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.
To understand the massive
world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity.
Since the different waves hit the planet, we have been hearing repeatedly two crucial
phrases: 1) “we are all in this together” (or the opposite: “we are not in this
together”), and 2) “we are all becoming complacent to the virus.” Politicians
and epidemiologists have shown us how we have “lowered down our collective guards”
to community transmission of the virus. Simultaneously, the pandemic has exposed
and accelerated social inequalities like never before. Complicity has led us to
be complacent, and complacency has only exacerbated our complicity. Complicity
with these increasingly genocidal and fascist forms of late capitalism at the
macro level and its counterpart of auto-exploitative neoliberal subjectivity at
the micro-level (see Chapoutot 2020) took us all to here-now.
The key question Michel
Foucault and other critical thinkers (see Peters 2020) have repeatedly asked
is: What causes us to love and obey forms of power/subjectivity that are
strictly against our interests? I argue that as we
move away from complicity/compliance, we should choose complicity/connection.
That is, we should aim to create entanglements of solidarity and ethical
relatedness to fight the current and future forms of oppression and inequality
that will emerge during and after the COVID-19 capitalist and neoliberal world.
Beyond
complicity/complacency
Two key ideas from Karl
Marx and Émile Durkheim can form our compass. First, the world-remaking
thesis: we need to go beyond inferring the world to radically change it. We
need to seize our complacencies with an individualistic commodity-driven world
shaped by extreme (auto)exploitation and (outer)profit. (2) the
connection-as-sociability thesis: we need to look at how solidarity works
as a form of social connective tissue, even more when considering the social
disconnection and the exacerbation of prior inequities created by the current
pandemic. Both Marx and Durkheim dealt with the ‘complacency’ dynamic, the
former as a matter of complicity (including cross-class alliances for
revolution), the latter as a matter of connection (social solidarity in an
anomic world). When we look up the etymology of complicity, we are
struck by the realization that it has the same root as compliance (from com– ‘together’ + the root of plicare ‘to fold’).
A kind of ‘folding together,’ the latter more like folding in the sense of
bending to authority or just giving up: as we have all had to adapt to wearing
masks, social distancing, following changing public
health orders, etc. Conversely, many have resisted this on the grounds of their
freedom being violated.
The
world-remaking thesis
Karl Marx was among the
first to confront the fact that intellectuals are never detached observers but
rather deeply connected with, and implicated in, structures of power, status,
wealth, and symbolic captures. In The German Ideology, Marx (1970) goes
against the Hegelian intellectuals who were “merely interpreting the world” (as
if that was ever possible). For Marx, the key organizing idea has always
been to “change the world.” Marx (1990) wrote Kapital while helping
to organize the International Workingmen’s Association in the middle of debates
with Bakunin and Proudhon on how to mobilize the working class to change the
world according to their interests. He was both a public writer and public
speaker fueling the masses to decode and transform this unjust (human-made,
and, thus, human-changeable) world. Those two things were never a contradiction
but his raison d’être.
Today, we have
naturalized and reified the capitalist world. We cannot imagine the end of it.
As Frederic Jameson (2003, 76) says “[s]omeone
once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the
end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine
capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” Imagining the end of the
world is visualizing our complicities with this capitalist world. We can see
how we (social scientists) are
wired and networked in ways that both insulate us and implicate us without
questioning capitalism itself. But for Marx, everything was about how
intellectuals–philosophers, historians, political organizers, and workers–were
complicit, compliant, and complacent with the unjust social worlds experienced
by the working-classes. That was the key back then, that is the key right now.
Does a post-covid world
help us imagine post-capitalism and post-neoliberal subjectivity? Or can we re-envision
capitalism by way of imagining the end of the COVID-19 world? Both are
intrinsically interconnected. Of course, there are “competing narratives”
pushing/pulling us to/from inequality and merit, deservingness and
undeservingness (Kalb 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has both intensified and
revealed myriad social, racial, gender, economic, political, migratory, and
ecological crossroads that were swept under the rug or systemically denied as
glitches in the default system designed for endless economic growth (and
endless economic gains by a very few; see Robbins 2020). This pandemic did not
begin in December 2019. The colonial violence and world imperial destruction,
before even industrialization, made this world. And the West would not be the
West without complicity with slavery and colonialism (Davis and Todd 2017).
Many interconnected
crises and vast inequalities of late capitalism have surfaced at the forefront
of the planetary consciousness because of the pandemic. In some weird
way, we need to thank the tiny virus for its contribution to seeing what we
cannot unsee.
Remarkably, those overlapping crises of late capitalism were not hiding out of
sight, quite contrary they were/are essential crises of the larger
politico-economic systems of accumulation and dispossession that were forced to
shift and pivot in new ways (think about Silicon Valley capital investing in
telecommunication apps, refugees always on the move finding even more dangerous
paths, and state agencies funnelling public money to big-pharma R&D for
COVID vaccines).
The
dual meaning of “complicity”
When Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848, 1), their first words
were these: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German
police-spies.” As Derrida (1994) writes, the “spectre of communism” were the
anti-status-quo forces; the phantasmagoric and powerful fears of imagination
(and the imaginative powers of fear) that worked for social revolution. These
phantom-like forces were spreading like a summer forest fire through Europe
ready to purge this “holy alliance.” They were threatening to destroy
everything that was prefiguring the current present (the separation of
production from reproduction, human exceptionalism, the racial/imperial project
of white European male supremacy). This is one meaning of complicity. COVID-19
is indeed a threat to the current status-quo because of its potential and
spectral capacity to disrupt the COVID-capitalist world.
The second meaning of complicity is linked to morality, like in this definition: “the fact or condition of being involved with others in an activity that is unlawful or morally wrong” (Oxford Dictionary). We can see that in the moral justification of outrageous social inequalities (Chancel 2021). For Marx and Engels (1848, 1), “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and there is no other place to see this right now than in the dramatically unequal and obscene distribution of vaccines between high- and low-income countries. Of course, that is not what Marx and Engels meant about class struggles. Yet, the history of our existing COVID-capitalist society is now the history of vaccine apartheid. There is a vaccine nationalism with an outspoken political and moral agenda. Nigeria, for instance, had to ask the World Bank for a USD400M loan to purchase vaccines. The good wishes of COVAX clashed with national and big-pharma plans.
Madhukar Pai argued, “… the widening chasm of vaccine inequity has devastating consequences, especially with the Delta variant ripping through populations. Millions of people will die, and trillions of dollars will be lost. Addressing this inequity MUST be a top priority for everyone, regardless of where they live.” In late 2020, India and South Africa proposed to the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Council a patent waiver proposal that would free vaccine technology to low- and middle-low-income countries to speed up the vaccination rollouts and to contain the further development of more mutations in those countries unable to access to vaccines via market purchases. In their statement, India argues “[o]n the one hand, these [high-income] countries are buying up as much of the limited supply as they can, leaving no vaccines in the pie for developing and least-developed countries. On the other hand, and very strangely, these are the same countries who are arguing against the need for the waiver that can help increase the global manufacturing and supply to achieve not just equitable, but also timely and affordable access to such vaccines for all countries” (Usher 2021, 1791). It is morally reprehensible that high-income countries are complicit with the further expansion of Delta and potential other variants in low and middle-low-income countries (and among their own marginalized communities).
The last words of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto were the working-class mantra: “Proletarians of all lands, Unite!” In this urgent context, there is no time to waste on any form of complicit-complacency regarding collective solutions to this pandemic (vaccines being not the only one but a big one). By September of 2021, according to the WHO, “Only 20% of people in low- and lower-middle-income countries have received a first dose of vaccine compared to 80% in high- and upper-middle income countries.” Few countries are overflowing with vaccines, whereas many parts of the world have few or no vaccines at all. There is a full-fledged vaccine diplomacy war (“vaccine nationalism”) developing between China, Russia, UK, and U.S (Zhou 2021). Calls to liberate patents and transfer know-how to rapidly accelerate the vaccination campaigns throughout the whole world have been scarce or muted. How, then, did we allow big pharma to set the tone of the vaccine campaigns worldwide when we know that no one will be safe until everyone is?
