I would never have expected
Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this
past year has been somehow unexpected, from the coup itself, in the early hours
of 1 February, to the scale of the popular reaction. Friends who expressed little
interest in politics or protest during my fieldwork, only a few years ago, have
been in the streets. Striking has been the role of young women—women like Ruth,
a Christian born in the Chin Hills, who works at a church in Yangon where I did
much of my research.
As the uprising grew through
February, Ruth’s posts filled my Facebook feed: selfies in Covid-19 masks amid
swelling crowds around the Sule Pagoda; memes mocking the generals behind the
coup; photographs of victims shot by security forces. One thing not surprising has
been the brutality of the crackdown. As it intensified in late February and
early March, Ruth’s posts showed her wearing not just a face mask, but also a
helmet and goggles.
As Pentecostals, believers
like Ruth have also been praying. One video streamed via Facebook Live had
about twenty members of her church engaged in a session of collective prayer,
entreating God to protect Myanmar. Such prayers were commonplace during my fieldwork.
But this one resonated with the revolution then building momentum in the
streets: put to the rhythm of a familiar call-and-response chant made famous in
the 1988 uprising, the prayer replaced the usual rejoinder “do ayei! do ayei!”
(“Our cause! Our cause!”) with “Amen! Amen!”
What draws these Christians so fully into the revolution through protest and prayer? There’s been much said about how a decade’s experience of a more open public sphere makes return to military rule impossible to countenance. Many have also remarked on how this moment has transcended lines of difference that have long animated Myanmar’s politics, with Chin Christians and even Rohingya Muslims manning barricades alongside majority Burman Buddhists.
But maybe part of an
answer also lies in the imagination.
I say this, in part,
because of another question I’ve had, watching Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
unfolding from afar over social media: What would David Graeber make of this?
Graeber never wrote about Myanmar, but he was, of course, deeply interested, intellectually and practically, in revolution. And for him, the question of revolution was tied to the question of imagination. In one essay (2007), he distinguished a “transcendent” form of imagination, the terrain of fiction and make-believe, of “imaginary creatures, imaginary places … imaginary friends”, from an “immanent” form, one not “static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world … ”. It was the latter, for Graeber, that had revolutionary potential.
While Graeber never wrote
about Myanmar, had he not died in September 2020, that might not have remained
true for long.
Some years ago, he agreed to write the foreword to a new edition of Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma. The foreword was never finished, so we can’t know what Graeber would have written. We can’t know how he would have engaged with Raymond Firth’s original, laudatory foreword. We can’t know how he would have dealt with Leach’s later reappraisal, when he acknowledged that he had somewhat essentialised gumsa and gumlao, the Kachin categories famously at the heart of his analysis. We can’t know how he would have situated the book in relation to debates in anthropology in the decades since, or how he would have dealt with critiques that have been directed towards it, including from Kachin scholars (e.g., Maran 2007), and especially amid growing calls to meaningfully decolonise the study of Myanmar.
What we do know is that Graeber was a fan. “Edmund Leach,” he once wrote, “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Leach was, for Graeber, “a model of intellectual freedom”. References to Leach appear across Graeber’s body of work, including citations of the younger Leach and the older Leach following his so-called “conversion” to structuralism—a break which, as Chris Fuller and Jonathan Parry note, has probably been overdrawn. “Not only are there striking continuities in the sort of questions Leach asked of data,” they write, “and the sort of answers he offered, but more importantly he kept faith throughout his career with one broad vision of the anthropological enterprise” (1989: 11).
If the same might be said of Graeber, it’s not the only way in which the two men were similar. Both thought across relatively long stretches of time: 140 years in the case of Leach’s study of the oscillations in Kachin political systems; millennia in the case of Graeber’s work on debt and his recent collaboration with David Wengrow. Both were also prolific and lucid writers, eager to engage audiences beyond anthropology—including, incidentally, via the BBC, which broadcast Leach’s Reith Lectures in 1967 and Graeber’s 12-part series on debt in 2016.
What James Laidlaw and
Stephen Hugh-Jones (2000:3) write about Leach could just as easily be said of
Graeber, that “the lessons of anthropological inquiry were relevant to the
everyday moral and political questions that were being debated all around him …”.
Both were interested in the micro and macro forces that impacted the production
of knowledge in anthropology, and both reflected on how their own biographies
and albeit very different insider/outsider positions in the discipline shaped
the work they produced (Leach 1984; Graeber 2014).
There are, however, few
references to Political Systems in Graeber’s corpus, which raises another
question: What would he have written in this foreword?
It’s impossible to attempt
a definite answer. Graeber was far too creative for that. But it’s probably not
going too far out on a limb to suggest that imagination might have been a
central theme. For what are the political categories of gumsa and gumlao
analysed by Leach if not products of the “immanent” mode of imagination that
interested Graeber? One reference that does appear at several points in
Graeber’s writing is to a point Leach made in his short 1982 treatise simply
titled Social Anthropology. There, Leach suggests that the distinction
between humans and non-humans is not that the former have a soul, but that they
are able to conceive—or imagine—that they have one, and thus, that it is
imagination, not reason, that sets humans apart. On this point, Graeber also
(e.g., 2001: 58) cites Marx’s observation that, unlike a spider weaving its web
or a bee building its nest, “the [human] architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality.”
If imagination is, for
Leach and Graeber, a general feature of the human condition, it’s also one
thrown into relief at certain moments, like moments of revolution. “When one tries to bring an
imagined society into being,” Graeber wrote, “one is engaging in revolution”
(2001: 88). It’s maybe
not too much of a stretch, then, to also imagine that, if he had been writing
the foreword to Political Systems this past year, Graeber would be
attending to the revolution underway in the valleys and the highlands that
feature in Leach’s book: a revolution whose participants, like Ruth, imagine
not just a political system in Myanmar with the military no longer in charge,
but a society transformed in myriad other ways.
Image 2: Book cover of Political Systems of Highland Burma by Edmund Leach
Around 2011, as Myanmar started to emerge from five decades of military rule, Ruth’s church and other Pentecostals intensified their evangelism efforts, seeking to win converts in a country where about 90 percent of the population are Buddhist. Taking advantage of the political opening, and with an eye to the spiritual rupture it was thought to herald, these Christians began to preach more energetically than they had in years.
But even before the coup, there was evidence that the rupture might not be forthcoming: a sense that liberalisation was benefitting only well-connected cronies; new forms of censorship impinging on what was supposed to be a newly open public sphere; an ascendent Buddhist nationalism rendering increasingly precarious the position of minorities, and playing out horrifically in the treatment of the Rohingya. There were also few signs that Buddhists were suddenly interested in Jesus. This did little to dent my friends’ commitment to evangelism, however. “God works in his own time,” was the frequent refrain.
How, in this understanding,
to make sense of the coup?
The immediate days after the military seized control, detaining elected leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, were strangely quiet. Healthcare workers and teachers were among the first to go on strike. Garment workers followed soon after. As the civil disobedience movement took shape, more people took to the streets. By the middle of February, tens of thousands of protesters were assembling each day in Hledan, a busy commercial neighbourhood near Yangon University.
Ruth was among them. We’d
been in touch since the hours following the coup. She sent photos and videos of
the swelling crowds. In one image her white sneakered foot stamps on a poster
of the face of Min Aung Hlaing, the general behind the coup, taped to the
pavement for protesters to walk over. In another she holds up a placard with
the words #justiceformyanmar alongside an image of Aung San Suu Kyi, the
imprisoned NLD leader. “Young people will not be turning back,” she wrote in one
message.
The spokesperson for the
parallel government established by the parliamentarians deposed by the coup has
been a prominent Chin Christian doctor, Dr Sasa. At certain points protest signs
featuring his face seemed to eclipse those featuring Aung San Suu Kyi’s. In
late February Ruth posted an old photo of her with Dr Sasa, with the caption,
“May the Lord bless you and use you for our nation and His kingdom.” Dr Sasa’s
role has been particularly important to my Chin friends, accustomed, like other
ethnic minorities, to being treated like second class citizens, if citizens at
all, by a state whose leadership has been dominated by Burman Buddhists.
The literature on ethnicity
in Burma has often been in dialogue with Leach, for better and for worse. His
arguments in Political Systems are so well known to anthropologists that
they barely need repeating. His analysis of oscillations between political
categories—the hierarchical gumsa and the egalitarian gumlao—is
deployed to attack the equilibrium assumptions of his structural-functionalist
colleagues, and their allied tendency to treat ethnic groups as bounded units. Social
systems, Leach argues, do not correspond to reality. They are models used, by
the anthropologist and those they study, to “impose upon the facts a figment of
thought”.
Such models find their
clearest expression, for Leach, in myth and ritual, which present the social
order in its ideal form, conjuring it by acting “as if” it already existed. Such
a model, importantly, does not float freely from the messy world of social facts;
it “can never have an autonomy of its own” (1964: 14).
Critics of Leach have homed
in on his nonchalant confession, toward the end of the book, that he is
“frequently bored by the facts” (1964: 227). This attitude, they charge, means
that his analysis floats more than a little too freely. “[O]ne might with
justification,” write Mandy Sadan and Francois Robbine, “accuse Leach of
reducing the Kachin sphere to a kind of intellectual laboratory without any
expression in reality because of the way in which he moulded his case study to
a theory, rather than the other way round” (2007: 10-11).
I’m sure Graeber would
have dealt with these criticisms in his foreword, but less certain what he
would have said about them, or how his own view of the relationship between
facts and theory would have shaped his assessment. My main hunch, though, is
that Graeber would have devoted much of his foreword to what Leach tells us
about the “as if”—the otherwise glimpsed in ritual and myth but still tethered
to social action. Such an otherwise, the space of the immanent imagination,
drew Graeber’s attention throughout his anthropology, even when he wasn’t using
the term.
Consider his foreword to
another book, The Chimera Principle by Carlo Severi, which deals with
the relationship between ritual objects, memory, and the imagination. Graeber praises
the book for showing that “imagination is a social phenomenon, dialogic even, but
crucially one that typically works itself out through the mediation of objects
that are … to some degree unfinished, teasingly schematic in such a way as to,
almost perforce, mobilize the imaginative powers of the recipient to fill in
the blanks” (p. xv). When communicated in the subjunctive mood of myth or
ritual, such an imagination can, to use a term of which Graeber was fond, prefigure
realities to come.
The crackdown in Myanmar grew more brutal through March. Protesters like Ruth continued to be in the streets. By late February, we’d shifted our conversation from Facebook Messenger to Signal because of the safer encryption that app offered. Still, Ruth continued to post on Facebook, using a private VPN to access the site in the face of the junta’s effort to block it, and, periodically, the internet altogether. Her content grew more graphic. In early March she posted a widely circulated video of three paramedics being beaten by security forces. Videos of shootings followed daily. Posts were often accompanied by the slogan, “The revolution must succeed”.
It’s now been one year since the coup, and Myanmar’s revolution has continued to evolve. Just as the country ought to be considered world historical, so those involved in the uprising continue to make history, through their ongoing resistance amid a military assault that has been especially vicious in Chin State and other ethnic areas.
What would Graeber have
made of this unfolding revolution?
Unfolding is the operative term. “Every real society is a process in time,” Leach famously writes in the introduction to Political Systems. And, as Tambiah (2002: 443) suggests, there is much in Leach that resonates with—prefigures, perhaps—Fabian’s (1983) critique of anthropology’s routine “denial of coevalness.” There’s an irony, then, that many of the strongest critiques of the book focus on Leach’s elision of the historical circumstances in which his study occurred, something about which Graeber would have no doubt remarked, especially if his treatment of another major figure in British anthropology, Evans-Pritchard, is anything to go by.
There are certainly important
differences between Graeber and Leach, political and otherwise, but one other
thing they had in common is that they were not just prolific writers, but
prolific readers too. There’s been much said about the place of the imagination
in the writing of anthropology, but less, perhaps, about imagination’s role in
its reading. If all ethnography is “fiction”, as Leach claimed in one of his
final lectures, and even if it isn’t, what imaginative faculties are engaged in
reading it?
What modes of speculative reading do we pursue, though gaps, from afar, of Facebook posts, of texts that don’t, really, exist? In his foreword to Severi’s book, Graeber pushes against the “utopian ideal” of a text produced by a “single, unique” genius. Instead, he argues, “everything turns on a tacit complicity, whereby the author leaves the work, in effect, half-finished so as to ‘capture the imagination’ of the interpreter” (2015: xx-xxi).
How do we read with an imagination
that is a “social phenomenon, dialogic even,” one that works through the
mediation of things unfinished and incomplete?
Unfinished, unfolding, incomplete—like
Myanmar’s revolution. Ruth is also working in the presence of something that
doesn’t, really, exist, and didn’t even in the years of so-called transition: a
democratic Myanmar that is both politically—and, for her, spiritually—saved. But
in continuing to defy the military, just as she continued to evangelise in the
face of indifference, she and others act “as if” they live in a world not just where
“the revolution must succeed,” but in which it already has, and in imagining
that world, they work to bring it into being.
Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research
fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism in
the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.
Fuller, Chris and Jonathan Parry. 1989. “Petulant
Inconsistency? The Intellectual Achievement of Edmund Leach”. Anthropology
Today 5/3: 11-14.
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward
and Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New
York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David. 2007. Revolutions
in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. London:
Minor Compositions.
Graeber, David. 2014. “Anthropology and the rise of
the professional-managerial class”. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
4/3: 73–88.
Graeber, David. 2015. “Concerning Mental Pivots and
Civilizations of Memory.” Preface to The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology
of Memory and Imagination. Chicago: HAU Books.
Laidlaw,
James and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 2000. The Essential Edmund Leach, Volume 1.
Anthropology and Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Maran, La Raw. 2007. “On the continuing relevance of
E. R. Leach’s political systems of Highland Burma to Kachin studies”. In M.
Sadan and F. Robbine (eds.) Social Dynamics in the Highlands of South East
Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden:
Brill
Leach, Edmund. 1964
[1954]. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press.
Leach, Edmund.1984.
“Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology”. Annual
Review of Anthropology 13: 1-23.
Sadan, Mandy and Francois
Robbine (eds.) 2007. Social
Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems
of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden: Brill.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 2002. Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cite as: Edwards, Michael. 2022. “Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar.” FocaalBlog, 27 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/27/michael-edwards-graeber-leach-and-the-revolution-in-myanmar/
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part of the Frontlines of Value research group at the University of Bergen. The workshop, featuring participants of different generations, academic fields and geographic specializations, was educating and revealing in a number of ways (see below for the full programme). In what follows, I will not try to do justice to the presentations or the engaging debates, but to pick out a few themes which seem to me to be of abiding importance for anthropology and related disciplines, and to make some tentative suggestions of my own.
As many have remarked, the Marxism now
resurgent in certain sections of the academy, including European social
anthropology (Neveling and Steur 2018),
seems much more preoccupied than preceding generations of the tradition with
questions surrounding the relations between this mode of production and its
“outside” – whether conceived of in temporal terms, as pre-capitalist (or, much
more rarely, post-capitalist); in spatial terms, as subsisting in regions
outside the control of global capital; or in more complex theoretical terms.
The concept of “primitive accumulation,” used by Marx himself to describe the
events leading up to the flowering of capitalism in England, has been applied
and even stretched (Glassman 2006), up to
a point which some consider excessive. Accumulation by unequal exchange, backed
up by the threat of force, certainly exists in our late-late capitalist
society; but what do we gain, ask theorists like Henry Bernstein, by calling
that accumulation “primitive”? (Agrarian
Questions JAC 2019)
Additional questions regarding the relations
between capitalism’s putative “inside” and “outside” are raised by the concept
of the surplus population, which stood at the center of the workshop. As with
other of Marx’s terminological choices, there is an easily missed irony at play
here: proletarian populations can only be “surplus” from the point of view of
capital itself, insofar as it does not find it profitable to exploit them as
laborers. Furthermore, people deprived of access to their own means of
production but denied the opportunity to participate in production by selling
their labor-power to others are not necessarily superfluous to capital’s needs
in every sense: they may be useful as consumers, as soldiers and guards, or
indeed as a “reserve army” of strikebreaking laborers. They are only “surplus” in
the specific sense that the ability of capital to absorb labor-power is limited
on the one hand by aggregate effective demand – which grows sluggishly, due to
the lopsided distribution of the fruits of capitalist development – and on the
other by the productivity of labor, which grows swiftly as a result of capitalist
competition. This is Marx’s “general law of capitalist accumulation”: the number
of laborers required by the demands of profit-making enterprise, as a portion
of the total proletarian population, will tend to fall (Marx 1990, chap. 25).
