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.
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/
David Graeber’s Debt: The First
5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year,
he took part in the first New York City General Assembly that formed the Occupy
Wall Street movement. Much of the contemporary world revolves around claims we
make on each other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and payment
of taxes, wages, rents, fees etc. David addressed these through a focus on debt
in broad historical perspective. It is a central issue in global politics
today, at every level of society. The class struggle between debtors and
creditors to distribute costs after the long credit boom went bust in 2008 is
universal.
David held that the social
logic of debt is revealed most clearly when money is involved (Hart 2012). Following
Nietzsche, he argued that money introduced the first measure of unequal
relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Indeed, one school of
thought holds that “money is debt”. This includes the French and German
traditions. Money was always both a commodity and a debt-token, giving rise to
much political and moral contestation, especially in the ancient world. Whereas
Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he located the roots
of human bondage, slavery, tribute, and organized violence in debt relations.
The contradictions of indebtedness, escalating class conflict between creditors
and debtors fed by money and markets, led the first world religions to
articulate notions of freedom and redemption, often involving calls for debt
cancellation.
The book contrasts “human
economies” with those dominated by money and markets (“commercial economies”). These
societies are not necessarily more humane, but “they are economic systems
primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation,
destruction, and rearranging of human beings”. They use money, but mainly as
“social currencies” which maintain relations between people rather than being
used to purchase things.
“In a human economy, each
person is unique and of incomparable value, because each is in a unique nexus
of relations with others”. Yet money forms make it possible to treat people as
identical objects in exchange and that requires violence. Brutality is
omnipresent. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most
“human” of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is
commonplace. This is taken to another level when they are drawn into systems
like the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery and freedom — a pair driven by a culture
of honour and indebtedness — culminate in the ultimate contradiction of modern
liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially
isolated.
David Graeber then organizes
the world history of money in four stages: the first urban civilizations; the
“axial age” of world religions; the Middle Ages; and “the great capitalist
empires” that ended in 1971 when the US dollar abandoned gold. Money oscillates
between two broad types, “credit” and “currency” (bullion), between money as a
virtual measure of personal relations, like IOUs, and as impersonal things made
from precious metals. The recent rise of virtual credit money may indicate
another long swing in money’s central focus. Ours could be a multi-polar world,
more like the Middle Ages than the last two centuries. It could offer more
scope for “human economies” or at least “social currencies”. The debt crisis
might provoke revolutions. Perhaps the institutional complex based on states,
money, and markets (capitalism) will be replaced by forms of society more
directly responsive to ordinary people and their reliance on “everyday
communism”. David’s historical vision has no room for a Great Transformation in
the nineteenth century.
Most anthropologists of the
last century conceived of a world safe for fieldwork-based ethnography; another
minority interest co-existed with this. I call this “the anthropology of
unequal society”. Rousseau’s Discourse on
Inequality (1754) launched modern anthropology as the critique of unequal
society. Morgan (1877) and Engels (1884) were heavily indebted to him when they
reconstructed human history as the evolution of society from a kinship matrix to
states based on class divisions. This genre was continued by Lévi-Strauss (1949),
Sahlins (1958) and Wolf (1982), but with less explicit political content. Overlapping
the millennium, its main exponents have been Jack Goody (1976, 2013; Hart 2006)
and David Graeber (2011).
Goody sought to undermine
Western claims to superiority over the main Asian societies. He downplayed the
industrial revolution that allowed Europeans to take over the world in the
nineteenth century. Following Braudel (1975), Goody (2013) preferred to point
to the similarities between industrial capitalism and the “merchant cultures”
of pre-industrial civilizations. He claimed that Marx (1867) misread merchant
capitalism, but did not address his case for treating industrial capital as strategic.
Weber (1922) too gets short shrift for suggesting that modern capitalism
differs from its predecessors. Given their common origins in the Bronze Age
urban revolution, modern European capitalism diffused faster to Asia than the
Italian renaissance to Northwest Europe.
Despite a barrage of
propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and
democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization —
territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism,
bureaucracy, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue,
world religion, and the nuclear family (Hart 2002). The rebellion of the
bourgeoisie against the Old Regime was co-opted by “national capitalism” in a
series of political revolutions of the 1860s and 70s (Hart 2009). This severely
set back humanity’s emancipation from inequality. Consider the shape of world
society today. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, “the men
in suits”, rule masses who are predominantly poor, darker, female, and young.
The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, vainly try to stem
the inflow of migrants. Our world resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime
in France before the revolution (Tocqueville 1859). Goody may have a point in asking
us to reconsider how exceptional our societies are.
I have taken part in a
conference and book, Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East
(Weisweiler 2022), which was inspired by David’s Debt book. He drew
attention to the political economy underpinning a sequence of ancient empires
in western Eurasia from the Persians and classical Greeks through Alexander’s
conquests to republican and imperial Rome and the Arab conquest of the
Mediterranean. Its logic hinged on the need to provision vast armies on
prolonged marches. That meant using precious metal coinage, sustained by a
network of mines, states and mercenary soldiers, then converting conquered
peoples into slaves to be sold for the money needed to complete the cycle.
There seems little doubt that western empires from 1500 to 1800 relied on a
similar logic. But they were unable to take over the world until industrial
capitalism raised their technological competence to a far higher level than the
rest.
Marxists and liberals agreed
that a world-change was taking place in nineteenth-century Britain. Hegel’s
(1821) historical model, however, was very different from Marxism’s successive
stages (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism). His three phases were based
on the family and the land, the market economy of urban civil society and the
modern state respectively. These now co-existed under the coordinating guidance
of the state. Both Polanyi (1944) and Marx missed the revolutions of the 1860s
and 70s that installed a new class alliance in the leading countries, the
partnership between capitalists and the traditional enforcers that I call
“national capitalism”. This new alliance soon spawned the legal conditions for
modern corporations, as well as a massive expansion of state property and a
bureaucratic revolution at all levels of the economy. Mass production and
consumption was the result.
Image 1: Book cover and economist Thomas Picketty, photo by Frontieras do Pensamento/Greg Salibian (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Thomas Piketty’s (2014) book
on capital was the smash hit of our times. It was based on serious economics,
up to two centuries of national income accounting for a few rich countries. An
economist who can quote Balzac can’t be all bad. I identify three reasons for
his success. First, Piketty brought inequality back onto the mainstream agenda,
just as Occupy Wall Street did — “we are the 99 percent”; and this touched a
nerve after three decades of neoliberal responses to the financial crisis that included
bailing out the rich and making the poor pay. Second, Piketty’s argument rests
on two simple equations describing the relationship between capital and labour
over the last 200 years; he uses these to demonstrate that capital’s share of
national income must always increase. It is unlikely that teeming historical
diversity can be captured by timeless categories and equations. Third, against
the notion that capitalists make their money by producing competitively for
profit, Piketty claimed that property was a growing component of wealth; inheritance
and rent are neglected factors in distribution today.
There is something special
about the plutocracy built up in recent decades. The rise of modern
corporations comes from their being granted the rights of individual citizens
by the US Supreme Court in 1884; and they now combine those rights with their
long held special privileges, like limited liability for debt (Hart 2005). Even
the Romans, not noted as champions of democracy, limited the spending of the
rich on political campaigns. The US Supreme Court recently refused to accept
any restriction on corporate political spending since it would infringe their
“human rights” and allowed companies exemption from government rules on
religious grounds.
These corporations once built
their wealth by producing industrial commodities for profit at prices cheaper
than their competitors. Now they rely on extracting rents (transfers sanctioned
by political power) rather than on producing for profit in competitive markets.
