed to the creation of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that made the book all the more timely and important. Debt is a sweeping historical account of ‘human economies’ and an exposé of the moral foundations of modern economics. In dialogue with a range of influential economic thinkers, Keith Hart critically assesses the significance of the book as an exemplary work of ‘anthropology of unequal society.’ Maka Suarez weaves the theoretical insights of Debt into her own ethnography of Spain’s largest movement for the right to housing (La PAH), analysing how La PAH exposes the kind of politicised debt relations that are the historical focus of David’s book.

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE, Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and co-director of the Human Economy Programme. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. His latest book is Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes.

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

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

Don Kalb: Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’

December 13, 2021 focaal_admin

Cover image of David Graeber's book "Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value." — **Image 1:** Book Cover.

The last two decades in anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and with the Western Left more generally, this is even true for the Western world at large. With the publication of his debt book (Graeber 2010) – also exactly a decade ago – as Keith Hart once said, David became the most famous anthropologist among the general public of our age, taking that long empty seat next to Margaret Mead (and Levi Strauss perhaps). With the launch of the ‘Society for Ethnographic Theory’, the HAU journal and the turn towards Open Access publishing, David, now world famous, once more stirred up anthropology as well as academia more broadly. It feels a bit weird to say this about an anthropologist of the gift, but David literally made history by attacking established centers and practices of power and wealth.

While some in this series of seminars knew him well as a direct colleague or friend, I only ran into David a couple of times. I felt it was not easy to get to know him. He seemed a bit solipsistic, drawn into conversation with himself, sometimes mumbling and laughing privately about the sudden insights he seemed to run into while doing so. If you had not been introduced to that intimate conversation before, it was not so easy to enter it, I felt. He and I never had the time to get to that point, for which I am sorry.

I remembered these few moments of mutual awkwardness while rereading Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Graeber 2001). Its style of writing reminded me of David’s internal conversations and his moments of private enjoyment. The narrative of this book meanders, feels sometimes elliptic (as it does in all his books). The flow of the argument regularly gets punctuated. Jolts of joyful energy seem to pull the author in multiple unexpected directions. The possible connections that emerge from the words that he happened to choose, seem to seduce him to leave the path and get into the bush around it. David, who celebrates creative freedom, is certainly the Zizek of anthropology. As with Zizek, things can become very detailed within a narrative that was already far from linear. As a reader you may feel you are being unduly slowed down, even taken advantage of. But David can also take you by the hand while making a reckless jump, allowing you for a moment to tower over a conceptual landscape where most people would normally be lost, and you are struck by the sudden clarity of perception. I now imagine that such apparently reckless jumps produced his moments of private enjoyment.

My discussion here of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value must be short. I will leave the bush aside – the book has long chapters on gift giving societies in Melanesia, Madagascar and among Amerindians, some of it very interesting, some of it less compelling for non-specialists – and I will focus on the landscapes that emerge during those conceptual jumps. This book is not just representative of his writing style and his counterintuitive rhythm of discovery. It also partly lays out the tool kit of concepts, perspectives, and issues that was going to dominate his later work. In fact, it offers in embryo his full program of research. What is then David’s theory of value? How do Marx and Mauss cohabit in it? How do his very outspoken Chicago teachers, Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, figure? What are its possibilities and blind spots?

David developed his ‘anthropological theory of value’ against the intellectual and political background of what he calls ‘the bleak 1990s’. He is very explicit about it: neoliberal hegemony, globalized capitalism, economics as dominant social imaginary, post-structuralism, and the reduction of politics to ‘creative consumption’ and identity, both in anthropology and other social disciplines. While structure and history had gone out of fashion, he writes, action and agency had become cynically equated in social theory to mere individual market choices. Before 1989, Bourdieu had worked out ‘habitus’ as the connecting concept between structure and agency (and Giddens had been busy with similar issues). Graeber swiftly passes him by for the focus on dominance and power games that underlie Bourdieu’s project, in David’s eyes another symptom of the cynicism that he saw around him. For David, at this point in his career, it still seemed paradigmatic that anthropologists are dealing with people in relatively egalitarian societies and with people who desire (a core concept for him) to precisely escape such power games. David proposes ‘value’ as the point where structure and agency meet. After an interesting interlude on Roy Bashkar (and critical realism) and his thinking in terms of forces, tendencies, and processes rather than objects he emphasizes that his value does exactly that: setting open-ended dialectical processes in motion. What is this value and what are the anthropological traditions that help him shape it up?

The shortest way to answer that question is to bring in that concept that is all but foundational for David’s work: ‘constituent imagination’. While he borrows that term from Italian autonomous Marxism (Virno and Negri), he links it to a long anthropological pedigree that connects Klyde Kluckhohn, Marshall Sahlins, Terence Turner, Louis Dumont, and others, all of whom are discussed in interesting and original ways here. Value then emerges as what people tell themselves they find important in the realization of their lives, not very different from the common-sense meaning of value in various European languages. David’s value is emic, idealist, and dynamic. While his notion seems initially not very different from let’s say Talcott Parsons, David wouldn’t be Graeber if he didn’t loudly refuse the implied structural functionalism: David’s value emphatically doesn’t work to solidify stable social reproduction. On the contrary, it feeds the social imagination, both collectively and individually, and it is both agonistic and liberating. In the social processes that it sets in motion people die, strive, love, compete, believe, pray, moralize, estheticize, sacrifice, fetishize, and whatnot. Value is about making differences, and about ranking and proportioning them. De Saussure’s structuralism may be essential for how our language and imagination works, but David, following his teacher Terence Turner, adroitly embraces Vygotsky’s ‘generative structuralism’ and shifts the weight from langue to parole and towards ‘signifying material action’. Hence his interest in ethnohistory and the telling and remembering of histories. Stories become part of ‘constituent imagination’ in action, the practiced struggle for individual and collective autonomous becoming and in how these struggles are being remembered.

In the end he concedes that his foundational notion of value is perhaps not that different from Dumont, a student of Levi Strauss and the ultimate theorist of hierarchy, except for its emphasis on process, action, and agency. And while the structure of our social imagination is certainly ‘a totality’ of the Saussurian kind and as such fully embedded in the existing structuration of our societies, as well as fundamental for how we teach our children and reproduce ourselves, it is clear to David that this is a totality ridden by ambivalence and contradiction. There are inevitably contradictions between desires and pragmatic realities. ‘Constituent imagination’ often seems more the property, desire, and practice of individuals or groups and moieties within societies than of societies as a whole.