The
connection-as-sociability thesis
Émile Durkheim (1912) coined
the concept of “collective effervescence” during the vast secularization
and individualization processes of the early 20th century in metropolitan and
imperial Europe. His concept refers to instances in which a community,
social group, or society may come together as a sort of
collective-at-sync political-emotional unfolding. We could argue that the
COVID-19 pandemic is a fundamentally social phenomenon that (very unevenly) affects
humanity in the same way religion was for Durkheim back then. Some events can cause collective
effervescence which inspires individuals and can act as a catalytic
to unite society (think, for instance, the race to create COVID-19
vaccines or the anti-mask movement). We are all going to get out of it worse or
better and it entirely depends on how we manage this “collective effervescence.”
The police killing of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, Jared Lowndes and many other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color created long-lasting effects, political organizing, communal solidarity, and forms of resistance. The live-filmed death of Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman who suffered from a rare heart condition and filmed her health care providers in a Quebec hospital mistreating her and letting her die shook Canada. It prompted the province coroner to ask the Quebec government to recognize the systemic racism within the health care system. These are examples of how the pandemic has both exacerbated and made visible structural violence. We could expand the argument in the direction of the fresh COP26’s massive failure and global warming apocalypse, a massive capitalist restructuring from above is very possible, one which is going to replicate the injustices and unevenness of Covid. Yet, what keeps us together despite a brutal pandemic that tends to isolate, alienate, oppress, and vaccine-apartheid us? What is the source of hope despite, and because, of this pandemic? Naomi Klein says that we are living in Coronavirus Capitalism, and “If there is one thing history teaches us is that moments of shocks are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerves. The future will be determined by whoever is willing to fight harder for the ideas they have lying around.” If we can transition from complicity-complacency to complicity-connection, we could still change this story. We could change this world.
Rafael Wainer is a medical anthropologist and Lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His main research interests are children’s experiences of cancer treatment, palliative care, and medical assistance of dying, hope and resilience, and the socio-anthropological understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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d’obéir. Le management, du nazisme à aujourd’hui. Paris: Gallimard.
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Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical
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Émile. 1912. The Elementary Forms of the religious life. London:
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Jameson, Frederic.
2003. Future Cities. New Left Review, 21(May-June): 65-79.
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Peters, Michael A. 2020. ‘The fascism in our heads’: Reich, Fromm, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari – the social pathology of fascism in the 21st century. Educational Philosophy and Theory. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1727403
While
identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least
since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can
say that it is only in the second half of the 20th century that the
development of cultural anthropology and sociology lays the theoretical ground
for such a politicization, which is unconceivable without taking into account
the emergence in many parts of the world of feminist movements as well as of a
panoply of struggles against racial domination and for the rights of
“minorities.” Such important debates as the one surrounding multiculturalism
contributed to foster identity politics and more generally to nurture a coding
of politics in terms of (cultural) identity. Claims based upon identity played
an important role in denouncing the presumed “neutrality” and even universalism
of political institutions and in shedding light on the continuity of past
histories of conquest and domination. This was for instance the case in settler
colonial countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States, with respect
to the condition of indigenous peoples. More generally, identity provided a
language for the articulation of claims and desires for liberation of a
multiplicity of subjects whose oppression was predicated upon specific systems
of oppression that were not targeted as such by established traditions of emancipatory
politics. Struggles of racialized people or sexual minorities are good
instances in this respect as well as claims proliferating within feminism along
the lines that fracture the unitary figures of “the woman” and “universal
sisterhood” (just think of the debates surrounding “postcolonial feminism”
since the 1980s).
Image 1: Ni Una Menos march, Buenos Aires, 3 June 2017. Photo by Titi Nicola.
From this point of view, it is not surprising that one of the first polemical targets of identity politics was the concept of class and class politics. If one takes class as a collective subject (and even as a collective identity) whose unity and homogeneity are immediately given as an “objective” outcome of the relations of production, it is easy to see that there is no space here for a politics capable to grasp claims and movements articulated in specific terms – be it in gender or racial terms. There is no shortage of historical examples of such conflicts and clashes within the labor movement. Take for instance B.R. Ambedkar, the great spokesperson of the Dalits in colonial India. In the late 1920s he had several debates with the leaders of the Communist Party of India, always pointing to the peculiarity of the position of the Dalits and to the spread of practices of untouchability in the world of labor and emphasizing the need to give priority to those questions in labor politics. This is precisely what Communist leaders did not want to accept, leading to a split with Ambedkar (Roy 2016, 110). The latter, in his The Annihilation of Caste (1936), took stock of those debates writing that caste is “a division of laborers,” and even more precisely “it is a hierarchy in which the divisions of laborers are graded one above the other” (Ambedkar 2016, 233-234). The question of caste is directly addressed here from the point of view of what we could call the composition of labor, of the disruption of its unity as a sociological factor and as a political subject. And Ambedkar points to the relevance of conflicts within the ranks of workers – conflicts that played an important role elsewhere in the world, for instance in the relation between African American struggles and the labor movement in the United States (see for instance Roediger 1991).
In
this essay I will discuss a specific notion that has become particularly
influential in framing the discussion of identity and identity politics –
intersectionality. I will show that the original formulation of that notion was
crucially intertwined with debates on class and class politics. At the same
time, my argument is inspired by a theoretical and political concern with the
main forms of contemporary identity politics, which are nurtured by such
notions as “white privilege” and by “decolonial” language and theories (see
Mezzadra 2021, 30-33). While I remain wary of the moralistic tones of identity
politics today, what troubles me more is the tendency to simply affirm a
subaltern identity as a closed and bordered one (often in the framework of a
race to establish that identity as the most oppressed and humiliated). This
makes alliances, convergences, and coalitions – as well as opposition –
ultimately impossible (Haider 2018, 40). It is against this background that I
ask in the last section of the essay whether it is possible, and even necessary
to rethink the very concept of class to open up a different political
perspective for struggles and movements as the ones that are at the center of
theories of intersectionality. Needless to say, this requires going beyond the
traditional notion of class that I have sketched above, I admit, providing a
kind of caricature.
Intersectionality,
so what?
There is something important
that must be stressed at the outset of this section. Over the last few years,
the notion of intersectionality, originally forged in the United States, began
to travel. And as is often the case with “traveling theories” (Said 1983 and
1994), it acquired new meanings and was in a way even reinvented first of all
in the streets, outside of the academia. This happened in particular in the
framework of the new wave of feminist movements in Latin America and Southern
Europe, often using the slogan Ni Una Menos (“No one less”). In
Argentina and Brazil, the notion of intersectionality is used to articulate and
connect the movements and claims of indigenous and black women, rural and
metropolitan communities, sexual minorities and women living in slums, without
losing sight of their specificity, while in Italy and Spain it allows
addressing issues of migration, colonialism, and sexuality. In a way, one can
say that this appropriation and these uses of intersectionality prompted a
re-politicization of the notion, where what is at stake, to quote the words of
Angela Davis, is “not so much intersectionality of identities but
intersectionality of struggles” (Davis 2016, 144). Interestingly, this notion
of intersectionality also played outstanding roles in the debates within the massive
movement for black lives and against police brutality in the United States in the
summer of 2020 (see for instance Thompson 2020).
I spoke of a re-politicization
of intersectionality because over the last years in the United States the
notion had become a kind of standard academic reference and its original
political imprint had been to some extent neutralized (which does not mean of
course that there were not many scholars continuing to do a very interesting
and even radical work in the framework of intersectionality – see Nash 2019). This
is why there is a need to go back to the origin of the notion, and even beyond
that to shortly reconstruct its genealogy. As I anticipated above, the
reference to the world of work is foundational for intersectionality. Kimberlé
Crenshaw, who is usually credited to have “invented” the notion, defines it as
follows. Intersectionality, she writes, designates “the various ways in which
race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women’s
employment experiences” (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). Discussing the De Graffenreid
v. General Motors case of 1977, in which the court rejected the claim of
five black women that the company’s seniority system discriminated against them,
Crenshaw famously writes that the court’s refusal to acknowledge “combined race
and sex discrimination” rested on the assumption “that the boundaries of sex
and race discrimination are defined respectively by white women’s and black
men’s experiences” (Crenshaw 1989, 143). The interplay of those boundaries
effectively obscures and deletes a specific subjective experience within the
ranks of workers, the one of black women. In focusing on such a neglected
difference, intersectionality sets out to shed light on the parallel working of
systems of oppression and domination that hierarchize the working class.