Thus “Big Pharma” makes more money from patents granted by Congress than the
entire Medicare budget. Sony makes 75% of its revenues, not from selling
machines, but from DVDs which are reproduced, almost without cost, from movies
sold in cinemas; they call duplicating movies “piracy” (Johns 2009). Goldman Sachs
retrieved from the US Treasury at full face value the $90 billion lost by
insurance giant, AIG in the 2008 crash. These rent-seekers are not punished for
stealing from the public, but are bailed out by our taxes and held up as shining
examples of super-rich consumption to a public that has exchanged equal
citizenship for bread and circuses (reality TV). This is decadence: there are
no longer any national political solutions to economic problems that are global
in scope.
Marx held that industrial capitalist
profit subordinated rent and interest to its logic. This is why he and Engels
thought that Victorian England held the future of the world economy. New phases
of capitalist development and decline have been identified ever since. The
American macro-economist, Dean Baker (2011) provides much insight into rentier
capitalism in the US today. Selling stuff for profit means adding value through
production. Rent-seeking is “…an attempt to derive economic rent
by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic
activities occur, rather than by adding value”. Rent and interest (banking) no
longer take their scale, form, and function from industrial capitalist production
for profit, as Marx insisted in Capital. Has the focus of political
economy tipped away from industrial production (in the broadest sense) towards
rents derived from political privilege? It is hard to see how the richest 1%
could have done so well in the last four decades otherwise, given the overall stagnation
of production and real wages in this period.
The digital revolution in
communications is highly relevant, since many intangible commodities can now be
copied easily at no cost. If you steal my cow, I can no longer milk it, but
no-one loses out if I copy your song. Entertainment is the fastest-growing
sector of the world economy after finance. National capitalism’s rise to
dominance after the First World War is central to understanding today’s
economic crisis, since it has been eroded since the early 1970s. Digital Retail
Management regimes now being installed around the world illustrate the dominance
of political and legal coercion in the economy now.
Rent-seeking now trumps value-added through
production. The war over intellectual property escalates to ever higher levels
of absurdity; and the rise of Big Tech, in extending corporate command and
control, undermines our ability to make society in the interest of the American
Empire. Like Marx and Engels, I believe that the machine revolution can be a
force for greater economic democracy; but the open source and free software
movements have lost the influence they once promised. Our main hope is to
mobilise global networks to develop democracy, knowing that the multitudes are
faster than they are. That was certainly David Graeber’s project.
Image 2: Economist Dean Baker, photo by CEPR (CC BY 4.0)
David’s book is or will be
the biggest best-seller by an anthropologist, even over Ruth Benedict’s Patterns
of Culture (1934), the previous frontrunner. In 2011, he spent a sabbatical
leave from Goldsmiths in New York where he was able to promote the book heavily
before becoming a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was
invited by the German President to debate on national television with the
leader of the Social Democratic Party and Debt sold 30,000 copies there
in two weeks. In the last two decades his books have been translated into many
languages. He has a strong following in Japan, Korea, and China.
Debt’s phenomenal success was not
an accident or freak of creative genius (Hart 2020, 2021). Anthropology
narrowed its scope in the last century to meet the needs of academic
bureaucracy and lost its public appeal in the process. David set out to write a
big book with big ideas that allowed readers to place themselves in history.
Anthropologists, in adopting fieldwork-based ethnography as their standard
method, settled for narrow localism and a truncated version of their own history,
finding in ethnography a replacement for racist colonial empire, while ignoring
the fragmentation of world society into myopic nationalisms. David by-passed
all this to resurrect the Victorian polymath and the world thanked him
profusely for it. But there were other strings to his methodological bow, chief
of them the ability to combine academic life with revolutionary politics when most
of his colleagues were trapped in universities committed to bureaucratizing
capitalism (Hart 2021). From the time he was a graduate student, he trained
himself to write accessibly for the general public. He wrote each piece twice,
once for himself and once for everyone else.
David’s
intellectual success in a curtailed lifetime drew on self-conscious methods: vision,
imagination and endurance through hardship, for sure; reading with no bounds;
love of comparative ethnography; writing “to be understood rather than admired and
not for knowing and over-acute readers” (Nietzsche); active participation in democratic
politics; and returning to anthropology’s original mission as the study of
humanity (Hart 2020). Call that genius, if you like; I prefer to call it a
personal synthesis built on disciplined hard work over an extraordinary range
of human activities. If only we could each aim to emulate him in some respects.
Keith Hart is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London and a full-time writer based in Paris and Durban. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes will be published in Spring 2022.
Baker, Dean. 2011. The End of Loser Liberalism: Making markets progressive. Washington
DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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Cite as: Hart, Keith. 2021. “Comment on Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/keith-hart-comment-on-debt-the-first-5000-years/
In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major contemporary critics of our current economic paradigm. Around the same time, he contributed to the creation of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that made the book all the more timely and important. Debt is a sweeping historical account of ‘human economies’ and an exposé of the moral foundations of modern economics. In dialogue with a range of influential economic thinkers, Keith Hart critically assesses the significance of the book as an exemplary work of ‘anthropology of unequal society.’ Maka Suarez weaves the theoretical insights of Debt into her own ethnography of Spain’s largest movement for the right to housing (La PAH), analysing how La PAH exposes the kind of politicised debt relations that are the historical focus of David’s book.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at
LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute
and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s
Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE, Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and co-director of the Human Economy Programme. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. His latest book is Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes.
Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.
The last two decades in
anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given
David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and with the Western
Left more generally, this is even true for the Western world at large. With the
publication of his debt book (Graeber 2010) – also exactly a decade ago – as
Keith Hart once said, David became the most famous anthropologist among the
general public of our age, taking that long empty seat next to Margaret Mead
(and Levi Strauss perhaps). With the launch of the ‘Society for Ethnographic
Theory’, the HAU journal and the turn towards Open Access publishing, David,
now world famous, once more stirred up anthropology as well as academia more
broadly. It feels a bit weird to say this about an anthropologist of the gift,
but David literally made history by attacking established centers and practices
of power and wealth.
While some in this series of
seminars knew him well as a direct colleague or friend, I only ran into David a
couple of times. I felt it was not easy to get to know him. He seemed a bit
solipsistic, drawn into conversation with himself, sometimes mumbling and
laughing privately about the sudden insights he seemed to run into while doing
so. If you had not been introduced to that intimate conversation before, it was
not so easy to enter it, I felt. He and I never had the time to get to that
point, for which I am sorry.
I remembered these few moments
of mutual awkwardness while rereading Toward an Anthropological Theory of
Value (Graeber 2001). Its style of writing reminded me of David’s internal
conversations and his moments of private enjoyment. The narrative of this book
meanders, feels sometimes elliptic (as it does in all his books). The flow of
the argument regularly gets punctuated. Jolts of joyful energy seem to pull the
author in multiple unexpected directions. The possible connections that emerge
from the words that he happened to choose, seem to seduce him to leave the path
and get into the bush around it. David, who celebrates creative freedom, is
certainly the Zizek of anthropology. As with Zizek, things can become very
detailed within a narrative that was already far from linear. As a reader you may
feel you are being unduly slowed down, even taken advantage of. But David can also
take you by the hand while making a reckless jump, allowing you for a moment to
tower over a conceptual landscape where most people would normally be lost, and
you are struck by the sudden clarity of perception. I now imagine that such apparently
reckless jumps produced his moments of private enjoyment.
My discussion here of Toward
an Anthropological Theory of Value must be short. I will leave the bush aside
– the book has long chapters on gift giving societies in Melanesia, Madagascar
and among Amerindians, some of it very interesting, some of it less compelling
for non-specialists – and I will focus on the landscapes that emerge during those
conceptual jumps. This book is not just representative of his writing style and
his counterintuitive rhythm of discovery. It also partly lays out the tool kit
of concepts, perspectives, and issues that was going to dominate his later work.
In fact, it offers in embryo his full program of research. What is then David’s
theory of value? How do Marx and Mauss cohabit in it? How do his very outspoken
Chicago teachers, Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, figure? What are its
possibilities and blind spots?