Anthropologists, who have always been curious
about the lives of people outside Europe and outside wage-labor, have good
reason to be interested in the concept of the surplus population. However, as
the contributors to the workshop highlighted, operationalizing this concept for
the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems. The most
obvious of these is that most people who lack access to “proper jobs” (Ferguson and Li 2018) do, after all, work.
Some of them retain some access to land and other means of production, and engage
in “petty commodity production”; others labor in the ill-defined “informal
sector,” for example as petty merchants; still others do sell their labor-power,
but not under conditions considered viable or legal by national and
international institutions (Campbell 2020; Cowan 2019). All these people purchase
at least some of their means of subsistence on the market, and are thus tied
into capitalism as consumers, if nothing else. To be truly outside of
capital, as one participant at the workshop remarked, one would need to be
“undiscovered,” a member of one of those mythical, self-sufficient tribes of
whose non-existence anthropologists are well aware. Hence, surplus populations
are at best “inside-outside,” taking on a painfully ambiguous role.
The “functionality” of surplus populations is a
related issue. Is the emergence of such populations a side-effect of the rise
in the productivity of labor, primarily caused by capitalists’ desire to gain
short-term “super-profits” by producing more efficiently than their
competitors, or is it actively encouraged by these capitalists and their
agents, such as the state? My own contribution to the workshop came down on the
“functional” (if not functionalist) side of the debate. Setting aside the ample
empirical evidence which could be used to make the case, I argued on purely
theoretical grounds that exclusion from the labor market should not be
understood as diametrically opposed to exploitation within it. It is easy
enough to understand why lack of choice should force those at greater threat of
exclusion to accede to greater exploitation, thus exposing the same individuals
to the cruelest brunt of both processes.
There are, however, some important objections
to this account. By all estimates, the surplus population is far vaster than
capital could ever be expected to absorb into standard employment – perhaps
around three quarters of the world’s total population (see Neilson and Stubbs 2011). Thus, most “surplus” workers have no
hope of ever entering the army of labor, even as “reservists” or scabs, and any
question of how they might behave given such a chance is moot. But the
ethnographic evidence, which shows that many such people do in fact work and
consume in quite recognizably capitalistic ways, casts doubt over such a
formulation. Perhaps the calculations of scholars like Neilson and Stubbs are
over-hasty? If surplus populations are only surplus from the point of view of
capital, perhaps this perspective is less singular and unambiguous than the
assumptions of such quantitative exercises require?
Image 1: Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea, heading from Turkish coast to the north-eastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016 (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe; Wikimedia Commons).
I would like to suggest one way of getting at the problem, through a category that remains under-theorized despite its crucial role in Marx’s labor theory of value: the value of labor-power. One of Marx’s greatest theoretical discoveries was the distinction between the value of labor-power and the value which labor can produce: in other words, the difference between what human beings need in order to live and work, and what they are capable of producing with their life and their work. It is only with the total commodification of life (and work) under capitalism that these two quantities become commensurable, as both the needs and the capacities of the worker can now be measured with one yardstick: money. At the same time, capitalism disguises the difference between the two quantities by insisting that after the costs of living and working are deducted and transferred to the worker as her wage, the remnant is not the product of her labor but a special sum called “profit,” which the employer is legally and morally entitled to appropriate.
But the value of labor-power is
underdetermined. Even ignoring changes in productivity – we shall get to these
in a moment – the needs of a worker, of the working family, and of the
proletariat as a whole, are eminently contestable. Indeed, everyday class
struggle consists to a great degree in disputations over the value of
labor-power in the broad sense, which includes the wage itself as well as the
length of the working day, “social wages” like health insurance and pensions, and
so on. But despite this underdetermination, the value of
labor-power can only fluctuate between two limits: at the top is the point
where the wage begins to eat into profits to an extent unacceptable to
employers, and at the bottom is the minimum of biological reproduction, below
which the workers would begin to die off.
But even given a particular level of needs, the value of labor-power will shift with changes in the productivity of the types of labor which produce the essentials of life, however these are defined. The most obvious of these necessities, and the one which preoccupies Marx above all, is food. If the amount of labor necessary to produce the standard food basket goes down, for example through the introduction of agricultural technologies such as those of the Green Revolution, then so does the value of labor-power (Moore 2010). But many other technologies also play a role: for example, the great advances in hygienic and epidemiological science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also lowered the value of labor-power by drastically reducing infant mortality and raising life expectancy. Here then is one of those paradoxical ironies of capitalism: the more we invest in improving the quality of life, the cheaper human life becomes, in a very literal sense.
The relation between the value of labor-power
and surplus populations now becomes clear. Marx insists that there is no general
“law of population” in capitalist societies, and specifically rejects (against
Malthus) any tendency to exponential increase in population (Foster 2000). If anything, long-term trends appear
to demonstrate that human populations adjust their birthrates to prevailing deathrates,
such that population tends to increase quite slowly. The boom in world
population over the last century, as Aaron Benanav (2019) shows, can be interpreted as following from an easily understandable
lag between the introduction of the hygienic and medical reforms which lowered
deathrates and the subsequent adjustment of birthrates. Thus, experts expect world
population to stabilize by the end of the current century (United Nations 2015), while the environmental
preconditions of cheap labor-power may be under threat from climate change and
related environmental crises (Moore 2015),
potentially triggering a secular rise in the price of food. Nevertheless, the minimum
value of labor-power – the amount of work required to produce the basket of
goods absolutely necessary to keep the proletariat capable of working and
reproducing, per capita – has decreased drastically since the publication of Capital.
Of course, the global working class is not satisfied with this level of bare
subsistence: even in poor countries, workers demand additional goods, like
electronics and education. But this only points to the growing extent to which the
value of their commodity is not reducible to physical constraints, but determined
by the outcome of political processes. So long as the supply of labor-power
tends to outstrip demand – that is, for the next few decades at least – the
pressure of competition over jobs will tend to push the value of labor-power
toward the minimum. Only proletarian resistance can counter this trend.
But the agency of proletarians cannot be
reduced to the extent to which capital needs them as laborers. Even the most
outcast of populations have means of putting pressure on capital, and maintenance
of global hegemony requires that their demands be dealt with in one way or
another. One way is, of course, violence: when people are not needed as
workers, the global power structure is happy to countenance their warehousing,
and if need be, their mass death (Mbembe 2003).
But since the necessities of life have become so cheap, maintaining them in a
sort of social death while providing them with the means of bare existence
through humanitarian aid or debt is also an option (Sanyal 2014). With regard to these populations, global capital has
become something like the Calvinist God, capable of arbitrarily granting or
denying their every wish yet devoid of any need for their labors and
supplications.
Regardless of how precisely we parse the concept of the surplus population, its continuing and even growing relevance shows that the analytic categories of Marx’s Capital are as relevant to our world as they were to those of the 19th century. The workings of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” have produced a world in which even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions. This certainly necessitates a rethinking of political strategy, one to which anthropology is particularly suited to contribute. However, the final goal of that strategy – a world in which each contributes according to her abilities and receives according to her needs – remains the same.
Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His article “Saving the Arabah: Thai migrant workers and the asymmetries of community in an Israeli agricultural settlement” is forthcoming in American Ethnologist. He is a member of Academia for Equality and LeftEast, among other political initiatives.
Benanav, Aaron. 2019. “Demography and
Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce,
1950-2000.” Social Science History 43 (4): 679–703.
Campbell, Stephen. 2020. “Debt collection
as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement.” Social
Anthropology 28 (3): 729–742.
Cowan, Thomas. 2021. “The Village as Urban Infrastructure: Social
Reproduction, Agrarian Repair and Uneven Urbanisation.” Environment and
Planning E 4 (3): pp. 736–755. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619868106
Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018.
“Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of
Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s
Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Glassman, Jim. 2006. “Primitive
Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’
Means.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 608–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506070172.
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.
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/
David Graeber’s work is
often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David
Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of many of
the most entrenched Enlightenment myths about human history and the origins of
social inequality. But what makes his way of myth-busting particularly
compelling is that it is informed by a theory of myth itself – of what myth is,
what it does, and how it stands in relation to human creativity and social
transformation. The study of myth, for Graeber, was not an arbitrary
indulgence. It was central to his overall take on the scope of anthropology.
For him, anthropology was most valuable as a comparative inquiry into human
possibilities – one that throws our own contemporary myths into sharp relief,
thereby revealing our own creative potential and possibilities for social
transformation.
Though Graeber never
published specifically on myth, the theme emerges in a variety of guises
throughout his work: in the Value book (2001), in the essays collected in Possibilities
(2007), and of course in The Dawn of Everything
(2021). He often taught courses on myth and ritual.
Before his death, he had prepared a series of lectures focused on Gregory
Bateson’s Naven mythic and ritual complex. Most importantly, in 2017 he wrote a
long foreword to Terry Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar (2017), a detailed structural analysis of the
Kayapo myth on the origin of cooking fire. We learn from this not only the
value that Graeber saw in the anthropological study of myth, but also the huge
influence that Turner had on his thinking. Turner was for Graeber what Graeber
is for many of us, someone with “a remarkable ability to make … (still
extremely complicated) ideas sound like matter-of-fact common sense, and even
to render them fairly straightforward.” (Graeber 2017:xxi). Graeber lamented that what Terry
Turner could do in person in no way corresponded to his written work. He admitted
that, initially, he could not understand a word of it. Once he understood it,
however, he came to regard Turner as “the most underrated social theorist of
the last 50 years” (pers. comm.) and The Fire of the Jaguar “one of the
greatest achievements of anthropological theory, […] that should deserve a
place among the classics” (ibid:xxxix).
Image 1: Book cover of Fire of the Jaguar by Terence Turner
Given Graeber’s political
life, his interest in myth seems surprising. In a pedigree that goes from
Mircea Eliade to Jordan Peterson, the study of myth has traditionally been the
province of the politically conservative. Though approaches to the subject vary
widely, for the great majority of theorists, myths either reflect archetypal structures
of the human mind or resolve contradictions related to individual experience.
They have no direct relationship to social organisation, let alone social
transformation. What Graeber saw in Turner was quite the opposite: a rare
progressive theory of myth, where the latter emerges as the embodiment, if not
as the paragon, of human social creativity. In what follows, we examine these
connections, we show how this argument originates from a radical rethinking of
structuralism, and we consider how it came to fashion Graeber’s way of doing
anthropology.
First, though, a few words
on The Fire of the Jaguar.
Myth, action and dynamic
structuralism
The Fire of the Jaguar is the most prominent myth of the Kayapo, an Amazonian group whom
Terry Turner researched for over fifty years. The myth recounts the story of a
young boy who is adopted by
jaguars, who then teach him how to use cooking fire – knowledge that he brings back
to the Kayapo community. In essence, the myth explains how Kayapo attain full
sociality out of nature, a process that is reflected both in the maturation of
the boy and in the manipulation and replication of fire.
To our knowledge, Turner’s
analysis of this myth is the most detailed analysis of a single myth in the
anthropological literature. It is structuralist in character but very different
(and, in Graeber’s view, more compelling) than the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss.
Turner embeds his analysis of myth in Kayapo socioeconomic organisation (which
he knew very well) and is not concerned with comparing it with other myths to
reveal an underlying code. He suggests instead that the maturation of the boy
in the myth reveals a model not only for the socialisation of youth but also
for the consolidation of Kayapo society as a whole. In Kayapo matriuxorilocal
communities, men must undergo an emotionally disruptive process of detachment
as they move from their natal home to the communal men-house, and finally to
the house of their in-laws. By recounting parallel processes of detachment, the
myth of the fire of the jaguar reframes the tensions and contradictions of this
experience. Myth thus functions as an important means whereby societies are
able to shape behaviour into collectively prescribed organizational patterns.
Ultimately, Turner argues that Kayapo myth and social organisation stand in a
relation of circular causality with one another, i.e., they influence each
other in non-linear fashion.
He arrives at this
argument by making a fundamental move away from Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism:
the minimal units of myth in his analysis are not categories (types of beings
or types of objects), but actions. The difference between categories and
actions is that actions, when repeated, force the subject to consciously
acknowledge a pattern. This is ultimately what structure is for Turner: it is a
pattern of action, or, in his words, a “group of transformations bounded
together by invariant constraints” (2017:207). This type of structure is always
dialectic. As soon as a pattern shows change and diversification, the acting
subject is forced to create a higher level of abstraction in order to account
for and compare differences, which in turn can lead to yet another higher
level, and so on.
Understanding what Turner
means by all this requires some minimal familiarity with the concepts of
‘dynamic hierarchical system’ and ‘self-organisation’ that he takes from Piaget
and cybernetics (Turner 1973) (were he to write today, Turner would
probably find a more compelling treatment of these concepts in the field of
complexity science (e.g., Thompson 2007 or Deacon 2012)). His adaptation of these theories into
anthropology might be at times counterintuitive. For Graeber, the
cross-disciplinary move he accomplishes is central. To exemplify Turner’s application
of dynamic structuralism to the social domain, Graeber asks us to consider the
action of feeding a child (Graeber 2017:xxxii). The moment we do this twice but
with the understanding that it
is the ‘same’ action we performed before, we generate, through repetition, a
kind of hierarchy since there is a higher level at which those actions are both
tokens of the same type. But the moment we say a different kind of repeated
action is not the same – say, feeding a husband or feeding a rival at a feast –
we are generating a third level, where different types are being compared. At
the same time, by defining certain types of action in this way, we typically generate
certain identities (child, husband, rival), kinds of person who typically
perform such actions, which in turn lead us to consider, on yet a higher level of
analysis, how these identities relate to one another, and so forth. Structure,
in short, is always dynamic and open-ended, and always develops from
lower-level actions.
Turner applies this analysis to both Kayapo social
organisation and the myth of origin. The plot of the myth proceeds through a
sequence of apparent tensions (e.g., a boy growing up in a matriuxorilocal
society, which implies eventual separation from the natal family), which it overcomes by transposing them
onto a higher level of structural differentiation of the same pattern. For
instance, the detachment from the boy’s original family in the myth reflects an
initial distancing from ‘nature’, which is then reproduced on a higher level in
the boy’s manipulation of fire. Similarly, in Kayapo society, the actions that
produce sociality at the lower level of family organisation level are structural
variations of actions that produce sociality at the upper level of moieties and
communal organization in the village. Overall, Turner claims to have demonstrated that, at least among the
Kayapo, the dynamic structures of myth and social organisation parallel one
another.
Turner’s central theoretical argument in The Fire of
the Jaguar is that what we usually consider ‘mythical thought’ – the
central message of the myth that is subjectively experienced by people – consists
in the highest level of social
self-organisation. Myth, essentially, places a cap on an otherwise ever-evolving
dialectical process that would make social organisation impossible. At some
point, the complexity of social reality – of why we treat one another the way
we do, or why we value certain actions over others – becomes such that we are
unable to form a higher level of abstraction to account for it. What myth does
is pre-empting the need to construct that level, because it treats
contradictions in the structure of society as playing out within the terms of
that structure itself. For Turner, this also explains the reason why
most myths are about the origins of social institutions: in order to avoid
having to consciously create a higher level, we attribute the origin of social
institutions to a mythical power in the distant past. And this is why the
Kayapo, for example, regard the very power to create and maintain their social
order – the fire – as originating from an extra-social source – the jaguar (see
also Graeber 2020).
In sum, Turner’s
structuralism makes a radical departure from Lévi-Strauss’ because 1) it takes
actions, rather than ideas, as starting points. ‘Nature’ and ‘society’ are not
static orders of classification but contrastive modes of actions continuously
in tension with one another. 2) It takes the perspective of the subjects,
rather than that of the analyst. These are tensions and processes lived by the
Kayapo, which shape their values and subjectivity and the reproduction of their
society. 3) It does not assume that myth simply evokes contradictions and then
mediates them. This is only half of the story. The other half of the story is
that myth is equally concerned with the differentiation of ambiguous situations
and with their transformation; it is the end-product of a dialectical process.