Writing in 1989, Kimberlé
Crenshaw was aware of the fact that the notion of intersectionality that she
forged from a specific perspective of critical legal thinking had been long in
gestation in Black feminist thought as well as in the toil and struggles of
black working women in the United States (see Carasthatis 2016, chapter 1 and Bohrer
2019, chapter 0). In the turmoil of the 1970s we can find for instance in the
“Statement” of the Combahee River Collective (1977) a striking
formulation of the problematic of intersectionality. Named after Harriet
Tubman’s raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina during the Civil War,
which freed 750 enslaved people, the collective was a Black radical feminist and
lesbian organization formed in 1974 (see Taylor 2017). As they write, their
politics is defined by an active commitment “to struggling against racial,
sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” and they see as their “particular
task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact
that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (Taylor 2017, 15). This
notion of “interlocking” systems of oppression clearly foreshadows
intersectionality. At the same time, it calls attention precisely to the moment
of “interlocking,” which means to the junctures and articulation between them.
“We also find it difficult,” the collective writes, “to separate race from
class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced
simultaneously” (Taylor 2017, 19). The concept of “identity politics” that
readers can find in one of its earliest uses in the “Statement” of the Combahee
River Collective has consequently quite different meanings than the ones that
became usual later on. This concept is here a rallying and battle cry, urging
Black women to focus on their “own oppression” and struggle for their own
liberation, which would necessarily be a general liberation since “our freedom
would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Taylor
2017, 23).
Even long before the 1970s,
the experience of the “interlocking” of racial, sexual, and class oppression
had shaped the living experience of a multitude of black women in the United
States. And it was contested in multifarious ways through struggles and
organizing, first against slavery and then against lynching and segregation. While
writings from the early stage of Black feminist thought (including such
important names as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells-Barnett) compose an
important archive for anybody interested in the genealogy and prehistory of intersectionality
(see Gines 2014), I would like to shortly dwell here on the debates about the
condition of the Black proletarian woman in the Communist Party of the U.S.A.
in the 1930s and in the 1940s. In the writings of Louise Thompson and Claudia
Jones the questions of race and sex are indeed discussed from the point of view
of the concept of exploitation, which will be later marginalized in the
intersectional debate. Writing in 1936, Louise Thompson provides in Toward a
Brighter Dawn a striking analysis of the condition of black women, focusing
on a “Southern road,” on “the plantations in the South,” and on “Bronx Park,
New York.” The legacy of slavery runs through the whole article, which finds a
dramatic apex in the description of the predicament of black domestic workers
in the Bronx. Thompson speaks of a “slave market” in the Bronx, and casts it as
a “graphic monument to the bitter exploitation of this most exploited section
of the American working population – the Negro women.” And this is because they
“meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, and as Negroes”
(Thompson 1936).
More than a decade later,
Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad and doomed to live and work in the U.K. after
being deported from the United States in 1955, further develops such analysis.
Her An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (1949)
starts with an emphasis on the growth in the militant participation of black
women “in all aspects of the struggle for peace, civil rights and economic
security.” It is in front of this intensified militancy that Jones calls for a
new understanding of the role of black women and for an end to the neglect of
that role permeating the labor movement. Jones dwells on the position of black
women in different social spheres, from the family to mass organizations. She
carefully analyzes in particular the condition of black domestic workers,
focusing on the reasons that lead to the relegation of black women to “domestic
and similar menial work” and stressing their “unbearable misery.” She echoes
Thompson’s writing that black domestic workers “suffer the additional indignity,
in some areas, of having to seek work in virtual ‘slave markets’ on the streets
where bids are made, as from a slave block, for the hardiest workers.”
Interestingly, she also analyzes the reasons that divide black and white women
also within the working class. “White chauvinism” works as a boundary at the
societal level, a boundary that crosses and divides also the composition of the
working class. Even the experience of exploitation is hierarchized, as black
women clearly demonstrate. As Jones writes, “not equality, but degradation and
super-exploitation: this is the actual lot of Negro women!” (Jones 1949).
Figures of oppression
“Triple exploitation” and
“super-exploitation,” the concepts introduced by Linda Thompson and Claudia
Jones, are clearly attempts to use a Marxist language to come to terms with the
specific condition of black working women. The proposed diversification and
even hierarchization of exploitation raise however several problems. This is
particularly the case when the notion of exploitation is understood in purely
economistic terms and strictly connected to a narrow interpretation of
“productive labor.” Such an economistic concept of exploitation has long been
prevailing in Marxism, including in the United States, and it allowed a
subordination of all forms of oppression (for instance, in Thompson’s words,
oppression “as women, and as Negroes”) to exploitation itself (“as workers”)
and to the related class politics. Consequently, several activists and scholars
began to underscore the autonomy of those systems of oppression (say, sexism
and racism) and to prioritize struggles against them, in many cases completely
obscuring the relevance of exploitation. This is what characterizes the
mainstream of debates on intersectionality, which are often shaped by a
conceptual opposition between oppression and exploitation (see Bohrer 2019).
The important book by Patricia
Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (originally published in 1990),
joins a long tradition of theoretical reflection on the continuing legacy of
slavery in defining the condition of African American women using the notion of
oppression as the main conceptual reference of her analysis. It is worth
quoting at length Collins’ book on this point. “Oppression,” she writes,
“describes any unjust
situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies
another group access to the resources of society. Race, class, gender,
sexuality, nation, age, and ethnicity among others constitute major forms of
oppression in the United States. However, the convergence of race, class, and
gender oppression characteristic of U.S. slavery shaped all subsequent
relationships that women of African descent had within Black American families
and communities, with employers, and among one another. It also created the
political context for Black women’s intellectual work” (Collins 2000, 4).
Collins’ theory of
“intersecting oppressions” has been very influential in establishing the field
of intersectionality (or “matrix of domination” as she preferred to say in
1990). It is easy to see that most “forms of oppression” mentioned by Collins
(race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity…) are open to processes of multiplication
form within, and a proliferation of figures of oppression indeed characterizes
debates on intersectionality. Chicana feminism, for instance, introduced new
perspectives into a discussion that was born out of the condition and struggles
of black women (see García 1997), while the topics of sexual oppression and
heteronormativity gained prominence in writings on intersectionality. This led
to a kind of explosion of the field, which allowed multiple processes of
subjective expression and constitution, shedding light on forms of domination
that had long remained invisible, and productively widening the terrain of
struggles for liberation. At the same time, it raised specific problems for a
theory of intersectionality.
It is definitely true that, as
Ashley Bohrer writes, intersectional theorists “have argued against additive
and multiplicative models for their failure to highlight the mutual constitution
of the structures of domination” (Bohrer 2019, 102). Nevertheless, it is
important to remind that the notion of oppression in intersectional debates is
characterized by an emphasis on “irreducibility” (of the single systems of
oppression), which goes hand in hand with an emphasis on “simultaneity,” i.e. with
the claim that those systems “are experienced simultaneously and are
inseparable” (Carasthatis 2016, 57). There is a clear tension here, and while
the critique of “single axis” thinking is a constitutive moment for theories of
intersectionality, one can say that the principle of “irreducibility” has often
tended to obscure the one of “simultaneity.” What is at stake here is the risk
of an identity politics that takes the specificity of a system of oppression as
an exclusive framework not only for analysis but also for the process of
subject constitution. The point is not to propose as an alternative a
hierarchization of oppressions and consequently of struggles and claims, which
is anathema to theories of intersectionality. It is rather to shift attention to
the unitary moment in the working of systems of domination and oppression and
to work toward the establishment of spaces of convergence for diverse and
heterogeneous subjects. A focus on a specific system of oppression can well be
an important moment in a process of subjectivation, even necessary to break
processes of marginalization and to open up new vistas of liberation. Nevertheless,
when the “identity” forged by such focus becomes frozen it paradoxically risks
replicating the boundaries of the specific system of oppression it sets out to
contest. And it becomes an obstacle to wider processes of subjectivation.
Within intersectional debates
this problem is often addressed from the angle of a theory of coalition. “It
was a while,” writes Audre Lorde, “before we came to realize that our place was
the very house of difference rather that anyone particular difference” (Lorde
1982, 226). These words nicely encapsulate the point I just made on identity
and identity politics. The “house of difference” can be a powerful image to
describe an intersectional coalition, intertwining solidarity and resistance
toward a politics capable to bring “into being the worlds we really need”
(Bohrer 2019, 257). Such a coalition, as Bohrer rightly emphasizes (256), is
necessarily different than being what is traditionally understood as the lowest
minimum denominator among different groups. While in this case the subjectivity
and identity of the collectives involved remain untouched, an intersectional
coalition is a space of convergence for a multitude of diverse and
heterogeneous people, within which new subjectivities and even identities are
continuously fabricated in a common struggle for liberation. Needless to say,
the very unity of a coalition is not given in advance, it is itself at stake in
this process of subjectivation.