David developed his
‘anthropological theory of value’ against the intellectual and political
background of what he calls ‘the bleak 1990s’. He is very explicit about it:
neoliberal hegemony, globalized capitalism, economics as dominant social
imaginary, post-structuralism, and the reduction of politics to ‘creative
consumption’ and identity, both in anthropology and other social disciplines.
While structure and history had gone out of fashion, he writes, action and
agency had become cynically equated in social theory to mere individual market
choices. Before 1989, Bourdieu had worked out ‘habitus’ as the connecting
concept between structure and agency (and Giddens had been busy with similar
issues). Graeber swiftly passes him by for the focus on dominance and power games
that underlie Bourdieu’s project, in David’s eyes another symptom of the
cynicism that he saw around him. For David, at this point in his career, it
still seemed paradigmatic that anthropologists are dealing with people in relatively
egalitarian societies and with people who desire (a core concept for him) to precisely
escape such power games. David proposes ‘value’ as the point where structure
and agency meet. After an interesting interlude on Roy Bashkar (and critical
realism) and his thinking in terms of forces, tendencies, and processes rather
than objects he emphasizes that his value does exactly that: setting open-ended
dialectical processes in motion. What is this value and what are the
anthropological traditions that help him shape it up?
The shortest way to answer
that question is to bring in that concept that is all but foundational for David’s
work: ‘constituent imagination’. While he borrows that term from Italian
autonomous Marxism (Virno and Negri), he links it to a long anthropological
pedigree that connects Klyde Kluckhohn, Marshall Sahlins, Terence Turner, Louis
Dumont, and others, all of whom are discussed in interesting and original ways
here. Value then emerges as what people tell themselves they find important in
the realization of their lives, not very different from the common-sense
meaning of value in various European languages. David’s value is emic,
idealist, and dynamic. While his notion seems initially not very different from
let’s say Talcott Parsons, David wouldn’t be Graeber if he didn’t loudly refuse
the implied structural functionalism: David’s value emphatically doesn’t work
to solidify stable social reproduction. On the contrary, it feeds the social
imagination, both collectively and individually, and it is both agonistic and
liberating. In the social processes that it sets in motion people die, strive,
love, compete, believe, pray, moralize, estheticize, sacrifice, fetishize, and
whatnot. Value is about making differences, and about ranking and proportioning
them. De Saussure’s structuralism may be essential for how our language and imagination
works, but David, following his teacher Terence Turner, adroitly embraces Vygotsky’s
‘generative structuralism’ and shifts the weight from langue to parole
and towards ‘signifying material action’. Hence his interest in ethnohistory
and the telling and remembering of histories. Stories become part of
‘constituent imagination’ in action, the practiced struggle for individual and
collective autonomous becoming and in how these struggles are being remembered.
In the end he concedes that his
foundational notion of value is perhaps not that different from Dumont, a student
of Levi Strauss and the ultimate theorist of hierarchy, except for its emphasis
on process, action, and agency. And while the structure of our social
imagination is certainly ‘a totality’ of the Saussurian kind and as such fully embedded
in the existing structuration of our societies, as well as fundamental for how
we teach our children and reproduce ourselves, it is clear to David that this
is a totality ridden by ambivalence and contradiction. There are inevitably
contradictions between desires and pragmatic realities. ‘Constituent
imagination’ often seems more the property, desire, and practice of individuals
or groups and moieties within societies than of societies as a whole.
Where is Marcel Mauss here,
David’s most basic theoretical and political inspiration? Mauss appears at all
levels of David’s approach. David spends some very interesting pages introducing
him as the key thinker for a non-cynical anthropology and for a humanist Left,
who famously rejected the Bolsheviks for their recourse to state terror,
authoritarianism, and bureaucratic diktat. In the book, Mauss of course appears
as the quintessential theorist of the gift and of egalitarian societies, which,
as I said, are for David at this point still the self-evident object of
anthropology. David may criticize him for his romanticism, but he fully embraces
his notion of ‘everyday communism’ as the glue of human sociality. Then there
is also the basic methodological notion of the ‘total prestation’ where the
full quality, the core values, of a whole society are reflected in each and
every of its parts, including the imaginations and actions of its members.
David does not discuss it explicitly, but if I’m not mistaken, he does seem to
think that Mauss’ approach may be too static for his purposes. The constituent values
for which people once congregated as a distinct group or society, may become corrupted
over time and people seek repair, interpretations will differ, agonistic and
liberating conflict will ensue. Holism, for David, therefore, does not take
away the dialectics. On the contrary, it feeds them and is fed by them.
In all this Graeber seems to
follow Terence Turner closely. And indeed, in a much later preface to a
collection of Turner’s essays (2017) David remarked that he wrote his value
book to make the notoriously complex texts of Turner understandable for a wider
public. The book was thus originally intended as a gift to Turner.
But Turner was strong on Marx,
indeed perhaps the most outspoken Marxist in the anthropology of the 1990s. And
Marx was strong on totality and dialectics too, but of a less idealistic kind. David
in this book sets a Turnerian Marx into a dynamic conversation with Mauss. How
does that work out? A Marxist will immediately wonder how the thoroughly
idealist concept of value as constitutive imagination that Graeber is on to
will relate to Marx’s similarly dialectical but certainly not idealist
conceptions of (use, exchange, and surplus) value. Most importantly, how does
it relate to Marx’s ‘law of value’, which is Marx’s short formula for talking
about the social relations of capitalist accumulation.
Graeber is sympathetic to the
young Marx who wrote on behalf of the emancipation of humans from their
self-constructed religious fetishes which he wanted them to begin to see as the
mere products of their own powers of creative imagination rather than as the gods
that they had to obey. This indeed corresponds perfectly to David’s own agenda
as his long and interesting discussions of fetishism show. But the post 1848 Marx
of capital and labor receives rather short shrift. David repeatedly complains
about the ‘convoluted language’ of Marxists. He does not like the Marxian
vocabularies and prefers for example to talk about ‘creative powers’ rather
than about labor (a concept that hardly appears in this book on value). Marx
for David is mainly interesting, he says, for his approach to money – and here
we find an early announcement of the coming book on debt. So, not capital, not
labor, but money. He emphasizes that for Marx value and money are not the same,
but in the next pages Marx’s value disappears and David gets stuck with money
and prices, which are of course a holistic system too. With Terence Turner, he
embraces the idea that ‘socially necessary labor time’ – a core element of
Marx’s ‘law of value’ – is also inevitably a cultural construct but the
discussions about that centrally important concept for Marx are not referenced
in this book as they are by Turner (2008). Nor does David seem aware that this concept
helps Marx to discover a particular relational form of value under capitalism
that consistently operates behind people’s back and is therefore ontologically
something rather different than a self-conscious ‘constituent’ value choice. In
Chicago David was apparently not exposed to Moishe Postone. He also does not seem
aware of the important value debates among Marxist theorists of the 1970s (in
particular Diane Elson 1979, whom Turner had read closely). Considering the
number of pages dedicated to such discussions in this book, Marx’s value appears
intellectually far less compelling then Kluckhohn’s, Parson’s or Dumont’s
value. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in David’s handling is then in the next
moment reduced to a rather static cultural concept for determining, via prices,
how important we find particular items of consumption as compared to other
items of consumption (cars: 7% of yearly consumer expenditures in the US in the
late nineties). David’s Marx, surprisingly, seems in the end not to be about
capital and labor but primarily about consumption, not unlike the way David’s
teacher Marshall Sahlins looked at capitalism in ‘Culture and Practical Reason’
(1976).