On alienated consciousness
and social creativity
It is challenging, of
course, to give justice to the complexity of Turner’s thought on myth in the
space of a few paragraphs. We hope it is clear, however, how these ideas might
have had a profound influence on David Graeber: the causal significance of
myth, the emphasis on action, the focus on social production, the conscious
creation of structure, the very idea of a ‘dynamic structuralism’… Graeber
endlessly reworked these ideas throughout his writings. The aspect we are most
interested in focusing on here is that of social creativity.
Turner saw myth as the
creative result of a dialectical process that enables a system of social
relations. By virtue of their capacity to support different types of social
organisation, the constellation of myths we find across cultures could be seen as
a vast compendium of human creativity. Yet (and this is something Graeber finds
particularly curious) myth is also creativity turned against itself: most of
them are about how latter-day humans can’t be genuinely creative anymore. They
often appear to be all about fixing either natural differences or social
relations. The Kayapo myth of cooking fire is a good example of this. The
creation myths of Ju|’hoan (or !Kung) speakers, among whom I (Megan Laws) did
fieldwork, are another good example. They speak of a time when different beings
had no fixed form, and of how (and this is significant) humans then ‘branded’ the animals with fire to give them their
distinctive characteristics (Biesele 1993: 116-123) and set in place the relationships
between them.
It is natural, here, for
both Turner and Graeber to turn to Marx’s (1964) idea of alienation, because, so defined,
myth does appear to be a form of alienated social consciousness (“we create our
physical worlds, but are unaware of, and hence not in control of, the process
by which we do so”, Graeber 2005: 409). As Turner puts it (2017: 202), myths seemingly
present us with the “form of the natural universe”, which is “seen as
self-existing prior to any particular instance of human social activity”
(2017:202). We appear to be presented with the way things are, not with how they
came to be. In the process, we confer power upon that which we have ourselves
created. There is clearly a potential dark side to this. As Marx argues so eloquently,
there is a necessary link between humans’ misunderstanding of the process of
their own creativity and forms of authority and exploitation.
One of the problems in
seeing things this way is that, from an anthropological perspective, one risks
being condescending to people like the Kayapo. Are we really prepared to say
that the Kayapo live under a form of alienated consciousness? Graeber reflects
on this dilemma on several occasions, most explicitly in his criticism of the
‘ontological turn’ (Graeber 2015).
His take is twofold. Firstly,
he writes, the dilemma changes as soon as we realise that we frequently
criticise our colleagues’ own assumptions about the workings of society.
Denying the possibility of saying that the Kayapo are wrong in their own
assumptions would amount to denying their status as potential intellectual
peers. But, secondly, though certainly capable of questioning the foundations
of their own thought and actions, we should not assume that people like the
Kayapo are questioning the
foundations of their own thought and actions, or that there’s any particular
reason why they should.
As Turner points out, the Kayapo “are fully conscious of constructing themselves and their society” (2017:203) through myth. We see the same awareness in the phenomenon of fetishism examined by Graeber (2005). Drawing upon ethnographic research from West Africa from the 17th to the 19th century, he writes that fetishes, from the African viewpoint, are not simply objects that are presumed to have power over us. They are objects recognised as creations, as embodiments of intentions and actions that have power over us. Likewise, the Akha people of highland Laos where I (Giulio Ongaro) did my fieldwork are known to build their villages around three features (a swing, a well, a gate) that are imbued with spiritual force. These spirits both protect and afflict Akha people with illness, but they can also be torn apart every time Akha move village. Besides, Akha know that they are the only people in their multi-ethnic region to have those features, which suggests that they are also aware that these spirits do not exist out there independent of their own minds. Like myths, these objects can embody social creativity because they have the power to establish new social relations. Yet, it would be a stretch to consider them as products of alienated consciousness because people are ultimately conscious, on some level, of the fact that their power has a human origin.
The danger comes when we
take this power as natural, “when fetishism gives way to theology, the absolute
assurance that the gods are real.” (Graeber, 2005:431). The assurance, in other
words, that such power is immutable. Similarly, with myth, the danger comes
when we elevate myth as fact. When we do so, we risk losing sight of those
moments when the forms we take as natural or given are a product of the
activity of human agents (and to this end, might be transformed).
In many of his writings, Graeber
states that this is the condition we find ourselves in at this historical
moment. We forget, as his popular line puts it, that “the ultimate, hidden
truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as
easily make differently”. He and David Wengrow reflect at length on this point
in The Dawn of Everything. They show how our own Enlightenment myth of
origin takes the linear growth of social complexity and hierarchy as natural. If
there is something peculiar about this Enlightenment myth of origin is that,
unlike virtually all other origin myths, which start with a creative event (with
the branding of animals or the mastery of fire), it starts with nothing and
seems to negate the possibility of social creativity altogether. This brings us
back to Graeber’s overall vision of anthropology and his scholarly efforts to question
our own contemporary myths and their social effects.
Creative refusal
Graeber saw anthropology
as a dialogic enterprise, driven by the willingness to turn to ‘others’ to
challenge the value-laden assumptions – or myths – that colour our own
experience of the world. He knew that anthropologists cannot take a ‘view from
nowhere’, as philosopher Thomas Nagel (1989) puts it. As all social scientists, they
labour under the weight of their own culturally specific assumptions. Some of Graeber’s
contemporaries, most notably those aligned with the ‘Writing Culture’ turn (as
well as post-structuralist and post-humanist scholars), saw this as a damning
indictment of the impossibility of anthropology as an objective science (Graeber
2007b). For Graeber, it was its main strength. It
is precisely by turning to ethnography, specifically to comparison, that he saw
it possible to challenge our own myths, and it was in this guise that
anthropology was most valuable for him.
How does the ‘dynamic
structuralism’ of Graeber’s mentor, Terry Turner, fit into this? As we have
examined, an important difference between the structuralism espoused by
Levi-Strauss and ‘dynamic structuralism’ is that the former takes myths to have
no direct link to social and material reality. The latter, to the contrary,
takes myths to not only grow out of “the
structure of social relations” and appeal in concrete, affective terms to those
who listen to them; they are, as Turner puts it, “powerful devices for
supporting a given form of social organisation” (2017:134). If we assume a
relation of non-linear dynamic co-causality between myth and social
organisation, then the political implications are clear: by changing one, one
can change the other. Whether this circular causality between myth and social
organisation is actually in place can be questioned. Graeber certainly assumes
it and turns to our contemporary myths to both draw attention to their
consequences, and to attack them.
Ernesto De Martino once
wrote that “the task of anthropology lies in the possibility of positing
problems whose solution leads to an expansion of the self-consciousness of our
civilization. Only then can anthropology help the formation of a wider humanism”
(De Martino
1973:3; translation from Italian original). With some reservations on the term
‘civilisation’, Graeber would surely embrace this spirit. Once he said on
Twitter: “I am bored of post-humanists. I think I am a pre-humanist. Humanity
is something we aspire to achieve at some point in the future”. But Graeber
would also add that, though anthropology is uniquely placed to fulfil this
role, the aspiration to achieve a wider humanism is by no means exclusive to
the society that invented anthropology. In one way or another, it has been the
primal moving force of all cultures.
This was the key point of
his Marilyn Strathern lecture, where he suggested that what we call ‘cultures’
should be seen as examples of successful social movements, particularly as the
outcome of a creative process of refusal (Graeber 2013). Indeed, it is not a coincidence that many
ethnonyms – the names a culture gives to itself – actually mean ‘human’,
suggesting perhaps that they see themselves as having achieved such status. The Dawn of Everything considerably elaborates
on the argument of the Strathern lecture. Graeber and Wengrow not only engage
in their own process of creative refusal – challenging enduring Enlightenment
myths and their socially deleterious effects – they show the role that creative
refusal and conscious social experimentation has played throughout human
history. Some early criticisms of the book have contended that Graeber and
Wengrow “demythologise the past” (Vernon 2021) and take our ancestors to be rational
political actors who believe that “mythical narratives and religious
sensitivities are inferior bases for organising society” (Shullenberger
2021). This should certainly call for an unpacking
of the term ‘conscious social experimentation’. Perhaps, in and of itself, the
term does evoke the idea of a group of people getting together and rationally
imposing their will on the world. In light of what we have discussed in this
paper, we suggest that the rubric of ‘conscious experimentation’ can – without
contradictions – involve forms of myth and mythmaking.
Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in
the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo
Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in
highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.
Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology.
She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted
ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on egalitarianism,
sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia.
Biesele,
Megan. 1993. Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the
Kalahari Ju/’Hoan. Bloomington:
Witwatersrand University Press.
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/
Discussants:
Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws & Michael Edwards
In a short essay published after his death, David writes that “Good ideas rarely, if ever, emerge from isolation… I have no idea, for instance, the degree to which many of the ideas attributed to me are the product of me, or some of my graduate student friends with whom I spent long hours hashing out the meaning of the universe twenty years ago, and ultimately I think it’s a meaningless question: the ideas emerged from our relation.” This week considers David’s ‘relations’ with two of his anthropological forebears, Terence Turner and Edmund Leach. For David, Turner was “the most underrated social theorist of the last 50 years” and Leach “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Together, they inspired, in big and small ways, much of his thinking around myth and imagination, respectively. David’s contributions to the study of myth and imagination are scattered throughout his work. As Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws (on Turner) and Michael Edwards (on Leach) show, they are key to David’s thinking about possibilities for social transformation.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at
LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute
and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s
Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in
the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo
Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in
highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.
Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology.
She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted
ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on
egalitarianism, sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia.
Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research
fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of
Cambridge. He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and
Buddhism in the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.
Published
in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around
the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of
an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments)is a tiny and
mighty, genre-defying text. Graeber calls it a pamphlet, “a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories,
and tiny manifestos” (Graeber 2004: 1). The pamphlet is impossible to summarize
and discuss fully in twenty minutes, especially since in hindsight, it bears
the seeds of many of the major arguments Graeber was to develop later in life. I
will therefore limit myself to sketching some basic elements of the kind of social
theory that Graeber is proposing in this spirited text. Broadly, Fragments seeks to outline a body of
radical theory that would, in Graeber’s words, “actually be of interest to
those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to
govern their own affairs” (Ibid: 9). This is characteristic of Graeber: the
desire to render social theory—particularly anthropology—usefully interesting to
radical movements, and radical movements—particularly anarchism—useful and interesting
to social theory.
In
Fragments, Graeber explores what he names
the “strange affinity” between anarchism and anthropology (Ibid: 12). He observes
“there was something about anthropological thought in particular—its keen
awareness of the very range of human possibilities—that gave it an affinity to
anarchism from the very beginning” (Ibid: 13). Graeber himself was fascinated
by this, the range of human possibilities in the past and the present, which could
unravel the seeming inevitability of our current social and political institutions,
while grounding hope for living collectively with greater freedom in more egalitarian
arrangements.
Graeber
is able to observe the strange affinity between anthropology and anarchism in Fragments because in his version,
anarchism is not about a body of theory bequeathed in the 19th
century by “founding figures” such as Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon that one
would have to adopt wholesale. Instead, it is more about a particular attitude,
even a faith that is shared among
anarchists (Ibid: 4). Anarchism can be thought of as a faith, Graeber asserts, which
involves “the rejection of certain types of social relations, the confidence
that certain others would be much better ones on which to build a livable
society, [and] the belief that such a society could actually exist” (Ibid: 4). Likewise,
the “founding figures” of anarchism did not think they invented anything
new—they simply made a faithful assumption that, in Graeber’s words, “the basic
principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual
aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about
as long as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all
forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.” (Ibid: 3) Arguably,
it is this assumption about human history that Graeber sets out to prove valid
in his latest book, The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he co-authored with the
archeologist David Wengrow: Humanity has always practiced anarchistic forms of human
behavior and social organization—since the Ice Age.
In Graeber’s vision, in any case, anthropology as a discipline could strengthen faith in the possibility of another world by offering an archive of alternative ways of organizing social relations, of reconstituting them consciously, or of abandoning them altogether. But to be able to strengthen this faith in the possibility of another world free from “the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance” (Ibid: 10), social theory itself would have to assume another world is possible. In fact, Graeber asserts this as the first assumption that any radical social theory has to make. “To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith,” he finds, “since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible” (Ibid: 10). In a move that resembles a sophisticated theological argument about the existence of God, he then declares, “it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative” (Ibid: 10). I wonder, however, if anthropologists or others can be drawn into such faithful optimism by argumentation. Perhaps one could be inspired to have faith in the possibility of another world and inspire David Graeber did along with the radical movements he dearly treasured.
Graeber’s
second proposition is that any radical, particularly anarchist, social theory
would have to self-consciously reject vanguardism (Ibid: 11). To his mind,
ethnography as an anthropological method provides a particularly relevant, if a
rough and incipient model of how “nonvanguardist revolutionary intellectual
practice may work” (Ibid: 12). The goal of such a practice would not be to “arrive at the correct
strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow” (Ibid: 11), but to tease
out the implicit logics—symbolic, moral or pragmatic—that already underlie
people’s actions, even if they are themselves not completely aware of them (Ibid:
12). “One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that,”
Graeber writes in Fragments, “to look
at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be
the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those
ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts”
(Ibid: 12). Not prescriptions, but contributions, possibilities, gifts. That is
what Graeber offered in his work—particularly in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,Direct Action: An Ethnography (2008) and The Democracy Project (2013)—whether his gifts were accepted or
not by everyone he wrote about, thought and acted with, or, for that matter,
was read by. After all, gifts too can be rejected, and as Graeber recognized, not
much of what he proposed or practiced as an anthropologist had “much to do with
what anthropology, even radical anthropology, has actually been like over the
last hundred years or so” (Graeber 2004: 13).
Nevertheless,
in Fragments, Graeber turns to anthropologists,
most notably Marcel Mauss, to reflect on his influence on anarchists, despite
the fact that Mauss had nothing good to say about them. “In the end, though,”
Graeber writes as if speaking about himself as well, “Marcel Mauss has probably
had more influence on anarchists than all the other [anthropologists] combined.
This is because he was interested in alternative moralities, which opened the
way to thinking that societies without states and markets were the way they
were because they actively wished to live that way. Which in our terms means,
because they were anarchists. Insofar as fragments of an anarchist anthropology
do, already, exist, they largely derive from him” (Ibid: 21). In my
interpretation, Graeber’s own interest in developing an anarchist anthropology too
was driven by an appreciation of and fascination with “alternative moralities”
that underpin people’s self-conscious determination to live otherwise—in the
anarchist case, free from capitalism and patriarchy, free from the state,
structural violence, inequality, and domination.
“This
is what I mean by alternative ethics” Graeber explains in a critical section of
Fragments where he theorizes
revolutionary counterpower and foreshadows a core argument he co-authors in The Dawn of Everything (2021): “Anarchistic
societies are no more unaware of human capacities for greed or vainglory than
modern Americans are unaware of human capacities for envy, gluttony, or sloth;
they would just find them equally unappealing as the basis for their
civilization. In fact, they see these phenomena as moral dangers so dire they
end up organizing much of their social life around containing them” (Graeber
2004: 24). This is a remarkable proposition. First, it is determined to cast
ethics and morality as the constitutive, self-conscious grounds of social
organization. Second, it intimates this to be the case across human history, “modern”
or “pre-modern.”
In
fact, Graeber argues that “any really politically engaged anthropology will
have to start by seriously confronting the question of what, if anything,
really divides what we like to call the ‘modern’ world from the rest of human
history” (Ibid: 36). In Fragments, as
well as in the Dawn of Everything, he
passionately rejects familiar historical periodizations and evolutionary stages
such that the entirety of human history—along
with every society, people, and civilization across time and space—becomes populated
by examples of human possibility enacted by decidedly imaginative, intelligent,
playful, experimental, thoughtful, creative, and politically self-conscious
creatures.