Where is Marcel Mauss here, David’s most basic theoretical and political inspiration? Mauss appears at all levels of David’s approach. David spends some very interesting pages introducing him as the key thinker for a non-cynical anthropology and for a humanist Left, who famously rejected the Bolsheviks for their recourse to state terror, authoritarianism, and bureaucratic diktat. In the book, Mauss of course appears as the quintessential theorist of the gift and of egalitarian societies, which, as I said, are for David at this point still the self-evident object of anthropology. David may criticize him for his romanticism, but he fully embraces his notion of ‘everyday communism’ as the glue of human sociality. Then there is also the basic methodological notion of the ‘total prestation’ where the full quality, the core values, of a whole society are reflected in each and every of its parts, including the imaginations and actions of its members. David does not discuss it explicitly, but if I’m not mistaken, he does seem to think that Mauss’ approach may be too static for his purposes. The constituent values for which people once congregated as a distinct group or society, may become corrupted over time and people seek repair, interpretations will differ, agonistic and liberating conflict will ensue. Holism, for David, therefore, does not take away the dialectics. On the contrary, it feeds them and is fed by them.

In all this Graeber seems to follow Terence Turner closely. And indeed, in a much later preface to a collection of Turner’s essays (2017) David remarked that he wrote his value book to make the notoriously complex texts of Turner understandable for a wider public. The book was thus originally intended as a gift to Turner.

But Turner was strong on Marx, indeed perhaps the most outspoken Marxist in the anthropology of the 1990s. And Marx was strong on totality and dialectics too, but of a less idealistic kind. David in this book sets a Turnerian Marx into a dynamic conversation with Mauss. How does that work out? A Marxist will immediately wonder how the thoroughly idealist concept of value as constitutive imagination that Graeber is on to will relate to Marx’s similarly dialectical but certainly not idealist conceptions of (use, exchange, and surplus) value. Most importantly, how does it relate to Marx’s ‘law of value’, which is Marx’s short formula for talking about the social relations of capitalist accumulation.

Graeber is sympathetic to the young Marx who wrote on behalf of the emancipation of humans from their self-constructed religious fetishes which he wanted them to begin to see as the mere products of their own powers of creative imagination rather than as the gods that they had to obey. This indeed corresponds perfectly to David’s own agenda as his long and interesting discussions of fetishism show. But the post 1848 Marx of capital and labor receives rather short shrift. David repeatedly complains about the ‘convoluted language’ of Marxists. He does not like the Marxian vocabularies and prefers for example to talk about ‘creative powers’ rather than about labor (a concept that hardly appears in this book on value). Marx for David is mainly interesting, he says, for his approach to money – and here we find an early announcement of the coming book on debt. So, not capital, not labor, but money. He emphasizes that for Marx value and money are not the same, but in the next pages Marx’s value disappears and David gets stuck with money and prices, which are of course a holistic system too. With Terence Turner, he embraces the idea that ‘socially necessary labor time’ – a core element of Marx’s ‘law of value’ – is also inevitably a cultural construct but the discussions about that centrally important concept for Marx are not referenced in this book as they are by Turner (2008). Nor does David seem aware that this concept helps Marx to discover a particular relational form of value under capitalism that consistently operates behind people’s back and is therefore ontologically something rather different than a self-conscious ‘constituent’ value choice. In Chicago David was apparently not exposed to Moishe Postone. He also does not seem aware of the important value debates among Marxist theorists of the 1970s (in particular Diane Elson 1979, whom Turner had read closely). Considering the number of pages dedicated to such discussions in this book, Marx’s value appears intellectually far less compelling then Kluckhohn’s, Parson’s or Dumont’s value. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in David’s handling is then in the next moment reduced to a rather static cultural concept for determining, via prices, how important we find particular items of consumption as compared to other items of consumption (cars: 7% of yearly consumer expenditures in the US in the late nineties). David’s Marx, surprisingly, seems in the end not to be about capital and labor but primarily about consumption, not unlike the way David’s teacher Marshall Sahlins looked at capitalism in ‘Culture and Practical Reason’ (1976).

It is also as if David at once forgets about his discussion of Roy Bhaskar and his own declared embrace of forces, tendencies, and processes. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in Marx is a dynamic dialectical relation between abstract capital and abstract labor that produces immanent tendencies and is indeed also a dynamic dialectical cultural construct. It is the basis for Marx’s ‘law of value’, which Marx knew well was not a law but a tendency. As labor does its daily work for capital, labor productivity would systematically be driven up because of the competition among capitals and of the class struggle with labor, via mechanization, automation, and the overall capitalization of life. Over time labor would lose any sovereignty over its own conditions of life and social reproduction. Apart from being disciplined in its wage claims and lifestyles, lest capital would move to cheaper and more hardworking places, labor would also be forced into (paying for) ever more education or face devaluation and degradation. And of course, it would have to face the inescapable uncertainties of life and status. The same would be true for cities, regions, and states that failed to compete within a globalizing capitalism and would therefore literally be up for grabs. All of this, including the geographically uneven and war-mongering repercussions, is a logical part of Marx’s ‘law of value’. David could have used Mauss and the gift to give a deeper anthropological and relational twist to Marx’s rather flat notion of use value. But Marx is never allowed in this book to play on his own unique strengths: in the end both capital and labor, the two elementary positions whose combination produces not just use values and exchange values but, crucially, surplus value, the very returns to capital that are the key driver of social change in a capitalist world, simply disappear. According to David Harvey (2018), Marx sees capital as ‘value on the move’. But in this book that sort of value is just moved out – only to be rediscovered big time and with ‘anarchist concreteness’ in David’s later work on debt and bullshit jobs.