Image 2: International Women’s Day in Berlin, 8 March 2020. Photo by Leonhard Lenz.
Class, reloaded
The critique of the
economistic notion of exploitation that I sketched above led to a
marginalization of class, and even capitalism, in many debates on
intersectionality. As it happened in cultural and postcolonial studies (see
Mezzadra 2011), capital and capitalism were confined to the realm of “economy”
while class was often identified with white, male, heterosexual workers in a
standard employment relation. Differential systems of oppression like sexism
and racism were considered to operate at the margins of capitalism, which could
definitely instrumentalize the processes of hierarchization generated by them
without ceasing to remain a fundamentally homogenizing power. I am convinced
that such an understanding of capitalism is deeply flawed, and that a different
way to look at the history and contemporary working of capitalism could provide
us with an effective way to tackle the question of the “simultaneity” of
systems of oppression raised by theories of intersectionality.
At stake here is first of all
the question of the relation of capital with “difference” (Mezzadra and Neilson
2019, 32-38). This is a question that has been reframed over the last years by
historians of colonialism and global historians of labor, by postcolonial scholars
and critical researchers working on the topic of development. There is an
emerging consensus that what Lisa Lowe (1996, 28) calls the “social production
of ‘difference’” is a distinct and crucial moment in the operations of capital,
which works in tandem with (and enables) the production of “abstract labor” as
a norm for the reproduction of capitalism writ large. In my work with Brett
Neilson, I have argued that the interplay between difference and abstraction,
or homogeneity and heterogeneity is particularly apparent in the working of
contemporary global capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013 and 2019). This
interplay regards in particular the question of labor. Following Marx’s
definition of labor power as “the aggregate of attitudes and capabilities”
contained in the body, “the living personality of a human being” (Marx 1976,
270), I contend that there is a need to emphasize the gap between the element
of attitudes and capabilities and their “container,” the body (Marx uses the
German word Leiblichkeit, whose absolute materiality is not adequately
rendered by the English translation with “physical form”).
Such an emphasis on the body
opens up new continents for the understanding of labor power as well as of its
production as a commodity. What is at stake here is what we can call the
production of subjectivity that is required for the very existence of that
commodity. The differential fabrication of hierarchized bodies, where systems
of oppression like sexism and racism have prominent roles to play, emerges as a
crucial moment in the production of labor power as a commodity, which is
according to Marx the cornerstone upon which no less than the existence of
capitalism is predicated. The very boundary between production and
reproduction, as well as between productive and unproductive labor appears
tested and blurred from this point of view. And it is easy to see that a merely
economistic understanding of capitalism and exploitation becomes untenable. The
moment that I called of a production of subjectivity has rather multiple
dimensions that must be acknowledged as internal to exploitation. We are
confronted here with a panoply of (exploited) subjective figures, whose
experience of oppression and exploitation is definitely mediated by different
subject positions (where for instance racism, sexism, or heteronormativity can
be prevailing) while their “simultaneity” is orchestrated by the operations of
capital.
Class is today composed by
this multitude of differences living, toiling, and struggling under the
pressure of capital’s exploitation. Multiplicity is the hallmark of class. While
I emphasize the relevance of a non-economistic notion of exploitation for
rethinking class today, there is a need to add that class politics today
requires a panoply of movements and struggles that go well beyond the
boundaries of class. Once we acknowledge the constitutive relevance for the
working of exploitation of, say, racism and sexism, mobilizations against them,
which may well include people who are not “exploited,” are of the utmost
importance – and can never be considered as addressing a kind of “secondary”
contradiction. Parallel to such transversal struggles there is a need to forge
and practice new forms of solidarity and spaces of convergence, where
intersectionality becomes a method for a multiplicity of encounters and for
counteracting any ossification of identity politics. The latter can definitely
play a positive role in opening up new fields of struggle but is always at risk
of becoming an obstacle for wider processes of subjectivation – for building a
more effective base for struggles against exploitation and oppression. The
notion of class, a “multitudinous class” or a “intersectional class” to put it
with Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2019, 84), provides a subjective name to
that base and opens new lines of investigation and political intervention. And
the reinvention of intersectionality that I mentioned above (as an “intersectionality
of struggles,” to remind the words of Angela Davis) seems to foreshadow a new
politics of solidarity and even a new class politics.
Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna. His scholarly work has centered on borders and migration, contemporary capitalism and globalization, Marx and workerism. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019) As an activist he is currently engaged in the “Mediterranea Saving Humans” project (https://mediterranearescue.org/).
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David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his scholarly legacy is slowly emerging. I want to contribute to such a critical assessment of his oeuvre by concentrating on his book “Utopia of Rules” published in 2015. This assessment has resulted from my participation in the roundtable “On David Graeber’s Work: Potentialities for a Radical Leftist Anthropology” at the conference of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA) in Bremen on 28.9.2021, the stream of which can be watched on Facebook.
I propose
that a scholarly book can be evaluated according to three criteria:
Does it present new facts—that is, results
of research according to accepted research protocols, be they ethnographic or
others?
Does it engage with theory, and the
body of existing knowledge, in a novel way?
If that is not the case, does it
present new ideas, even if only in a more essayistic way, e.g. without the
necessity to give evidence; or does it present old ideas in a better way than
they have already been presented elsewhere.
Even if a
book is written for a larger audience, as this book clearly is, it should still
stand the test of at least one of these criteria. This is in fact in line with
what Graeber himself (in a highly unusual six-page response to a five-page
negative review of his book) demanded—i.e., that the book should be judged
“according to the actual arguments and the evidence assembled to support these
arguments” (Piliavsky 2017; Graeber 2017: 118). These criteria can be summed up
in the question of whether I would put the book, or parts of it, in a list of
core readings, say for a course on the anthropology of bureaucracy.
I will limit myself to the introduction to the book and the central essay on structural stupidity (ch. 1). The chapter – the only one with an anthropology pedigree – first came into being as the 2006 LSE Malinowski lecture under the title “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity” (https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos). Later, however, Graeber did not want the lecture to be cited any longer. He replaced it by the text “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture,” which he published in HAU (a journal that he co-edited) and which, in a strangely bureaucratic turn of phrase, he declared “the official one” (Graeber 2012: 105 fn. 1; https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau2.2.007). It finally turned into a 2015 book chapter. Each time the text became longer. I have found lots of praise of the book, but predominantly from outside anthropology (but see Piliavsky 2017) and mainly from journalists (see the praise page of the book).
The central
argument seems to be that the world is faced with an increasing
bureaucratisation whereby public and private bureaucracies, as well as
neoliberal capitalism melt into each other and form a total structure of
oppression and exploitation which furthermore relies on technology and sheer
physical violence. This over-bureaucratisation of the world stifles creativity
and imagination, in particular revolutionary imagination, so the left needs to
reflect on how to get out of this trap (which according to Graeber it has not
done, therefore the need for his intervention).
I say this “seems to be” the argument, as Graeber’s writing is not very structured. He writes more by way of analogy, and about whatever comes to his mind. His style of writing has been called “ruminative” by a reviewer; the author resembles a happy deer strolling across a sunny alpine meadow, picking a weed here, plucking a shamrock there, and then chewing the whole thing several times over. So, to give the reader a selection of topics touched upon: the two chapters jump from huge generalisations on « the » Germans, Americans, and British (p. 13), to Graeber’s experiences as a customer of an American bank (p. 15), student debt, again in the US (p. 23), chats with a World Bank economist at a conference (pp. 25-26) as well as with a British bank employee at another occasion (note 15 p. 231), newspaper opinion pieces which he presents as results of ethnographic research (p.22), the shape of bank buildings “when I was growing up” (p. 33), surprising but unsubstantiated references to Goethe as a supporter of Prussian bureaucracy (p. 39), similarities between refugees and female applicants to London music schools (p. 41), a visit to an occupied factory in Marseilles (p. 43), his mother’s death (pp. 45-50), problems of registering his car in New York (p. 48), to academics complaining about too much paperwork (pp. 53-54), why a thick description of a bureaucratic document is impossible (p. 52, but see Göpfert 2013), violence as the weapon of the stupid (p. 68), gender roles in American situation comedies of the 1950s (p. 69), stories about American teenagers that somebody told him but he doesn’t remember who it was (note 59 p. 242), to what a friend told him about degrees in library science (note 26 p. 233), what “most of us” think about the police (p. 73), to vampires (p. 77), Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (p. 78), and American prisons (p. 102).