For
Graeber, human history does not
consist of a series of revolutions (Ibid: 44)—be it the Neolithic Revolution,
the Agricultural Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Industrial
Revolution—that introduce clear social, moral, or political breaks in the
nature of social reality, or “the human condition” as he prefers to think of
it. If this is the case, and if anarchism is above all an ethics of practice (Ibid: 95), as he asserts, such an ethics
becomes available for anthropological study and political inspiration across
human history. It is important to note however that Graeber passionately
disagrees with primitivist anarchists inspired by his anthropologist mentor
Marshall Sahlins’ (1972) influential essay “The Original Affluent Society,” anarchists
who propose that “there was a time when alienation and inequality did not
exist, when everyone was a hunter gathering anarchist, and that therefore real
liberation can only come if we abandon ‘civilization’” (Graeber 2004: 55). In Fragments, and the Dawn of Everything, he instead draws a more complex history of endless variety where, for instance, “there
were hunter gatherer societies with nobles and slaves,” and “agrarian societies
that are fiercely egalitarian” (Ibid: 54). Graeber insists, in other words,
that “humans never lived in the garden of Eden” (Ibid: 55). The significance of
this finding is manifold. Among other things, it means that history can become
“a resource for us in much more interesting ways,” and that “radical theorists
no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of
revolutionary history” (Ibid: 54).
Writing
of revolution in Fragments, Graeber rejects
its commonplace definition which “has always implied something in the nature of
a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social
reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no
longer apply” (Ibid: 42). Instead, he urges us “to stop thinking about
revolution as a thing—‘the’ revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead
ask ‘what is revolutionary action?’” (Ibid: 45). He stresses that “revolutionary
action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some
form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social
relations—even within the collectivity—in that light” (Ibid: 45), without
necessarily aiming to topple a government, or for that matter, the head of an
anthropology department.
I
mention this possibility in the playful spirit of David to bring us back to the
here and now, and to the final section of Fragments
titled “Anthropology,” in which he “somewhat reluctantly bites the hand that
feeds him” (Ibid: 95). Graeber observes how, instead of adopting any kind of
radical politics, anthropologists have risked becoming “yet another clog in a
global ‘identity machine,’ a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and
assumptions,” whereby all debates about the nature of political or economic
possibilities are seen to be over, and “the only way one can now make a
political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions
about what identity is” (Ibid: 101), he laments. And bitingly, he declares, “the
perspective of the anthropologist and the global marketing executive have
become almost indistinguishable” (Ibid: 100).
But
what does Graeber propose for anthropology instead? Observing that “anthropologists
are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and
political experiments no one else really knows about,” he regrets that this archive
of human experience is treated by anthropologists as “our dirty little secret”
(Ibid: 94). Of course, it was colonial violence that made such an archive possible
in the first place as Graeber recognizes without reluctance: “the discipline we
know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and
mass murder—much like most modern academic disciplines,” he writes (Ibid: 96). Nevertheless,
he makes the daring proposition that “the fruits of ethnography—and the
techniques of ethnography—could be enormously helpful” for radical movements
around the world if anthropologists could “get past their—however
understandable—hesitancy, owing to their own often squalid colonial history,
and come to see what they are sitting on not as some guilty secret (which is
nonetheless their guilty secret, and no one else’s) but as the common property
of humankind” (Ibid: 94).
Towards
a conclusion, I would like to submit that anarchism, and the anthropological
knowledge of anarchist ethics, practices, and imaginaries across human history
are part of “the common property of humankind,” which now includes Graeber’s
own contributions to anarchist theory and practice along with his astounding
imagination of their possible pasts and futures. Allow me to end then with a
strikingly imaginative passage from Fragments,
which we could receive as an invitation to think and act towards an anarchist
future:
“[A]narchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. … [T]hey would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority.” (Ibid: 40)
In
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,
writing of Madagascar, Graeber observes how “it
often seems that no one really takes on their full authority until they are
dead.” To my mind, we now have to deal with David’s “full authority” in an anarchist spirit. The task at hand cannot be
petrification through idolization or canonization, but the extension of an
invitation to think, play, and experiment with his contributions to
anthropology and anarchism alike.
Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.
Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Graeber, D. 2008. Direct
Action: An Ethnography. California: AK Press.
Graeber, D. 2013. The
Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York City: Spiegel
& Grau, a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House.
Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint
of Penguin Books.
Sahlins, M. 1968. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Lee and DeVore (eds), pp. 85-9. Chicago: Aldine.
Cite as: Ayça Çubukçu. 2022. “On Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 18 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/18/ayca-cubukcu-on-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology/
Fragments
of an Anarchist Anthropology is a book that fizzes with a
multiplicity of ideas; so many that they seem on occasion to overgrow the
boundaries of the text. In the text, we see many themes that were to be
developed in more detail in later years, in other books such as Debt: The First
5 000 years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018)and his
posthumous magnum opus, co-authored with David Wengrow, The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). All of the different
overflowing themes share a common underlying thread, however; namely a desire
to learn from and explore the multiplicity of alternatives to hierarchy and
competition that are already in existence, often underneath our noses, rather than
lay down a fixed template for resistance. Rather than trying to re-solve the
Leninist question of What is to be done?, David continuously asked us to
reflect upon the implications of What is being done?. It is in this
regard that David’s anarchism and his anthropology most clearly complement each
other. By slowing down and paying attention to the variety of ways in which
people step outside and subvert hierarchy in order to live a life more worth
living, anthropology might become the liberatory discipline par excellence –
if only its practitioners were able to realise the potential power within their
practice.
Let me take one example from Fragments. On page 60, David discusses the Italian autonomist theory of “revolutionary exodus,” a theory itself inspired by a previous refusal of large numbers of young Italians to engage in wage-labour. David (Graeber 2004, 60) writes that, “[…] in all this Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratory for future social movements, anticipating trends that are now beginning to happen on a global scale.” If this was true when David wrote Fragments back in 2004, how much more is it today, when the so-called Great Resignation poses the greatest threat to the return of business as usual in the aftermath of Covid-19.
Image 1: Viral internet meme conveying the happiness of resigning
A quick scan of headlines on National Public Radio in the US tells the story. “Business should be booming – if only there were enough workers for the job”, or “As the Pandemic recedes, millions of workers are saying I quit”. And why are they quitting? “I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time,” says Jonathan Caballero, a 27-year-old software engineer who previously commuted 45 minutes each way to work on a daily basis. NPR reports that now he “believes that work has to accommodate life.” Alyssa Casey, a researcher for the federal government states that, “I think the pandemic just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want.” And NPR reports of 42-year-old restaurant manager Jeremy Golembiewski and his decision to join the Great Resignation:
“In the months that followed, Golembiewski’s life changed. He was spending time doing fun things like setting up a playroom in his garage for his two young children and cooking dinner for the family. At age 42, he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he didn’t have to put in 50 to 60 hours a week at the restaurant and miss Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas morning with his family. ‘I want to see my 1-year-old and my 5-year-old’s faces light up when they come out and see the tree and all the presents that I spent six hours at night assembling and putting out,’ says Golembiewski, who got his first restaurant job at 16 as a dishwasher at the Big Boy chain in Michigan.”
Golembiewski
apparently comes from humble origins, but even high-end executives are not immune
from the humanising influence of the lockdown. Will Station, a vice-president
at Boeing, is reported as becoming “emotional thinking about how much [of his
children’s lives] he’s missed and how much he’s getting to experience now.” “I
got to see my kids and see their world in a way that I’ve never experienced
before,” he says. “It’s very special.” “Even with all the chaos, this has been
a bonus year for me.”
NPR also reports in June that people quitting jobs in normal times would signal a healthy economy. But these are not “normal times”; the pandemic led to the worst recession in US history and still a record 4 million quit their jobs in April. The situation has continued in the months since. “The Great Resignation appears to be getting worse” complain Kylie Logan and Lance Lambert on the Fortune news website – who, for some reason, seem unhappy that thousands of working people such as Station and Golembiewski are discovering the joy of spending irreplaceable time with their growing children. In September, a new record of 4.4 million resignations were recorded.
The Great Resignation is one of those phenomena that shows most clearly the interconnection of aspects of life that are often kept conceptually separate. We see in the examples above not simply an individualistic “take this job and shove it” kind of mood, but also the ways in which the refusal of work seems to open the possibility for reimagining the possibilities of gendered relations of kinship and care, which anthropologists have long argued are intimately and unavoidably entwined with the world of paid employment. There was quite a bit of talk in last week’s seminar on Debtof the way in which David was sceptical of the kind of “great transformation” picture of the emergence of capitalist modernity that is an otherwise conventional framing for political economic anthropologists. And indeed, in Fragments (2004, 46), David is quite explicit about this scepticism, stating that,
“[…] almost everyone agrees that at somewhere in the sixteenth, or seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, a Great Transformation occurred, that it occurred in Western Europe and its settler colonies, and that because of it, we became ‘modern’. And that once we did, we became a fundamentally different sort of creature than anything that had come before. But what if we kicked this whole apparatus away?”
It’s
worth making the point however, that David’s argument was not, as he put it, “that
nothing important has happened over the past 500 years, any more than I’m
arguing that cultural differences are unimportant.” It was rather that once we
drop the assumption that this always has to be the starting framing of analysis,
and once we decide to “at least entertain the notion that we aren’t quite so
special as we like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has
changed and what hasn’t.” Alternatives to what we think we are can potentially
to be found in our present daily practice; not necessarily to be sought before
the total transformation of the rise of capitalism or after the great
transformation of the total revolution that is yet to come. David was concerned
with the way in which the fetishisation of something called the “market” or the
“economy” as separate from the rest of society prioritised particular
relational obligations over others – not least the way in which life accommodates
work not the other way round, as critiqued by Caballero. This is in many
regards an eminently Polanyian critique of the rhetorical disembedding of the
market economy from society and the consequent setting up of that market
economy as society’s driving institution. And he was always keen to point out
that in our daily practice market rationality relies upon – or is, in Polanyi’s
(1944) terms, still embedded within – other moral perspectives and practices.
Both David and Polanyi knew that any transformation that has occurred in recent
centuries – great or otherwise – could never create an economy with the people
left out, and that any attempt to do so was doomed to be nothing but a shallow
liberal utopia.
Although
the Great Resignation came as a surprise to many, one suspects it would not
have come as a surprise to David, nor to Polanyi, who might well have seen it
as an example of the famous “double movement” by which society, in this case in
the shape of Golembiewski, Station, and millions more like them, protect
themselves from a disembedded market morality and prioritise the reproduction
of persons over the production of objects and economic value. For David it
would have been further proof, if more were needed, that something radically
different to what we think we are now has been within us and in front of us all
along. We might well find radical differences before the great transformation,
after the revolution or at the end of a tributary of the Amazon River, but we
don’t necessarily have to. We’re as likely to find them in an Amazon
distribution centre – if we know how to look. David was fascinated by the grand
historical or reassuringly exotic ethnographic examples that have long been the
stock in trade of anthropology– he wouldn’t have spent so long conducting
fieldwork on magic in Madagascar or researching the role of wampum in early
American colonial contacts if he wasn’t. But he also pointed out that assuming
that these were the only potential points from which radical difference could
be observed meant that we likely overlook them in other spaces.
David
felt that the most common use of anthropology by radicals and anarchists, the
vision of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer paradise, was of limited value. “I do
not think we’re losing much if we admit that human beings never really lived in
the Garden of Eden,” he argues in Fragments, again presaging the more
fully worked out and demonstrated argument underpinning The Dawn of
Everything. Examples from different times and places are not necessarily to
be used as examples or templates of “anarchist societies” to contrast what
David calls “imaginary totalities” to our own. Whatever new forms of sociality
you and I and Station and Golembiewski and the rest of us will build, it is
unlikely to look much like !Kung San or the Baining. Such romantic
appropriations are vulnerable to a number of entirely reasonable conservative
objections. So, in order to give up hierarchy, we have to give up antibiotics,
central heating and clean water too? The alternative that you have to offer
Station and Golembiewski is that they establish an imaginary totality called an
“anarchist society” that goes endlessly wandering across the Orange County in
search of nuts and berries? If this is the only or the main use that radicals
and anarchists can make of the anthropological record, then doesn’t it
implicitly accept or at the very least strengthen the teleology that The
Dawn of Everything sets out to weaken – namely that even if our past might
have been a Rousseauian paradise rather than a Hobbesian nightmare – that
social complexity and technology by their very definition require ever more
complex and technologically developed forms of monitoring, control, discipline,
hierarchy and oppression? Instead, if, as David suggests in Fragments, we
“knock down the walls’ in our thought that separate complex from simple (or the
West from the Rest) than this “can allow us to see this history as a resource
in much more interesting ways.”
So,
when David introduces the example of the Italian autonomists’ “engaged withdrawal”
mentioned earlier, he does it immediately after a discussion of Kasja Eckholm’s
analysis of the Kongo monarchy as an empty shell that people simply withdrew
from. What relevance might this historical practice have for today, David asks?
Taking the walls of separation between Italian modernity and Kongolese
non-modernity as our assumed starting point means that we almost inevitably find
ourselves finding the essential radical difference that we assume they must express.
But knocking down the conceptual walls enables us to see the shared desire for
greater freedom and the reproduction of valued human relations that they
embody. Throughout Fragments, David uses such examples, but in a manner
designed to stress the ways in which they might, to some extent at least,
express such a common shared desire. Differences exist – differences of
perspective, power, and privilege. For an anarchist like David, this almost
went without saying. But they are differences that come in and out of being in
shifting contexts, not the expression of ahistorical essentialised cultural
difference that could only ever be understood by a small coterie of scholars
who would be able to see over the wall that separates West from Rest. They are
often the differences that emerge within and from oneself, such as the shift in
perspective when men such as those mentioned above see their children and their
own lives in a different light and attempt to withdraw from the obligations
that seek to nullify that new perspective. And if we can’t see how radical and
important that is, this is simply because so many of us have naturalised and
now fail to even notice the bizarre character of capitalist cosmology. It’s a
cosmology that insists that we must believe in the existence of a mysterious
cosmic invisible hand that will distribute goods in a fair and efficient manner
to us – at least if we worship it properly by (among other things) sacrificing
our children to it, in the form of giving up so much precious life-enriching
time with them in order to appease its demands, as made manifest in “the labour
market.” It’s a cosmology as wild and fascinating as anything else we find in
the ethnographic record. And David would point out that the rejection of it
that we see today is therefore a potentially profound and revolutionary one,
but one that is far less likely to be “taken seriously” in some corners of a
discipline still wedded to what Arjun Appadurai famously referred to as “sightings
of the savage” as its default mode of intellectual or political critique.
I should note in passing that David would not have been too pleased with me for wheeling out Appadurai in defence of his position. It is fair to say that David was not a great fan. Two weeks ago, Chris Gregory mentioned having initially thought that David was something of a “bullshit artist.” I can confirm the truth of this account. The first time I met David was at a conference in Cambridge about 10 years ago – Chris, David and I were billeted together at a college some distance from the other participants and so spent quite a bit of time together. Chris would complain to me after breakfast that it was bad enough having to listen to the man bullshit endlessly at the conference, but having to endure it first thing in the morning before he’d even woken up properly was another thing altogether. And then when Chris was out of the room, David started talking to me about how thrilled he was to be spending time with the author of Gifts and Commodities (1982), one of his favourite books,and how misguided and intellectually dishonest he felt that Appadurai’s critique of it in The Social Life of Things (1986)had been. It was a slightly awkward situation to manage, although I wasn’t surprised to hear that Chris had come round a few years later. David was on occasion a difficult man to converse with – especially over breakfast – but I knew that the quality and ambition of David’s work would prove irresistible to Chris in the long run.
In
following years, David would occasionally ask us rhetorically, “Why do they always
refer to me as ‘the anarchist anthropologist,’ why not refer to Appadurai as ‘the
neoliberal anthropologist’?” It’s just as accurate but doesn’t get constantly
attached to his name as a pejorative in the same way. Of course, David knew
that he was being slightly disingenuous here – Appadurai hadn’t authored a book
entitled Fragments of a Neoliberal Anthropology, so whether or not David
was correct to label him as such, it’s not surprising that such a label was
less easily attached to him than it was to David. But the underlying point that
David was making – that his own scholarship was endlessly and subtly sneered at
and undermined by repeatedly introducing him as such, even when it wasn’t
necessarily relevant – was valid and important to make. And it was typical of
David that rather than shy away from the association with anarchist theory –
that he knew would be used to belittle him and his work – he instead chose to
take the prejudice on head first, early in his career, before he had the
security of tenure.
