Monthly Archives: January 2022

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

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

I would never have expected Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this past year has been somehow unexpected, from the coup itself, in the early hours of 1 February, to the scale of the popular reaction. Friends who expressed little interest in politics or protest during my fieldwork, only a few years ago, have been in the streets. Striking has been the role of young women—women like Ruth, a Christian born in the Chin Hills, who works at a church in Yangon where I did much of my research.

As the uprising grew through February, Ruth’s posts filled my Facebook feed: selfies in Covid-19 masks amid swelling crowds around the Sule Pagoda; memes mocking the generals behind the coup; photographs of victims shot by security forces. One thing not surprising has been the brutality of the crackdown. As it intensified in late February and early March, Ruth’s posts showed her wearing not just a face mask, but also a helmet and goggles.

As Pentecostals, believers like Ruth have also been praying. One video streamed via Facebook Live had about twenty members of her church engaged in a session of collective prayer, entreating God to protect Myanmar. Such prayers were commonplace during my fieldwork. But this one resonated with the revolution then building momentum in the streets: put to the rhythm of a familiar call-and-response chant made famous in the 1988 uprising, the prayer replaced the usual rejoinder “do ayei! do ayei!” (“Our cause! Our cause!”) with “Amen! Amen!”

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

What draws these Christians so fully into the revolution through protest and prayer? There’s been much said about how a decade’s experience of a more open public sphere makes return to military rule impossible to countenance. Many have also remarked on how this moment has transcended lines of difference that have long animated Myanmar’s politics, with Chin Christians and even Rohingya Muslims manning barricades alongside majority Burman Buddhists.

But maybe part of an answer also lies in the imagination.     

I say this, in part, because of another question I’ve had, watching Myanmar’s Spring Revolution unfolding from afar over social media: What would David Graeber make of this?

Graeber never wrote about Myanmar, but he was, of course, deeply interested, intellectually and practically, in revolution. And for him, the question of revolution was tied to the question of imagination. In one essay (2007), he distinguished a “transcendent” form of imagination, the terrain of fiction and make-believe, of “imaginary creatures, imaginary places … imaginary friends”, from an “immanent” form, one not “static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world … ”. It was the latter, for Graeber, that had revolutionary potential.

While Graeber never wrote about Myanmar, had he not died in September 2020, that might not have remained true for long.

Some years ago, he agreed to write the foreword to a new edition of Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma. The foreword was never finished, so we can’t know what Graeber would have written. We can’t know how he would have engaged with Raymond Firth’s original, laudatory foreword. We can’t know how he would have dealt with Leach’s later reappraisal, when he acknowledged that he had somewhat essentialised gumsa and gumlao, the Kachin categories famously at the heart of his analysis. We can’t know how he would have situated the book in relation to debates in anthropology in the decades since, or how he would have dealt with critiques that have been directed towards it, including from Kachin scholars (e.g., Maran 2007), and especially amid growing calls to meaningfully decolonise the study of Myanmar.

What we do know is that Graeber was a fan. “Edmund Leach,” he once wrote, “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Leach was, for Graeber, “a model of intellectual freedom”. References to Leach appear across Graeber’s body of work, including citations of the younger Leach and the older Leach following his so-called “conversion” to structuralism—a break which, as Chris Fuller and Jonathan Parry note, has probably been overdrawn. “Not only are there striking continuities in the sort of questions Leach asked of data,” they write, “and the sort of answers he offered, but more importantly he kept faith throughout his career with one broad vision of the anthropological enterprise” (1989: 11).

If the same might be said of Graeber, it’s not the only way in which the two men were similar. Both thought across relatively long stretches of time: 140 years in the case of Leach’s study of the oscillations in Kachin political systems; millennia in the case of Graeber’s work on debt and his recent collaboration with David Wengrow. Both were also prolific and lucid writers, eager to engage audiences beyond anthropology—including, incidentally, via the BBC, which broadcast Leach’s Reith Lectures in 1967 and Graeber’s 12-part series on debt in 2016.

What James Laidlaw and Stephen Hugh-Jones (2000:3) write about Leach could just as easily be said of Graeber, that “the lessons of anthropological inquiry were relevant to the everyday moral and political questions that were being debated all around him …”. Both were interested in the micro and macro forces that impacted the production of knowledge in anthropology, and both reflected on how their own biographies and albeit very different insider/outsider positions in the discipline shaped the work they produced (Leach 1984; Graeber 2014).

There are, however, few references to Political Systems in Graeber’s corpus, which raises another question: What would he have written in this foreword?

It’s impossible to attempt a definite answer. Graeber was far too creative for that. But it’s probably not going too far out on a limb to suggest that imagination might have been a central theme. For what are the political categories of gumsa and gumlao analysed by Leach if not products of the “immanent” mode of imagination that interested Graeber? One reference that does appear at several points in Graeber’s writing is to a point Leach made in his short 1982 treatise simply titled Social Anthropology. There, Leach suggests that the distinction between humans and non-humans is not that the former have a soul, but that they are able to conceive—or imagine—that they have one, and thus, that it is imagination, not reason, that sets humans apart. On this point, Graeber also (e.g., 2001: 58) cites Marx’s observation that, unlike a spider weaving its web or a bee building its nest, “the [human] architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”

If imagination is, for Leach and Graeber, a general feature of the human condition, it’s also one thrown into relief at certain moments, like moments of revolution. “When one tries to bring an imagined society into being,” Graeber wrote, “one is engaging in revolution” (2001: 88). It’s maybe not too much of a stretch, then, to also imagine that, if he had been writing the foreword to Political Systems this past year, Graeber would be attending to the revolution underway in the valleys and the highlands that feature in Leach’s book: a revolution whose participants, like Ruth, imagine not just a political system in Myanmar with the military no longer in charge, but a society transformed in myriad other ways.

Image 2: Book cover of Political Systems of Highland Burma by Edmund Leach

Around 2011, as Myanmar started to emerge from five decades of military rule, Ruth’s church and other Pentecostals intensified their evangelism efforts, seeking to win converts in a country where about 90 percent of the population are Buddhist. Taking advantage of the political opening, and with an eye to the spiritual rupture it was thought to herald, these Christians began to preach more energetically than they had in years.

But even before the coup, there was evidence that the rupture might not be forthcoming: a sense that liberalisation was benefitting only well-connected cronies; new forms of censorship impinging on what was supposed to be a newly open public sphere; an ascendent Buddhist nationalism rendering increasingly precarious the position of minorities, and playing out horrifically in the treatment of the Rohingya. There were also few signs that Buddhists were suddenly interested in Jesus. This did little to dent my friends’ commitment to evangelism, however. “God works in his own time,” was the frequent refrain.    

How, in this understanding, to make sense of the coup?

The immediate days after the military seized control, detaining elected leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, were strangely quiet. Healthcare workers and teachers were among the first to go on strike. Garment workers followed soon after. As the civil disobedience movement took shape, more people took to the streets. By the middle of February, tens of thousands of protesters were assembling each day in Hledan, a busy commercial neighbourhood near Yangon University.

Ruth was among them. We’d been in touch since the hours following the coup. She sent photos and videos of the swelling crowds. In one image her white sneakered foot stamps on a poster of the face of Min Aung Hlaing, the general behind the coup, taped to the pavement for protesters to walk over. In another she holds up a placard with the words #justiceformyanmar alongside an image of Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned NLD leader. “Young people will not be turning back,” she wrote in one message.

The spokesperson for the parallel government established by the parliamentarians deposed by the coup has been a prominent Chin Christian doctor, Dr Sasa. At certain points protest signs featuring his face seemed to eclipse those featuring Aung San Suu Kyi’s. In late February Ruth posted an old photo of her with Dr Sasa, with the caption, “May the Lord bless you and use you for our nation and His kingdom.” Dr Sasa’s role has been particularly important to my Chin friends, accustomed, like other ethnic minorities, to being treated like second class citizens, if citizens at all, by a state whose leadership has been dominated by Burman Buddhists.   

The literature on ethnicity in Burma has often been in dialogue with Leach, for better and for worse. His arguments in Political Systems are so well known to anthropologists that they barely need repeating. His analysis of oscillations between political categories—the hierarchical gumsa and the egalitarian gumlao—is deployed to attack the equilibrium assumptions of his structural-functionalist colleagues, and their allied tendency to treat ethnic groups as bounded units. Social systems, Leach argues, do not correspond to reality. They are models used, by the anthropologist and those they study, to “impose upon the facts a figment of thought”.

Such models find their clearest expression, for Leach, in myth and ritual, which present the social order in its ideal form, conjuring it by acting “as if” it already existed. Such a model, importantly, does not float freely from the messy world of social facts; it “can never have an autonomy of its own” (1964: 14).

Critics of Leach have homed in on his nonchalant confession, toward the end of the book, that he is “frequently bored by the facts” (1964: 227). This attitude, they charge, means that his analysis floats more than a little too freely. “[O]ne might with justification,” write Mandy Sadan and Francois Robbine, “accuse Leach of reducing the Kachin sphere to a kind of intellectual laboratory without any expression in reality because of the way in which he moulded his case study to a theory, rather than the other way round” (2007: 10-11).