Now my criterion
1: where is the evidence, and what about new knowledge? Graeber has a
remarkably cavalier use of what is habitually called evidence. I can only give
two examples here: In the beginning of the introduction, he claims that “we” (a
pronoun, like “us” and “ours”, he frequently uses but never defines) are
increasingly faced with paperwork. He then presents three graphs to prove his
point (pp. 4-5). At closer inspection, however, the graphs – presented without
any source – rather show how often “paperwork” or associated terms like
“performance review” have appeared in English language books over time, which
of course is different from the thesis it is supposed to illustrate, and rather
refutes his other thesis, that “nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy”
(p. 3). In fact, Graeber admits that he is purely “imagining” graph no. 2 (his
words, p. 4; see also p. 15) which supposedly shows that people spend ever more
time filling out forms. In any case, he has a penchant, throughout the text, for
terms like “apparently”, “I suppose”, “we all know that”, “most of us believe”,
“apparently”, the subjunctive form of the verb, and what “everybody knows” (p.
27).
Apart from
these imagined figures, Graeber’s main type of evidence are personal anecdotes,
which for him apparently assume the function of explanations. He starts off chapter
1 with the problems he had when, after a life mostly spent as a “bohemian
student” (p. 48), he was suddenly faced with different bureaucratic hiccups
when his mother had a stroke, the problems being caused by a particularly
incompetent notary. Like this coming-of-age story, all the other anecdotes are also
taken from his immediate personal experience, almost exclusively concern the US
and the UK and not rarely relate to narcistic insults he suffered from some apparently
stupid bureaucrat who did not recognize his, Graeber’s, intelligence (e.g., p.
48, p. 64). In fact, he also has six pages on Madagascar where he essentially
says that outside the capital city, state bureaucracy is practically absent,
but then immediately nuances this statement with respect to schools (pp. 61-66;
one would wonder what this evaluation would say about health centres, for
example, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and more generally, also). As an
Africanist, that doesn’t surprise me (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1997),
but Graeber does not consider the fact that this widespread absence of state
bureaucracy in the highlands of Madagascar might in fact invalidate his general
thesis of total bureaucratization as a planetary phenomenon.
Image 1: A utopia of rules? The bureaucratic embeddedness of ethnographic research (Photo: Thomas Bierschenk, 2009)
What about criterion 2, the engagement with existing knowledge and theory? Graeber clearly is somebody who does not like reading but prefers writing up and sharing with the world whatever comes to his mind. In the introduction, he claims that despite the increasing importance of bureaucracy, nobody is interested in analysing it, so that is why he must do it. This sounds a bit overly self-confident, as there is a huge body of social-science literature on bureaucracy and organisation since the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in sociology, but from the 1980s increasingly also in anthropology (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2021). Graeber simply does not know this literature. And when, here and there, he does mention selected topical works, he does not engage with them (e.g. note 44 p. 238).
What about
theory? The book cover claims that we are faced with “a powerful work of social
theory in the traditions of Foucault and Marx”. This might be discounted as
commercial overselling but then Graeber himself sees his book as “an exercise
in social theory” (p. 75). However, throughout the book, he is very eclectic in
his theoretical references. He likes neither Weber nor Foucault, but dislikes Foucault
more than Weber, and sees both as intellectual frontmen of neoliberal
bureaucratic capitalism, in passages on the history of ideas, which he himself qualifies
as “caricaturish” (p. 57). On the other hand, and surprisingly, Graeber likes Lévi-Strauss,
and structuralism in general (pp. 76 seq.). As for Marx, he prefers to lie low,
but stresses repeatedly that he was a man of his times (e.g., p. 88). Many of
his renderings of theorists, say Weber, appear somewhat crude to the educated
reader, if not outright wrong. In the passages where that is the case, and when
you turn to the footnotes, you are then puzzled to read from Graeber’s pen a
sentence like: “I am aware this (i.e., his own [Graeber’s] claim about Weber in
the main text, p. 74) is not really what Weber said.” (fn. 64 p. 243). Elsewhere,
he admits that his reflections are not new but have already been formulated
somewhere else, and possibly better (e.g., by feminist standpoint theory or
critical race theory, p. 68). But he admits to this only in passing and shares
his inspirations with the reader anyway. It is also interesting to reflect upon
what social theory Graeber leaves out. To name only a few authors who
immediately come to my mind as they clearly resonate with Graeber’s concerns
but are absent from his book: Hegel’s and Sartre’s theorem on the dialectics of
the master-servant relationship, Gramsci’s writings on hegemony, the whole
Frankfurt school of critical theory, and in particular Herbert Marcuse’s
One-dimensional Man, or the sociology of critique of Boltanski. So, in sum, the
happy ruminator, in this book, has confidently waded into areas where he didn’t
have many bearings, and not surprisingly, he got lost.
I do not think I need to dwell much on criterion 3 as the reader will not be surprised by my negative answer. One could ask why, after all, the book has been rather successful even if much less successful than the Debt book (Graeber 2011). I have two answers to that, one of which I will present later. My main charge against the book is that it essentially confirms middle-class readers and fellow academics from the Global North, in particular the Anglo world, in their clichés about and grudges against bureaucracy. In fact, in Germany which remained rather untouched by the hype around Graeber, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), a left-wing daily, titled its review of the book “cliché as scholarship” (Klischee als Wissenschaft) and notes the author’s “love of the commonplace” (Walter 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/). It is true that there are interesting ideas in the book, which are not, however, developed (for example, was Foucault a neoliberal thinker? In fact, I wonder if Graeber is not a neoliberal thinker himself.). Other propositions are pure reinventions of the wheel. How many books and articles have been written about the bureaucratisation of the world? (See for example the solidly researched Hibou 2015). Other statements are truisms, like that all banks are regulated (p. 16) or commonplaces like “most human relations … are extremely complicated” (p. 58). Again others are outright wrong. All this is woven into a text with no discernible structure, and basically from a perspective, which implicitly makes the claim that a middle-class perspective from the Anglo-academic world describes the global default situation.
In sum, I
would not give the book to anthropology undergraduates to read. It would be
embarrassing if they got the impression that this is what anthropology is about,
and it would be wasting their time. Anthropology is, I propose, about creating
new, and preferably counterintuitive knowledge. It is about discovering the
unknown, putting question marks behind common sense, and not about confirming
what “we” anyway believe we know. The book may have clicked with many people
because it resonates with widespread uneasy feelings especially among fellow
academics that “we” are wasting our time in meetings and with paperwork.
However, that a book confirms common sense is certainly not a sufficient
criterion for its scientific quality.
We should
realize (Graeber does not) that criticism of bureaucracy is as old as bureaucracy
itself; since its invention in 18th century France, it has been
criticised from the left (not acknowledged by Graeber), but more prominently
from the right (Fusco et al. 1992). This criticism from the right came in two
kinds, and not just one, as Graeber claims: there was and is indeed the
bourgeois right which is concerned with red tape over-regulating the market and
thereby diminishing profits. But there also have been aristocratic critics who were
more concerned about being restricted by rules, rules which may be appropriate
for the lower classes, but which inhibit the freedom of the gentleman to do
whatever he pleases. Graeber’s critique is dangerously close to the latter
position; as he admits himself in passing, it is a critique from the
positionality of somebody who likes to see himself as a bohemian.
Which brings me to Graeber’s theory of revolution, as far as it can be ascertained from this book. Graeber is an anthropologist who is not only interested in what is, but also how to make the world a better place “without states and capitalism” (p. 97). In other words, he aims at an emancipatory theory of revolution. The classic model here is Marx, who analysed not only the way capitalism functioned – after having spent years in the British library reading the whole body of political economy of his time – but also the internal contradictions of capitalism, which in the long run would lead to its transformation, and, most relevant for the point I want to make, which the social actors were best positioned to bring about these transformations. Graeber is silent, at least in this book, on the first point (the transformational dynamics of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism) and very short on the second (the social carriers of revolution). He only speaks of “social revolutionaries” who profess immanent—i.e., practically grounded—conceptions of utopianism, and who act “as if they are already free“, in alliance with avantgarde artists (p. 89, 97). There is nothing about the class positions of these revolutionaries. Who are they? US-American and European anthropology students under the guidance of their enlightened teachers? Here, again, the figure of the bohemian lurks in the wings. Neither do we read much about realistic strategies, necessary for any successful revolution, of how to seize the masses, to paraphrase Marx (“The weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons; material violence must be overthrown by material violence; theory alone also becomes material violence as soon as it seizes the masses”, Marx 1843/44, p. 385). The catchy phrase “we are the 99 percent,” which Graeber is often said to have coined (regarding whether that is true or not, see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html), is not very helpful in this respect. It is pure populism, coupled with a nostalgic over-reading of the impact of the global justice movement of his youth.