Constituent imagination is David’s core concept. It was a concept that came from Italian Marxist post-operaismo authors who were impressed by labor’s refusal to work for capital in the Italy of the seventies and eighties after they had lost a series of violent confrontations. Young workers now preferred to seek the creation of autonomous worlds of life and labor outside the wage nexus. This is shortly mentioned by Graeber, and he imagines, like James Scott, that his egalitarian kinship groups similarly refused to further engage with hierarchical power centers and simply moved out to constitute their own desired societies inspired by constituent egalitarian imagination. Clearly, this is a further radicalization of the original concept, which talks about evading the wage nexus but does not carry any hint at a mass exodus out of Egypt towards a promised land and a new separate society, to use an image. David even argues that all societies at some point were formed out of such mass rejection of earlier power centers and were therefore always founded on constituent imagination. This to me seems like an extravagant claim, largely untestable, and suspiciously supportive of David’s theoretical purposes. However, Italian Marxists such as Antonio Negri always kept the development of capital and the state in dynamic tension with the autonomous desires of his multitudes, which were indeed urban subjects rather than spread out kin-groups in marginal spaces. In Graeber’s Value book that dynamic tension disappears. David’s egalitarians are on their own, engaging in a similar constitutive mytho-praxis that has inspired Marshall Sahlins’s work (see also Jonathan Parry’s discussion of Lost People for a similar disappearance of the IMF and therefore of global capital in David’s analysis of recent Malagasy histories).

Tweet from @DavidGraeber reading "Arjun Appadurai's footnote about my Debt book in his latest work on financial derivatives. Apparently my work is irrelevant because I see 'no hope whatever for redemption in the new financial instruments.' Um, yeah. I'm anti-capitalist." A screenshot of the footnote in question is attached to the tweet. — **Image 2:** Screenshot of David Graeber’s tweet responding to Arjun Appadurai’s critique of his book on debt.

David in this book firmly dismisses Appadurai’s ‘regimes of value’ notion (1986) for his neoliberal fixation on consumption. Appadurai recently returned the compliment by claiming that David’s anthropology was an entirely traditional one. David did a fantastic job in giving 21st century anthropology a new pride in focusing on egalitarian desires and popular values of autonomy in rejection of the rule of capital. But Appadurai is unfortunately right in one way: the values David envisions are emic, singular, particular, idealist, and deeply place-based and return us to classic bounded fieldwork and a bounded notion of culture. The book has no references to Wolf, Wallerstein, or anyone else dealing with space and multiscalar dynamic analysis of the dialectical value processes associated with globalized capital and the ensuing popular counter politics and desires. Except for a journalistic type of political economy, there is in fact hardly any serious political economy at all here, not even an anthropological political economy – a school that traces itself back to leading scholars like Wolf, Mintz, and Leacock, always largely ignored by both Graeber and Sahlins. David later improved marvelously on that lack with the Debt book (but see for example Kalb 2014), which, importantly, also brought long run and deep global histories back into anthropology. But while that book appears to have been incubated during the writing of this text on value via David’s interest in Marx and money, it is not yet conceptually or methodologically anticipated, and I do wonder how David later looked back on this very traditional anthropological theory of value he develops here.

David was a magnificent and creative utopian and moralist. He was uniquely in tune with the resistant Western mood of the times, from the alter-globalists to Occupy, including in his embrace of the ethos of the mass refusals and moral outcries that we have seen in the last twenty years, often driven by the desire for autonomy and the condemnation of the overall bleakness of things. But he did not at all anticipate the rise of the populist right, which is also very much about value and values, and indeed loudly proclaims a desire for the resurrection of (white, male, majoritarian etc.) hierarchy (see Kalb 2021 for further discussion). The rise of the right in many places after the failed rebellions of 2011 must be understood from within the failures of the ‘horizontalist’ mobilizations of which David and many of us were a part and which at that point seemed to have an elective affinity with the anthropology of egalitarianism. Nor does David’s book on value anticipate a situation where core central bankers and enlightened economists write books about the economics of the green transition with ‘value’ prominently in the title while making a claim to the heritage of the value-driven popular risings that David sees himself part of (Carney 2020; Mazzucato 2019). And finally, in the excitement of retrieving some pride for the traditions of the discipline, in David’s book on value we also seem to have forgotten some of the earlier advances in ‘the anthropology of complex societies’ and of ‘world society’, including some Marxist ones which are very precisely about value.

Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and FocaalBlog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.

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

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carney, Marc. 2020. Value(s): Building a better world for all. William Collins: Dublin.

Elson, Diane. 2015 (1979). Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: Verso

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2010. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House.

Harvey, David. 2018. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. London: Profile books

Kalb, Don. 2014. “Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world anthropology.“ Focaal 69: 113-134.

Kalb, Don. 2021. “The neo-nationalist ascendancy: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 316-328.

Mazzucato, Mariana. 2019. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Penguin.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Terence Turner. 2008. “Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.” Anthropological Theory 8 (1): 43-56.

Turner, Terence. 2017. The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago: HAU Books.

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2021. “Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’.” FocaalBlog, 13 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/13/don-kalb-constituent-imagination-versus-the-law-of-value-on-david-graebers-anthropological-theory-of-value.

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

Chris Gregory: What is the false coin of our own dreams?

December 9, 2021 focaal_admin

I confess that the first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to become his Debt book. He covered 5,000 years in 50 minutes, and this was in an era when the Grand Narrative was very much out of fashion. His presentation struck me as rambling and incoherent.

Over the past 15 years I have come to change my mind about him completely. I have just published an article (Gregory, 2021) where I have argued that Sahlins and Graeber should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. For many, this is high praise, but I can’t be sure that David would accept it. His approach to the theory of value stands opposed to everything the so-called ‘Nobel Prize’ for Economic Science symbolises.

My brief today is to discuss his book Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001). I shall keep to that brief as best I can. I must say, however, it was only after reading his books on Anarchism (2004), Direct Action (2009), Debt (2011), and Bullshit Jobs (2019) that I began to get my head around the central arguments of his Value book, by far his most difficult book. What struck me about all these books was the extraordinary unity of theme and content. I see them as a five-volume study of the value question. I am not saying that this is the best way to interpret what he has done. There are many ways to approach his work. This is the one I find most useful.