I’m sure Graeber would have dealt with these criticisms in his foreword, but less certain what he would have said about them, or how his own view of the relationship between facts and theory would have shaped his assessment. My main hunch, though, is that Graeber would have devoted much of his foreword to what Leach tells us about the “as if”—the otherwise glimpsed in ritual and myth but still tethered to social action. Such an otherwise, the space of the immanent imagination, drew Graeber’s attention throughout his anthropology, even when he wasn’t using the term.

Consider his foreword to another book, The Chimera Principle by Carlo Severi, which deals with the relationship between ritual objects, memory, and the imagination. Graeber praises the book for showing that “imagination is a social phenomenon, dialogic even, but crucially one that typically works itself out through the mediation of objects that are … to some degree unfinished, teasingly schematic in such a way as to, almost perforce, mobilize the imaginative powers of the recipient to fill in the blanks” (p. xv). When communicated in the subjunctive mood of myth or ritual, such an imagination can, to use a term of which Graeber was fond, prefigure realities to come.

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

The crackdown in Myanmar grew more brutal through March. Protesters like Ruth continued to be in the streets. By late February, we’d shifted our conversation from Facebook Messenger to Signal because of the safer encryption that app offered. Still, Ruth continued to post on Facebook, using a private VPN to access the site in the face of the junta’s effort to block it, and, periodically, the internet altogether. Her content grew more graphic. In early March she posted a widely circulated video of three paramedics being beaten by security forces. Videos of shootings followed daily. Posts were often accompanied by the slogan, “The revolution must succeed”.

It’s now been one year since the coup, and Myanmar’s revolution has continued to evolve. Just as the country ought to be considered world historical, so those involved in the uprising continue to make history, through their ongoing resistance amid a military assault that has been especially vicious in Chin State and other ethnic areas.

What would Graeber have made of this unfolding revolution?

Unfolding is the operative term. “Every real society is a process in time,” Leach famously writes in the introduction to Political Systems. And, as Tambiah (2002: 443) suggests, there is much in Leach that resonates with—prefigures, perhaps—Fabian’s (1983) critique of anthropology’s routine “denial of coevalness.” There’s an irony, then, that many of the strongest critiques of the book focus on Leach’s elision of the historical circumstances in which his study occurred, something about which Graeber would have no doubt remarked, especially if his treatment of another major figure in British anthropology, Evans-Pritchard, is anything to go by.

There are certainly important differences between Graeber and Leach, political and otherwise, but one other thing they had in common is that they were not just prolific writers, but prolific readers too. There’s been much said about the place of the imagination in the writing of anthropology, but less, perhaps, about imagination’s role in its reading. If all ethnography is “fiction”, as Leach claimed in one of his final lectures, and even if it isn’t, what imaginative faculties are engaged in reading it?

What modes of speculative reading do we pursue, though gaps, from afar, of Facebook posts, of texts that don’t, really, exist? In his foreword to Severi’s book, Graeber pushes against the “utopian ideal” of a text produced by a “single, unique” genius. Instead, he argues, “everything turns on a tacit complicity, whereby the author leaves the work, in effect, half-finished so as to ‘capture the imagination’ of the interpreter” (2015: xx-xxi).

How do we read with an imagination that is a “social phenomenon, dialogic even,” one that works through the mediation of things unfinished and incomplete?

Unfinished, unfolding, incomplete—like Myanmar’s revolution. Ruth is also working in the presence of something that doesn’t, really, exist, and didn’t even in the years of so-called transition: a democratic Myanmar that is both politically—and, for her, spiritually—saved. But in continuing to defy the military, just as she continued to evangelise in the face of indifference, she and others act “as if” they live in a world not just where “the revolution must succeed,” but in which it already has, and in imagining that world, they work to bring it into being. 

Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism in the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.

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

References

Fuller, Chris and Jonathan Parry. 1989. “Petulant Inconsistency? The Intellectual Achievement of Edmund Leach”. Anthropology Today 5/3: 11-14.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward and Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2007. Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. London: Minor Compositions.

Graeber, David. 2014. “Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class”. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4/3: 73–88.

Graeber, David. 2015. “Concerning Mental Pivots and Civilizations of Memory.” Preface to The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination. Chicago: HAU Books.

Laidlaw, James and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 2000. The Essential Edmund Leach, Volume 1. Anthropology and Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Maran, La Raw. 2007. “On the continuing relevance of E. R. Leach’s political systems of Highland Burma to Kachin studies”. In M. Sadan and F. Robbine (eds.) Social Dynamics in the Highlands of South East Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden: Brill

Leach, Edmund. 1964 [1954]. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press.

Leach, Edmund.1984. “Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology”. Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 1-23.

Sadan, Mandy and Francois Robbine (eds.) 2007. Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden: Brill.

Tambiah, Stanley J. 2002. Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cite as: Edwards, Michael. 2022. “Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar.” FocaalBlog, 27 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/27/michael-edwards-graeber-leach-and-the-revolution-in-myanmar/

Blog

Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop

I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part of the Frontlines of Value research group at the University of Bergen. The workshop, featuring participants of different generations, academic fields and geographic specializations, was educating and revealing in a number of ways (see below for the full programme). In what follows, I will not try to do justice to the presentations or the engaging debates, but to pick out a few themes which seem to me to be of abiding importance for anthropology and related disciplines, and to make some tentative suggestions of my own.

As many have remarked, the Marxism now resurgent in certain sections of the academy, including European social anthropology (Neveling and Steur 2018), seems much more preoccupied than preceding generations of the tradition with questions surrounding the relations between this mode of production and its “outside” – whether conceived of in temporal terms, as pre-capitalist (or, much more rarely, post-capitalist); in spatial terms, as subsisting in regions outside the control of global capital; or in more complex theoretical terms. The concept of “primitive accumulation,” used by Marx himself to describe the events leading up to the flowering of capitalism in England, has been applied and even stretched (Glassman 2006), up to a point which some consider excessive. Accumulation by unequal exchange, backed up by the threat of force, certainly exists in our late-late capitalist society; but what do we gain, ask theorists like Henry Bernstein, by calling that accumulation “primitive”? (Agrarian Questions JAC 2019)

Additional questions regarding the relations between capitalism’s putative “inside” and “outside” are raised by the concept of the surplus population, which stood at the center of the workshop. As with other of Marx’s terminological choices, there is an easily missed irony at play here: proletarian populations can only be “surplus” from the point of view of capital itself, insofar as it does not find it profitable to exploit them as laborers. Furthermore, people deprived of access to their own means of production but denied the opportunity to participate in production by selling their labor-power to others are not necessarily superfluous to capital’s needs in every sense: they may be useful as consumers, as soldiers and guards, or indeed as a “reserve army” of strikebreaking laborers. They are only “surplus” in the specific sense that the ability of capital to absorb labor-power is limited on the one hand by aggregate effective demand – which grows sluggishly, due to the lopsided distribution of the fruits of capitalist development – and on the other by the productivity of labor, which grows swiftly as a result of capitalist competition. This is Marx’s “general law of capitalist accumulation”: the number of laborers required by the demands of profit-making enterprise, as a portion of the total proletarian population, will tend to fall (Marx 1990, chap. 25).

Anthropologists, who have always been curious about the lives of people outside Europe and outside wage-labor, have good reason to be interested in the concept of the surplus population. However, as the contributors to the workshop highlighted, operationalizing this concept for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems. The most obvious of these is that most people who lack access to “proper jobs” (Ferguson and Li 2018) do, after all, work. Some of them retain some access to land and other means of production, and engage in “petty commodity production”; others labor in the ill-defined “informal sector,” for example as petty merchants; still others do sell their labor-power, but not under conditions considered viable or legal by national and international institutions (Campbell 2020; Cowan 2019). All these people purchase at least some of their means of subsistence on the market, and are thus tied into capitalism as consumers, if nothing else. To be truly outside of capital, as one participant at the workshop remarked, one would need to be “undiscovered,” a member of one of those mythical, self-sufficient tribes of whose non-existence anthropologists are well aware. Hence, surplus populations are at best “inside-outside,” taking on a painfully ambiguous role.

The “functionality” of surplus populations is a related issue. Is the emergence of such populations a side-effect of the rise in the productivity of labor, primarily caused by capitalists’ desire to gain short-term “super-profits” by producing more efficiently than their competitors, or is it actively encouraged by these capitalists and their agents, such as the state? My own contribution to the workshop came down on the “functional” (if not functionalist) side of the debate. Setting aside the ample empirical evidence which could be used to make the case, I argued on purely theoretical grounds that exclusion from the labor market should not be understood as diametrically opposed to exploitation within it. It is easy enough to understand why lack of choice should force those at greater threat of exclusion to accede to greater exploitation, thus exposing the same individuals to the cruelest brunt of both processes.