Image 2: Book cover of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Fragments is a book that I found a little frustrating on first read. I found the way in which it jumped from point to point and back again a little – well – fragmentary. Much as I am sure that David was aware that there was a certain contradiction in the author of a book entitled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, complaining that people referred to him as “the anarchist anthropologist,” I was aware that I was kind of missing the point in my frustration at the fragmentary nature of a book with the same title. I felt myself to be in a similar position to the kind of American tourist one occasionally overhears in Copenhagen, loudly complaining that the statue of the Little Mermaid is kind of small. On second reading, however, it went a lot better. As with a conversation with David in real life, one simply had to allow oneself to go with the flow – and if one did, it was a conversational experience like no other. Like Chris, I felt David to be a little much on first meeting – particularly before I’d managed to get to the coffee machine. But in later years, as I got to know him better, I looked forward to those wonderful rambling conversations that went from Ray Davies, through Lukacs on to Rodney Dangerfield and then back home via a detour to discuss 18th century Madagascan pirates.
I
think David’s intellectual range sometimes irritated those who envied it and
wanted to pull him back into the narrow arid scripture scholarship of the
intellectual silos that they had settled for and claimed as their little
empires of dirt. The kinds of people who write things in peer-review such as “I
can’t believe that the author of this paper on value seems totally unaware of
Malinowski’s seminal footnote on Trobriand yam exchange from 1937.” I suspect
that what upset these kinds of people most about David was that they knew he
probably was aware of the precious little nuggets of knowledge that they
had devoted their lives to curating; it was just that – as he always did – he
had chosen to go his own way and make his own connections. And in many regards,
that was David’s greatest gift to the academy. This is a profession in which
success is often driven by networks, nepotism and ass-kissing more than the
alleged liberal values of free thought and intellectual inquiry. And in such an
environment, David stood out by his consistent refusal to do anything but his
own thing.
I’m
sure it made him a frustrating colleague at times. But as we all know the
category of “good colleague’ is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it means the
person who turns their marking in on time and I would not be surprised to hear
from colleagues that sometimes David’s contempt for what he might view as the “bullshit”
parts of his job left others picking up the pieces. But let us also remember
that all too often “being a good colleague’ means being the person who turns a
blind eye to bad behaviour and abuse on the part of senior or powerful
colleagues out of loyalty to the institution. After years in this profession,
my skin tends to crawl when I hear senior colleagues praise the virtues of
collegiality– my first instinct is to wonder whose body are we burying
or whose mouth are we taping up today? I remain immensely grateful to David for
consistently prioritising being a good person over being a good colleague – in
this regard at least – and I still, on occasion, miss him very much. His free
and sometimes disrespectful spirit is precisely what a profession that all too
often demands deference to status, rather than engagement and fresh ideas,
needs. And with Fragments we have something that keeps some of that
spirit alive – irreverent, bursting with ideas, and most of all principled –
whether we all agree with all those principles or not. There’s a spirit of
freedom in this short book that senior academics often tell us that we need to
squeeze out of ourselves as the price of admission. The greatest gift that
David gave us with Fragments is the enduring proof that we don’t have to
listen to them.
Keir Martin
is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was
previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His
work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and
their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He
conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This
work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The Death of the
Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain.
He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy
among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has published on the contemporary
global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets,
including The Financial Times and The Guardian.
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/
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.
A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021.
The Dawn of Everything’s central idea is
challenging. We are told that humans are politically adventurous and
experimental – so much so that after a spell of freedom and equality, people
are inclined to choose oppression just to make a change. History takes a rhythmic
form, oscillating between one extreme and the next. In recent times, however, we’ve
all got stuck in just one system and we must try to understand why.
All this is new and refreshing but hardly credible. I
prefer the standard anthropological view that the political instincts and
social emotions that define our humanity were shaped under conditions of
egalitarianism. To this day, all of us feel most relaxed and happy when able to
laugh, play and socialize among companions who are our equals. But
instead of building on this experience so familiar to us all, Graeber and
Wengrow (henceforth: ‘G&W’) oppose the whole idea that our hunter-gatherer
ancestors were egalitarians. In their view, they would just as likely have
chosen to be oppressed.
As they put it: ‘If the very essence of our humanity
consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore
capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean
human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements
over the greater part of our history?’ Among these possibilities, as the
authors readily acknowledge (pp. 86-7), were abusive dominance hierarchies like
those of chimpanzees. G&W seem to be arguing that if our ancestors were
so adventurous, then surely, they would have experimented not only with
egalitarianism but also with harassment, abuse and domination by aggressive,
bullying males.
Image 1: Dawn or teatime? The new book by David Graeber and David Wengrow (photo: Chris Knight, 2021)
G&W make these points in the context of a
consistent attack on any idea that we became socially and morally human during
the course of a revolution. All my academic life, I have been exploring the
idea that human language, consciousness, kinship and morality evolved in a
process of gradual evolution which culminated in an immense social and
political revolution. My motivation was always to challenge the popular
prejudice that socialism is impossible because by nature we humans are selfish
and competitive – and ‘not even a revolution could change human nature’.
I would always answer this way. Yes, we are a species of great ape. Yes, like our primate cousins, we have competitive, selfish, aggressive and often violent instincts. But these were not the ones responsible for our success. Everything distinctively human about our nature – our capacity to be brilliant mums and dads, to care for one another’s children and not just our own, to establish moral rules, to see ourselves as others see us and to use music, dance and language to share our dreams – these extraordinary capacities were precisely the products of the greatest revolution in history, the one that worked.
Chris Boehm’s theory of the human revolution
Nearly a decade after the appearance of my own book
detailing the complexities of this ‘human revolution’ (Knight 1991), the anthropologist
Christopher Boehm (1999) published a version of the theory that, despite its
insights, played safe in political terms by omitting any mention of the most
important element – the dynamics of sex and gender. It is this abstract, unisex
version of human revolution theory that G&W consider safe enough to mention
explicitly in order to discredit it.
Boehm points out that our earliest ancestors were neither one-sidedly cooperative nor one-sidedly competitive. Instead, they were psychologically disposed to dominate others while forming alliances to resist being dominated in turn. This collective resistance from below eventually culminated in everyone coming together to prevent any would-be leader from dominating the group. Our ancestors’ chimpanzee-style dominance was now turned on its head, culminating in ‘reverse dominance’ – rule by a morally aware community committed to an egalitarian ethos.
G&W go along with the idea that humans ‘do appear
to have begun … with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do’ (p.
133). In this context, they agree that extant hunter-gatherers display ‘a whole
panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and
bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning …. none of which have any
parallel among other primates’ (p. 86). What they’ve no interest in is the idea
that such tactics played a crucial role in shaping human nature during our
evolutionary past.
Summing up their objection to Boehm’s account, they
describe any suggestion that hunter-gatherers consistently preferred
egalitarianism as an ‘odd insistence’ that ‘for many tens of thousands of
years, nothing happened’. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors were consistently
egalitarian, their political lives must have somehow been frozen, stuck in
time. G&W conclude with these words: ‘Before about 12,000 years ago, Boehm
insists, humans were basically egalitarian . . . according to Boehm, for about
200,000 years [these] political animals all chose to live just one way.’ (p.
87)
The only problem is that this isn’t what Boehm wrote.
His actual words are worth quoting:
‘Once one band, somewhere, invented an egalitarian order, this radical change in social ways of doing things would become visible to its neighbors. The advantages would have been evident wherever subordinates were ambivalent about being dominated, particularly in bands with very aggressive bullies…. One would expect a gradual cultural diffusion to take place, with attractive egalitarian traditions replacing despotic ones locally. … Over time, migration patterns over longer distances could have fairly rapidly spread this political invention from one continent to another.’ (Boehm 1999: 195)
This is how successful revolutions work. Plainly,
Boehm’s argument was not simply that until 12,000 years ago ‘humans were
basically egalitarian.’ Instead, he suggests that early humans developed a
variety of different political systems while gradually converging around one
particularly successful model – egalitarianism.
The Teatime of Everything
Quite unfairly, The Dawn of Everything conflates
modern evolutionary theory with social evolutionism – the nineteenth century
narrative of a ladder of stages progressing from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’
to ‘civilization’. Darwinism claims to be scientific, we are told, but in reality,
is pure myth. Quixotically, G&W expect readers to give serious
consideration to a perspective on human origins that does not acknowledge
evolutionary theory at all.
The only science these authors do recognize is
‘archaeological science’, and then only if the archaeology doesn’t go too far
back. They justify dating ‘the dawn of everything’ to a mere 30,000 years ago
on the basis that nothing about politics or social life can be gleaned from
archaic human ‘cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint’(p.
81).
This excuse no longer works in the light of recent
evidence that our species’ most unique trait – art and symbolic culture –
emerged in Africa three or four times earlier than was previously thought. By
no means limited to bones and stones, this evidence consists of beads,
geometric engravings, burials with grave goods and artefacts such as
grindstones and paint pots, all invariably found in association with red ochre
(Henshilwood et al. 2009, 2011). G&W do notice one or two of these
discoveries (pp. 83-4) but show little interest – despite the fact that when
cutting-edge Darwinian theory is applied to the ochre record, the possibilities
for generating predictions about social dynamics, patterns of ritual
performance and gendered alliances become very real (Power 2009, 2019; Power et
al. 2013; Power et al. 2021; Watts 2014).
Unfortunately, these authors won’t go near Darwinism in any shape or form. They concede that someone whom they term a ‘feminist’ (actually the highly respected founding figure in primate and human sociobiology Sarah Hrdy) has come up with a ‘story’ about the critical role of collective childcare in shaping our human instincts and psychology (Hrdy 2009). Commenting that ‘there’s nothing wrong with myths’, they describe this particular myth as ‘important.’ They then immediately cast doubt on it by quipping that ‘such insights can only ever be partial because there was no garden of Eden, and a single Eve never existed’ (p. 82). Tricks of this kind – in this case ignoring the fact that Hrdy’s groundbreaking work is focused on the emergence of the genus Homo some 2 million years before the dating of our common mitochondrial DNA ancestor – are clearly aimed at undermining the very idea that human origins research is worth pursuing at all.
Readers interested in Mesolithic and Neolithic
archaeology will find plenty of intriguing speculations in this book. But if
you are interested in how we became human – how we developed our unusually
revealing eyes, our extraordinarily large brains, our distinctively social
emotions, our laughter, our innate capacity for music and language – you won’t
find anything at all!
The title is seriously misleading. The Dawn of
Everything? ‘Teatime’ would be more accurate. The story begins with the
European Upper Paleolithic, best known for those spectacular cave paintings in Ice
Age France and Spain. According to the authors, by that stage the archaeology
is at last getting interesting because it indicates the emergence of an
economic surplus allowing elites to arise. For the first time, we begin to see
evidence for social complexity, hierarchy, sumptuous burials etc.
‘Tiny hunter-gatherer bands’
For G&W, the fact that our hunter-gatherer
ancestors established an egalitarian lifestyle much earlier in Africa is of
limited interest. They concede that extant hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza
of Tanzania share their resources, but instead of admiring this, they complain
that resistance to accumulation obstructs the emergence of ‘social complexity’,
using this term where others might have spoken of ‘class’. The authors, it
seems, are averse to the concept of social class.
So, hunter-gatherers obstruct complexity – i.e.,
prevent class society from arising – by resisting the accumulation of wealth. G&W
invoke the authority of the hunter-gatherer specialist James Woodburn here.
They conclude from his work that ‘the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society
is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all’ (p.
128). This, they argue, rules out social complexity and – with it – the full
richness of human cultural and intellectual life.
Woodburn (1982, 2005) certainly did argue that
deliberate resistance to accumulation underpins hunter-gatherer egalitarianism
and represents a political choice consciously made. He observed that such
egalitarianism was a feature only of non-storage hunter-gatherers, concluding
that ‘immediate return’ was the original type of human economy. But Woodburn did not argue that such egalitarianism was
lacking in complexity. In fact, he viewed the binary contrast between ‘simple’
and ‘complex’ social forms as damaging and misleading. For Woodburn,
maintaining egalitarianism was a supremely sophisticated achievement –
demanding far greater levels of political intelligence and complexity than
simply allowing inequalities to arise. The
Hadza, he explained, have the intelligence to realize how dangerous it would be
to let anyone accumulate more wealth than they need.
Wealth inequalities not OK
According to G&W, however, wealth inequalities are
unproblematic. In support of their position, they invoke Kandiaronk, the
seventeenth century First American critic of European ‘civilization’ to whom
they devote an inspiring chapter. Somewhat unconvincingly, they assure us that
Kandiaronk and his First American co-thinkers ‘had trouble even imagining that
differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of
power’ (p. 130).
G&W accept that immediate-return hunter-gatherers
refuse to allow wealth inequalities to develop. But surprisingly, they regard
this whole situation as disappointing:
‘This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store?’ (p. 129)
What kind of future? They answer this by suggesting that activists who take inspiration from African hunter-gatherers are inviting modern city-dwellers to become ‘stuck,’ like the unfortunate Hadza, in the repetitive simplicity of life in tiny nomadic bands.
To be clear, I am no primitivist. I am in favor of
technological, social and political development. The Hadza illustrate that it
is fulfilling and enjoyable to share wealth on demand, to laugh and sing, to
‘waste time’ in play, to resist letting anyone dominate us – and to prioritize
caring for each other’s children over all other concerns. When it comes to
development, these politically sophisticated bow-and-arrow hunters can teach us
a lot.
In the beginning … private property?
G&W argue that private property is primordial
because it’s inseparable from religion. By way of illustration, they refer to
the trumpets and other paraphernalia used in some indigenous traditions during
boys’ coming-of-age ceremonies:
‘Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist… It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts…, so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.’ (p. 159)
Note how ‘absolute’ here gets translated as ‘private.’
The claim seems to be that if ritual property is sacred to an ‘absolute’
degree, then it qualifies by definition as ‘private property’.
The conflation is reinforced when the authors seek authority for their association of religion with private property. At this point G&W (p. 159) invoke Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’:
‘Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning “not to be touched”. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?’
The authors then describe how ethnographers working
with indigenous Amazonians discovered ‘that almost everything around them has
an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars,
liana groves and animals.’ (p. 161) A spiritual entity’s sacred ownership of a species
or resource sets it apart from the rest of the world. Similar reasoning, write
G&W, underpins Western conceptions of private property. ‘If you own a car’,
they explain, ‘you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from
entering or using it’ (p. 159).
It is quite breath-taking to find G&W conflating
traditional notions of spiritual ‘ownership’ with ideas about owning your own
car. On what planet are they when they view modern private ownership as ‘almost
identical’ in its ‘underlying logic and social effects’ with a supernatural
being’s ‘ownership’ of natural resources?
When indigenous activists tell us that a lake or
mountain is sacred to a powerful spirit, they are not endorsing anything
remotely equivalent to ‘private property’. If the ‘Great Spirit’ owns the
forest, the clear implication is that it is not for sale, not to
be privatized, not to be claimed by a logging company.
One of the most powerful of Durkheim’s insights was
that when people invoke Divinity, they are envisaging the moral force of their
community as a whole. So, if a mountain belongs to God, that’s a way of
declaring that it cannot be privatized. When G&W turn that round – claiming
that the concept of ‘private property’ emerged inseparably from the very idea that
some things are sacred – you can see what a crude misrepresentation this
is.
What Durkheim really said
For Durkheim (1963, 1965), ‘setting apart’ was the
antithesis of private appropriation. In his quest to explain the origin of the
world-wide cultural taboo against incest, he puzzled over traditional beliefs
investing women ‘with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the
masculine population at a distance…’ (1965: 72). In such belief systems,
Durkheim wrote, women’s segregating power is that of their blood, bound up
intimately with notions of the sacred. If divinity becomes visible in women
when they bleed, it is because their blood itself is divine. ‘When it runs out,
the god is spilling over’ (Durkheim 1965: 89).
For Durkheim, then, the primordial concept of ‘setting
apart’ had nothing to do with private property. The issue was what happened to
a young woman on coming of age (1965: 68-96). Alerted by her menstrual onset, her
kin would assemble as a body to lay claim to her – that is, to ‘initiate’ her –
setting her apart from male company and from the world. Her seclusion
was accomplished through a special ritual – her coming-of-age ceremony. This
established that her body was sacred, her choices with respect to it
accountable to her sisters and other kin. In association with such collective
action, the emergence of human consciousness, language and culture, for
Durkheim, was the point at which a new kind of authority – that of the
community – first came into being.