In the acknowledgements to his Value book David thanks everyone at Palgrave except the editor who made him switch around his title. If we restore the order he wanted, the main title of his book becomes, The false coin of our own dream, and the subtitle, Toward an anthropological theory of value. This inversion gives us a different angle on his work. The word ‘toward’ suggests a movement, not yet completed, from an old theory to a new one. It also brings the expression ‘the false coin of our dreams’ to front and centre. The origin of this expression can be traced back to Mauss and Hubert in their General Theory of Magic (1902-03; 1972), but David gives the metaphor a 21st century twist. As I see it, the phrase false coin of our own dreams defines a paradox that is the central organizing metaphor of all five volumes of his books on value. But what does he mean by this paradox?

My short answer to this question is that he is referring to the political battle over those big ideas that can change the world. For him the value question is, first and foremost, the battle over competing images of wealth. The false coins are the images of wealth produced by the dreamers of yesterday, the false coiners of an image that has become adulterated and debased through excessive use over time. David the dreamer wants to recoin these debased images of wealth to create a new image of what could be. His dream is not a fantasy. It is a real possibility grounded in economic history, cultural geography, and the political present. Graeber the dreamer, then, is a political activist who wants to appropriate the false coins of the ruling elite, melt them down, and forge something new in collaboration with those who have a hopeful image of the future. He wants to join them in the streets as they ‘shout, clamour and make joyful noises’ in the now obsolete sense of the word ‘dream’ (OED).

What is this new image of wealth?

David, we must never forget, was born in New York and raised in Chelsea, just four miles from Wall Street. He has a New York-centric view of the world he has never lost. This visual image captures the essence of his approach as I understand it. It shows the Charging Bull sculpture that artist Arturo Di Modica secretly installed near Wall Street in 1989 in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. In 2017 Kristen Visbal installed her sculpture of Fearless Girl facing down the Charging Bull, but following complaints, the Fearless Girl was relocated to a different part of Wall Street, totally transforming Fearless Girl’s symbolic power. She now represents, Google Maps tells us, the fight for female equality inside the boardrooms of Wall Street. The original juxtaposition of images admits of a very different interpretation, especially when we overlay with the lyrics of the ‘blah, blah, blah’ song the rebellious young sing.

Statue of young girl in a skirt, legs astride and hands on hips, faces down a statue of a charging bull opposite. — **Image 1:** Fearless girl statue by Kristen Visbal, New York City, Wall Street, by Anthony Quintano is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Greta’s ‘blah, blah, blah’ is a quote from a song very popular among the young. The other line of the song goes ‘Ja, Ja, Ja.’ The language of this song is not double Dutch, even though the elite might think so given that the composer, Armin van Buuren, was a Dutchman. A Dr Sev from Poland has mixed Greta’s speech and Armin’s song. It was premiered on YouTube 30 September 2021. The sonic image, created to excite the passions of the young, raises a serious question: What does ‘No more blah, blah, blah’ mean? What is the message the young are trying to convey to those in power with lyrics of this kind?

Enter David Graeber, the bilingual Wall Street ethnographer. Not only has he has learned the language of the bulls and the bears inside the offices of Wall Street, but he has also learned the language of the young protestors on the streets outside in New York, London and elsewhere. In May 2019 he attended the Extinction Rebellion in London. He duly recorded what they said and reported it (Graeber 2019). The following is my very brief gloss on how he might re-present their point of view.

‘No more blah, blah, blah’ is a polite way of saying: ‘tell us the truth about climate change. Stop lying. Stop talking bullshit. Don’t give us bullshit jobs to do. We, too, are capable of imagining different possibilities for life on earth. If you old folks in power don’t listen to our dreams, we are all finished (one imagines that the protestors may have used different F-words in this final sentence).

The distinction here between the liar and a bullshitter, which David (2018: Ch 1, fn 10) notes but does not develop, is very important one. The bullshitter, Frankfurt (1986) notes in his classic essay, is one who exaggerates or talks nonsense to bluff or impress. The liar, by contrast, deliberately sets out to mislead with falsehoods. In other words, it is one thing for an academic to talk nonsense unintentionally to impress, but quite another for a politician like Trump who knows the truth to deliberately propagate falsehoods. Bulls can also produce manure, which is to say that the academic bullshitter can produce something very useful.

We are dealing here with two quite distinct values. The ambiguous quality of academic bullshit requires that it be handled with the greatest of care and respect. David does precisely this in his writings. However, his unique meandering rhetorical style takes some getting used to. I can now see some virtues in it, but it is not one that I would urge my students to imitate!

Let me now move to David’s analysis of the language of those on the other side of the barricade. The bulls and the bears of Wall Street who excite the emotions and imagination of academics and well as sculptors, singers, and other creative artists. On the one side we have academics from the schools of business and economics who crunch the numbers and give advice, for a price, to the politicians and shareholders who run the show. On the other side, we have academics like David who occupy the streets and call for radical change, often at some cost to their careers.

Academics, then, can be divided into three categories: those who work for Wall Street, those who work against it, and those interested in other questions. It is a quaint feature of the English language that those who work for Wall Street are called ‘policy advisors’ whilst those who work against it are called ‘political activists.’ Henceforth I shall refer to both as political activists. It is obvious, then, that the schools of business and economics and law are full of political activists whilst anthropology has very few. This raises the uncomfortable question for us non-activists of the political implications of our inaction.

Activists in the schools of Economics and Business come in many different stripes and political persuasions defined by their approach to the theory of value: Neo-Smithian, Neo-Ricardian, Neo-Marxist, Neo-Keynesian and Neo-classical among many others. Most belong to the mainstream neo-classical school epitomised by the work done by the economists of the Chicago School of Economics, a school that has produced ten Nobel Prize winners, two short of Harvard, the top school.

The image of wealth that informs the thought of these people, I assert, is the false coin of David’s dream, the anti-thesis that defines his thesis. Let me be clear. When it comes to an image of wealth, there is a sense in which David is opposed to the whole history of European economic thought from Adam Smith in 1776 to the Nobel Prize winners of 2021. Everyone. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevon, Keynes, Friedman. It is a different matter when it comes to concepts of value and specific theories of value and, especially those of Marx. Some fine conceptual distinctions between images, concepts and theories are at stake here. I will come back to this trichotomy below. In the meantime, it suffices to note that when a theory of value uses concepts to make an argument it presupposes an image of wealth as a moral precept.