There are, however, some important objections to this account. By all estimates, the surplus population is far vaster than capital could ever be expected to absorb into standard employment – perhaps around three quarters of the world’s total population (see Neilson and Stubbs 2011). Thus, most “surplus” workers have no hope of ever entering the army of labor, even as “reservists” or scabs, and any question of how they might behave given such a chance is moot. But the ethnographic evidence, which shows that many such people do in fact work and consume in quite recognizably capitalistic ways, casts doubt over such a formulation. Perhaps the calculations of scholars like Neilson and Stubbs are over-hasty? If surplus populations are only surplus from the point of view of capital, perhaps this perspective is less singular and unambiguous than the assumptions of such quantitative exercises require?

Image 1: Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea, heading from Turkish coast to the north-eastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016 (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe; Wikimedia Commons).

I would like to suggest one way of getting at the problem, through a category that remains under-theorized despite its crucial role in Marx’s labor theory of value: the value of labor-power. One of Marx’s greatest theoretical discoveries was the distinction between the value of labor-power and the value which labor can produce: in other words, the difference between what human beings need in order to live and work, and what they are capable of producing with their life and their work. It is only with the total commodification of life (and work) under capitalism that these two quantities become commensurable, as both the needs and the capacities of the worker can now be measured with one yardstick: money. At the same time, capitalism disguises the difference between the two quantities by insisting that after the costs of living and working are deducted and transferred to the worker as her wage, the remnant is not the product of her labor but a special sum called “profit,” which the employer is legally and morally entitled to appropriate.

But the value of labor-power is underdetermined. Even ignoring changes in productivity – we shall get to these in a moment – the needs of a worker, of the working family, and of the proletariat as a whole, are eminently contestable. Indeed, everyday class struggle consists to a great degree in disputations over the value of labor-power in the broad sense, which includes the wage itself as well as the length of the working day, “social wages” like health insurance and pensions, and so on. But despite this underdetermination, the value of labor-power can only fluctuate between two limits: at the top is the point where the wage begins to eat into profits to an extent unacceptable to employers, and at the bottom is the minimum of biological reproduction, below which the workers would begin to die off.

But even given a particular level of needs, the value of labor-power will shift with changes in the productivity of the types of labor which produce the essentials of life, however these are defined. The most obvious of these necessities, and the one which preoccupies Marx above all, is food. If the amount of labor necessary to produce the standard food basket goes down, for example through the introduction of agricultural technologies such as those of the Green Revolution, then so does the value of labor-power (Moore 2010). But many other technologies also play a role: for example, the great advances in hygienic and epidemiological science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also lowered the value of labor-power by drastically reducing infant mortality and raising life expectancy. Here then is one of those paradoxical ironies of capitalism: the more we invest in improving the quality of life, the cheaper human life becomes, in a very literal sense.

The relation between the value of labor-power and surplus populations now becomes clear. Marx insists that there is no general “law of population” in capitalist societies, and specifically rejects (against Malthus) any tendency to exponential increase in population (Foster 2000). If anything, long-term trends appear to demonstrate that human populations adjust their birthrates to prevailing deathrates, such that population tends to increase quite slowly. The boom in world population over the last century, as Aaron Benanav (2019) shows, can be interpreted as following from an easily understandable lag between the introduction of the hygienic and medical reforms which lowered deathrates and the subsequent adjustment of birthrates. Thus, experts expect world population to stabilize by the end of the current century (United Nations 2015), while the environmental preconditions of cheap labor-power may be under threat from climate change and related environmental crises (Moore 2015), potentially triggering a secular rise in the price of food. Nevertheless, the minimum value of labor-power – the amount of work required to produce the basket of goods absolutely necessary to keep the proletariat capable of working and reproducing, per capita – has decreased drastically since the publication of Capital. Of course, the global working class is not satisfied with this level of bare subsistence: even in poor countries, workers demand additional goods, like electronics and education. But this only points to the growing extent to which the value of their commodity is not reducible to physical constraints, but determined by the outcome of political processes. So long as the supply of labor-power tends to outstrip demand – that is, for the next few decades at least – the pressure of competition over jobs will tend to push the value of labor-power toward the minimum. Only proletarian resistance can counter this trend.

But the agency of proletarians cannot be reduced to the extent to which capital needs them as laborers. Even the most outcast of populations have means of putting pressure on capital, and maintenance of global hegemony requires that their demands be dealt with in one way or another. One way is, of course, violence: when people are not needed as workers, the global power structure is happy to countenance their warehousing, and if need be, their mass death (Mbembe 2003). But since the necessities of life have become so cheap, maintaining them in a sort of social death while providing them with the means of bare existence through humanitarian aid or debt is also an option (Sanyal 2014). With regard to these populations, global capital has become something like the Calvinist God, capable of arbitrarily granting or denying their every wish yet devoid of any need for their labors and supplications.

Regardless of how precisely we parse the concept of the surplus population, its continuing and even growing relevance shows that the analytic categories of Marx’s Capital are as relevant to our world as they were to those of the 19th century. The workings of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” have produced a world in which even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions. This certainly necessitates a rethinking of political strategy, one to which anthropology is particularly suited to contribute. However, the final goal of that strategy – a world in which each contributes according to her abilities and receives according to her needs – remains the same.

Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His article “Saving the Arabah: Thai migrant workers and the asymmetries of community in an Israeli agricultural settlement” is forthcoming in American Ethnologist. He is a member of Academia for Equality and LeftEast, among other political initiatives.

Sources

Agrarian Questions JAC. 2019. An Interview with Henry Bernstein. (4/8) Primitive Accumulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwhX7fhZ-Z4.

Benanav, Aaron. 2019. “Demography and Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce, 1950-2000.” Social Science History 43 (4): 679–703.

Campbell, Stephen. 2020. “Debt collection as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement.” Social Anthropology 28 (3): 729–742.

Cowan, Thomas. 2021. “The Village as Urban Infrastructure: Social Reproduction, Agrarian Repair and Uneven Urbanisation.” Environment and Planning E 4 (3): pp. 736–755. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619868106

Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018. “Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies.

Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Glassman, Jim. 2006. “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’ Means.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 608–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506070172.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume I). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Middlesex: Penguin.

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40.

Moore, Jason W. 2010. “The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1450–2010.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (3): 389–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00276.x.

———. 2015. “Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology.” Critical Historical Studies 2 (1): 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1086/681007.

Neilson, David, and Thomas Stubbs. 2011. “Relative Surplus Population and Uneven Development in the Neoliberal Era: Theory and Empirical Application.” Capital & Class 35 (3): 435–53.

Neveling, Patrick, and Luisa Steur. 2018. “Introduction: Marxian Anthropology Resurgent.” Focaal 2018 (82): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2018.820101

Sanyal, Kalyan. 2014. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality & Post-Colonial Capitalism. 1. paperback ed. London: Routledge.

United Nations, ed. 2015. World Population Prospects. ST/ESA/SER.A 377. New York: United Nations.

This article is linked to a research workshop that was held at Bergen University in December. The full workshop program is below.

Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory From the Peripheries
13-14 December 2021,
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen,
Frontlines of Value Research Program

Monday 13 December
10.00 – 10.15
Welcome and Introduction
Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

10.15 – 11.00
Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory from the “Peripheries”
Stephen Campbell (Nanyang Technological University) and Thomas Cowan (University of Nottingham)

11.00 – 11.45
Surplus Labour, Surplus Population, Primitive Accumulation: Notes for Discussion
Henry Bernstein (SOAS, University of London)

11.45 – 12.30
New Exploitation of an Old Form of “Work”: Exploitation of Tenant Shopkeepers’ Livelihoods in South Korea
Yewon Lee (University of Tübingen)

14.00 – 14.45
Violence of Abstraction, Violence of Concretion: Surplus Population as an Element of a Marxist Theory of Racialization
Matan Kaminer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

14.45 – 15.30
The Death of the Proper Job? Aspiration, Class, and Labour in Urban Brazil and Egypt
Harry Pettit (Northumbria University) and Mara Nogueira (Birkbeck, University of London)

15.30 – 16.15
Surplus Population/Surplus Labour: Past and Present
Marcel Van Der Linden (University of Amsterdam)

Tuesday 14 December
10.00 – 10.45
From Assumed Reluctancy to Enforced Redundancy: The Changed Depreciation of Labour in the Transition Towards Global Capitalism
Jan Breman (University of Amsterdam)

10.45 – 11.30
Land/Ocean Grabs and the Relative Surplus Population in Ghana
Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno (University of Development Studies, Tamale)

11.30 – 12.15
‘Productive’ Migrants and ‘Dependent’ Left-behind Brothers
Hadia Akhtar Khan (University of Toronto)

13.30 – 14.15
Surplus Population In-Situ: Brick Kiln Labour and the Production of Idle time
Pratik Mishra (King’s College, University of London)

14.15 – 15.00
The Social Reproduction of Pandemic Neoliberalism: Planetary Crises and the Reorganization of Life, Work and Death
Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS, University of London)

15.00 – 15.45
A Surplus Population? The Making of a Racialized (Non) Working Class in a Former Romanian Mining District
Sorin Gog and Enikö Vince (Babes-Bolyai University)

15.45 – 16.30
Comment and General Discussion
Gavin Smith (University of Toronto)

Cite as: Kaminer, Matan. 2022. “Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop.” FocaalBlog, 26 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/26/matan-kaminer-marxist-anthropology-in-a-world-of-surplus-population-reflections-on-a-frontlines-of-value-workshop/

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

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

David Graeber’s work is often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of many of the most entrenched Enlightenment myths about human history and the origins of social inequality. But what makes his way of myth-busting particularly compelling is that it is informed by a theory of myth itself – of what myth is, what it does, and how it stands in relation to human creativity and social transformation. The study of myth, for Graeber, was not an arbitrary indulgence. It was central to his overall take on the scope of anthropology. For him, anthropology was most valuable as a comparative inquiry into human possibilities – one that throws our own contemporary myths into sharp relief, thereby revealing our own creative potential and possibilities for social transformation.