Finally, I want to come back to why the book has sold well. I think the cover explains that. I have already referred to the über-promotion on the back cover, while on the front cover, Graeber is presented as the author of a previous, highly successful book. As Wikipedia explains, after the success of the previous book (Graeber 2011), the same editor quickly entered into a new contract with the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules; see also Walther 2016). Obviously, both the commercial editor and author were trying to capitalize on Graeber’s acquired reputation and his having “captivated a cult following” (Roberts 2020). The mechanism is well known, and thereby the book is a very good example of the capitalist economics of reputation, which govern the academic book market and which function according to a winner-takes-all logic (similar to international soccer, social media, and investment banking). The expression of this logic is the star cult, which in the academic world takes the form of the cult of the genius, and it explains how an altogether, from a scholarly perspective, bad book becomes a required citation. One may detect a slight contraction here between the anti-capitalist substance of the book and its capitalist form. So, while I do not recommend the book for an undergraduate course on the anthropology of bureaucracy, it would make fascinating case material for a postgraduate course on the political economy of the academic world.
Thomas Bierschenk is professor emeritus at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz/Germany. He has worked on development, the state, bureaucracy, and the police in Oman, Central and West Africa, as well as Germany, and has co-edited, together with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill 2014). More about his work at: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/prof-dr-thomas-bierschenk/
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Roberts,
Sam. 2020. “David Graeber, caustic critic of inequality, is dead at 59.” The
New York Times, 4 September 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html.
In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a
proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the
climate change argument makes sense, at the same time Greece has experienced
wildfires for many decades now. In the post-dictatorial Greek popular
imaginary, fire represents the creative destruction process of a violent
disjunctive modernization, led by a quasi-illicit capitalism based on the
construction boom. Across Greece, one can hear stories about great wildfires
that flattened forests and green mountainsides only to see villas, casinos and
tourist resorts growing in their place some years later. Tied to the monolithic
emphasis on an economic growth strategy based almost entirely on tourist
services, wildfires over the last decades have facilitated the expansion of
tourist infrastructures and the built environment. The systematic exploitation
of gray areas (parathirakia/παραθυράκια) in Greek environmental law and urban
planning law have facilitated these opportunities (see Dalakoglou and Kallianos
2019). Factual or not, such arguments have been enhanced during the recent
wildfires, as many informants of the infra-demos project are noticing that
during the early years of the financial crisis (2010-2016) when real estate,
tourism and infrastructures investment saw a drop, one also witnessed a
noticeable decrease in wildfires, for the first time in decades. Although we
cannot confirm such datasets on wildfires, if one takes as case study the ways
that the state protects archaeological sites from wildfires and other risks,
there is arguably an implied link with specific shifts in the Greek state’s
touristic growth strategies.
Antiquities on Fire
In one of these usual wildfires in August 2020, some shocking news came to the attention of the Greek public. The famous Lion Gate of Mycenae, erected in 1250 BC, was set ablaze as the Greek civil protection agencies failed to protect it from a wildfire that had flared up in the area. The Greek government downplayed the issue, stating that no real damage had been done. Many local informants of Poulimenakos claimed that during the previous years there had been fire-brigade forces near the site for its protection, but they were not present that summer.
In August 2021, Greece faced perhaps the most destructive
wave of wildfires in its recent history, with more than a million acres of
forest turned into ashes. During this wave, the archaeological site of ancient
Olympia in Peloponnese was almost eradicated, with people on the site talking
about the pure luck in the guise of a change in the wind direction, which
ultimately prevented that catastrophe. The official policy of the Greek state
was to evacuate the area and protect human lives, with saving the forest or the
archeological sites seen as less of a priority. A few weeks earlier, the most
important archaeological site in the Attica region outside the Athens
metropolis, Poseidon Temple in Sounio, saw a wildfire next to the monument. It
was extinguished thanks to its proximity to the town of Lavrio, where sizeable
forces of fire brigades are stationed, yet many locals mention to Dalakoglou
that if it was not for the five-star hotel that was between the ancient temple
and the fire, they would not have saved it in time. Another wildfire entered
the national park of Sounio later in August 2021.
Figure 1: Remains of fire 1km away from the ancient temple of Sounio (on the background). Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
The Archaeology of Greece 2.0
Earlier in 2021, the Ministry of Culture caused outrage among
archaeologists of the country with its actions. To mention a few, a large public
construction project was carried out in the Acropolis of Athens to create a
large concrete walkway, which was built near the monument during the lockdown.
Many compared the construction to a fashion show stage. And the truth is that a
few months later, a luxury clothing brand arranged a show on the new cement
corridor with the Parthenon as the background for the videos and photos. A few
weeks later, Sounio was booked by the same brand for another fashion show. The
indifference that the current Ministry of Culture has shown towards ancient
sites has other facets. For example, in the summer of 2021, the Minister
announced that the entire Byzantine high street in Thessaloniki that was
discovered during the public works for the construction of Thessaloniki metro
will be removed. The Minister, an archeologist herself, would not consider the
proposals to exhibit and integrate the findings within the metro
infrastructure, which was promoted by various archaeology associations. The
promise that 92% of the site will be reconstructed on the site after the works
for the metro are completed did not convince the archaeologists. The metro and
the gentrification it will bring to various parts of the city were more
important priorities than the findings, which are significant even for a nation
with as much archaeological wealth as Greece.
Figure 2: The announcement that the Sounio temple will not be open to the public due to the photoshoot. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
Figure 3: The Acropolis after the cement walkway was built. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
“Greece 2.0” was what Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis,
leader of the neoliberal New Democracy party, named the country’s post-covid
recovery plan. Greece 2.0 suggests a plan oriented to all-inclusive hotels,
casinos and hip new neighborhoods, signifying a shift to a new tourism model to
appeal to different kinds of customers. The city branding and the emphasis on
this new type of tourism has been going on for some years now at the behest of
Greek tourism policymakers, targeting so-called “high quality” tourists with
big wallets. These new categories of tourists are expected to be rich enough to
buy cheap metropolitan properties to rent out on airbnb when they are not
staying there, thus gentrifying the cities, or to afford the high prices of
5-star tourist accommodation. To put it simplistically, there seems to be a
transition from the stereotypical history-aware tourist in socks and sandals
wandering around the acropolis, to new categories, with little interest in
archaeology (e.g. Western yuppies, Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and upper
classes from emerging economies).
Before the pandemic, there was a widely held idea that Greek
tourism is no longer affordable for Greeks and is thus only open to foreigners.
The drop in the real income of many Greeks since the crisis of 2010 and the
unaffordability, for most Greeks, of tourist products, especially
accommodation, has caused this gap. To put it simply, until the early 2010s,
there was expensive luxurious accommodation in the islands of Greece, but it
was not rare to also find local small units with a cost of 40-50 EUR per night,
even in the high session. Today, however, such prices are nothing but a fantasy
for many millions of Greeks, who have seen a decrease in their income since
2010. Many people in Greece wait for the state-sponsored ‘social tourism
vouchers’ in order to get a few days in one of the many touristic destinations
of the country. Yet this affects international tourism too, as the Greek
tourist product is addressed increasingly to wealthier classes who look for
five-star tourist experiences.
The Resetting of Popular Greekness
As the anthropological preoccupation with infrastructures has
taught us, things like social and cultural identities, the relation between the
state and its citizenry, and even ideology itself, are not abstract, immaterial
ideas installed in the hearts and minds of the people. A very concrete,
material basis that shapes particular socio-cultural environments is a
prerequisite for social contracts and imagined communities to be shaped. The
archeological sites in Greece served in many ways as such infrastructures, as
they secured the ideological and, in many instances, also the economic
integration of an emerging Greek middle class. As many people (not just the
wealthy elites) were profiting from the commodification of the national identity
within the touristic industry. Restaurants, hotels, stores selling souvenirs,
local and international tour operators, guides, airports, and port
infrastructures all relied to a great extent on that same materiality. The
creative imagination often has depicted with humor the image of the Greek
islander holding a ‘rooms to let’ sign in the port of their island, with
museums and archaeological sites having a significant role in this industry.