What does this ‘false coin’ of European economic thought look like? What image of wealth does it excite in the mind of its beholders?

In 1895 Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to be awarded to those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.’ Five prizes are given each year: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace. In 1968 the Swedish Central Bank donated money for a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel. This award, which is administered by the Nobel Foundation, it not a Nobel Prize. However, by the operation of the Law of Contagious Magic, it is falsely called the Nobel prize in Economics when in fact its real name is the Swedish Reserve Bank [Sveriges Riksban] Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobel’s descendants are very unhappy about this situation. ‘Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being,’ said Peter Nobel, a great grandnephew. In 2001 they demanded, without success, that the Nobel name be dropped from the Swedish Reserve Bank award because, they said, Alfred Nobel was highly sceptical of economics and as such the existence of this award was an insult to his legacy.

David Graeber and Alfred Nobel obviously shared certain assumptions about the ability of economic science to confer wealth and happiness upon humankind. I feel, therefore, that while he would reject the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science, he would happily accept the Nobel Prize for Peace. As Don Kalb (2014: 115) has correctly noted, David is a political activist in the Gandhian tradition rather than the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary tradition. Music, dance, and discussion are his preferred weapons, not guns.

David has a very interesting discussion of ‘dream tokens’ in his Value book, but I fault him for not including a discussion of the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science as a token of value. This is the true coin of the economic scientist’s dream, but the false coin of David’s dream. For David, the token is a ‘false coin’ because it epitomises an impoverished and debased Eurocentric image of wealth, one whose use-by date has long passed.

David’s life’s work has been the search of a better image. For inspiration he raided the cabinet of ethnographic curiosities, the historical archives, and of course spoke to the young. He has no new answers to old questions. His concern is to identify the constraints that economic history and cultural geography impose on our capacity to imagine new possibilities for life on earth. This enables him to pose new questions and to change the terms of debate. He has no manifesto, no commandments, just difficult questions that get to the root of the matter. He is primarily concerned to excite creative debate about issues of pressing importance for the human condition. If you are looking for simple answers to these questions you will not find them in David’s work. He is no messiah. He teaches us how to think, not what to think. He takes a few steps toward an anthropological theory of value. He has not arrived at the final destination.

The theory of value is the most hotly disputed subject in economics. If you ask ten economists to define money, for example, they will give you ten different answers. However, when it comes to the question of an image of wealth, there is remarkable agreement. This can be found in the image they have selected for themselves to distinguish their discipline. I refer to the image of the horn of plenty, the symbol of abundance and nourishment found in European mythology that appears on the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science but not the real Nobel Prizes. All 89 Economic Science laureates have all proudly accepted this token as a symbol of the true coin of their dreams.

Two gold coins with male profiles side by side. One is labeled "The Nobel Prize 1896," the other "The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize for Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel 1968." Header text says "Spot the difference." — **Image 2:** Nobel Prize vs. The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize

David correctly notes that modern European economic thought has its origins in the secularisation of European economic theology. This image of the horn of plenty, which has its origins in a Greek myth, could not be a better illustration of his thesis.

For the economic scientist the horn of plenty conjures up images of Adam Smith, their revered founding ancestor, whose book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) serves as the creation myth of their science. The very first line of his classic text introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and theories presuppose.

“The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.” (Smith, 1776: 1)

What students in Economics 101 don’t learn is that Adam Smith had a labour theory of value, one that excited the thoughts of Karl Marx. Marx’s revised version of Smith’s labour theory of value was published in 1867. Like Smith, the very first line of Marx’s classic work introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and theories presuppose.

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.” (Marx, 1867:1)

What separates these two images of wealth was, of course, the industrial revolution. This revolution not only excited the thinking of radicals like Marx, but it also excited the thinking of more conservative thinkers such as William Stanley Jevons and two others who were independently working on a new theory of value that turned Smith’s objective labour theory of value upside down. This was a subjective marginal utility theory of the value based on the mathematical calculus of the pleasure and pain derived from the differential consumption of goods. It provided different answers to questions about wages, prices, and profit. Instead of a class-based historically grounded theory of profit as exploitation, Jevon’s theory was based on the figure of the abstract, ahistorical individual making free choices in the marketplace. In came Smith’s doctrine of laissez faire, out went his labour theory of value. This new theory of value was informed by a radically new paradoxical image of the horn of plenty. As Robbins (1932:47) put it, “wealth is not wealth because of its substantial qualities. It is wealth because it is scarce.” Thus, wealth for the conservative economist is not the material abundance produced by industrial wage labour, but the subjective scarcity as perceived by the universal consumer of consumption goods.

Marx’s political economy inspired the dreams of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others; Jevon’s economic science the dreams of the heretic Keynes, the true-believer Friedman, and others. At one extreme a very negative Smithian-inspired image of wealth as historically specific surplus value, at the other extreme a very positive Smithian-inspired image of wealth as universal scarcity value. The rest, as they say, was the history of the 20th century.

David concern is the quest for a 21st century image of wealth that enables us to put this Eurocentric image in its place and to imagine something that goes beyond it. David’s thinking was inspired by the comparative ethnographic literature which revealed to him the common ground of both sides of the debate between economists. Like Sahlins, he rejects the idea of universal scarcity and strives to extend Marx by looking at the ethnographic evidence on non-capitalist and pre-capitalist images in the quest for a 21st century post-capitalist image.

“Political economy”, David (2007: 47) notes, “tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women.” Political economy gives primacy to abstract labour time on the factory floor. David wants to turn this upside down and give primacy to the creative thoughts and actions of people engaged in the process of reproducing their society and their children in a culture of their own making.

As a contribution to thinking about the value question in general, David’s work in not original. He is careful to acknowledge his debt to the many anthropologists who have inspired him, especially his teachers at Chicago: Terry Turner and Nancy Munn. He also acknowledges the work of many others whose work he has critiqued such as Marilyn Strathern and me. Since he published his book, many other anthropologists, such as Hart and Hann, have developed important new approaches to economic analysis that put human beings at the centre.

What distinguishes David’s contribution, it seems to me, is that his five-volume study of value is the most radical and the most ambitious. David’s life work—which now amounts to some fifteen books by my count—is nothing less than a whole socio-economic history and cultural geography of the human condition.