Though Graeber never published specifically on myth, the theme emerges in a variety of guises throughout his work: in the Value book (2001), in the essays collected in Possibilities (2007), and of course in The Dawn of Everything (2021). He often taught courses on myth and ritual. Before his death, he had prepared a series of lectures focused on Gregory Bateson’s Naven mythic and ritual complex. Most importantly, in 2017 he wrote a long foreword to Terry Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar (2017), a detailed structural analysis of the Kayapo myth on the origin of cooking fire. We learn from this not only the value that Graeber saw in the anthropological study of myth, but also the huge influence that Turner had on his thinking. Turner was for Graeber what Graeber is for many of us, someone with “a remarkable ability to make … (still extremely complicated) ideas sound like matter-of-fact common sense, and even to render them fairly straightforward.” (Graeber 2017:xxi). Graeber lamented that what Terry Turner could do in person in no way corresponded to his written work. He admitted that, initially, he could not understand a word of it. Once he understood it, however, he came to regard Turner as “the most underrated social theorist of the last 50 years” (pers. comm.) and The Fire of the Jaguar “one of the greatest achievements of anthropological theory, […] that should deserve a place among the classics” (ibid:xxxix).

Image 1: Book cover of Fire of the Jaguar by Terence Turner

Given Graeber’s political life, his interest in myth seems surprising. In a pedigree that goes from Mircea Eliade to Jordan Peterson, the study of myth has traditionally been the province of the politically conservative. Though approaches to the subject vary widely, for the great majority of theorists, myths either reflect archetypal structures of the human mind or resolve contradictions related to individual experience. They have no direct relationship to social organisation, let alone social transformation. What Graeber saw in Turner was quite the opposite: a rare progressive theory of myth, where the latter emerges as the embodiment, if not as the paragon, of human social creativity. In what follows, we examine these connections, we show how this argument originates from a radical rethinking of structuralism, and we consider how it came to fashion Graeber’s way of doing anthropology.

First, though, a few words on The Fire of the Jaguar.

Myth, action and dynamic structuralism

The Fire of the Jaguar is the most prominent myth of the Kayapo, an Amazonian group whom Terry Turner researched for over fifty years. The myth recounts the story of a young boy who is adopted by jaguars, who then teach him how to use cooking fire – knowledge that he brings back to the Kayapo community. In essence, the myth explains how Kayapo attain full sociality out of nature, a process that is reflected both in the maturation of the boy and in the manipulation and replication of fire.

To our knowledge, Turner’s analysis of this myth is the most detailed analysis of a single myth in the anthropological literature. It is structuralist in character but very different (and, in Graeber’s view, more compelling) than the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Turner embeds his analysis of myth in Kayapo socioeconomic organisation (which he knew very well) and is not concerned with comparing it with other myths to reveal an underlying code. He suggests instead that the maturation of the boy in the myth reveals a model not only for the socialisation of youth but also for the consolidation of Kayapo society as a whole. In Kayapo matriuxorilocal communities, men must undergo an emotionally disruptive process of detachment as they move from their natal home to the communal men-house, and finally to the house of their in-laws. By recounting parallel processes of detachment, the myth of the fire of the jaguar reframes the tensions and contradictions of this experience. Myth thus functions as an important means whereby societies are able to shape behaviour into collectively prescribed organizational patterns. Ultimately, Turner argues that Kayapo myth and social organisation stand in a relation of circular causality with one another, i.e., they influence each other in non-linear fashion.

He arrives at this argument by making a fundamental move away from Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism: the minimal units of myth in his analysis are not categories (types of beings or types of objects), but actions. The difference between categories and actions is that actions, when repeated, force the subject to consciously acknowledge a pattern. This is ultimately what structure is for Turner: it is a pattern of action, or, in his words, a “group of transformations bounded together by invariant constraints” (2017:207). This type of structure is always dialectic. As soon as a pattern shows change and diversification, the acting subject is forced to create a higher level of abstraction in order to account for and compare differences, which in turn can lead to yet another higher level, and so on.

Understanding what Turner means by all this requires some minimal familiarity with the concepts of ‘dynamic hierarchical system’ and ‘self-organisation’ that he takes from Piaget and cybernetics (Turner 1973) (were he to write today, Turner would probably find a more compelling treatment of these concepts in the field of complexity science (e.g., Thompson 2007 or Deacon 2012)). His adaptation of these theories into anthropology might be at times counterintuitive. For Graeber, the cross-disciplinary move he accomplishes is central. To exemplify Turner’s application of dynamic structuralism to the social domain, Graeber asks us to consider the action of feeding a child (Graeber 2017:xxxii). The moment we do this twice but with the understanding that it is the ‘same’ action we performed before, we generate, through repetition, a kind of hierarchy since there is a higher level at which those actions are both tokens of the same type. But the moment we say a different kind of repeated action is not the same – say, feeding a husband or feeding a rival at a feast – we are generating a third level, where different types are being compared. At the same time, by defining certain types of action in this way, we typically generate certain identities (child, husband, rival), kinds of person who typically perform such actions, which in turn lead us to consider, on yet a higher level of analysis, how these identities relate to one another, and so forth. Structure, in short, is always dynamic and open-ended, and always develops from lower-level actions.

Turner applies this analysis to both Kayapo social organisation and the myth of origin. The plot of the myth proceeds through a sequence of apparent tensions (e.g., a boy growing up in a matriuxorilocal society, which implies eventual separation from the natal family), which it overcomes by transposing them onto a higher level of structural differentiation of the same pattern. For instance, the detachment from the boy’s original family in the myth reflects an initial distancing from ‘nature’, which is then reproduced on a higher level in the boy’s manipulation of fire. Similarly, in Kayapo society, the actions that produce sociality at the lower level of family organisation level are structural variations of actions that produce sociality at the upper level of moieties and communal organization in the village. Overall, Turner claims to have demonstrated that, at least among the Kayapo, the dynamic structures of myth and social organisation parallel one another.

Turner’s central theoretical argument in The Fire of the Jaguar is that what we usually consider ‘mythical thought’ – the central message of the myth that is subjectively experienced by people – consists in the highest level of social self-organisation. Myth, essentially, places a cap on an otherwise ever-evolving dialectical process that would make social organisation impossible. At some point, the complexity of social reality – of why we treat one another the way we do, or why we value certain actions over others – becomes such that we are unable to form a higher level of abstraction to account for it. What myth does is pre-empting the need to construct that level, because it treats contradictions in the structure of society as playing out within the terms of that structure itself. For Turner, this also explains the reason why most myths are about the origins of social institutions: in order to avoid having to consciously create a higher level, we attribute the origin of social institutions to a mythical power in the distant past. And this is why the Kayapo, for example, regard the very power to create and maintain their social order – the fire – as originating from an extra-social source – the jaguar (see also Graeber 2020).

In sum, Turner’s structuralism makes a radical departure from Lévi-Strauss’ because 1) it takes actions, rather than ideas, as starting points. ‘Nature’ and ‘society’ are not static orders of classification but contrastive modes of actions continuously in tension with one another. 2) It takes the perspective of the subjects, rather than that of the analyst. These are tensions and processes lived by the Kayapo, which shape their values and subjectivity and the reproduction of their society. 3) It does not assume that myth simply evokes contradictions and then mediates them. This is only half of the story. The other half of the story is that myth is equally concerned with the differentiation of ambiguous situations and with their transformation; it is the end-product of a dialectical process.

On alienated consciousness and social creativity

It is challenging, of course, to give justice to the complexity of Turner’s thought on myth in the space of a few paragraphs. We hope it is clear, however, how these ideas might have had a profound influence on David Graeber: the causal significance of myth, the emphasis on action, the focus on social production, the conscious creation of structure, the very idea of a ‘dynamic structuralism’… Graeber endlessly reworked these ideas throughout his writings. The aspect we are most interested in focusing on here is that of social creativity.