Much of the material basis of the national identity was simultaneously the main
axis of the touristic industry.
Of course, Greece is not the only polity that is abandoning
its archeological infrastructures and by extension abandoning a classic liberal
need for a minimum of social cohesion based on a common sociocultural identity.
The destruction of the Notre Dame in Paris some years ago, with the French
state failing to secure one of the most acknowledged material symbols of the
continent, marked probably the end of the western need to produce relations and
continuities with a timeline and a purpose that make sense.
What can this seeming abandonment of a certain kind of
archaeological tourism infrastructure tell us about Greece today? As the
neoliberal model deepens, the tourist industry is “liberated” from the need to link
with a collective identity. This identity traditionally functioned by
economically and socio-culturally integrating the lower classes inside Greece,
and by addressing mass tourism outside. As this link was inextricably connected
with certain material infrastructures, the indifference towards them signifies
an era in which the tourist model, and perhaps the very structure of Greek
society, will no longer be based on gaining consensus from the lower strata,
but in aggressively serving the 1%.
The neoliberal management of the world is sending collective
identities and the sense of history or geography into a state of limbo. The
aesthetics of a 5-star all-inclusive hotel on a beachfront are almost
context-free, a tourist could be pretty much in any of the 5 continents, and in
any recent decade, and have a very similar, if not the same, experience.
Similarly, the aesthetics of a New York loft, which preoccupies much of the
renovation for airbnb purposes in apartments in downtown Athens (even quoting
‘New York style loft’ in the airbnb ad), could be almost anywhere else in the Americas
or Europe. What is needed for neoliberalism is a culture of the present
expressed in constant transactions. Everything else can be surrendered to the
merciless critique of entropy.
Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.
Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He will be researching the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.
Dalakoglou, D., & Kallianos, Y. (2018).
‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’: Disjunctive modernization,
infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece. Political Geography, 67,
76-87.
Poulimenakos G. & Dalakoglou D. (2018). Airbnbizing Europe: mobility, property and platform capitalism. Online publication or Website, Open Democracy
Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Georgos Poulimenakos. 2021. “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/
QAnon, Deep
State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama
birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever
so reflective anthropologists are being inundated with one conspiracy theory
after another. A May 2021 survey reveals that 15% of Americans and 23% of those
who call themselves Republicans believe that ‘the government, media, and
financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping
pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation’ (PRRI 2021). The evil
conspirators are often termed a ‘cabal’ (a word derived from the Hebrew ‘kabbalah’/esoteric
teachings). This subversive cabal is viewed as embedded in our governments, collaborating
with the global financial elite and the Davos crowd, within the US and European
Left, the Hollywood elite, the mainstream media, and with transgender activists
and Critical Race Theory proponents, even with the West European welfare states
with their Covid-19 lockdown/vaccine policies. Cabals are the secret agents of conspiratorial
plots. To study conspiracy theory is to do cabal anthropology.
Conspiracy
theories are stigmatized knowledge. This has led some anthropologists to view
conspiracy theorists as ‘contesting’ power. Conspiracism becomes a form of
resistance by the powerless against the arrogant elites and elite institutions
(Pelkmanns and Machold 2011, Dean 2000, Fassin 2021). So, what do we anthropologists
do about the kind of stigmatized knowledge promoted by the QAnon believers? Who
assert that America is threatened by a Satanic, pedophile cult from which only
Donald Trump can save us? What do we do about the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who say that
the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by the U.S. government, or the
‘birthers’ who assert that Obama (whose mother was an anthropologist!) was born
a Muslim in Kenya? Should we
view Holocaust deniers, the Stolen Election crowd and the racist Great
Replacement adherents as ‘contestation’?
We all
like ‘speaking truth to power’, but what about those who speak untruth to power?
Are there good and bad forms of contestation? Are we anthropologists in danger of becoming what the philosopher Cassam
called ‘conspiracy apologists’? What, in fact, can we anthropologists add to
the now frantic discussion of conspiracy theories?
Theories of conspiracy versus conspiracy theory
In the
ordinary forensic sense, a conspiracy is simply a secret plot to do something
bad, such as robbing a bank or political subversion. Conspiracies require secret
plans, malevolent motives and a group of conspirators. Forensic conspiracies
are commonplace. Some succeed, others are discovered and in most cases the
plotters exposed, caught and punished. The bombing of the World Trade Center garage
in 1993, and the suicide plane hijackings of September 11, 2001 were
both forensic conspiracies.
What we
call ‘conspiracy theories’ are also secret plots, to be sure, but the plotters tend
to be all-powerful, sophisticated, and diabolical. Their project is more than
robbing a bank, tapping phones or a terrorist attack. It is nothing short of total
control and world domination. Conspiratorial plots of this kind do not occur
alone. They are connected to other plots over space and time (Illuminati,
Freemasons, Jews, Communists, Trilateral Commission, Icke’s ‘lizard people’, alien
abduction, ‘New World Order’, the Neocons, the Deep State, etc.).
Because
the conspirators are considered to be so deeply embedded among us, the work of
a conspiracy theorist is to expose their deception. The 9/11 truthers, for
example, believe that the Bin Laden-based, ‘Official Conspiracy Theory’ is one
such deception, what they call a ‘false flag operation’. They believe that the
World Trade Centers collapsed because U.S. military/intelligence organs,
perhaps helped by the Mossad, planted explosives in the buildings. Somehow, these
explosives detonated precisely when the planes flew into the buildings, and it
is assumed that a third building close by, Building no. 7, also collapsed not
due to fire but due to explosives. How and why this was done remains
unexplained.
Of
course, no conspirator has ever been found. The truthers believe that the U.S. government
decided to murder thousands of its own citizens in order to achieve some
nefarious end, presumably connected to domination of the Middle East and its
oil and to create a military/security state in the U.S. The QAnon conspiracy
theory is even more elaborate, with narratives of child kidnapping and blood libel
in a plot that has long anti-Semitic roots, but which now brings together the
Clintons, the Democratic party left, and their Hollywood friends. Whether 9/11
truth or QAnon, conspiracy theorists see themselves as ‘truth tellers’ or
‘truth-seekers’ (Toseland 2018). They are not just propounding theories; they
are on a mission.
Conspiracy theory: the state of research
Conspiracy
theory research has focused on the logical structure of conspiratorial
explanations and why these are so attractive to so many. For the cultural
theorist Michael Barkun (2014), all conspiracy theories revolve around three
premises: Nothing happens by accident, Nothing is at it seems, and Everything
is connected. Conspiracy is thus the reverse side of transparency. Anything
on the surface is false or misleading. Hence the need to look deeper in search
of the real, more significant truth. According to the philosopher Karl Popper, who
was the first to coin the idea of a ‘conspiracy theory of society’, conspiracy
theory begins with the death of God. When God was around, all disasters and misfortunes
could be attributed to this higher power. With the Enlightenment, however, disasters
and misfortunes are now blamed on human actors (secret cabals in the King’s
court), newly powerful social groups such as the Freemasons, or outsider groups
such as Jews or Roma. During the Enlightenment, conspiratorial thinking becomes
a theory of total agency (Wood 1982). Bad things happen because secret sinister
groups of people intend them to happen.
Social
psychologists have speculated on the attraction of conspiracy theory, based on
the premise that conspiratorial beliefs are a danger to society. Clearly, conspiracy
theories give believers a simple, all-encompassing explanation for adverse
developments or disasters. We obtain a ‘who’ behind a complex or chance event. For
ardent conspiracy believers, this also gives them a mission, and the chance to
enter a community of fellow believers seeking to expose the sinister cabal. The
Trump ‘stolen election’ conspiracy – whose culprits are corrupt inner city
Black voting officials, Democratic Party swindlers and evil voting machine
companies with ties to Venezuela – has now become the latest ‘cabal’. In this
narrative, political power was stolen from the American people, and Mr. Trump
will help them get it back.