A defining characteristic of David’s approach is his interest in the economic theology as well as the political economy of wealth. He finds much economic theology in European political economy, and much political economy in non-European economic theology. He is concerned with what our image of wealth has become and with signs of hope of what it can become.

One of David’s projects, for example, was the deep cultural history of the secularisation of European economic theology, and the extent to which the secularisation was unfinished business. European political economy from Petty in 1662 to Marx in 1867, for example, is full of talk about Father Labour and Mother Earth as the creators of Wealth, but no mention of God the Son in the form of a wheat-God named baby Jesus or baby Zeus suckling their mother’s milk. This partial secularisation of the horn of plenty myth not only devalues women as mothers, but it also devalues males as sons as the supreme form of wealth. This is a truly great revolution in human thought, one whose English history the OED lexicographers have documented in painstaking detail. I know of no male-centric economic theology of wealth from the non-European world that goes this far. In 21st century India, for example, the quest for wealth in the Smithian laissez faire sense reigns supreme, but so too does the ideology of the son as a supreme form of wealth. As the census data on the sex ratio shows, this ideology is strongest in those areas of Northwest India where capitalism is the most advanced. Where I work in east-central India, by contrast, the economic theology of wealth assumes the ritual form of a rice goddess named Lakshmi, the daughter of Mother Water, not Mother Earth. The 31,000-line sacred poem priestesses sing celebrates Lakshmi as fearless daughter rather than dutiful wife. Indeed, her wedding to a wife-bashing husband leads to her demise. The story has a happy ending when wife-beating husband, and jealous co-wives realise the error of their ways. As political economy this theology is womb-centric, daughter-centric, rice-centric, and water-centric. But as David notes, comparisons like this enable us to perceive the phallo-centric, wheat-centric European images of wealth of Political Economy for what they are.

Concluding remarks

Theories of value present themselves as descriptive accounts of the world that use a limited set of concepts—such as ‘use-value’ ‘exchange-value,’ ‘reciprocity,’ and the like—to develop general theories about what is. The flip side of these descriptive accounts is a prescription of what should be. The difference between a description and the prescription are the policy conclusions needed to bring about the changes necessary to close the gap. When it comes to Political Economy and Economic Science, the prescription is a very simple image of wealth, one that has its origins in Adam Smith’s version of the Greek myth of plenty. On the one side, an historically specific image of the abundance of commodities, on the other side a universal image of scarce goods.

This Eurocentric dream, which has enabled millions of people the world over to escape from the material poverty of their forebears, has become the nightmare of us all. It has led to obscene wealth here, dire poverty there, and environmental destruction everywhere. David rightly identifies the image of wealth that informs Political Economy and Economic Science as the false coins of our dreams today. The anthropologically and historically informed concepts and theories that he develops in all his books are all concerned to reveal the debased and worn-out nature of this false coin. He wants to encourage collective thought about how to forge a new image of wealth. The concepts and theories in his Value book, his Debt book and his Bullshit Jobs book present us with alternative images of wealth from non-European, non-capitalist economies, pre-capitalist economies, and 21st century capitalist economies respectively.

The image of wealth that informs David’s dreams, like all images of wealth, is very simple and possible to achieve. He wants to move the focus of attention from the production of commodities, and the consumption of goods, to the reproduction of people, one where the children of today have a say in the world of tomorrow. The task of re-imagining a world where people can reproduce themselves has become a very urgent one. His writings reveal the huge gap between what is and what could be. His non-violent political actions, and his optimism, remind us that scholarly work is a necessary but not a sufficient means to achieve this end. Political activists in the schools of Business, Law, and Economics who give ‘policy advice’ to governments and the captains of industry have long recognised this fact. The Fearless Girl who used to oppose the Charging Bull on Wall Street reminds us that anthropology for David is not just about taking a point of view, it is also about taking action. Anthropologists, he might say echoing Marx, have only interpreted the world; the problem, however, is to change it.

Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.

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

References

Barnes, J. A. (1994). A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, H. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an anarchist anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. (2007). Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Edinburgh.

Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5000 years. New York: Melville House Publishing.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Simon & Schuster.

Graeber, D. (2019). If Politicians Can’t Face Climate Change, Extinction Rebellion Will: A new movement is demanding solutions. They may just be in time to save the planet. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/extinction-rebellion-climate-change.html

Gregory, C. (2021). On the Spirit of the Gift that is Stone Age Economics. Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, LV (1), 11-34. doi: DOI: 10.26331/1131

Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. (1902-1903). Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. L’Année sociologique, 7, 1-146.

Kalb, D. (2014). Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world anthropology. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (69), 113-134. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2014.690108

Marx, K. (1867). Capital. Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production: Moscow: Progress.

Mauss, M. (1972). A General Theory of Magic, with a foreword by D. F. Pocock (R. Brain, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Robbins, L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.

Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1970.

Cite as: Gregory, Chris. 2021. “What is the false coin of our own dreams?” FocaalBlog, 9 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/09/chris-gregory-what-is-the-false-coin-of-our-own-dreams.

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

Jonathan Parry: The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s ‘Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar’

December 7, 2021 focaal_admin

David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis. It was not for some years that it appeared in print. That was 2007, and by then he had already published a considerable amount of other work, including a couple of significant books. To my shame, I have to admit that I hadn’t read Lost People until Alpa signed me up to comment on it today and that I should never have accepted her invitation. I am neither a specialist on Madagascar, nor expert in the literature on slavery or on narrative and history. But it’s worse than that. Something I have always especially admired about David’s writing is its clarity; his ability to state propositions that seem blindingly obvious once he has set them out but were never obvious before. Several of Lost People’s reviewers comment on its literary qualities, so I guess it’s just me. For my part, however, I found it uncharacteristically heavy-going, its narrative labyrinthine and its detail overwhelming. I was often unsure that I was getting the point.

David himself describes its style as experimental, “a kind of cross between an ethnography and a long Russian novel.” The aspiration was to produce a ‘dialogic ethnography’ that would do away with the distance between author and informants created – as David sees it – by so much social science writing. As I’ll later explain, he here draws a sharp distinction between social scientists and historians, and he identifies himself squarely with the latter. His sympathies are with what he represents as old-style ethnography where the objective is to provide a window on a way of life rather than to deploy ethnography – as is currently usual – as a prop for some single theoretical argument. He wants his Malagasy interlocutors to emerge “as both actors in history, and as historians” (Graeber 2007, 379).