Turner saw myth as the creative result of a dialectical process that enables a system of social relations. By virtue of their capacity to support different types of social organisation, the constellation of myths we find across cultures could be seen as a vast compendium of human creativity. Yet (and this is something Graeber finds particularly curious) myth is also creativity turned against itself: most of them are about how latter-day humans can’t be genuinely creative anymore. They often appear to be all about fixing either natural differences or social relations. The Kayapo myth of cooking fire is a good example of this. The creation myths of Ju|’hoan (or !Kung) speakers, among whom I (Megan Laws) did fieldwork, are another good example. They speak of a time when different beings had no fixed form, and of how (and this is significant) humans then ‘branded’ the animals with fire to give them their distinctive characteristics (Biesele 1993: 116-123) and set in place the relationships between them.

It is natural, here, for both Turner and Graeber to turn to Marx’s (1964) idea of alienation, because, so defined, myth does appear to be a form of alienated social consciousness (“we create our physical worlds, but are unaware of, and hence not in control of, the process by which we do so”, Graeber 2005: 409). As Turner puts it (2017: 202), myths seemingly present us with the “form of the natural universe”, which is “seen as self-existing prior to any particular instance of human social activity” (2017:202). We appear to be presented with the way things are, not with how they came to be. In the process, we confer power upon that which we have ourselves created. There is clearly a potential dark side to this. As Marx argues so eloquently, there is a necessary link between humans’ misunderstanding of the process of their own creativity and forms of authority and exploitation.

One of the problems in seeing things this way is that, from an anthropological perspective, one risks being condescending to people like the Kayapo. Are we really prepared to say that the Kayapo live under a form of alienated consciousness? Graeber reflects on this dilemma on several occasions, most explicitly in his criticism of the ‘ontological turn’ (Graeber 2015).

His take is twofold. Firstly, he writes, the dilemma changes as soon as we realise that we frequently criticise our colleagues’ own assumptions about the workings of society. Denying the possibility of saying that the Kayapo are wrong in their own assumptions would amount to denying their status as potential intellectual peers. But, secondly, though certainly capable of questioning the foundations of their own thought and actions, we should not assume that people like the Kayapo are questioning the foundations of their own thought and actions, or that there’s any particular reason why they should.

Image 2: Akha swing, © Giulio Ongaro

As Turner points out, the Kayapo “are fully conscious of constructing themselves and their society” (2017:203) through myth. We see the same awareness in the phenomenon of fetishism examined by Graeber (2005). Drawing upon ethnographic research from West Africa from the 17th to the 19th century, he writes that fetishes, from the African viewpoint, are not simply objects that are presumed to have power over us. They are objects recognised as creations, as embodiments of intentions and actions that have power over us. Likewise, the Akha people of highland Laos where I (Giulio Ongaro) did my fieldwork are known to build their villages around three features (a swing, a well, a gate) that are imbued with spiritual force. These spirits both protect and afflict Akha people with illness, but they can also be torn apart every time Akha move village. Besides, Akha know that they are the only people in their multi-ethnic region to have those features, which suggests that they are also aware that these spirits do not exist out there independent of their own minds. Like myths, these objects can embody social creativity because they have the power to establish new social relations. Yet, it would be a stretch to consider them as products of alienated consciousness because people are ultimately conscious, on some level, of the fact that their power has a human origin.

The danger comes when we take this power as natural, “when fetishism gives way to theology, the absolute assurance that the gods are real.” (Graeber, 2005:431). The assurance, in other words, that such power is immutable. Similarly, with myth, the danger comes when we elevate myth as fact. When we do so, we risk losing sight of those moments when the forms we take as natural or given are a product of the activity of human agents (and to this end, might be transformed).

In many of his writings, Graeber states that this is the condition we find ourselves in at this historical moment. We forget, as his popular line puts it, that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. He and David Wengrow reflect at length on this point in The Dawn of Everything. They show how our own Enlightenment myth of origin takes the linear growth of social complexity and hierarchy as natural. If there is something peculiar about this Enlightenment myth of origin is that, unlike virtually all other origin myths, which start with a creative event (with the branding of animals or the mastery of fire), it starts with nothing and seems to negate the possibility of social creativity altogether. This brings us back to Graeber’s overall vision of anthropology and his scholarly efforts to question our own contemporary myths and their social effects.

Creative refusal

Graeber saw anthropology as a dialogic enterprise, driven by the willingness to turn to ‘others’ to challenge the value-laden assumptions – or myths – that colour our own experience of the world. He knew that anthropologists cannot take a ‘view from nowhere’, as philosopher Thomas Nagel (1989) puts it. As all social scientists, they labour under the weight of their own culturally specific assumptions. Some of Graeber’s contemporaries, most notably those aligned with the ‘Writing Culture’ turn (as well as post-structuralist and post-humanist scholars), saw this as a damning indictment of the impossibility of anthropology as an objective science (Graeber 2007b). For Graeber, it was its main strength. It is precisely by turning to ethnography, specifically to comparison, that he saw it possible to challenge our own myths, and it was in this guise that anthropology was most valuable for him.

How does the ‘dynamic structuralism’ of Graeber’s mentor, Terry Turner, fit into this? As we have examined, an important difference between the structuralism espoused by Levi-Strauss and ‘dynamic structuralism’ is that the former takes myths to have no direct link to social and material reality. The latter, to the contrary, takes myths to not only grow out of “the structure of social relations” and appeal in concrete, affective terms to those who listen to them; they are, as Turner puts it, “powerful devices for supporting a given form of social organisation” (2017:134). If we assume a relation of non-linear dynamic co-causality between myth and social organisation, then the political implications are clear: by changing one, one can change the other. Whether this circular causality between myth and social organisation is actually in place can be questioned. Graeber certainly assumes it and turns to our contemporary myths to both draw attention to their consequences, and to attack them.

Ernesto De Martino once wrote that “the task of anthropology lies in the possibility of positing problems whose solution leads to an expansion of the self-consciousness of our civilization. Only then can anthropology help the formation of a wider humanism” (De Martino 1973:3; translation from Italian original). With some reservations on the term ‘civilisation’, Graeber would surely embrace this spirit. Once he said on Twitter: “I am bored of post-humanists. I think I am a pre-humanist. Humanity is something we aspire to achieve at some point in the future”. But Graeber would also add that, though anthropology is uniquely placed to fulfil this role, the aspiration to achieve a wider humanism is by no means exclusive to the society that invented anthropology. In one way or another, it has been the primal moving force of all cultures.

This was the key point of his Marilyn Strathern lecture, where he suggested that what we call ‘cultures’ should be seen as examples of successful social movements, particularly as the outcome of a creative process of refusal (Graeber 2013). Indeed, it is not a coincidence that many ethnonyms – the names a culture gives to itself – actually mean ‘human’, suggesting perhaps that they see themselves as having achieved such status. The Dawn of Everything considerably elaborates on the argument of the Strathern lecture. Graeber and Wengrow not only engage in their own process of creative refusal – challenging enduring Enlightenment myths and their socially deleterious effects – they show the role that creative refusal and conscious social experimentation has played throughout human history. Some early criticisms of the book have contended that Graeber and Wengrow “demythologise the past” (Vernon 2021) and take our ancestors to be rational political actors who believe that “mythical narratives and religious sensitivities are inferior bases for organising society” (Shullenberger 2021). This should certainly call for an unpacking of the term ‘conscious social experimentation’. Perhaps, in and of itself, the term does evoke the idea of a group of people getting together and rationally imposing their will on the world. In light of what we have discussed in this paper, we suggest that the rubric of ‘conscious experimentation’ can – without contradictions – involve forms of myth and mythmaking. 

Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.

Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology. She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on egalitarianism, sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia.  

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

References

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

De Martino, Ernesto. 1973. Il mondo magico: prolegomeni a una storia del magismo. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

Deacon, Terrence W. 2012. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2005. “Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction.” Anthropological Theory 5 (4): 407–438.

Graeber, David. 2007a. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

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

Graeber, David. 2013. “Culture as Creative Refusal.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31 (2): 1–19.

Graeber, David. 2015. “Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying ‘Reality’: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 1–41.

Graeber, David. 2017. “At Long Last. Foreword to Terence Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar.” In The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago: HAU Books.

Graeber, David. 2020. Anarchy–In a Manner of Speaking – Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier–Zauberman. Zurich, Paris, Berlin: Diaphanes.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. S.l.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Marx, Karl. 1964. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Vol. 333. New York City: International Publishers.