If only G&W had shown an interest in modern
evolutionary science, they would have recognized how these Durkheimian insights
anticipated the most recent and authoritative modern archaeological explanation
for the ochre record in human evolution, based on the idea that blood-red ochre
was used by women as cosmetic ‘war-paint’ to alert men to the newly-established
sacredness of the female body (Watts 2014, Power 2019, Power et al., 2021).
Seasonal or lunar?
Now we come to The Dawn of Everything’s central
idea. It is that we were all once free because we could choose how to live,
experimenting now with one political structure and now another – sometimes even
oscillating between utterly different social states.
Anyone who has studied anthropology will have come
across the Eskimo seal-hunters who traditionally practiced sexual communism
throughout the winter months, only to switch over to patriarchal family life
throughout the summer – returning suddenly to communism on a particular day
announced publicly as the onset of winter. G&W apply this pendulum or
oscillation model to the Ice Age cultures of the European Upper Paleolithic,
arguing that these complex hunter-gatherers deliberately set up vertical
hierarchies of elite privilege and power – only to enjoy the pleasure of tearing
them all down as the old season gave way to the new.
Because they enjoyed this revolution so much, these
Ice Age political geniuses realized that they shouldn’t hold on permanently to
their revolutionary gains. They understood that in order to keep enjoying
successive revolutions, they would have to fill the intervals with transient
counter-revolutions – doing this by allowing ‘special’ individuals to establish
dominance so as to present a nice target for the next revolutionary upsurge.
I love this idea. As it happens, it uncannily
resembles the oscillatory principle that we in the Radical Anthropology
Group have analysed as the inner secret of hunter-gatherer
egalitarianism ever since Blood Relations was published three decades
ago (Knight 1991). On the other hand, my oscillation model was not quite the
same. Because we evolved not in sub-Arctic conditions but in Africa, there were
good ecological reasons why monthly periodicities should take precedence over
seasonal rhythms. So, if power was seized and surrendered in the way G&W
imagine, then social life would have been turned upside-down on a monthly
schedule, oscillating with the waxing and waning moon (Knight 1991: 327-373).
A pendulum of power
G&W’s history is bursting with oppositions and alternations among
hunter-gatherers but its periodicities are one-sidedly seasonal. Don’t they
know that hunter-gatherers follow not just the sun but the moon? Their most
important rituals, bound up as these are with women’s menstrual ebbs and flows,
are scheduled by the moon.
In the rainforests of the Congo, writes Morna Finnegan (2008, 2009,
2012), women deliberately encourage men to display their courage and potential
for dominance – only to defy them in an all-female ritual known as Ngoku before
yielding playfully in a ‘pendulum of power’ between the sexes. G&W (pp.
114-15) allude to this but then claim that:
‘… there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alternation, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for “the origins of social inequality” really is asking the wrong question.
If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be “how did we get stuck?”’
This final question is a truly profound one. It can
only be answered, however, once we have developed some realistic notion of the
situation that previously prevailed. Was there ever a time when our prehistoric
ancestors were truly free, truly ‘unstuck’?
When marriage became permanent
Among the Central African Bayaka forest
people, the Moon is said to be ‘women’s biggest husband’ (Lewis 2008). From the
standpoint of any man, his wife in effect abandons him for her celestial
husband each time she bleeds. The reality behind this
ancient metaphor (Knight and Lewis 2017) is a tradition in which women
playfully ‘seize power’ for some part of the month before willingly handing
over to men once they have made their point, establishing what Finnegan (2008)
has termed ‘communism in motion’. Patterns of kinship and residence in such
societies set up a pendulum swinging between menstruation and ovulation,
brothers and lovers, kinship and marriage, communal solidarity and the
intimacies of sex.
Given the probable antiquity of such
patterns, G&W are right to view some kind of block on political oscillation
as something which really did happen during the course of history. But
accounting for the blockage will require us to deal with a topic that G&W
will not touch. It will mean respectfully approaching indigenous peoples’
practices around menstruation (Testart 1985, 1986. Knight 1991. Lewis 2008.
Power 2017). It is also important to understand variability in kinship patterns
and post-marital residence – again a critically important topic that G&W scarcely
mention in their book.
Among non-storage hunter-gatherers, women
generally insist on living with their own mother at least until after she has
had a couple of children (Marlowe 2004). Genetic studies have shown that in
Africa where our species evolved, this pattern extends far back into the past
(Destro-Bisol et al., 2004. Verdu et al. 2013. Wood et al. 2005). In place of
life-long marriage, ‘bride service’ typically prevails, each African
hunter-gatherer woman accepting her chosen lover while continuing to live in
her mother’s camp. Her temporary husband must make himself useful by bringing
back hunted meat to his bride and her household. If he doesn’t measure up – he
is out! Under such arrangements, everyone alternates between kinship and marital
life, in that sense switching between utterly distinct worlds.
Living with mum is a resilient pattern, but pressure from the husband can compel her to switch residence and live permanently with him and his kin. Where this happens, a young mother with her children may find it difficult to escape. As she loses her former freedom, her husband’s care for her may then morph seamlessly into coercive control. It was this disastrous outcome which Engels (1972 [1884]) described so eloquently as the ‘world-historic defeat of the female sex’. Across much of the world, the patriarchal forces that transformed marriage into a fixed bond correspondingly imposed fixity on social life as a whole.
How humanity got ‘stuck’
This looks like a promising answer to the
question, ‘How did we get stuck?’ So, what answer do G&W give to this
question? Their final chapter is so meandering that it is difficult to know. They
mention how care for a person may morph seamlessly into coercive control – but
for some reason don’t connect this with changes in postmarital residence or
family life. The nearest they get is when describing spectacles of execution
and torture in seventeenth-century Europe and among the North American Wendat.
We are reminded that the King’s right to punish his subjects was modelled on
the patriarch’s duty to discipline his wife and children. This political
domination was publicly represented as his duty of care. By contrast, when the
Wendat subjected a prisoner to prolonged torture, it was to make the opposite
point – publicly distinguishing dominance and control from loving care. Since
the prisoner was not part of the household he needed to be tortured, not loved.
And so it is that G&W find in the
distinction between care and domination their long-awaited explication of how
we got stuck:
‘It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by re-creating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck….’
Instead of exploring hunter-gatherer
research and gender studies, then, G&W confine their horizons to the
experiences of First American military leaders, torturers and European
monarchs, exploring how we ‘got stuck’ by imagining these peoples’
psychological conflicts. If the bewildering words quoted above mean anything,
they seem to suggest that we got stuck because certain power-hungry figures
confused caring for people with violently dominating them.
Is this a serious explanation? Did people
really get confused in this way? In place of an answer, G&W themselves seem
to have got stuck. We are just offered the same question in slightly different
words:
‘Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck?’
No further effort is made to answer the
most crucial question of the entire book.
Morgan and Engels
What is missing here is any real understanding of
human evolution. In Chapter 3, G&W criticize what they describe as the
mainstream anthropological consensus for likening our foraging ancestors to
extant African hunter-gatherers – simple folk living in ‘tiny mobile bands’.
Then in Chapter 4 they change their mind. The mainstream anthropological
consensus, they now tell us, is that hunter-gatherers such as Aboriginal
Australians:
‘… could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as “brothers” and “sisters” (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners.’
It was Lewis Henry Morgan (1877, 1881) who founded our
discipline on the basis of his discovery of so-called ‘classificatory’ kinship.
Its principle can be summed up as the ‘equivalence of siblings’. Two brothers,
for example, will step into one another’s shoes with respect to their
relationships. A woman will say to her sister: ‘Your children are mine and mine
are yours’. So, there’s no concept of ‘private property’ with respect to children.
Family life is not ‘nuclear’. Every child will be free to move between her
numerous different ‘mothers’ and other supportive kin, and she will continue to
enjoy such freedom throughout her adult life.
When life is structured in this way, the result is
extraordinary. Everyone can expect hospitality from ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’
treated formally as equivalents to one another in chains of connection
stretching across vast areas. One consequence of this is that the state has no
soil in which to grow. When people are self-organized, allied to one another
and where the joys of childcare, sex, dance and domestic life are more
communally experienced, then there are no dead spaces – no social vacuums – for
the state to enter and fill. You can’t abolish the state without replacing it,
and communal family life – in today’s world, self-organised neighborhoods and
other wider communities – is one way of doing this.
Curiously, Graeber and Wengrow say almost nothing
about kinship in their long book. Instead of critiquing the Morgan-Engels
paradigm, Graeber and Wengrow turn Engels’ vision in The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State (Engels 1972 [1884]) upside-down. In
the beginning, they say, was private property, religion and the state. To quote
the concluding words of Chapter 4, ‘If private property has an “origin”, it is
as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself.’
In an earlier book with Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (2017),
Graeber even suggested that since imagined supernatural agents such as divine
kings and forest spirits have always exercised authority over people, the
principle of the state is an immovable feature of the human condition.
It may seem paradoxical for an anarchist to accept the
inevitability of private property and the state. But The Dawn of Everything adds
weight to that message. Yes, say the authors, anarchist freedom can be implemented,
but only in precious moments or enclaves. Personally, I find it hard to imagine
what kind of ‘enclave’ might be found in a planet already beginning to burn up.
Graeber and Wengrow seem to have abandoned the revolutionary slogan that
‘another world is possible’. Instead, they offer only the sobering message that
‘hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together, as complements to one
another’. (p. 208) They seem to be saying that we cannot have freedom in one
place without accepting oppression somewhere else.
Where do we go from here?
Despite these criticisms, the one important point
about this book is its advocacy of oscillation. All living things have a pulse.
They live and they die, wake and sleep, breathe in and out in ways driven by
the changing seasons and the many other periodicities of our life-friendly,
earth-sun-moon orbital system.
We need to get Planet Earth turning once more, not
just physically but socially and politically, too. This will not be done by
telling people to stop confusing care with dominance and control. It will be
done by supporting the school strikes, singing on their picket lines, extending
the action to workplaces, dancing in the streets, blocking traffic, bringing
capitalism to a complete halt.
But once we’ve taken control, what next? If we stay on
strike too long, we’ll soon starve. So, let’s oscillate. Those weekly school
strikes, for example, could, perhaps, be lengthened, joined up and staged once
a month, spreading across the world until we’ve released all humanity from
wage-slavery. Carbon emissions immediately cut by 50 per cent. Then we go back
to work, re-organizing it as necessary. We can risk returning to work only once
we’re sure it won’t lead back to capitalism. And we can be sure of that only
once we’ve all sworn to be back with our children on their picket line next New
Moon. We keep doing this, seizing power and surrendering it, until the world is
rocking and breathing once more. Reclaim the future. Neither patriarchy nor
matriarchy but, something like, rule by the moon.
That would be to repeat the class and gender dynamics of the original human revolution, but this time on a higher plane. Might any of this be possible or practical? Let’s open up the debate to everyone and see what we can do. That surely is what the activist-anthropologist, David Graeber, would have wanted.
Chris Knight is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London, where he forms part of a team researching the origins of our species in Africa. His books include Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991) and Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016).
Bibliography
Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the forest.
The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Destro-Bisol, G. et al. 2004. Variation of female and male lineages in sub-Saharan populations: the importance of sociocultural factors. Mol Biol Evol. 21: 1673-82.
Durkheim, Émile. 1963 [1898]. La prohibition de
l’inceste et ses origines. L’Année Sociologique, 1, 1-70. Reprinted as Incest.
The nature and origin of the taboo, trans. E. Sagarin. New York: Stuart.
Durkheim, Émile. 1965 [1912]. The elementary forms
of the religious life. New York: Free Press.
Engels, Frederick. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press.
Finnegan, Morna. 2008. The Personal is Political:
Eros, ritual dialogue, and the speaking body in Central African hunter-gatherer
society. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis: Edinburgh University.
Finnegan, Morna. 2009. Political bodies: Some thoughts
on women’s power among Central African hunter-gatherers. Radical
Anthropology 3: 31-37.
Finnegan, Morna. 2014. The politics of Eros: ritual
dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter-gatherer societies.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 697-715.
Henshilwood, Chris, Francesco d’Errico and Ian Watts.
2009. ‘Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South
Africa’, Journal of Human Evolution 57(1): 27-47.
Henshilwood, Chris, d’Errico, F., van Niekerk, K.L.,
Coquinot, Y., Jacobs, Z., Lauritzen, S.E., Menu, M., García-Moreno, R. 2011. A
100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Science
334: 219-222. DOI: 10.1126/science.1211535
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and others. The
evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. London and Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Knight, C. 1985. Menstruation as medicine. Social
Science and Medicine 21: 671-683.
Knight, Chris. 1991. Blood Relations. Menstruation
and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Knight, Chris. 1997. The wives of the sun and moon. Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(N.S.): 133-153.
Knight, Chris, Camilla Power and Ian Watts. 1995. The
human symbolic revolution: A Darwinian account. Cambridge Archaeological
Journal 5(1): 75-114.
Knight, Chris, Robin Dunbar and Camilla Power. 1999.
An evolutionary approach to human culture. In R. Dunbar, C. Knight and C. Power
(eds), The Evolution of Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 1-11.
Knight, C. and J. Lewis, 2017. Towards a theory of
everything. In C. Power, M. Finnegan and H. Callan (eds.), Human Origins:
Contributions from Social Anthropology. New York & Oxford: Berghahn,
pp. 84-102.
Lewis, J. 2008. Ekila: blood, bodies and egalitarian
societies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14: 297-315.
Lewis, Jerome D. 2014. Egalitarian Social
Organization: The Case of the Mbendjele BaYaka. In Barry S. Hewlett (ed), Hunter-Gatherers
of the Congo Basin. New Brunswick: Transaction, pp. 219-43.
Marlowe, F. W. 2004. Marital residence among foragers.
Current Anthropology 45 (2): 277-284.
Morgan, L. H. 1877. Ancient Society. London:
MacMillan.
Morgan, L. H. 1881. Houses and House-Life of the
American Aborigines. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Power, Camilla. 2004. Women in prehistoric art. In G.
Berghaus (ed.), New Perspectives in Prehistoric Art. Westport, CT &
London: Praeger, pp. 75-104.
Power, Camilla. 2009. Sexual
selection models for the emergence of symbolic communication: Why they should
be reversed. In The Cradle of Language
R. Botha and C. Knight (eds). Oxford: Oxford University press, pp.257-280.
Power, Camilla, Volker
Sommer and Ian Watts. 2013. The seasonality thermostat: Female reproductive
synchrony and male behaviour in monkeys, neanderthals and modern humans. PaleoAnthropology 2013: 33-60.
doi:10.4207/PA.2013.ART79
Power, Camilla. 2017. Reconstructing a source
cosmology for African hunter-gatherers. In C. Power, M. Finnegan and H. Callan
(eds), Human Origins: Contributions from
Social Anthropology. New York & Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 180-202.
Power, Camilla. 2019. The
role of egalitarianism and gender ritual in the evolution of symbolic
cognition. In T Henley, M Rossano, E Kardas (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology. Routledge, pp.354-374.
Power, Camilla, Ian Watts
and Chris Knight. 2021. The Symbolic Revolution: a sexual conflict model. In N
Gontier, C Sinha, A Lock (eds) Oxford
Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution Oxford UP, 2nd edition.
Online Publication Date: Mar 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198813781.013.13
Testart, A. 1985. Le communisme primitif.
Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Sahlins, Marshall and David Graeber, 2017. On
Kings. London: HAU Books.
Testart, A. 1986. Essai sur les fondements de la
division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs. Paris: Éditions
de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Townsend, Cathryn, 2018. The Evolution Egalitarianism.
In Hilary Callan (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
London: John Wiley.
Verdu, P., et al., 2013. Sociocultural behavior, sex-biased admixture and effective population sizes in Central African Pygmies and non-Pygmies Mol Biol Evol, first published online January 7, 2013 doi:10.1093/molbev/mss328
Watts, Ian. 2014. The red thread: pigment use and the
evolution of collective ritual. In D. Dor, C. Knight and J. Lewis (eds), The
Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 208-227.