Despite the difficulties of his text, it’s relatively easy to say what it’s centrally about and to summarise its main narrative. In case there are people present who haven’t read it, or whose memories need refreshing, that’s what I’ll do. It’s centrally about slavery, about its local history, and more especially about its post-abolition legacy. Above all, that is, it’s about the past in the present, about the ways in which history impinges on contemporary relations between people of free and of slave descent in a rural area in the western highlands of Madagascar, an hour or so drive from the capital, Antananarivo. Betafo (his fieldsite) is in Imerina, the old kingdom of the Merina people, who ruled most of the island in the nineteenth century, and of whom Maurice Bloch has written with such distinction. David’s main window on these relationships is through the narrative of an ordeal held in 1987, that provoked the ancestors, resulted in disaster for the principal protagonists, and ended by dividing the community even more deeply than formerly between people of slave descent and the “nobles” who had been their erstwhile masters. This narrative threads through the book with new interpretations, new perspectives on it, and new details piling up over 400 pages.

Betafo, something like a parish, is made up of around fifteen scattered hamlets which in total have a floating population of 300-500. It’s locally notorious for witchcraft and sorcery, and for the hostility of relations between its inhabitants – a major reason for selecting it, David reports. In the 1980s, it experienced an epidemic of petty thefts. The village assembly decided to hold an ordeal to identify the culprit(s). The villagers were to drink water in which earth from the ancestors’ tombs had been dissolved. But since they were not all of the same ancestry – there were nobles and ex-slaves, who were in principle totally separate groups between whom marriage was theoretically impossible – the earth should come from two separate tombs. And even that was a political fudge because the ex-slaves weren’t in fact a single descent group, though that is how the procedure adopted for the ordeal represented them. Nor was this provocative mixing of earth the only dangerous blunder. It turns out that both elders who had instigated and organised the ordeal – one noble, one slave – had recently taken a wife from the other group. They were guilty of mixing bodily fluids and bloods as well. No wonder disaster followed. The rice had just been harvested and was still in the fields. A flash flood swept it away. Actually, it later transpired that it was only the crops of the two elders that were completely destroyed. This was 1987. David started his research three years later and witnessed the aftermath. What had been intended to reassert communal solidarity had provoked a definitive rift. Now ‘blacks’ (slave descendants) were avoiding ‘white’ (‘noble’) parts of Betafo and were exploiting their reputations for magical powers and knowledge of local taboos to harass and constrain Betafo nobles who had moved to the capital but were now threatening to return and to resume their lands.

In parenthesis, it should perhaps be said that by standards elsewhere, the levels of antagonism seem muted. Returnee nobles might be told that there was a taboo on taking water from a particular spring. They weren’t physically attacked or forcibly prevented from moving back home. Intermarriage was anathematized, but we nevertheless hear of quite a few instances. None had resulted in murder, nor even in serious boycott. Compare rural Bihar or Haryana where couples who have contracted such serious misalliances could never be sure of their safety.

Even in eighteenth century Madagascar, slavery and slave-trading had a prominent role in many local economies. In the nineteenth, however, slavery took off spectacularly in Imerina after the British did a deal with the Merina king by which he agreed to halt the international trade of slaves for guns on the understanding that the British would supply him with guns anyway (and would not supply his rivals). That enabled the Merina state to dominate most of the island and to capture more and more slaves. They were deployed on public works and in agriculture in the Merina heartlands from where more and more Merina went as soldiers. Later in the century, perhaps as many as half Imerina’s population were slaves, according to Bloch. It was in any event an enormous proportion and that had a profound impact on Merina society and cultural representations.

The French annexed Madagascar in 1895. Slavery was abolished in 1897. From Betafo many nobles moved off to the capital to join the civil service, a few to Paris. Their former slaves became their sharecroppers and generally thrived. That was widely attributed to their manipulation of their magical powers. The downward mobility of many nobles was put down to the sins of slavery – even by nobles themselves. Nobles were increasingly deeply divided between a rich elite (who largely moved out) and the poor (who largely remained). David offers a vivid picture of just how opulent and aristocratic these rich nobles were in the early years of the colonial period with their twilit parties, music and dancing, and their colourful silk garments and golden diadems. Still at the time of his fieldwork, émigré nobles would descend on Betafo in numbers to collect a share of the harvest or to bury some kinsman in their ancestral tomb. When a corpse was flown in from Paris, the paths were jammed with cars and vans, and in their hundreds ‘everywhere around the tomb were knots of grave-looking men in three-piece suits with expensive watches, ladies in silk dresses, pearls, gold and silver jewellery.’ Within village society itself, however, the most fundamental division – regardless of class – remained that between andriana (nobles) and andevo (slaves). Though the topic of slavery was avoided, nobody could ever forget it, and slaves were still associated with pollution and ideas of contamination.

Historic sepia photograph of a Black woman wearing white looking directly into the camera. — **Image 2:** Female slave mourning, 1886, source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

Crucially, however the situation of many of these émigré nobles became seriously precarious after the 1972 revolution. Subsequent to it, the peasant sector was badly neglected. The government took vast loans for development which it could not service, resulting in insolvency, dependence on the IMF, structural adjustment, the slashing of state budgets, the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside, a catastrophic collapse in living standards and widespread pauperization. The state largely withdrew from places like Betafo, leaving them as “temporary autonomous zones.” At the same time, many metropolitan civil servants were badly impoverished and were tempted to move back to their ancestral villages to resume the land that their ex-slave sharecroppers had been cultivating. And that, of course, is the essential background to the tensions that resulted from the Betafo ordeal at the heart of Lost People.