Nagel, Thomas. 1989. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shullenberger, Geoff. 2021. “Archaeology of Freedom.” Washington Examiner. December 31, 2021. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/archaeology-of-freedom

Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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

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

Vernon, Mark. 2021. “Mark Vernon Reviews The Dawn of Everything.” Idler. 2021. https://www.idler.co.uk/article/mark-vernon-reviews-the-dawn-of-everything/

Cite as: Ongaro, Giulio and Megan Laws. 2022. “Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/24/giulio-ongaro-and-megan-laws-towards-a-progressive-theory-of-myth-turner-and-graeber-on-social-creativity/

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

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Myth and Imagination

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws & Michael Edwards

In a short essay published after his death, David writes that “Good ideas rarely, if ever, emerge from isolation… I have no idea, for instance, the degree to which many of the ideas attributed to me are the product of me, or some of my graduate student friends with whom I spent long hours hashing out the meaning of the universe twenty years ago, and ultimately I think it’s a meaningless question: the ideas emerged from our relation.” This week considers David’s ‘relations’ with two of his anthropological forebears, Terence Turner and Edmund Leach. For David, Turner was “the most underrated social theorist of the last 50 years” and Leach “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Together, they inspired, in big and small ways, much of his thinking around myth and imagination, respectively. David’s contributions to the study of myth and imagination are scattered throughout his work. As Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws (on Turner) and Michael Edwards (on Leach) show, they are key to David’s thinking about possibilities for social transformation.

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

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

Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.

Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology. She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on egalitarianism, sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia. 

Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism in the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.

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

Ayça Çubukçu: On “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”

Published in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments)is a tiny and mighty, genre-defying text. Graeber calls it a pamphlet, “a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos” (Graeber 2004: 1). The pamphlet is impossible to summarize and discuss fully in twenty minutes, especially since in hindsight, it bears the seeds of many of the major arguments Graeber was to develop later in life. I will therefore limit myself to sketching some basic elements of the kind of social theory that Graeber is proposing in this spirited text. Broadly, Fragments seeks to outline a body of radical theory that would, in Graeber’s words, “actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs” (Ibid: 9). This is characteristic of Graeber: the desire to render social theory—particularly anthropology—usefully interesting to radical movements, and radical movements—particularly anarchism—useful and interesting to social theory.

In Fragments, Graeber explores what he names the “strange affinity” between anarchism and anthropology (Ibid: 12). He observes “there was something about anthropological thought in particular—its keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities—that gave it an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning” (Ibid: 13). Graeber himself was fascinated by this, the range of human possibilities in the past and the present, which could unravel the seeming inevitability of our current social and political institutions, while grounding hope for living collectively with greater freedom in more egalitarian arrangements.

Graeber is able to observe the strange affinity between anthropology and anarchism in Fragments because in his version, anarchism is not about a body of theory bequeathed in the 19th century by “founding figures” such as Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon that one would have to adopt wholesale. Instead, it is more about a particular attitude, even a faith that is shared among anarchists (Ibid: 4). Anarchism can be thought of as a faith, Graeber asserts, which involves “the rejection of certain types of social relations, the confidence that certain others would be much better ones on which to build a livable society, [and] the belief that such a society could actually exist” (Ibid: 4). Likewise, the “founding figures” of anarchism did not think they invented anything new—they simply made a faithful assumption that, in Graeber’s words, “the basic principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.” (Ibid: 3) Arguably, it is this assumption about human history that Graeber sets out to prove valid in his latest book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he co-authored with the archeologist David Wengrow: Humanity has always practiced anarchistic forms of human behavior and social organization—since the Ice Age.

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

In Graeber’s vision, in any case, anthropology as a discipline could strengthen faith in the possibility of another world by offering an archive of alternative ways of organizing social relations, of reconstituting them consciously, or of abandoning them altogether. But to be able to strengthen this faith in the possibility of another world free from “the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance” (Ibid: 10), social theory itself would have to assume another world is possible. In fact, Graeber asserts this as the first assumption that any radical social theory has to make. “To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith,” he finds, “since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible” (Ibid: 10). In a move that resembles a sophisticated theological argument about the existence of God, he then declares, “it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative” (Ibid: 10). I wonder, however, if anthropologists or others can be drawn into such faithful optimism by argumentation. Perhaps one could be inspired to have faith in the possibility of another world and inspire David Graeber did along with the radical movements he dearly treasured.

Graeber’s second proposition is that any radical, particularly anarchist, social theory would have to self-consciously reject vanguardism (Ibid: 11). To his mind, ethnography as an anthropological method provides a particularly relevant, if a rough and incipient model of how “nonvanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice may work” (Ibid: 12). The goal of such a practice would not be to “arrive at the correct strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow” (Ibid: 11), but to tease out the implicit logics—symbolic, moral or pragmatic—that already underlie people’s actions, even if they are themselves not completely aware of them (Ibid: 12). “One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that,” Graeber writes in Fragments, “to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts” (Ibid: 12). Not prescriptions, but contributions, possibilities, gifts. That is what Graeber offered in his work—particularly in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Direct Action: An Ethnography (2008) and The Democracy Project (2013)—whether his gifts were accepted or not by everyone he wrote about, thought and acted with, or, for that matter, was read by. After all, gifts too can be rejected, and as Graeber recognized, not much of what he proposed or practiced as an anthropologist had “much to do with what anthropology, even radical anthropology, has actually been like over the last hundred years or so” (Graeber 2004: 13).

Nevertheless, in Fragments, Graeber turns to anthropologists, most notably Marcel Mauss, to reflect on his influence on anarchists, despite the fact that Mauss had nothing good to say about them. “In the end, though,” Graeber writes as if speaking about himself as well, “Marcel Mauss has probably had more influence on anarchists than all the other [anthropologists] combined. This is because he was interested in alternative moralities, which opened the way to thinking that societies without states and markets were the way they were because they actively wished to live that way. Which in our terms means, because they were anarchists. Insofar as fragments of an anarchist anthropology do, already, exist, they largely derive from him” (Ibid: 21). In my interpretation, Graeber’s own interest in developing an anarchist anthropology too was driven by an appreciation of and fascination with “alternative moralities” that underpin people’s self-conscious determination to live otherwise—in the anarchist case, free from capitalism and patriarchy, free from the state, structural violence, inequality, and domination.

“This is what I mean by alternative ethics” Graeber explains in a critical section of Fragments where he theorizes revolutionary counterpower and foreshadows a core argument he co-authors in The Dawn of Everything (2021): “Anarchistic societies are no more unaware of human capacities for greed or vainglory than modern Americans are unaware of human capacities for envy, gluttony, or sloth; they would just find them equally unappealing as the basis for their civilization. In fact, they see these phenomena as moral dangers so dire they end up organizing much of their social life around containing them” (Graeber 2004: 24). This is a remarkable proposition. First, it is determined to cast ethics and morality as the constitutive, self-conscious grounds of social organization. Second, it intimates this to be the case across human history, “modern” or “pre-modern.”

In fact, Graeber argues that “any really politically engaged anthropology will have to start by seriously confronting the question of what, if anything, really divides what we like to call the ‘modern’ world from the rest of human history” (Ibid: 36). In Fragments, as well as in the Dawn of Everything, he passionately rejects familiar historical periodizations and evolutionary stages such that the entirety of human history—along with every society, people, and civilization across time and space—becomes populated by examples of human possibility enacted by decidedly imaginative, intelligent, playful, experimental, thoughtful, creative, and politically self-conscious creatures.

For Graeber, human history does not consist of a series of revolutions (Ibid: 44)—be it the Neolithic Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution—that introduce clear social, moral, or political breaks in the nature of social reality, or “the human condition” as he prefers to think of it. If this is the case, and if anarchism is above all an ethics of practice (Ibid: 95), as he asserts, such an ethics becomes available for anthropological study and political inspiration across human history. It is important to note however that Graeber passionately disagrees with primitivist anarchists inspired by his anthropologist mentor Marshall Sahlins’ (1972) influential essay “The Original Affluent Society,” anarchists who propose that “there was a time when alienation and inequality did not exist, when everyone was a hunter gathering anarchist, and that therefore real liberation can only come if we abandon ‘civilization’” (Graeber 2004: 55). In Fragments, and the Dawn of Everything, he instead draws a more complex history of endless variety where, for instance, “there were hunter gatherer societies with nobles and slaves,” and “agrarian societies that are fiercely egalitarian” (Ibid: 54). Graeber insists, in other words, that “humans never lived in the garden of Eden” (Ibid: 55). The significance of this finding is manifold. Among other things, it means that history can become “a resource for us in much more interesting ways,” and that “radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary history” (Ibid: 54).

Writing of revolution in Fragments, Graeber rejects its commonplace definition which “has always implied something in the nature of a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no longer apply” (Ibid: 42). Instead, he urges us “to stop thinking about revolution as a thing—‘the’ revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask ‘what is revolutionary action?’” (Ibid: 45). He stresses that “revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light” (Ibid: 45), without necessarily aiming to topple a government, or for that matter, the head of an anthropology department.

I mention this possibility in the playful spirit of David to bring us back to the here and now, and to the final section of Fragments titled “Anthropology,” in which he “somewhat reluctantly bites the hand that feeds him” (Ibid: 95). Graeber observes how, instead of adopting any kind of radical politics, anthropologists have risked becoming “yet another clog in a global ‘identity machine,’ a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and assumptions,” whereby all debates about the nature of political or economic possibilities are seen to be over, and “the only way one can now make a political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions about what identity is” (Ibid: 101), he laments. And bitingly, he declares, “the perspective of the anthropologist and the global marketing executive have become almost indistinguishable” (Ibid: 100).