Watts, Ian., Michael Chazan and Jayne Wilkins 2016.
Early evidence for brilliant ritualized display: Specularite use in the
Northern Cape (South Africa) between ~500 and ~300 ka. Current Anthropology,
57(3).
Woodburn, James. 1982. Egalitarian Societies. Man:
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(3): 431-451.
Woodburn, James. 2005. Egalitarian societies
revisited. In T. Widlok and W. G. Tadesse (eds), Property and Equality,
vol. 1: Ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism. New York: Berghahn
Books, pp. 18-31.
Wood, E. T et al., 2005. Contrasting patterns of Y
chromosome and mtDNA variation in Africa: evidence for sex-biased demographic
processes. Eur J Hum Genet 13: 867-76
Let me
begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and
I find useful.
In
this talk I’d like to propose an approach to Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011) that connects the book
to David’s earlier work on Fragments of
an Anarchist Anthropology (Graeber 2004) and his latest work—with David
Wengrow—on The Dawn of Everything (Graeber
& Wengrow 2021). I think there are many different readings of the book on debt.
My own reading of David’s work is in light of ten years of ethnographic
research with Latin-American migrants in Spain, who became involved in the
country’s largest movement for the right to housing—the Platform for People
Affected by Mortgages—or La PAH for its short Spanish acronym (Suarez 2017,
2020). My research focuses on the relationship between political mobilization,
mortgage debt, and transnational migration.
My
interlocutors were being foreclosed and evicted from their homes, which were
bought during the housing bubble. On average they owed over 250,000 euros. They
joined La PAH in despair and out of guilt for not paying their debts. The
movement helped them transform their guilt into outrage by shifting the grand
narrative from individual failure into a counter-narrative on massive financial
fraud.
In
what follows I engage with David’s concepts of debt and freedom, as I try to
illuminate some of the challenges I ran into while theorizing what debt meant
to my interlocutors and fellow activists.
It was
January 11th, 2012. I had just returned to London from a preliminary field
visit to Barcelona. David was on leave that year and in New York but was on a
short visit to London. His mind, however, was still in New York, where he had
inspired and was collaborating with the Occupy movement. As we ate delicious
Thai food, one of his favorite activities, David detailed his time with Occupy.
Meanwhile, I was trying to get a word in to figure out my own research.
In
between dishes of prawn panang, charcoal duck, lots of white rice, and Thai iced
tea, David turned around and said: “What’s interesting here is not only why has
debt become the focus of this movement, but why it has been so effective. It’s
notorious that debt is very hard to organize around. We keep talking about debt
strikes, debt this, debtors that… and everybody keeps trying to come up with a
formula but it’s incredibly difficult. Part of the reason why is because this
sort of old morality is very hard to, like, convince people it’s not their
fault … What’s interesting here is you have a really effective broad grassroots
movement focusing on [debt]. You could ask: why debt becomes a focus and why
it’s worked in a certain way?” (In discussion with the author, January 2012).
The question is: in what way?
So,
let me begin with Fragments and its
relation to Debt. In Fragments, David describes several
“invisible spaces” where direct forms of democracy are already taking place. To
him, it is in these spaces that “the potential for insurrection, and the
extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in
revolutionary moments actually comes” (Graeber 2004, 34). In Debt, on the other hand, David defines
the principle of communism as “the foundation of all human sociability” (2011,
96). Communism implies spaces free of debt in which all people can contribute
to a common project given the abilities they already have. Unlike hierarchy,
communism is not based on relationships of precedent or status, but of
cooperation. And, unlike exchange, communism does not intend to end
relationships by paying back what is owed, but rather builds a sociality in
which one aspires to live in. Communism would then be the moral principle of
economic life operating at the heart of the “invisible spaces” suggested by
David in his anarchist anthropology.
Now I
want to give you an ethnographic vignette to analyze how this moral principle
organized the everyday realities lived by Latin American migrants to complicate
David’s theorizing.
Hector
was forty-eight at the time of our interview and his family was able to get
what many families desired at La PAH: cancelling their mortgage debt after
being foreclosed. In Spain, mortgage law dictates that a mortgaged home is not
the sole collateral to a debt. A bank can collect on any remaining debt after
the house is auctioned. The predatory nature of this law translated into debts
in the hundreds of thousands for my interlocutors after having lost the property. So, full cancelation of a mortgage
debt felt, indeed, like a “victory”—as Hector put it. Oddly then, most
Latin-American migrants end up celebrating losing their house to the bank in
exchange for a full debt cancellation. However, Hector came to another
realization right at the same time: he and his family had no place to live. His
wife’s monthly income of 600 euros could not pay for a place to rent, not if
they wanted to pay the bills and have enough to live. They were left with one
option: La PAH’s Obra Social, a project based on the re-occupation of buildings
belonging to banks rescued with public funds and which sat empty for years. The
idea was to relocate families like Hector’s. The name of La PAH’s project is a
play on words. Every large bank in Spain has an ‘Obra Social’, a philanthropic
entity supporting cultural events or alleviating social problems. In Catalonia
for instance, they often funded Catalan language promotion or similar social
events. La PAH thought it would establish its own strategy for solving real
social problems by occupying empty buildings and using them for what they saw
as its intended purpose: to house people.
La
PAH’s Housing Reoccupation project for evicted families was criticized by both
the left and the right. For leftist and long-term squatters, it was not radical
enough because the strategy was not a permanent reappropriation. For
conservatives, occupation was a crime and a threat to private property. For my
interlocutors, it was a respite but not an optimal solution. Hector’s family is
just one example. There were a significant number of single-mothers and their
children, unemployed or in low-paid jobs, which constituted the greater portion
of subprime mortgages in Spain (and other places like the US). When I
interviewed Hector and his family, they had been living in the occupied
building for four months. The experience had been very difficult for them, and
they hoped to buy an apartment again in the future. Hector was just one case
among many people for whom homeownership was still the preferred housing option
and a marker of success.
Why
did my interlocutors want to own a house or an apartment rather than occupying
one or even renting it? To answer this question, I’d like to connect Debt with The Dawn of Everything. One of David’s most important invitations
in Debt is to move away from an
omnipresent language of debt. Thinking with David means questioning why people
narrate their lives in the idiom of debt and examining whether and how an
alternative approach is even possible. David goes to extraordinary lengths to
illuminate the very mechanisms that prevent us from living without debt. The
biggest endeavor of this book—to my mind—is showing us a path to freedom, real
freedom we can already access if we choose to recognize that many “big
theories” are in fact forms of reproducing a ruling class or the legitimacy of
the state. David knew wholeheartedly that anthropology is uniquely well placed
to document these sites of moral and monetary indebtedness.
In The Dawn of Everything, David along with
David Wengrow, characterize freedom as the potential for doing things otherwise
(something they see taking three primary forms). First, freedom to move or
relocate, the idea of being free to leave a place in the face of danger or
otherwise. Then, freedom to refuse orders or how not to be bound by hierarchy.
Finally, freedom to shape new social realities by choosing what is at the
center of our existence. I’m interested in following here the first freedom,
freedom of movement, as it is key in understanding why Latin-American migrants
became indebted in the first place and why they would consider doing it again
today. There are two key moments in Latin Americans’ migratory journey in which
debt is essential for moving. First, when they decide to travel (irregularly)
to Spain. The trip required anything between 4,000 and 5,000 US dollars which
were almost invariably a debt acquired in their countries of origin to move to
Spain. The second moment is buying a mortgaged property. To bring their
families from Latin America to Spain, migrants needed to show adequate proof of
housing, buying a home was the fastest route to reunifying with their loved
ones, mainly moving children from Latin America to Spain. Let me illustrate
this with another ethnographic vignette.
“The
thing is I didn’t even want to buy a flat, I was trying to rent one,” said
Juan. He had been trying to rent a flat in order to bring his wife, Paulina,
and their three children from Ecuador to Spain under a family reunification
scheme. They had been apart for nearly two years. It was his reunification
application that pushed him to look for a new place to live since he needed to
demonstrate to immigration services proof of suitable accommodations for his
family in Spain. Like many other migrants, Juan was aware that it was not
possible to accommodate family life in small bedrooms that were often no more
than lined, adjacent mattresses on the floor, or a few bunked beds in a room.
Migrants’ usual shared rentals were legally (and physically) inadequate for
bringing families to Spain.
Juan
wanted to rent a flat because he thought he would not qualify for a mortgage loan.
To him, private property was a superior form of housing. But in addition, he
was aware of the ease private property meant when faced with Spanish
immigration services. Each autonomous community has its own process of showing
proof of adequate housing. In Catalonia, the regional government, through its
Department of Family and Social Wellbeing, was responsible for providing a
report asserting the quality of housing. According to Juan, if one had a rental
agreement, the Department sent someone to check your home to know that it was
indeed as you described, that no other people lived with you, and that you were
able to house others—particularly children. However, as Juan explained, if one
had proof of property, they never sent anybody to check anything at all.
Reading
David’s three books together allows me to reflect upon this double-bind of debt
as the absence of freedom and its condition of possibility. I want to circle
back to David’s initial question: why was this movement so effective in
organizing around debt? As an activist of La PAH but also as an anthropologist,
I believe the movement was effective because it stuck with the problem of debt.
It never tried to solve it but showed when it became excessive and violent. The
basic requirements that the movement has long advocated for include stopping
home evictions without proper rehousing, making mortgaged properties the sole
collateral to a loan, implementing rental caps, and increasing social housing
availability.
Although
the Spanish movement for the right to housing does not seek a debt jubilee,
which David advocated for in his book, it offers us a space to politicize debt
relations. David never dismissed the PAH as a bunch of reformists, which
several leftist activists and scholars did and continue to do. David was more
interested in how people organized around debt collectively than what people
did with debt individually. It’s important to highlight that in over a decade,
La PAH has gone from a small group of activists meeting weekly in 2009 to becoming
the largest movement for the right to housing with over 220 nodes around Spain,
and weekly assemblies that gather—to this day—thousands of individuals to
discuss mortgage debt and political mobilization. La PAH is an effective
intervention into a growing reality of financial predation, a movement that has
learned to respond to injustice collectively, and a socially diverse space
where ideological conceptualizations (of debt or occupation and others) can
change.
La PAH
is not an example of how David thought we should deal with debt, and yet David
was always ready to learn from other people’s experiences and strategies. This
was very much David. A self-absorbed but incredibly generous activist, mentor,
scholar, and friend. While at Goldsmiths and the LSE, I often thought I had
gone in for a supervision but came out knowing about Occupy, Rojava, or his
friendship with Anton Newcombe—the lead singer from the Brian Jonestown
Massacre. Yet, upon listening back to each one of our conversations – I
recorded many – I found detailed guides for thinking differently about what I
was working on. They didn’t seem terribly evident at the time because he was
never telling me how to think. Rather, David was thinking with me based on his
own ethnographic examples and political aspirations. This, I believe, is a
perfect reflection of how he thought and wrote. He was never trying to tell
people how to think but was inviting us into his own way of connecting
seemingly disconnected phenomena, often going back several thousand years to do
that.
I’d
like to thank Jorge Núñez for thinking with me about many of the ideas advanced
here, and Alpa Shah for the opportunity to engage with David’s legacy at a time
when his ideas are greatly needed, and he is so dearly missed. To everyone here
today thank you for choosing to do exactly what David said occurs in mourning
and other acts of memorialization, these are an essential part of the labor of
people-making. Let’s continue making our relationships to each other matter in
ways that shape the futures we want to build. Thank you!
Maka
Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos, Center for Interdisciplinary
Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.
Graeber,
David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press: Distributed by University of Chicago Press.
Graeber,
David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.
Graeber,
David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of
Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.
Suarez,
Maka. 2017. “Debt Revolts: Ecuadorian Foreclosed Families at the PAH in
Barcelona.” Dialectical Anthropology 41 (3): 263–77.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9455-8.
Suarez, Maka. 2020. “‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona.” Ethnos, February 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687539
Cite as: Suarez, Maka. “Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH.” FocaalBlog, 21 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/21/maka-suarez-thinking-about-debt-with-david-graeber-and-la-pah/
Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by authoritarianism. This parallel cannot be explained as simply due to both countries being Theravāda polities. Nevertheless, dominant politics in both countries express elements of conservative ethno-Buddhism, within the cultural markers of national identity and contested political discourse. The political economy of political Buddhism in both countries can best be apprehended as genealogical problems in the context of an emergent new space, which heralds the inexorable logic of the future foretold: new hegemonic, populist/ultra-nationalist forms of governance, influenced by Chinese capital investment.
The Thai and Burmese generals are cooperating to ensure democracy and liberty are crushed in both countries. This unholy alliance goes back to the days when current General Min Aung Hlaing, chair of Myanmar’s ruling junta, regarded Thailand’s ultra-royalist now-deceased undemocratic General Prem Tinsulanonda as his adopted father and inspiration. Prem, as Chief Privy Councillor, was always close to the Thai palace and the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Their combined strategy was to use the military to restrict freedom and human rights, while appearing democratic. Military coups, along with violence, have been repeatedly carried out. Thailand has had some thirty coup attempts since 1912. Nicholas Farrelly notes, “Thailand’s 19 modern military coups and attempted coups distinguish its elite political culture from those of other so-called ‘coup-prone’ states. Since a bloodless military coup in 1932 [apparently] ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy, Thailand has failed to consolidate a democratic culture among its elites that would make coups inconceivable. Instead, episodic military interventionism – supported by persistent military influence in politics – is now part of a distinctive Thai coup culture that has been reproduced over many decades.” The 1932 military coup to overthrow the absolute monarchy never actually obliterated monarchical absolutism; it only masked the autocratic authority held by the military-monarchy alliance (Taylor 2021) behind limited parliamentary democracy (with senators handpicked and political leaders sanctioned by the palace). The current situation in Thailand can be referred to as “neo-absolutism” (Streckfuss 2014). This arrangement has endured under a façade of democracy maintained by mass propaganda and military control over the judiciary, apparatuses of state, and commerce.
In Sri Lanka, certain coup dynamics are not discernible given that the Rajapaksas and the armed forces are at one. Tellingly, Sri Lanka’s British-inspired constitutional traditions show an ability to withstand and counter the worst excesses of Sinhalese authoritarianism. But the militarisation of both the civil administration and public life continues. The consequence is the on-going strangulation of civic space, a dynamic we also discern in Thailand.
In the pre-European and colonial history of Sri Lanka and Thailand, there were Buddhist missions between Kandy and Siam. Indeed, the Kandyan Sangha was repurified by a mission that saw the Thai monk Upali Thera carry out upasampada for a small group of Sinhalese monks. So came into being the Siyam Nikaya in Kandy. Other missions followed. But from the late nineteenth century urban Theravāda Buddhism in both Sri Lanka and Thailand underwent modernisation and a concomitant fashioning of a thoroughly individualist ethic wholly consistent with the logic of capital. The ideological conservatism that characterises the urban Sangha in both Sri Lanka and Thailand is thus a consequence of this modernisation, or what Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988) characterised as “Protestantisation.”
Image 1: Sri Lankan Theravāda Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala Apadanaya (1864 – 1933) (source: Wikimedia Commons)
Here we look at the varied consequences of Buddhist modernism in Sri Lanka and Thailand
in two shared registers: First, marginalisation, ethno-chauvinism, and ethnic
palingenetic ultranationalism (Roger Griffin’s term) with its re-interpretations of a
conservative Buddhist ideology; and, second, an alliance between political elites
(i.e. Sinhalese senior public servants, military leaders, and a Sinhalese
political class, and, in Thailand, a monarchical regime with serving officer
corps) and a Westernised bourgeoisie, which sustains an ethno-historical prism
of nationalism, hierarchy and order. The more recent intervention of Chinese
capital has impacted these domestic social, political, and economic
arrangements, while creating neo-colonial regional dependencies.