It is also as if David at once
forgets about his discussion of Roy Bhaskar and his own declared embrace of
forces, tendencies, and processes. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in Marx is a
dynamic dialectical relation between abstract capital and abstract labor that
produces immanent tendencies and is indeed also a dynamic dialectical cultural
construct. It is the basis for Marx’s ‘law of value’, which Marx knew well was
not a law but a tendency. As labor does its daily work for capital, labor productivity
would systematically be driven up because of the competition among capitals and
of the class struggle with labor, via mechanization, automation, and the
overall capitalization of life. Over time labor would lose any sovereignty over
its own conditions of life and social reproduction. Apart from being
disciplined in its wage claims and lifestyles, lest capital would move to
cheaper and more hardworking places, labor would also be forced into (paying
for) ever more education or face devaluation and degradation. And of course, it
would have to face the inescapable uncertainties of life and status. The same
would be true for cities, regions, and states that failed to compete within a
globalizing capitalism and would therefore literally be up for grabs. All of
this, including the geographically uneven and war-mongering repercussions, is a
logical part of Marx’s ‘law of value’. David could have used Mauss and the gift
to give a deeper anthropological and relational twist to Marx’s rather flat
notion of use value. But Marx is never allowed in this book to play on his own
unique strengths: in the end both capital and labor, the two elementary
positions whose combination produces not just use values and exchange values
but, crucially, surplus value, the very returns to capital that are the key
driver of social change in a capitalist world, simply disappear. According to
David Harvey (2018), Marx sees capital as ‘value on the move’. But in this book
that sort of value is just moved out – only to be rediscovered big time and with
‘anarchist concreteness’ in David’s later work on debt and bullshit jobs.
Constituent imagination is
David’s core concept. It was a concept that came from Italian Marxist
post-operaismo authors who were impressed by labor’s refusal to work for
capital in the Italy of the seventies and eighties after they had lost a series
of violent confrontations. Young workers now preferred to seek the creation of
autonomous worlds of life and labor outside the wage nexus. This is shortly
mentioned by Graeber, and he imagines, like James Scott, that his egalitarian kinship
groups similarly refused to further engage with hierarchical power centers and simply
moved out to constitute their own desired societies inspired by constituent
egalitarian imagination. Clearly, this is a further radicalization of the
original concept, which talks about evading the wage nexus but does not carry any
hint at a mass exodus out of Egypt towards a promised land and a new separate
society, to use an image. David even argues that all societies at some point
were formed out of such mass rejection of earlier power centers and were
therefore always founded on constituent imagination. This to me seems like an
extravagant claim, largely untestable, and suspiciously supportive of David’s
theoretical purposes. However, Italian Marxists such as Antonio Negri always
kept the development of capital and the state in dynamic tension with the
autonomous desires of his multitudes, which were indeed urban subjects rather
than spread out kin-groups in marginal spaces. In Graeber’s Value book that dynamic
tension disappears. David’s egalitarians are on their own, engaging in a
similar constitutive mytho-praxis that has inspired Marshall Sahlins’s work
(see also Jonathan Parry’s discussion of Lost People for a similar
disappearance of the IMF and therefore of global capital in David’s analysis of
recent Malagasy histories).
Image 2: Screenshot of David Graeber’s tweet responding to Arjun Appadurai’s critique of his book on debt.
David in this book firmly dismisses Appadurai’s ‘regimes of value’ notion (1986) for his neoliberal fixation on consumption. Appadurai recently returned the compliment by claiming that David’s anthropology was an entirely traditional one. David did a fantastic job in giving 21st century anthropology a new pride in focusing on egalitarian desires and popular values of autonomy in rejection of the rule of capital. But Appadurai is unfortunately right in one way: the values David envisions are emic, singular, particular, idealist, and deeply place-based and return us to classic bounded fieldwork and a bounded notion of culture. The book has no references to Wolf, Wallerstein, or anyone else dealing with space and multiscalar dynamic analysis of the dialectical value processes associated with globalized capital and the ensuing popular counter politics and desires. Except for a journalistic type of political economy, there is in fact hardly any serious political economy at all here, not even an anthropological political economy – a school that traces itself back to leading scholars like Wolf, Mintz, and Leacock, always largely ignored by both Graeber and Sahlins. David later improved marvelously on that lack with the Debt book (but see for example Kalb 2014), which, importantly, also brought long run and deep global histories back into anthropology. But while that book appears to have been incubated during the writing of this text on value via David’s interest in Marx and money, it is not yet conceptually or methodologically anticipated, and I do wonder how David later looked back on this very traditional anthropological theory of value he develops here.
David was a magnificent and
creative utopian and moralist. He was uniquely in tune with the resistant
Western mood of the times, from the alter-globalists to Occupy, including in
his embrace of the ethos of the mass refusals and moral outcries that we have
seen in the last twenty years, often driven by the desire for autonomy and the
condemnation of the overall bleakness of things. But he did not at all
anticipate the rise of the populist right, which is also very much about value
and values, and indeed loudly proclaims a desire for the resurrection of
(white, male, majoritarian etc.) hierarchy (see Kalb 2021 for further
discussion). The rise of the right in many places after the failed rebellions
of 2011 must be understood from within the failures of the ‘horizontalist’
mobilizations of which David and many of us were a part and which at that point
seemed to have an elective affinity with the anthropology of egalitarianism. Nor
does David’s book on value anticipate a situation where core central bankers
and enlightened economists write books about the economics of the green
transition with ‘value’ prominently in the title while making a claim to the
heritage of the value-driven popular risings that David sees himself part of (Carney
2020; Mazzucato 2019). And finally, in the excitement of retrieving some pride
for the traditions of the discipline, in David’s book on value we also seem to
have forgotten some of the earlier advances in ‘the anthropology of complex
societies’ and of ‘world society’, including some Marxist ones which are very precisely
about value.
Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and FocaalBlog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986.
“Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-36. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Carney, Marc. 2020. Value(s):
Building a better world for all. William Collins: Dublin.
Elson, Diane. 2015 (1979). Value:
The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: Verso
Graeber, David.
2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our
own dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David.
2010. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House.
Harvey, David. 2018. Marx,
Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. London: Profile books
Kalb, Don. 2014. “Mavericks:
Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world
anthropology.“ Focaal 69: 113-134.
Kalb, Don. 2021. “The
neo-nationalist ascendancy: further thoughts on class, value and the return of
the repressed.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 316-328.
Mazzucato, Mariana. 2019. The
Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London:
Penguin.
Sahlins, Marshall.
1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Terence Turner.
2008. “Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.” Anthropological Theory 8 (1): 43-56.
Turner, Terence. 2017. The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago: HAU Books.
Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2021. “Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’.” FocaalBlog, 13 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/13/don-kalb-constituent-imagination-versus-the-law-of-value-on-david-graebers-anthropological-theory-of-value.
I confess that the
first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in
Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to become his Debt
book. He covered 5,000 years in 50 minutes, and this was in an era when the
Grand Narrative was very much out of fashion. His presentation struck me as
rambling and incoherent.
Over the past 15 years
I have come to change my mind about him completely. I have just published an
article (Gregory, 2021) where I have argued that Sahlins and Graeber should
have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. For many, this is high praise,
but I can’t be sure that David would accept it. His approach to the theory of
value stands opposed to everything the so-called ‘Nobel Prize’ for Economic
Science symbolises.
My brief today is to
discuss his book Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001). I
shall keep to that brief as best I can. I must say, however, it was only after
reading his books on Anarchism (2004), Direct Action (2009), Debt
(2011), and Bullshit Jobs (2019) that I began to get my head
around the central arguments of his Value book, by far his most difficult
book. What struck me about all these books was the extraordinary unity of theme
and content. I see them as a five-volume study of the value question. I am not
saying that this is the best way to interpret what he has done. There are many
ways to approach his work. This is the one I find most useful.
In the acknowledgements to his Value book David thanks everyone at Palgrave except the editor who made him switch around his title. If we restore the order he wanted, the main title of his book becomes, The false coin of our own dream, and the subtitle, Toward an anthropological theory of value. This inversion gives us a different angle on his work. The word ‘toward’ suggests a movement, not yet completed, from an old theory to a new one. It also brings the expression ‘the false coin of our dreams’ to front and centre. The origin of this expression can be traced back to Mauss and Hubert in their General Theory of Magic (1902-03; 1972), but David gives the metaphor a 21st century twist. As I see it, the phrase false coin of our own dreams defines a paradox that is the central organizing metaphor of all five volumes of his books on value. But what does he mean by this paradox?