But what does Graeber propose for anthropology instead? Observing that “anthropologists are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and political experiments no one else really knows about,” he regrets that this archive of human experience is treated by anthropologists as “our dirty little secret” (Ibid: 94). Of course, it was colonial violence that made such an archive possible in the first place as Graeber recognizes without reluctance: “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder—much like most modern academic disciplines,” he writes (Ibid: 96). Nevertheless, he makes the daring proposition that “the fruits of ethnography—and the techniques of ethnography—could be enormously helpful” for radical movements around the world if anthropologists could “get past their—however understandable—hesitancy, owing to their own often squalid colonial history, and come to see what they are sitting on not as some guilty secret (which is nonetheless their guilty secret, and no one else’s) but as the common property of humankind” (Ibid: 94).  

Towards a conclusion, I would like to submit that anarchism, and the anthropological knowledge of anarchist ethics, practices, and imaginaries across human history are part of “the common property of humankind,” which now includes Graeber’s own contributions to anarchist theory and practice along with his astounding imagination of their possible pasts and futures. Allow me to end then with a strikingly imaginative passage from Fragments, which we could receive as an invitation to think and act towards an anarchist future:

“[A]narchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. … [T]hey would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority.” (Ibid: 40)

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, writing of Madagascar, Graeber observes how “it often seems that no one really takes on their full authority until they are dead.” To my mind, we now have to deal with David’s “full authority” in an anarchist spirit. The task at hand cannot be petrification through idolization or canonization, but the extension of an invitation to think, play, and experiment with his contributions to anthropology and anarchism alike.

Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.

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

References

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

Graeber, D. 2008. Direct Action: An Ethnography. California: AK Press.

Graeber, D. 2013. The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York City: Spiegel & Grau, a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House.

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

Sahlins, M. 1968. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Lee and DeVore (eds), pp. 85-9. Chicago: Aldine.

Cite as: Ayça Çubukçu. 2022. “On Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 18 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/18/ayca-cubukcu-on-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology/

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

Keir Martin: Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a book that fizzes with a multiplicity of ideas; so many that they seem on occasion to overgrow the boundaries of the text. In the text, we see many themes that were to be developed in more detail in later years, in other books such as Debt: The First 5 000 years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018)and his posthumous magnum opus, co-authored with David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). All of the different overflowing themes share a common underlying thread, however; namely a desire to learn from and explore the multiplicity of alternatives to hierarchy and competition that are already in existence, often underneath our noses, rather than lay down a fixed template for resistance. Rather than trying to re-solve the Leninist question of What is to be done?, David continuously asked us to reflect upon the implications of What is being done?. It is in this regard that David’s anarchism and his anthropology most clearly complement each other. By slowing down and paying attention to the variety of ways in which people step outside and subvert hierarchy in order to live a life more worth living, anthropology might become the liberatory discipline par excellence – if only its practitioners were able to realise the potential power within their practice.

Let me take one example from Fragments. On page 60, David discusses the Italian autonomist theory of “revolutionary exodus,” a theory itself inspired by a previous refusal of large numbers of young Italians to engage in wage-labour. David (Graeber 2004, 60) writes that, “[…] in all this Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratory for future social movements, anticipating trends that are now beginning to happen on a global scale.” If this was true when David wrote Fragments back in 2004, how much more is it today, when the so-called Great Resignation poses the greatest threat to the return of business as usual in the aftermath of Covid-19.

Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music standing in front of a mountain, arms outstretched as she twirls happily. Meme text reads "This is me quitting my job."
Image 1: Viral internet meme conveying the happiness of resigning

A quick scan of headlines on National Public Radio in the US tells the story. “Business should be booming – if only there were enough workers for the job”, or “As the Pandemic recedes, millions of workers are saying I quit”. And why are they quitting? “I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time,” says Jonathan Caballero, a 27-year-old software engineer who previously commuted 45 minutes each way to work on a daily basis. NPR reports that now he “believes that work has to accommodate life.” Alyssa Casey, a researcher for the federal government states that, “I think the pandemic just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want.” And NPR reports of 42-year-old restaurant manager Jeremy Golembiewski and his decision to join the Great Resignation:

“In the months that followed, Golembiewski’s life changed. He was spending time doing fun things like setting up a playroom in his garage for his two young children and cooking dinner for the family. At age 42, he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he didn’t have to put in 50 to 60 hours a week at the restaurant and miss Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas morning with his family. ‘I want to see my 1-year-old and my 5-year-old’s faces light up when they come out and see the tree and all the presents that I spent six hours at night assembling and putting out,’ says Golembiewski, who got his first restaurant job at 16 as a dishwasher at the Big Boy chain in Michigan.”

Golembiewski apparently comes from humble origins, but even high-end executives are not immune from the humanising influence of the lockdown. Will Station, a vice-president at Boeing, is reported as becoming “emotional thinking about how much [of his children’s lives] he’s missed and how much he’s getting to experience now.” “I got to see my kids and see their world in a way that I’ve never experienced before,” he says. “It’s very special.” “Even with all the chaos, this has been a bonus year for me.”

NPR also reports in June that people quitting jobs in normal times would signal a healthy economy. But these are not “normal times”; the pandemic led to the worst recession in US history and still a record 4 million quit their jobs in April. The situation has continued in the months since. “The Great Resignation appears to be getting worse” complain Kylie Logan and Lance Lambert on the Fortune news website – who, for some reason, seem unhappy that thousands of working people such as Station and Golembiewski are discovering the joy of spending irreplaceable time with their growing children. In September, a new record of 4.4 million resignations were recorded.

The Great Resignation is one of those phenomena that shows most clearly the interconnection of aspects of life that are often kept conceptually separate. We see in the examples above not simply an individualistic “take this job and shove it” kind of mood, but also the ways in which the refusal of work seems to open the possibility for reimagining the possibilities of gendered relations of kinship and care, which anthropologists have long argued are intimately and unavoidably entwined with the world of paid employment. There was quite a bit of talk in last week’s seminar on Debt of the way in which David was sceptical of the kind of “great transformation” picture of the emergence of capitalist modernity that is an otherwise conventional framing for political economic anthropologists. And indeed, in Fragments (2004, 46), David is quite explicit about this scepticism, stating that,

 “[…] almost everyone agrees that at somewhere in the sixteenth, or seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, a Great Transformation occurred, that it occurred in Western Europe and its settler colonies, and that because of it, we became ‘modern’. And that once we did, we became a fundamentally different sort of creature than anything that had come before. But what if we kicked this whole apparatus away?”

It’s worth making the point however, that David’s argument was not, as he put it, “that nothing important has happened over the past 500 years, any more than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unimportant.” It was rather that once we drop the assumption that this always has to be the starting framing of analysis, and once we decide to “at least entertain the notion that we aren’t quite so special as we like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.” Alternatives to what we think we are can potentially to be found in our present daily practice; not necessarily to be sought before the total transformation of the rise of capitalism or after the great transformation of the total revolution that is yet to come. David was concerned with the way in which the fetishisation of something called the “market” or the “economy” as separate from the rest of society prioritised particular relational obligations over others – not least the way in which life accommodates work not the other way round, as critiqued by Caballero. This is in many regards an eminently Polanyian critique of the rhetorical disembedding of the market economy from society and the consequent setting up of that market economy as society’s driving institution. And he was always keen to point out that in our daily practice market rationality relies upon – or is, in Polanyi’s (1944) terms, still embedded within – other moral perspectives and practices. Both David and Polanyi knew that any transformation that has occurred in recent centuries – great or otherwise – could never create an economy with the people left out, and that any attempt to do so was doomed to be nothing but a shallow liberal utopia.

Although the Great Resignation came as a surprise to many, one suspects it would not have come as a surprise to David, nor to Polanyi, who might well have seen it as an example of the famous “double movement” by which society, in this case in the shape of Golembiewski, Station, and millions more like them, protect themselves from a disembedded market morality and prioritise the reproduction of persons over the production of objects and economic value. For David it would have been further proof, if more were needed, that something radically different to what we think we are now has been within us and in front of us all along. We might well find radical differences before the great transformation, after the revolution or at the end of a tributary of the Amazon River, but we don’t necessarily have to. We’re as likely to find them in an Amazon distribution centre – if we know how to look. David was fascinated by the grand historical or reassuringly exotic ethnographic examples that have long been the stock in trade of anthropology– he wouldn’t have spent so long conducting fieldwork on magic in Madagascar or researching the role of wampum in early American colonial contacts if he wasn’t. But he also pointed out that assuming that these were the only potential points from which radical difference could be observed meant that we likely overlook them in other spaces.