When the Burmese Generals launched a coup in February 2021 there was speculation in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese leadership of the Sri Lankan armed forces would do something similar. The objective would have been to ostensibly bolster the Rajapaksas cultural-constitutional state project – one inspired by the Chinese Communist Party’s mediation of Han culture. Influenced by Beijing, the Rajapaksas and the new Sinhalese elites have rejected the constitutional frame of the nation-state (originating in the colonial-bureaucratic reforms of the 1830s) in favour of that of the civilisation-state. This is reflected in a desire to align the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist history. The Burmese generals have pursued a similar strategy. That said, Sri Lanka, for all its ethno-religious extremism, has maintained the outward form of constitutional government. Myanmar, by contrast, left the Commonwealth after independence and, following the military coup of 1962, General Ne Win declared that parliamentary democracy was alien to Myanmar’s Buddhist history (Aung-Thwin and Aung-Thwin 2013, 27). The Myanmar military, like much of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese nationalist elites, simply misrepresented its own past. However, what these countries share is a process of either voluntary or enforced Sinification, which will have disastrous consequences for the region. This will lead to consequences such as an increased debt burden with China, the destruction of home-grown industries, and the assault on both individuals and civil society who oppose Beijing’s clients.
Modalities of violence in the periphery
The Rajapaksas
came to power in 2019-20 with one stated objective: to restore good governance
(in light of the shambles of the previous Sirisena/Wickremesinghe government). In
this context, “good government” aligned with an ethno-nationalist ideology. The
Rajapaksas came to power promising security for the majority Buddhist
community, even if that entailed increased insecurity for non-Sinhalese
communities, particularly in the minority-dominated hinterland. Indeed, the
minor reforms of the Sirisena/Wickremesinghe period, such as reducing militarisation
in the northeast, were swiftly reversed. Since coming to power, the Rajapaksas
have spent much energy focusing on the margins of the nation-state,
specifically the hinterland of the northeast where ethno-religious minorities
are the majority.
Margins are
defined as sites far from the centres of state sovereignty in which states have
weak jurisdiction and political control and are unable to ensure implementation
of their programmes and policies. To the extent that both the Sri Lankan and
Thai states have sought to exercise control over their political and geographical
margin, their respective practices have been over-determined. By this we mean
that the state’s response to contradictory/antagonistic forces is reduced to a
singularity – the monopoly of state violence. That is to say, violence that is both
structural and “symbolic” (Žižek 2008) is necessary to mask the contradictions
emanating from the margins and the multiplicity of meanings that the margins
generate. Rather than confront the contradictions of the multi-ethnic/religious
peripheries imaginatively, the state resorts to the singularity of structural
violence.
In Thailand, the
state’s periphery is defined along ethno-religious terms and in terms of the
form that Buddhism and Buddhist practice takes, especially in the far north and
northeast where charismatic monks have dominated public religious life since
the nineteenth century. The political economy of space shows how the centre and
periphery are contested domains of power. The Thai (and previously Siamese)
state since the early twentieth century has, for example, pursued a policy of
cultural assimilation directed at the ethnic Lao of northeast Thailand and the
ethnic northern Thai (Khon Mueang) – a classic instance of symbolic violence.
This echoes processes in Sri Lanka’s northeast borderlands that led those with
hybrid ethno-religious sensibilities to increasingly identify as Sinhalese
Buddhists. Such is the legacy of urban Protestant Buddhism and its ossifying
logic with respect to identity, as H.L Seneviratne (1999, pp 105-120) documents
in his monumental work on the processes of rationalisation in Sinhalese
Buddhism initiated by the Theosophists in late nineteenth century Ceylon.
Religious
nationalism and ethno-culturalism
In Seneviratne’s
trenchant critique, the modernising
turn in Ceylon associated with Dharmapala led to a form of political Buddhism
that was culturally monistic; the Rajapaksas, the Sinhalese bureaucracy, and
the military are merely completing the policy agenda of political Buddhism
initially framed by the Vidyalankara in the first half of the twentieth century. Like all nationalist
projects it will succeed and fail simultaneously; the more it succeeds, the
more it will fail, for it will have to continually reinvent it’s other. Contemporary Sinhalese nationalism since
the demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) shows flexibility in selecting
its target – Muslims and Tamils, but also liberal-left Sinhalese, women’s
rights activists, and wider civil society. Given this intimidating scenario, an
exodus of educated middle-class Sri Lankans is likely (note the proliferation
of private English tuition on the island simply for the purpose of aiding migration
overseas).
In the meantime, the Rajapaksas are putting their wider mission into practice, focusing on transforming what remains of the resistant margins of the island’s northeast. The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the institutional weaknesses of the Sinhalese state, allowing for the renewal of Sinhalese nationalism and other forms of populism, although a resurgent Tamil populism remains elusive at this time. Wang observed in April 2021 that Covid-19 “had underscored how fragmented Sri Lanka’s domestic supply chains were, leading to inefficiencies throughout the logistics sector.” The impact was devastating on farmers trying to get their produce to markets and urban centres. However, in one domain the logistics of the state are very effective: the intensification of the Sinhalese state’s commitment to fashioning a homogenous vision of Sinhalese Buddhist cultural forms. N.Q. Dias in the 1960s first envisioned a policy designed to physically encompass the Tamils in the Jaffna peninsula, the Vannī, and the east. His plan initially was to be executed by the then Jaffna Government Agent (GA), the late Neville Jayaweera, whose task was to enforce the Official Language Act in Jaffna and assist Dias in developing a series of measures for dealing with an anticipated Tamil uprising against the impact of a discriminatory policy agenda pursued by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. To contain this future Tamil revolt, Dias staked his nationalist credentials by unfolding a plan to construct army camps encircling the Northern Province.
Jumping forward to 2021, the Rajapaksas are Dias
reincarnated. In the Eastern Province the Rajapaksa brothers (President Gothabaya
Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa) have set about the task of
completing the homogenization of the east in a Sinhalese Buddhist image.
Ironically, homogenization is what the LTTE sought in the east when they were
in the ascendency; more recently, Wahabi influenced Muslims in the east have
exhibited similar objectives. The Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who have
organized around the Rajapaksas may well succeed. To the task of making the dhammadīpa
whole in the Sinhalese nationalist imaginary, the new President appointed
an all-male and all Sinhalese Buddhist Presidential
Task Force for Archaeological Heritage Management in the Eastern Province.
The task force’s objective is to “build a Secure Country, Disciplined, Virtuous
and Lawful society” (Groundviews 2021). It is hard to imagine how a body that
is only comprised of retired and serving senior military and police chiefs could
achieve this, other than in the most specious way imaginable – one that serves
to further the Sinhalese nationalist dream of wholesale spatial reorganisation
in the east (in which the Tamils and Muslims are reduced to permanent
second-class status) in the name of a highly fetishized Buddhism. The secondary
purpose of this mission is to embed the long-term dominance of the Rajapaksas,
their kin networks, and their allies in the capitalist class and the military.
Thailand
protests and the monarchy issue
In Thailand, protests against the monarchy-military alliance continue. Many observers thought the student-led protests and international support would bring the authoritarian leadership in Thailand to its knees and the monarch to the negotiating table. In this, they were mistaken. The response has instead been increased repression. The current student-led protests (with an increasingly broad social base) have a genealogy that stretches back to the red shirt protests of 2009-2010. Many of these students were too young to know the violence and injustices committed on protestors in 2010 but seem well informed through alternative free media and their well-informed seniors. Ironically, during the 2010 violence against protestors, the international and domestic media were reluctant to talk about the legitimacy of red shirt claims, or to expose the atrocities committed by ultra-royalists and the military on the streets in Bangkok. The persecution since that time has not stopped. Ann Norman of the Thai Alliance for Human Rights has compiled reports of the state sanctioned assassination of red shirt democracy activists and the plight of those individuals forced to flee to neighbouring countries since the 2010 crackdown. In contrast, we have seen in the past year live coverage of student-led protests beamed across the world in real time and witnessed increasing police brutality – especially a violent militarised faction trained under the auspices of the king, known as Ratchawallop Police Retainers, King’s Guards 904.
The student-led protestors have made three demands of the ruling regime: sack the junta’s self-appointed Prime Minister, Prayut Chan-Ocha; establish a new democratic constitution; and reform the monarchy into a more accountable and transparent institution under the constitution. The fear at present is the increasing evidence of monarchical absolutism under the current king. The latter demand does not imply “toppling” the monarchy (lom-jao), though semantics make little difference to die-hard ultra-royalists concerned that democratic reforms would weaken their patronage networks. Meanwhile, the junta has been using propaganda to encourage fascistic followers wearing yellow shirts to take to the streets. This rise of the New Right is seen not only in Thailand, but also in Sri Lanka, India, and elsewhere (Taylor 2021; Bello 2019). In Thailand, these developments are dangerous as we have seen in the past when pro-democracy groups took their grievances to the streets, only to have agents provocateurs and reactionaries mobilised to generate violence. This is the endgame in an authoritarian state-sanctioned ruse.
The transmission of
knowledge these days is largely through social media and social networking or
messaging apps. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued
statements on the regime’s attempt to shut down conventional media
broadcasting, other than the royalist-military media (i.e, the Manager [Phuujadkaan],
Daily News, Bangkok Post and the Nation). But international NGOs have little
influence in Thailand.
If the regime does not
listen to the people, who does it listen to, other than the mostly
Bavarian-resident monarch? Publicly, the Royal Household in Bangkok has
maintained that the King’s public appearances during the year were cancelled
owing to the third wave of Covid-19, which Thailand has not yet
(at the time of writing) managed to get under control. As in Sri Lanka, the pandemic
has become a cover for further curtailing civil liberties and targeting those
engaged in democratic participation.
Regarding Thailand’s Covid-19 vaccine roll out, for the first year of the pandemic this was nothing short of a farce – the privileged pharmaceutical facility owned by the Thai king, Siam Bioscience, was supposed to manufacture the Astra Zeneca vaccine, but this proved to be a flop. As well, the country is now heavily dependent on China’s Sinovac/Sinopharm (not internationally peer-reviewed and showing low effectiveness), produced under a lucrative contract between a royalist-favoured company owned by the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) and the Chinese Government. Officially, 36% of the Thai population have been fully vaccinated, though this could be an overstatement. Meanwhile, those people who want a credible vaccine (where supplies are available) must buy their own.
Thailand’s shifting
political economy mirrors developments in other Theravāda Buddhist
majority states. Myanmar and Sri Lanka are exemplary of military-corporate
states that have become heavily indebted (both financially and politically) to
the Chinese state. The military in Thailand could also use a Covid-19 resurgence to further embed
the dominant role of Beijing and mainland Chinese commercial interests in the
Thai state, especially given that only Beijing has the financial capacity to
distribute development largesse. The latter is a real possibility in Sri Lanka
as Covid-19 community transmission
increases and the most likely means to counter such resurgence is China’s vast
currency reserves, the Sinopharm vaccine, and the patron-client dynamics
emerging between dominant elements of Sinhalese capital in Sri Lanka and the
corporate Chinese state. The corporate-military-royalist Thai state ought to see the dangers of
lopsided development, trade, and commercial relations if they continue to cede
economic sovereignty to China.
Political Buddhism and a third space
In Thailand,
the country’s propaganda machinery has been at full steam to create further
divisions in society, mocking the student-led protests as anti-monarchy and
anti-statist. This could lead to violence, making military intervention appear
necessary and justified, leading to another coup. In the sense of Henri
Lefebvre’s “politics of space”, the royalist Thai state and its compliant
capitalists and public sector servants are directed to ‘‘pulverise’’ democratic
space into a manageable, calculable, and abstract grid and prevent diverse
social forces from creating, defending, or extending contested spaces of social
reproduction and autonomy.
In Sri Lanka, the struggle over the constitutional anchoring/grounding of space has been reclaimed by Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa have found a willing ally in the task of fashioning a Chinese inspired “civilisation state” (see Collins and O’Brien 2019, pp 36-49), a state model which aligns the future evolution of the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist historiography. Similarly, Thailand also has groups that have coalesced under the umbrella of the “Buddhism Protection Centre of Thailand” (sun phitak phraphuttasasana haeng prathet thai), advocating for a relatively ossified form of Thai Buddhist state, which intertwines the cultural identity of the Thai-Buddhist community with the identity of the Thai state (see Katewadee Kulabkaew 2019).
In Thailand, we may see the creation of a radical
“third space” (Soja 1996) as a consequence of the 2020-2021 student-led
protests. In following Soja’s reading of Lefebvre, the “third space” is defined
as “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human
life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the
new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of
spatiality–historicality–sociality” (ibid. p.57). This has involved some
radical Buddhist monks, though not many compared to revolutionary Myanmar, as
the Thai Sangha is highly regulated at all levels by monastic and lay
conservatives and centre-state elites under the monarchy. There is little autonomy
for Thailand’s Supreme Sangha Council as directives now come directly down from
the king. If a radical “third space” opens up in Thailand it will be a turning
point from a “feudal-like” (sakdina) (see Reynolds 2018, pp 149-170) social order
towards greater democracy. Sri Lankan progressives can only dream of a future
in which a civil-society-generated “third space” may emerge and re-energise the
task of re-territorialising the ethno-Sinhalese state in an authentically
pluralist direction.
As Thai society and culture changes, the need for a new democratic constitution to replace the current 2017 military-drafted constitution, has become an imperative. The 2017 constitution is a partisan “cultural constitution” that allows for the capture of (absolute) state power by a monarchy-military (“deep state”) alliance. Its logic and structure are being emulated by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka as President Rajapakse harnesses a modernist reconstruction of Buddhist historiography to fashion himself as a monarchical president channelling the energy of an absolutist and righteous (dhammikorajadhamma) cakkavatti.
In Thailand’s militarised constitution, the “juristocracy” (Mérieau 2014) prospers on misuses and abuses of what is termed “judicial review”. A constitution is supposedly a mechanism for the organisation, distribution, and regulation of power. However, as a foundational law of the state, a constitution’s origins are always extra-legal, and yet it simultaneously constructs a normative framework for the organisation of the state and its institutions. Thailand’s 2017 constitution is so flawed that it should never have been validated by the Constitutional Court of Thailand (Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang 2017). In a democratic society, given broad social and cultural changes, a constitution will always need constant revisions at historical periods to reflect the concerns and cultural values of its citizens, as constitutional legitimacy depends on its cultural anchoring. But it ought not to be anchored in a highly fetishized conservative-elite Buddhist historiography. This historiography needs to be opened up to new possibilities that render it imaginable to think anew about the nature of the social and the political in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In both countries, but in Thailand in particular, it appears that the ruling political regimes and their state apparatuses hear, given the volume of the protests, but do not listen (Thai: phuak’khao dai’yin tae phuak khao mai-fang).
Roshan de
Silva-Wijeyeratne is Senior Lecturer in Law at Liverpool
Hope University.
James Taylor is
Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Adelaide, South Australia and
affiliate at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University.
References
Aung-Thwin,
Michael and Maitrii Aung-Thwin. 2013, A History of Myanmar since Ancient
Times: Traditions and Transformations, second edition. London: Reaktion
Books.
Bello, Walden.
2019. Counter-Revolution: The global rise of the far right. Halifax:
Fernwood Publishing.
Collins, Neil and
David O’Brien. 2019. The politics of everyday China Guidance for the
Uninitiated. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gombrich, Richard
and Gananath Obeyesekere. 1988. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in
Sri Lanka. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Groundviews. 2021.
“Shaping a Single Narrative, courtesy the Clergy and Task Forces,” 11 July. https://groundviews.org/2021/11/07/shaping-a-single-narrative-courtesy-the-clergy-and-task-forces/
Reynolds, Craig.
2018. “Feudalism in The Thai Past,” in Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face
of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Streckfuss, David.
2014. “Freedom and Silencing under the Neo-Absolutist Monarchy Regime in
Thailand, 2006–2011,” in Pavin Chachavalpongpun ed., Good Coup Gone Bad:
Thailand’s Political Development since Thaksin’s Downfall. Singapore:
ISEAS.
Seneviratne, H L.
1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Soja, Edward. 1996.
Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Taylor, Jim. 2021.
“Thailand’s new right, social cleansing and the continuing military-monarchy
entente.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 6(3): 253-273.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways
Reflections. London: Profile Books.
Cite as: de Silva-Wijeyeratne, Roshan and James Taylor. 2021. “State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/roshan-de-silva-wijeyeratne-and-james-taylor-state-and-crisis-in-sri-lanka-and-thailand-hearing-but-not-listening-in-the-theravada-buddhist-world/