My short answer to this
question is that he is referring to the political battle over those big ideas
that can change the world. For him the value question is, first and foremost,
the battle over competing images of wealth. The false coins are the images
of wealth produced by the dreamers of yesterday, the false coiners of an image that
has become adulterated and debased through excessive use over time. David the dreamer
wants to recoin these debased images of wealth to create a new image of what
could be. His dream is not a fantasy. It is a real possibility grounded in
economic history, cultural geography, and the political present. Graeber the dreamer,
then, is a political activist who wants to appropriate the false coins of the
ruling elite, melt them down, and forge something new in collaboration with
those who have a hopeful image of the future. He wants to join them in the
streets as they ‘shout, clamour and make joyful noises’ in the now obsolete
sense of the word ‘dream’ (OED).
What is this new image
of wealth?
David, we must never
forget, was born in New York and raised in Chelsea, just four miles from Wall
Street. He has a New York-centric view of the world he has never lost. This
visual image captures the essence of his approach as I understand it. It shows
the Charging Bull sculpture that artist Arturo Di Modica secretly
installed near Wall Street in 1989 in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock
market crash. In 2017 Kristen Visbal installed her sculpture of Fearless
Girl facing down the Charging Bull, but following complaints, the Fearless
Girl was relocated to a different part of Wall Street, totally transforming
Fearless Girl’s symbolic power. She now represents, Google Maps tells
us, the fight for female equality inside the boardrooms of Wall Street. The
original juxtaposition of images admits of a very different interpretation,
especially when we overlay with the lyrics of the ‘blah, blah, blah’ song the
rebellious young sing.
Image 1: Fearless girl statue by Kristen Visbal, New York City, Wall Street, by Anthony Quintano is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Greta’s ‘blah, blah, blah’ is a quote from a song very popular among the young. The other line of the song goes ‘Ja, Ja, Ja.’ The language of this song is not double Dutch, even though the elite might think so given that the composer, Armin van Buuren, was a Dutchman. A Dr Sev from Poland has mixed Greta’s speech and Armin’s song. It was premiered on YouTube 30 September 2021. The sonic image, created to excite the passions of the young, raises a serious question: What does ‘No more blah, blah, blah’ mean? What is the message the young are trying to convey to those in power with lyrics of this kind?
Enter David Graeber,
the bilingual Wall Street ethnographer. Not only has he has learned the
language of the bulls and the bears inside the offices of Wall Street, but he
has also learned the language of the young protestors on the streets outside in
New York, London and elsewhere. In May 2019 he attended the Extinction Rebellion in London. He duly
recorded what they said and reported it (Graeber 2019). The following is my
very brief gloss on how he might re-present their point of view.
‘No more blah, blah, blah’ is a polite way of saying: ‘tell us the
truth about climate change. Stop lying. Stop talking bullshit. Don’t give us
bullshit jobs to do. We, too, are capable of imagining different possibilities
for life on earth. If you old folks in power don’t listen to our dreams, we are
all finished (one imagines that the protestors may have used different F-words
in this final sentence).
The distinction here
between the liar and a bullshitter, which David (2018: Ch 1, fn 10) notes but
does not develop, is very important
one. The bullshitter, Frankfurt (1986) notes in his classic essay, is one who
exaggerates or talks nonsense to bluff or impress. The liar, by contrast,
deliberately sets out to mislead with falsehoods. In other words, it is one thing for an academic to talk
nonsense unintentionally to impress, but quite another for a politician like
Trump who knows the truth to deliberately propagate falsehoods. Bulls can also
produce manure, which is to say that the academic bullshitter can produce
something very useful.
We are dealing here with two quite distinct values. The ambiguous
quality of academic bullshit requires that it be handled with the greatest of
care and respect. David does precisely this in his writings. However, his
unique meandering rhetorical style takes some getting used to. I can now see
some virtues in it, but it is not one that I would urge my students to imitate!
Let me now move to
David’s analysis of the language of those on the other side of the barricade.
The bulls and the bears of Wall Street who excite the emotions and imagination
of academics and well as sculptors, singers, and other creative artists. On the
one side we have academics from the schools of business and economics who
crunch the numbers and give advice, for a price, to the politicians and
shareholders who run the show. On the other side, we have academics like David
who occupy the streets and call for radical change, often at some cost to their
careers.
Academics, then, can be
divided into three categories: those who work for Wall Street, those who work
against it, and those interested in other questions. It is a quaint feature of
the English language that those who work for Wall Street are called ‘policy
advisors’ whilst those who work against it are called ‘political activists.’
Henceforth I shall refer to both as political activists. It is obvious, then,
that the schools of business and economics and law are full of political
activists whilst anthropology has very few. This raises the uncomfortable
question for us non-activists of the political implications of our inaction.
Activists in the
schools of Economics and Business come in many different stripes and political
persuasions defined by their approach to the theory of value: Neo-Smithian,
Neo-Ricardian, Neo-Marxist, Neo-Keynesian and Neo-classical among many others. Most
belong to the mainstream neo-classical school epitomised by the work done by
the economists of the Chicago School of Economics, a school that has produced
ten Nobel Prize winners, two short of Harvard, the top school.
The image of wealth
that informs the thought of these people, I assert, is the false coin of
David’s dream, the anti-thesis that defines his thesis. Let me be clear. When it
comes to an image of wealth, there is a sense in which David is opposed
to the whole history of European economic thought from Adam Smith in 1776 to
the Nobel Prize winners of 2021. Everyone. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevon, Keynes,
Friedman. It is a different matter when it comes to concepts of value
and specific theories of value and, especially those of Marx. Some fine
conceptual distinctions between images, concepts and theories
are at stake here. I will come back to this trichotomy below. In the meantime,
it suffices to note that when a theory of value uses concepts to
make an argument it presupposes an image of wealth as a moral
precept.
What does this ‘false
coin’ of European economic thought look like? What image of wealth does
it excite in the mind of its beholders?
In 1895 Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to be awarded to those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.’ Five prizes are given each year: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace. In 1968 the Swedish Central Bank donated money for a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel. This award, which is administered by the Nobel Foundation, it not a Nobel Prize. However, by the operation of the Law of Contagious Magic, it is falsely called the Nobel prize in Economics when in fact its real name is the Swedish Reserve Bank [Sveriges Riksban] Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobel’s descendants are very unhappy about this situation. ‘Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being,’ said Peter Nobel, a great grandnephew. In 2001 they demanded, without success, that the Nobel name be dropped from the Swedish Reserve Bank award because, they said, Alfred Nobel was highly sceptical of economics and as such the existence of this award was an insult to his legacy.
David Graeber and Alfred Nobel obviously shared certain
assumptions about the ability of economic science to confer wealth and
happiness upon humankind. I feel, therefore, that while he would reject the
Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science, he would happily accept the Nobel
Prize for Peace. As Don Kalb (2014: 115) has correctly noted, David is a
political activist in the Gandhian tradition rather than the Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary tradition. Music, dance, and discussion are his preferred
weapons, not guns.
David has a very
interesting discussion of ‘dream tokens’ in his Value book, but I fault
him for not including a discussion of the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science as a token of
value. This is the true coin of the economic scientist’s dream, but the false
coin of David’s dream. For David, the token is a ‘false coin’ because it
epitomises an impoverished and debased Eurocentric image of wealth, one whose
use-by date has long passed.