David felt that the most common use of anthropology by radicals and anarchists, the vision of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer paradise, was of limited value. “I do not think we’re losing much if we admit that human beings never really lived in the Garden of Eden,” he argues in Fragments, again presaging the more fully worked out and demonstrated argument underpinning The Dawn of Everything. Examples from different times and places are not necessarily to be used as examples or templates of “anarchist societies” to contrast what David calls “imaginary totalities” to our own. Whatever new forms of sociality you and I and Station and Golembiewski and the rest of us will build, it is unlikely to look much like !Kung San or the Baining. Such romantic appropriations are vulnerable to a number of entirely reasonable conservative objections. So, in order to give up hierarchy, we have to give up antibiotics, central heating and clean water too? The alternative that you have to offer Station and Golembiewski is that they establish an imaginary totality called an “anarchist society” that goes endlessly wandering across the Orange County in search of nuts and berries? If this is the only or the main use that radicals and anarchists can make of the anthropological record, then doesn’t it implicitly accept or at the very least strengthen the teleology that The Dawn of Everything sets out to weaken – namely that even if our past might have been a Rousseauian paradise rather than a Hobbesian nightmare – that social complexity and technology by their very definition require ever more complex and technologically developed forms of monitoring, control, discipline, hierarchy and oppression? Instead, if, as David suggests in Fragments, we “knock down the walls’ in our thought that separate complex from simple (or the West from the Rest) than this “can allow us to see this history as a resource in much more interesting ways.”

So, when David introduces the example of the Italian autonomists’ “engaged withdrawal” mentioned earlier, he does it immediately after a discussion of Kasja Eckholm’s analysis of the Kongo monarchy as an empty shell that people simply withdrew from. What relevance might this historical practice have for today, David asks? Taking the walls of separation between Italian modernity and Kongolese non-modernity as our assumed starting point means that we almost inevitably find ourselves finding the essential radical difference that we assume they must express. But knocking down the conceptual walls enables us to see the shared desire for greater freedom and the reproduction of valued human relations that they embody. Throughout Fragments, David uses such examples, but in a manner designed to stress the ways in which they might, to some extent at least, express such a common shared desire. Differences exist – differences of perspective, power, and privilege. For an anarchist like David, this almost went without saying. But they are differences that come in and out of being in shifting contexts, not the expression of ahistorical essentialised cultural difference that could only ever be understood by a small coterie of scholars who would be able to see over the wall that separates West from Rest. They are often the differences that emerge within and from oneself, such as the shift in perspective when men such as those mentioned above see their children and their own lives in a different light and attempt to withdraw from the obligations that seek to nullify that new perspective. And if we can’t see how radical and important that is, this is simply because so many of us have naturalised and now fail to even notice the bizarre character of capitalist cosmology. It’s a cosmology that insists that we must believe in the existence of a mysterious cosmic invisible hand that will distribute goods in a fair and efficient manner to us – at least if we worship it properly by (among other things) sacrificing our children to it, in the form of giving up so much precious life-enriching time with them in order to appease its demands, as made manifest in “the labour market.” It’s a cosmology as wild and fascinating as anything else we find in the ethnographic record. And David would point out that the rejection of it that we see today is therefore a potentially profound and revolutionary one, but one that is far less likely to be “taken seriously” in some corners of a discipline still wedded to what Arjun Appadurai famously referred to as “sightings of the savage” as its default mode of intellectual or political critique.

I should note in passing that David would not have been too pleased with me for wheeling out Appadurai in defence of his position. It is fair to say that David was not a great fan. Two weeks ago, Chris Gregory mentioned having initially thought that David was something of a “bullshit artist.” I can confirm the truth of this account. The first time I met David was at a conference in Cambridge about 10 years ago – Chris, David and I were billeted together at a college some distance from the other participants and so spent quite a bit of time together. Chris would complain to me after breakfast that it was bad enough having to listen to the man bullshit endlessly at the conference, but having to endure it first thing in the morning before he’d even woken up properly was another thing altogether. And then when Chris was out of the room, David started talking to me about how thrilled he was to be spending time with the author of Gifts and Commodities (1982), one of his favourite books,and how misguided and intellectually dishonest he felt that Appadurai’s critique of it in The Social Life of Things (1986)had been. It was a slightly awkward situation to manage, although I wasn’t surprised to hear that Chris had come round a few years later. David was on occasion a difficult man to converse with – especially over breakfast – but I knew that the quality and ambition of David’s work would prove irresistible to Chris in the long run.

In following years, David would occasionally ask us rhetorically, “Why do they always refer to me as ‘the anarchist anthropologist,’ why not refer to Appadurai as ‘the neoliberal anthropologist’?” It’s just as accurate but doesn’t get constantly attached to his name as a pejorative in the same way. Of course, David knew that he was being slightly disingenuous here – Appadurai hadn’t authored a book entitled Fragments of a Neoliberal Anthropology, so whether or not David was correct to label him as such, it’s not surprising that such a label was less easily attached to him than it was to David. But the underlying point that David was making – that his own scholarship was endlessly and subtly sneered at and undermined by repeatedly introducing him as such, even when it wasn’t necessarily relevant – was valid and important to make. And it was typical of David that rather than shy away from the association with anarchist theory – that he knew would be used to belittle him and his work – he instead chose to take the prejudice on head first, early in his career, before he had the security of tenure.

Image 2: Book cover of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments is a book that I found a little frustrating on first read. I found the way in which it jumped from point to point and back again a little – well – fragmentary. Much as I am sure that David was aware that there was a certain contradiction in the author of a book entitled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, complaining that people referred to him as “the anarchist anthropologist,” I was aware that I was kind of missing the point in my frustration at the fragmentary nature of a book with the same title. I felt myself to be in a similar position to the kind of American tourist one occasionally overhears in Copenhagen, loudly complaining that the statue of the Little Mermaid is kind of small. On second reading, however, it went a lot better. As with a conversation with David in real life, one simply had to allow oneself to go with the flow – and if one did, it was a conversational experience like no other. Like Chris, I felt David to be a little much on first meeting – particularly before I’d managed to get to the coffee machine. But in later years, as I got to know him better, I looked forward to those wonderful rambling conversations that went from Ray Davies, through Lukacs on to Rodney Dangerfield and then back home via a detour to discuss 18th century Madagascan pirates.

I think David’s intellectual range sometimes irritated those who envied it and wanted to pull him back into the narrow arid scripture scholarship of the intellectual silos that they had settled for and claimed as their little empires of dirt. The kinds of people who write things in peer-review such as “I can’t believe that the author of this paper on value seems totally unaware of Malinowski’s seminal footnote on Trobriand yam exchange from 1937.” I suspect that what upset these kinds of people most about David was that they knew he probably was aware of the precious little nuggets of knowledge that they had devoted their lives to curating; it was just that – as he always did – he had chosen to go his own way and make his own connections. And in many regards, that was David’s greatest gift to the academy. This is a profession in which success is often driven by networks, nepotism and ass-kissing more than the alleged liberal values of free thought and intellectual inquiry. And in such an environment, David stood out by his consistent refusal to do anything but his own thing.

I’m sure it made him a frustrating colleague at times. But as we all know the category of “good colleague’ is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it means the person who turns their marking in on time and I would not be surprised to hear from colleagues that sometimes David’s contempt for what he might view as the “bullshit” parts of his job left others picking up the pieces. But let us also remember that all too often “being a good colleague’ means being the person who turns a blind eye to bad behaviour and abuse on the part of senior or powerful colleagues out of loyalty to the institution. After years in this profession, my skin tends to crawl when I hear senior colleagues praise the virtues of collegiality– my first instinct is to wonder whose body are we burying or whose mouth are we taping up today? I remain immensely grateful to David for consistently prioritising being a good person over being a good colleague – in this regard at least – and I still, on occasion, miss him very much. His free and sometimes disrespectful spirit is precisely what a profession that all too often demands deference to status, rather than engagement and fresh ideas, needs. And with Fragments we have something that keeps some of that spirit alive – irreverent, bursting with ideas, and most of all principled – whether we all agree with all those principles or not. There’s a spirit of freedom in this short book that senior academics often tell us that we need to squeeze out of ourselves as the price of admission. The greatest gift that David gave us with Fragments is the enduring proof that we don’t have to listen to them.

Keir Martin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain. He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cite as: Martin, Keir. 2022. “Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 13 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/13/keir-martin-great-resignations-and-bad-colleagues-reflections-on-an-anarchist-anthropology/

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

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Anarchist Anthropology

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Keir Martin & Ayça Çubukçu

Much to his frustration, David was often labelled ‘the anarchist anthropologist’. Aware of the way the term ‘anarchist’ was used to belittle him and his work, as Keir Martin tells us, David took this prejudice on head first. Anarchism is “not an identity”, his Twitter bio reads, it is “something you do”. In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David elaborates—challenging our traditional assumptions about ‘anarchists’ or ‘anarchism’, and urging us to apply anarchism to the way we do anthropology. As Ayça Çubukçu explains, David saw in anthropology and anarchism a natural fit: anthropology, with its “keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities”, and anarchism, with its confidence that a life more worth living could actually exist. Together, Keir and Ayça take seriously David’s invitation “to think and act towards an anarchist future”. 

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

Keir Martin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.  His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities.  He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea.  This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain.  He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia.  He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.

Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.