What that background significantly qualifies, as it seems to me, is David’s claim to represent his informants as both actors in history and as historians. Of course, they are the first in a limited sense, but as actors they are highly constrained and have little autonomy. By that I mean to suggest that the most important part of the story that explains why Betafo’s andriana and andevo are at each other’s throats takes place off-stage between the Malagasy state and the IMF in Antananarivo’s corridors of power. That is what really drives the story and that bit of it is pure Graeber. It has no part in his informants’ narratives, which are as it were epiphenomenal. They are a derivative discourse that is somehow beside the main point. As historians, they were severely limited by having no access to sources that would give them a proper handle on that crucial background. That’s a no doubt rather crude way of introducing a more general reservation about David’s preoccupation with narrative. Nobody could possibly doubt its importance for history and politics, but Lost People repeatedly seems to claim that that’s what history and politics are. I worry that that leaves an awful lot out. If history is “mainly about the circulation of stories,” what of all the ecological, epidemiological and demographic influences on our lives of which we are often unconscious. If political action “is action that is intended to be recorded or narrated or in some way represented to others afterwards,” what kind of action is all the effort that goes into ensuring that so many of the deeds and misdeeds of rulers are never recorded. Representations, discourses and narratives are unarguably important, but they should not in my view be allowed to occupy all the space in an anthropological analysis.

In a podcast discussion of David’s Debt book chaired by Gillian Tett sometime after his death, one contributor acutely observed that if there is any one value that informed his work it is freedom. That made me wonder how Lost People fits in. Though it says little about freedom explicitly, the ethnography overwhelmingly suggests its absence. This is a society that seems entirely unable to escape its past. In David’s other writings, there is usually some possibility of escape from oppression that is provided by other ideological alternatives. Here the past seems almost inescapably tyrannical. The Merina are condemned to continually renew the legacy of guilt and resentment that stems from the history of slavery. And whether or not David intended us to put the two things together, his ethnography shows that the burden of the past goes well beyond that. The Merina ancestors play a significant role in the lives of their descendants, and in Bloch’s writings their influence seems mostly benign. In Lost People they come over as much more threatening. They are always telling the living what they cannot do and they regularly attack them. That provokes the resentment and hostility of the living, which are dramatically expressed in the secondary burial when the ancestral remains are assaulted, their bones crunched up, their dust bound tightly in wrappings, and they are securely locked up in their tombs once more. History, it seems, is some kind of prison against the walls of which the living can only bang their heads. Marx had already summed it brilliantly: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

All that prompts a series of comparative questions that I think are important, but which David passes by – largely I suspect because they fall outside the narrative frame of his informants. Crucially, why – well after a century since manumission – are the Merina still so obsessed by slavery? Partly no doubt on account of its scale and its cruelty, but there must be more to it. Recent contributions to the regional literature have drawn attention to wide variations between Malagasy societies in the degree to which slave descent remains stigmatised, in the extent to which they appear haunted by its history and in whether they are willing to speak of it at all. Margaret Brown (2004), and Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda (2018, Regnier 2020), make brave stabs at specifying the conditions that might explain that variation (differences in social structure, resources, ethnic mixing and migration, and according to whether the slaves were Malagasy or of African origin), while Luke Freeman (2013) writes illuminatingly about the mandatory silence on the subject of his Betsileo informants and of how that re-entrenches the stigma of slavery by making it literally unspeakable.

Moving right across to the other side of the Indian Ocean, the legacy of slavery in Sri Lanka is dramatically different. According to Nira Wikramasinghe’s (2020) recent book, the collective memory of it has been all but entirely obliterated. True, it was never on the same scale and was abolished some decades earlier than in Madagascar, but on her analysis, on the Ceylon side, the comparison would have to include the way in which the creolization brought about by slavery seriously challenged doctrines of racial purity in the south, and the way in which the enslavement of Tamil Untouchables by high-caste Tamil Vellalars subverted later political projects of Tamil nationalism in the north. But questions of that comparative order are not part of David’s enquiry.

The broader terrain on which he does locate his study, my final observation, concerns rather the relationship between history and the social sciences. I confess I find his pitch a bit puzzling and am hoping that somebody might help me out. What he postulates is a broad contrast between the concerns of social science, which have primarily to do with patterns of regularity and predictability, and the concerns of history which deals with the irregular and unpredictable. It’s “the record of those actions which are not simply cyclical, repetitive, or inevitable.” Anthropology should align itself with history. That seems to be above all because it is “the very concern with science, laws, and regularities that has been responsible for creating the sense of distance I have been trying so hard to efface; it is, paradoxically enough, the desire to seem objective that has been largely responsible for creating the impression that the people we study are some exotic, alien, ultimately unknowable other.” Personally, I don’t believe any of that, but what interests me more is whether you will be able to tell me whether this disciplinary opposition has resonances in David’s other work. Or is it, as I suspect, an opportunistic answer to the requirement to justify and explain the literary style he adopted in writing this book? Certainly, Debt seems to be larded with “social science”-type propositions about repetitive, predictable patterns: slavery played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere; bullion currency predominates in periods of generalised violence; coinage, slavery, markets and the state go inexorably together. . . and so it goes on.

Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.

This text was presented at the David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Lost People’.

References

Brown, Margaret L. 2004. Reclaiming lost ancestors and acknowledging slave descent: insights from Madagascar. Comparative studies in society and history, 46(3), 616-645.

Freeman, Luke. 2013. Speech, silence, and slave descent in highland Madagascar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3), 600-617.

Graeber, David. 2007. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

———. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Regnier, Denis. (2020). Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition. New York: Routledge.

Regnier, Denis, and Somda, Dominique. (2019). Slavery and post-slavery in Madagascar: An overview. In T. Falola, D., R. J. Parrott & D. Porter Sanchez (eds.), African Islands: Leading Edges of Empire and Globalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Pp. 345-369.

Wickramasinghe, Nira. (2020). Slave in a Palanquin. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cite as: Parry, Jonathan. 2021. “The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.” FocaalBlog, 7 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/07/jonathan-parry-the-burdens-of-the-past-comments-on-david-graebers-lost-people-magic-and-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-madagascar/

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

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Value

December 2, 2021 focaal_admin

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Chris Gregory & Don Kalb

‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris Gregory delves into the core of what David meant by ‘false coin of our own dreams’, Don Kalb casts a critical lens of his conception of ‘value’ and the constituent imagination. As the first considers David’s work in relation to the economists and their images of wealth, the second looks at its place among the Marxists, drawing a combined picture that situates David’s most challenging book in a refined comparative perspective.

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of NSW. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.

Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.