David’s life’s work has
been the search of a better image. For inspiration he raided the cabinet of
ethnographic curiosities, the historical archives, and of course spoke to the
young. He has no new answers to old questions. His concern is to identify the
constraints that economic history and cultural geography impose on our capacity
to imagine new possibilities for life on earth. This enables him to pose new
questions and to change the terms of debate. He has no manifesto, no
commandments, just difficult questions that get to the root of the matter. He
is primarily concerned to excite creative debate about issues of pressing
importance for the human condition. If you are looking for simple answers to these
questions you will not find them in David’s work. He is no messiah. He teaches
us how to think, not what to think. He takes a few steps toward an
anthropological theory of value. He has not arrived at the final destination.
The theory of value is the most hotly disputed subject in economics. If you ask ten economists to define money, for example, they will give you ten different answers. However, when it comes to the question of an image of wealth, there is remarkable agreement. This can be found in the image they have selected for themselves to distinguish their discipline. I refer to the image of the horn of plenty, the symbol of abundance and nourishment found in European mythology that appears on the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science but not the real Nobel Prizes. All 89 Economic Science laureates have all proudly accepted this token as a symbol of the true coin of their dreams.
Image 2: Nobel Prize vs. The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize
David correctly notes that modern European economic thought has its origins in the secularisation of European economic theology. This image of the horn of plenty, which has its origins in a Greek myth, could not be a better illustration of his thesis.
For the economic
scientist the horn of plenty conjures up images of Adam Smith, their revered
founding ancestor, whose book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776) serves as the creation myth of their science. The
very first line of his classic text introduces the image of wealth that his
concepts and theories presuppose.
“The
annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all
the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which
consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is
purchased with that produce from other nations.” (Smith, 1776: 1)
What students in
Economics 101 don’t learn is that Adam Smith had a labour theory of value, one
that excited the thoughts of Karl Marx. Marx’s revised version of Smith’s
labour theory of value was published in 1867. Like Smith, the very first line
of Marx’s classic work introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and
theories presuppose.
“The wealth of
those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevail presents
itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.” (Marx, 1867:1)
What separates these
two images of wealth was, of course, the industrial revolution. This revolution
not only excited the thinking of radicals like Marx, but it also excited the
thinking of more conservative thinkers such as William Stanley Jevons and two
others who were independently working on a new theory of value that turned
Smith’s objective labour theory of value upside down. This was a subjective
marginal utility theory of the value based on the mathematical calculus of the
pleasure and pain derived from the differential consumption of goods. It
provided different answers to questions about wages, prices, and profit. Instead
of a class-based historically grounded theory of profit as exploitation,
Jevon’s theory was based on the figure of the abstract, ahistorical individual
making free choices in the marketplace. In came Smith’s doctrine of laissez
faire, out went his labour theory of value. This new theory of value was
informed by a radically new paradoxical image of the horn of plenty. As Robbins
(1932:47) put it, “wealth is not wealth because of its substantial
qualities. It is wealth because it is scarce.” Thus, wealth for the
conservative economist is not the material abundance produced by industrial
wage labour, but the subjective scarcity as perceived by the universal consumer
of consumption goods.
Marx’s political economy inspired the dreams of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others; Jevon’s economic science the dreams of the heretic Keynes, the true-believer Friedman, and others. At one extreme a very negative Smithian-inspired image of wealth as historically specific surplus value, at the other extreme a very positive Smithian-inspired image of wealth as universal scarcity value. The rest, as they say, was the history of the 20th century.
David concern is the quest for a 21st century image of wealth that enables us to put this Eurocentric image in its place and to imagine something that goes beyond it. David’s thinking was inspired by the comparative ethnographic literature which revealed to him the common ground of both sides of the debate between economists. Like Sahlins, he rejects the idea of universal scarcity and strives to extend Marx by looking at the ethnographic evidence on non-capitalist and pre-capitalist images in the quest for a 21st century post-capitalist image.
“Political economy”,
David (2007: 47) notes, “tends to see work in capitalist societies as
divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always
factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to
women.” Political economy gives primacy to abstract labour time on the
factory floor. David wants to turn this upside down and give primacy to the
creative thoughts and actions of people engaged in the process of reproducing
their society and their children in a culture of their own making.
As a contribution to thinking about the value
question in general, David’s work in not original. He is careful to acknowledge
his debt to the many anthropologists who have inspired him, especially his
teachers at Chicago: Terry Turner and Nancy Munn. He also acknowledges the work
of many others whose work he has critiqued such as Marilyn Strathern and me. Since
he published his book, many other anthropologists, such as Hart and Hann, have
developed important new approaches to economic analysis that put human beings
at the centre.
What distinguishes David’s contribution, it seems
to me, is that his five-volume study of value is the most radical and the most
ambitious. David’s life work—which now amounts to some fifteen books by my
count—is nothing less than a whole socio-economic history and cultural
geography of the human condition.
A defining characteristic of David’s approach is
his interest in the economic theology as well as the political economy of
wealth. He finds much economic theology in European political economy, and much
political economy in non-European economic theology. He is concerned with what
our image of wealth has become and with signs of hope of what it can become.
One of David’s projects, for example, was the deep cultural history of the secularisation of European economic theology, and the extent to which the secularisation was unfinished business. European political economy from Petty in 1662 to Marx in 1867, for example, is full of talk about Father Labour and Mother Earth as the creators of Wealth, but no mention of God the Son in the form of a wheat-God named baby Jesus or baby Zeus suckling their mother’s milk. This partial secularisation of the horn of plenty myth not only devalues women as mothers, but it also devalues males as sons as the supreme form of wealth. This is a truly great revolution in human thought, one whose English history the OED lexicographers have documented in painstaking detail. I know of no male-centric economic theology of wealth from the non-European world that goes this far. In 21st century India, for example, the quest for wealth in the Smithian laissez faire sense reigns supreme, but so too does the ideology of the son as a supreme form of wealth. As the census data on the sex ratio shows, this ideology is strongest in those areas of Northwest India where capitalism is the most advanced. Where I work in east-central India, by contrast, the economic theology of wealth assumes the ritual form of a rice goddess named Lakshmi, the daughter of Mother Water, not Mother Earth. The 31,000-line sacred poem priestesses sing celebrates Lakshmi as fearless daughter rather than dutiful wife. Indeed, her wedding to a wife-bashing husband leads to her demise. The story has a happy ending when wife-beating husband, and jealous co-wives realise the error of their ways. As political economy this theology is womb-centric, daughter-centric, rice-centric, and water-centric. But as David notes, comparisons like this enable us to perceive the phallo-centric, wheat-centric European images of wealth of Political Economy for what they are.
Concluding remarks
Theories of value
present themselves as descriptive accounts of the world that use a limited set
of concepts—such as ‘use-value’ ‘exchange-value,’ ‘reciprocity,’ and the
like—to develop general theories about what is. The flip side of these
descriptive accounts is a prescription of what should be. The difference
between a description and the prescription are the policy conclusions needed to
bring about the changes necessary to close the gap. When it comes to Political
Economy and Economic Science, the prescription is a very simple image of
wealth, one that has its origins in Adam Smith’s version of the Greek myth of
plenty. On the one side, an historically specific image of the abundance of
commodities, on the other side a universal image of scarce goods.
This Eurocentric dream, which has enabled millions of people the world over to escape from the material poverty of their forebears, has become the nightmare of us all. It has led to obscene wealth here, dire poverty there, and environmental destruction everywhere. David rightly identifies the image of wealth that informs Political Economy and Economic Science as the false coins of our dreams today. The anthropologically and historically informed concepts and theories that he develops in all his books are all concerned to reveal the debased and worn-out nature of this false coin. He wants to encourage collective thought about how to forge a new image of wealth. The concepts and theories in his Value book, his Debt book and his Bullshit Jobs book present us with alternative images of wealth from non-European, non-capitalist economies, pre-capitalist economies, and 21st century capitalist economies respectively.
The image of wealth
that informs David’s dreams, like all images of wealth, is very simple and
possible to achieve. He wants to move the focus of attention from the
production of commodities, and the consumption of goods, to the reproduction of
people, one where the children of today have a say in the world of tomorrow.
The task of re-imagining a world where people can reproduce themselves has
become a very urgent one. His writings reveal the huge gap between what is and
what could be. His non-violent political actions, and his optimism, remind us
that scholarly work is a necessary but not a sufficient means to achieve this
end. Political activists in the schools of Business, Law, and Economics who
give ‘policy advice’ to governments and the captains of industry have long
recognised this fact. The Fearless Girl who used to oppose the Charging
Bull on Wall Street reminds us that anthropology for David is not just
about taking a point of view, it is also about taking action. Anthropologists,
he might say echoing Marx, have only interpreted the world; the problem,
however, is to change it.
Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.
Gregory,
C. (2021). On the Spirit of the Gift that is Stone Age Economics. Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, LV (1), 11-34. doi: DOI: 10.26331/1131
Hubert,
H., & Mauss, M. (1902-1903). Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. L’Année
sociologique, 7, 1-146.
Kalb,
D. (2014). Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and
Marxism in world anthropology. Focaal:
Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (69), 113-134. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2014.690108
Marx,
K. (1867). Capital. Vol. I: A Critical
Analysis of Capitalist Production: Moscow: Progress.
Mauss,
M. (1972). A General Theory of Magic,
with a foreword by D. F. Pocock (R. Brain, Trans.). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Robbins,
L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and
Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.
Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1970.
Cite as: Gregory, Chris. 2021. “What is the false coin of our own dreams?” FocaalBlog, 9 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/09/chris-gregory-what-is-the-false-coin-of-our-own-dreams.
David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in
Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis. It was
not for some years that it appeared in print. That was 2007, and by then he had
already published a considerable amount of other work, including a couple of
significant books. To my shame, I have to admit that I hadn’t read Lost
People until Alpa signed me up to comment on it today and that I should
never have accepted her invitation. I am neither a specialist on Madagascar,
nor expert in the literature on slavery or on narrative and history. But it’s
worse than that. Something I have always especially admired about David’s
writing is its clarity; his ability to state propositions that seem blindingly
obvious once he has set them out but were never obvious before. Several of Lost
People’s reviewers comment on its literary qualities, so I guess it’s just
me. For my part, however, I found it uncharacteristically heavy-going, its
narrative labyrinthine and its detail overwhelming. I was often unsure that I
was getting the point.
David himself describes its style as experimental, “a kind of
cross between an ethnography and a long Russian novel.” The aspiration was to
produce a ‘dialogic ethnography’ that would do away with the distance between
author and informants created – as David sees it – by so much social science
writing. As I’ll later explain, he here draws a sharp distinction between
social scientists and historians, and he identifies himself squarely with the
latter. His sympathies are with what he represents as old-style ethnography
where the objective is to provide a window on a way of life rather than to
deploy ethnography – as is currently usual – as a prop for some single
theoretical argument. He wants his Malagasy interlocutors to emerge “as both
actors in history, and as historians” (Graeber 2007, 379).
Despite the difficulties of his text, it’s relatively easy to say
what it’s centrally about and to summarise its main narrative. In case there
are people present who haven’t read it, or whose memories need refreshing,
that’s what I’ll do. It’s centrally about slavery, about its local history, and
more especially about its post-abolition legacy. Above all, that is, it’s about
the past in the present, about the ways in which history impinges on
contemporary relations between people of free and of slave descent in a rural
area in the western highlands of Madagascar, an hour or so drive from the
capital, Antananarivo. Betafo (his fieldsite) is in Imerina, the old kingdom of
the Merina people, who ruled most of the island in the nineteenth century, and
of whom Maurice Bloch has written with such distinction. David’s main window on
these relationships is through the narrative of an ordeal held in 1987, that
provoked the ancestors, resulted in disaster for the principal protagonists, and
ended by dividing the community even more deeply than formerly between people
of slave descent and the “nobles” who had been their erstwhile masters. This
narrative threads through the book with new interpretations, new perspectives
on it, and new details piling up over 400 pages.
Betafo, something like a parish, is made up of around fifteen
scattered hamlets which in total have a floating population of 300-500. It’s
locally notorious for witchcraft and sorcery, and for the hostility of relations
between its inhabitants – a major reason for selecting it, David reports. In
the 1980s, it experienced an epidemic of petty thefts. The village assembly
decided to hold an ordeal to identify the culprit(s). The villagers were to
drink water in which earth from the ancestors’ tombs had been dissolved. But
since they were not all of the same ancestry – there were nobles and ex-slaves,
who were in principle totally separate groups between whom marriage was
theoretically impossible – the earth should come from two separate tombs. And
even that was a political fudge because the ex-slaves weren’t in fact a single
descent group, though that is how the procedure adopted for the ordeal
represented them. Nor was this provocative mixing of earth the only dangerous
blunder. It turns out that both elders who had instigated and organised the
ordeal – one noble, one slave – had recently taken a wife from the other group.
They were guilty of mixing bodily fluids and bloods as well. No wonder disaster
followed. The rice had just been harvested and was still in the fields. A flash
flood swept it away. Actually, it later transpired that it was only the crops
of the two elders that were completely destroyed. This was 1987. David started
his research three years later and witnessed the aftermath. What had been
intended to reassert communal solidarity had provoked a definitive rift. Now
‘blacks’ (slave descendants) were avoiding ‘white’ (‘noble’) parts of Betafo
and were exploiting their reputations for magical powers and knowledge of local
taboos to harass and constrain Betafo nobles who had moved to the capital but
were now threatening to return and to resume their lands.
In parenthesis, it should perhaps be said that by standards
elsewhere, the levels of antagonism seem muted. Returnee nobles might be told
that there was a taboo on taking water from a particular spring. They weren’t
physically attacked or forcibly prevented from moving back home. Intermarriage
was anathematized, but we nevertheless hear of quite a few instances. None had
resulted in murder, nor even in serious boycott. Compare rural Bihar or Haryana
where couples who have contracted such serious misalliances could never be
sure of their safety.
Even in eighteenth century Madagascar, slavery and slave-trading
had a prominent role in many local economies. In the nineteenth, however,
slavery took off spectacularly in Imerina after the British did a deal with the
Merina king by which he agreed to halt the international trade of slaves for
guns on the understanding that the British would supply him with guns anyway
(and would not supply his rivals). That enabled the Merina state to dominate
most of the island and to capture more and more slaves. They were deployed on
public works and in agriculture in the Merina heartlands from where more and
more Merina went as soldiers. Later in the century, perhaps as many as half
Imerina’s population were slaves, according to Bloch. It was in any event an
enormous proportion and that had a profound impact on Merina society and
cultural representations.
The French annexed Madagascar in 1895. Slavery was abolished in
1897. From Betafo many nobles moved off to the capital to join the civil
service, a few to Paris. Their former slaves became their sharecroppers and
generally thrived. That was widely attributed to their manipulation of their
magical powers. The downward mobility of many nobles was put down to the sins
of slavery – even by nobles themselves. Nobles were increasingly deeply divided
between a rich elite (who largely moved out) and the poor (who largely
remained). David offers a vivid picture of just how opulent and aristocratic
these rich nobles were in the early years of the colonial period with their
twilit parties, music and dancing, and their colourful silk garments and golden
diadems. Still at the time of his fieldwork, émigré nobles would descend on
Betafo in numbers to collect a share of the harvest or to bury some kinsman in
their ancestral tomb. When a corpse was flown in from Paris, the paths were
jammed with cars and vans, and in their hundreds ‘everywhere around the tomb
were knots of grave-looking men in three-piece suits with expensive watches,
ladies in silk dresses, pearls, gold and silver jewellery.’ Within village
society itself, however, the most fundamental division – regardless of class –
remained that between andriana (nobles) and andevo (slaves).
Though the topic of slavery was avoided, nobody could ever forget it, and
slaves were still associated with pollution and ideas of contamination.
Crucially, however the situation of many of these émigré nobles became seriously precarious after the 1972 revolution. Subsequent to it, the peasant sector was badly neglected. The government took vast loans for development which it could not service, resulting in insolvency, dependence on the IMF, structural adjustment, the slashing of state budgets, the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside, a catastrophic collapse in living standards and widespread pauperization. The state largely withdrew from places like Betafo, leaving them as “temporary autonomous zones.” At the same time, many metropolitan civil servants were badly impoverished and were tempted to move back to their ancestral villages to resume the land that their ex-slave sharecroppers had been cultivating. And that, of course, is the essential background to the tensions that resulted from the Betafo ordeal at the heart of Lost People.
What that background significantly qualifies, as it seems to me,
is David’s claim to represent his informants as both actors in history and as
historians. Of course, they are the first in a limited sense, but as
actors they are highly constrained and have little autonomy. By that I mean to
suggest that the most important part of the story that explains why Betafo’s andriana
and andevo are at each other’s throats takes place off-stage between
the Malagasy state and the IMF in Antananarivo’s corridors of power. That is
what really drives the story and that bit of it is pure Graeber. It has no part
in his informants’ narratives, which are as it were epiphenomenal. They are a
derivative discourse that is somehow beside the main point. As historians, they
were severely limited by having no access to sources that would give them a
proper handle on that crucial background. That’s a no doubt rather crude way of
introducing a more general reservation about David’s preoccupation with
narrative. Nobody could possibly doubt its importance for history and politics,
but Lost People repeatedly seems to claim that that’s what history and
politics are. I worry that that leaves an awful lot out. If history is “mainly
about the circulation of stories,” what of all the ecological, epidemiological
and demographic influences on our lives of which we are often unconscious. If political
action “is action that is intended to be recorded or narrated or in some way
represented to others afterwards,” what kind of action is all the effort that
goes into ensuring that so many of the deeds and misdeeds of rulers are never
recorded. Representations, discourses and narratives are unarguably important,
but they should not in my view be allowed to occupy all the space in an
anthropological analysis.
In a podcast discussion of David’s Debt book chaired by
Gillian Tett sometime after his death, one contributor acutely observed that if
there is any one value that informed his work it is freedom. That made me
wonder how Lost People fits in. Though it says little about freedom
explicitly, the ethnography overwhelmingly suggests its absence. This is a
society that seems entirely unable to escape its past. In David’s other
writings, there is usually some possibility of escape from oppression that is
provided by other ideological alternatives. Here the past seems almost
inescapably tyrannical. The Merina are condemned to continually renew the
legacy of guilt and resentment that stems from the history of slavery. And
whether or not David intended us to put the two things together, his
ethnography shows that the burden of the past goes well beyond that. The Merina
ancestors play a significant role in the lives of their descendants, and in
Bloch’s writings their influence seems mostly benign. In Lost People
they come over as much more threatening. They are always telling the living
what they cannot do and they regularly attack them. That provokes the
resentment and hostility of the living, which are dramatically expressed in the
secondary burial when the ancestral remains are assaulted, their bones crunched
up, their dust bound tightly in wrappings, and they are securely locked up in
their tombs once more. History, it seems, is some kind of prison against the
walls of which the living can only bang their heads. Marx had already summed it
brilliantly: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare
on the brains of the living.”
All that prompts a series of comparative questions that I think are
important, but which David passes by – largely I suspect because they fall
outside the narrative frame of his informants. Crucially, why – well after a
century since manumission – are the Merina still so obsessed by slavery? Partly
no doubt on account of its scale and its cruelty, but there must be more to it.
Recent contributions to the regional literature have drawn attention to wide
variations between Malagasy societies in the degree to which slave descent
remains stigmatised, in the extent to which they appear haunted by its history
and in whether they are willing to speak of it at all. Margaret Brown (2004),
and Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda (2018, Regnier 2020), make brave stabs at
specifying the conditions that might explain that variation (differences in
social structure, resources, ethnic mixing and migration, and according to
whether the slaves were Malagasy or of African origin), while Luke Freeman
(2013) writes illuminatingly about the mandatory silence on the subject of his
Betsileo informants and of how that re-entrenches the stigma of slavery by
making it literally unspeakable.
Moving right across to the other side of the Indian Ocean, the
legacy of slavery in Sri Lanka is dramatically different. According to Nira
Wikramasinghe’s (2020) recent book, the collective memory of it has been all
but entirely obliterated. True, it was never on the same scale and was
abolished some decades earlier than in Madagascar, but on her analysis, on the
Ceylon side, the comparison would have to include the way in which the
creolization brought about by slavery seriously challenged doctrines of racial
purity in the south, and the way in which the enslavement of Tamil Untouchables
by high-caste Tamil Vellalars subverted later political projects of Tamil
nationalism in the north. But questions of that comparative order are not part
of David’s enquiry.
The broader terrain on which he does locate his study, my final observation, concerns rather the relationship between history and the social sciences. I confess I find his pitch a bit puzzling and am hoping that somebody might help me out. What he postulates is a broad contrast between the concerns of social science, which have primarily to do with patterns of regularity and predictability, and the concerns of history which deals with the irregular and unpredictable. It’s “the record of those actions which are not simply cyclical, repetitive, or inevitable.” Anthropology should align itself with history. That seems to be above all because it is “the very concern with science, laws, and regularities that has been responsible for creating the sense of distance I have been trying so hard to efface; it is, paradoxically enough, the desire to seem objective that has been largely responsible for creating the impression that the people we study are some exotic, alien, ultimately unknowable other.” Personally, I don’t believe any of that, but what interests me more is whether you will be able to tell me whether this disciplinary opposition has resonances in David’s other work. Or is it, as I suspect, an opportunistic answer to the requirement to justify and explain the literary style he adopted in writing this book? Certainly, Debt seems to be larded with “social science”-type propositions about repetitive, predictable patterns: slavery played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere; bullion currency predominates in periods of generalised violence; coinage, slavery, markets and the state go inexorably together. . . and so it goes on.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Brown, Margaret L. 2004. Reclaiming lost ancestors and
acknowledging slave descent: insights from Madagascar. Comparative
studies in society and history, 46(3), 616-645.
Freeman, Luke. 2013. Speech, silence, and slave descent in
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Graeber, David. 2007. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in
Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana
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———. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
Regnier, Denis. (2020). Slavery and
Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition. New
York: Routledge.
Regnier, Denis, and Somda, Dominique. (2019). Slavery
and post-slavery in Madagascar: An overview. In T. Falola, D., R. J. Parrott
& D. Porter Sanchez (eds.), African
Islands: Leading Edges of Empire and Globalization. Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press. Pp. 345-369.
Wickramasinghe, Nira. (2020). Slave in a Palanquin. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cite as: Parry, Jonathan. 2021. “The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.” FocaalBlog, 7 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/07/jonathan-parry-the-burdens-of-the-past-comments-on-david-graebers-lost-people-magic-and-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-madagascar/
‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris Gregory delves into the core of what David meant by ‘false coin of our own dreams’, Don Kalb casts a critical lens of his conception of ‘value’ and the constituent imagination. As the first considers David’s work in relation to the economists and their images of wealth, the second looks at its place among the Marxists, drawing a combined picture that situates David’s most challenging book in a refined comparative perspective.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
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.
Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at
the University of NSW. He specialises in the political and economic
anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.
Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.
Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s colleagues at the LSE and engaged readers of David’s work. They carry us through the complexity of David’s arguments about history and narrative and raise important questions about whether he engages deeply enough with the socio-economic realities that Malagasy people faced at the time of his research.
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.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Maurice Bloch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He has carried out long-term ethnographic research in Madagascar, is the author of In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theories of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, and writes more broadly on power, history, kinship, ritual, and cognition.