Part of
the conspiracists’ mission is to connect the dots. For conspiracies do not
occur alone. The death of JFK junior, Covid-19, faked moon landings, the ‘stolen election’ plot, transgender activism,
Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory can now be related to a secret
elite and their lackeys in government, in Silicon Valley, in the media, etc. This
is the QAnon project. Outside observers have described this mission as falling
down the ‘rabbit hole’. Hence, a recent book on QAnon adherents invokes the
‘rabbit hole’ imagery no less than 22 times (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021).
The work
of the conspiracy theorists is to uncover and interpret ‘evidence’, to discover
the truth. They are truth-seekers who do research (googling) by ‘connecting the
dots’, interpreting the evidence and communicating their interpretations to
others in meetings, forums and chat rooms.
Like others involved in political advocacy projects, conspiracy
theorists – be they truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, anti-Covid activists
— are emotionally engaged and
articulate. They are ready, willing and able to promote their views and defend
the most minute points, armed with ever more evidence along. This is because
conspiracy theorists are not simply propagating ‘theories’. Their explanatory
theories are ‘unlikely’, their premises are ideological, and their mission is
political, as the philosopher Quassim Cassam has argued (2019).
The
QAnon community, heavily overlapping with ardent Trump supporters and
right-wing extremist, is typical. QAnon revolves around the cryptic tweets, called
‘drops’, issued every few weeks by ‘Q’, someone supposedly deep inside the U.S.
government (for a discussion of who Q might really be see Bloom and Moskalenko
2021, ch. 1; on QAnon see also CBS News 2020, Quandt 2018, and further
references below). These texts are then interpreted, and often associated with
tweets by Trump or his followers, and connected to signs of an impending
‘storm’ or ‘awakening’ that will come but never does (that Hillary Clinton
would be arrested, that Trump would assume power in March, now in August). The
QAnon narrative is continually expanding, with any attempts at refutation
viewed as part of the plot to destroy its followers.
Populist expertise as Latourian matters of concern; but why?
The 9/11
truthers and QAnon are forms of ‘populist expertise’. Imitating experts, they
assemble facts, assess evidence, pass on newly found explanations for enigmatic
or troubling events (Marwick and Partin 2020). If Latour and STS described the ‘social
construction of scientific facts’, we now have a populist construction of ‘alternative
facts’. Latour’s ‘matters of concern’
have outrun us (Latour 2004).
QAnon,
the 9/11 truthers, the birthers, the 5G telephone protesters, the antivaxxers
who believe a chip is being implanted in their bodies, they are Foucault run
wild. To the extent that QAnon followers and other conspiracists question
established knowledge regimes and authorities, they are certainly ‘critical’. This
generates some sympathy among those who see conspiracists as performing a
valuable function for society, what Cassam calls ‘conspiracy apologists’. But
the conspiracists’ critique is based upon a profound and yet naïve distrust of
established institutions, a resistance to any kind of falsification or data
that would contradict their ‘findings’, and a vicious anti-Semitism and racism that
the apologists tend to overlook (Byford 2015). Conspiracy theorists may be
naïve or sympatico as individual human beings, but conspiracism is a pernicious
masquerading as science.
With the rise of QAnon pedophile blood libel conspiracy, the Trumpian ‘Big Lie’ and anti-Covid protests, we now face a presumed ‘rise of conspiracism’. The fear of conspiracism, a veritable ‘conspiracy panic’ is nothing new (Bratich 2008, Thalmann 2016). Past or present, one overarching question takes center stage, a question posed by the media and addressed by various experts who view conspiratorial thinking as dangerous: Why do people believe this stuff?
The
search for an answer forms the basis for the entire conspiracy research industry,
from ERC research projects to panels among our own tribe of anthropologists
(including a panel that I co-organized at EASA in 2018), to EU policy papers
and government reports proposing various counter-conspiracy measures (Institute
for Public Affairs 2013, European Commission 2021; Önnerfors 2021). My own fascination with
conspiracism began with my research in Romania, long before 1989, where I noticed
how people believed in all kinds of outlandish rumors and conspiracies about
domestic and foreign enemies (including me as spy; Sampson 1984). I then followed
conspiracies about the EU, the Soros Mafia and the Western NGO industry, which
led me to years of following the 9/11 truthers, many of whom are older male,
end-of-career academics, taking similar positions in society as myself and
other anthropologists.
Indeed,
the 9/11 truther activists share with us in anthropology that they search for
‘evidence’. Many are familiar with the protocols of the peer reviewed journal
article; as I have argued for the pretentious
Journal of 9/11 Studies and its truther editorial board (Sampson 2010). Indeed,
conspiracy producers, consumers and conspiracy entrepreneurs are not just
lonely ‘losers’ sitting in a basement staring at a screen all day. They are
active members of a community who ‘produce content’, and keep abreast of
events, even in mainstream media. So why indeed do people believe this stuff?
Image 1: How important is it to be paranoid? A selection of readings (photo by the author)
Conspiracism
as epistemology
Early theorizing
on the ‘why’ question begins with Hofstadter (1964), who depicted conspiracy
believers as acting out a ‘paranoid style’, perhaps socially disoriented, isolated
and even cognitively disabled. Recent surveys of those arrested in the January
6th riots at the U.S. Capitol finds that a sizeable percentage of
participants have (had) a variety of mental illnesses such as anxiety,
depression and PTSD, and estrangement from their children (Bloom and Moskalenko
2021, who also highlight the propensity of ‘truther’ women for some of these
sufferings). Along with the mental instability argument, Sunstein and Vermeule
(2009) argue that conspiracism is based on a ‘crippled epistemology’. This
individualized understanding, based on the psychological or cognitive
characteristics of ‘the conspiracy believer’, or the conspiratorial mind-set, focuses
on conspiracists as somehow irrational, as overly fearful as frantically
searching for someone to blame for their personal troubles or social deroute.
Their anxiety both
reflects and results in an intense distrust of institutions, authorities, or established
science and thus a susceptibility to conspiratorial explanations of suspicious events,
disasters or other misfortunes, ranging from 9/11 to Covid-19 to Trump’s
election loss. Moreover, since they trust no institution, imploring them to ‘believe
the science’ is useless. Scientific experts and institutions are themselves
suspect. Conspiracists must do the research themselves, on the internet, encouraged
by like-minded conspiracy theorists and amateur experts who can parlay their
academic expertise from one field into another: the leading 9/11 truther, David
Ray Griffin, is a professor of religion. This distrust of authorities has a
derivative effect: conspiracists can be easily manipulated by populist
politicians (Bergmann 2018).
The conspiratorial
mindset was also depicted in a famous study by Leon Festinger and his
colleagues (1956) when they described how a UFO cult that predicted the end of the
world was only more reinforced in their belief when the disaster did not
happen. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance approach seems to be supported by the
hardcore support for Trump and his ‘stolen election’ theory, culminating in
Trump supporters’ invasion of the U.S. Congress on January 6th 2021,
and the election of QAnon supporters to political office. The consensus among
conspiracy theory researchers is that conspiracy theorists cannot be combatted
by any kind of fact-checking enterprise. People do not get converted, nor do
they see the light, simply because they are confronted with contradictory
evidence, new facts or sophisticated counter-arguments. The conspiracy mindset
is not about facts and evidence. It is about social engagement, political
projects, and belief.
The problem
with explanations of conspiracy followers as people who are somehow socially,
emotionally or cognitively disabled is that these explanations are far too
general. After all, who among us does not at times feel disempowered, confused,
uncertain, insecure or distrustful of institutions and science, most especially
in this Covid-19 era? How much should we ‘trust science’ when scientific
explanations are contested or change? If we all suffer from ‘confirmation bias’
or other such psychological syndromes, then why aren’t we all conspiracy
theorists? Could it be that a healthy scepticism about the scientific enterprise
is a core theme in the work of STS and anthropologists of policy? Are the
conspiracy theorists just another form of institutional critique? Do we regard
Holocaust deniers, Great Replacement adherents or QAnon activists as fellow
compatriots ‘contesting authority’? What indeed is the difference between an
outrageous conspiracy theory and hard-hitting critique of subtle powers and
hidden agendas in state institutions and global capitalism?
What is belief?
Let me
come back to the question of “Why people believe this stuff”?
Anyone
who has argued with a conspiracy theorist, a religious zealot or political true
believer of any kind knows that refutation of their evidence is fruitless. You
point out contrary facts or illogical arguments and your remarks are simply
cast aside as irrelevant or confirmation of the conspiracy. This is because the
conspiratorial narrative is in fact an expression of belief. The problem, then,
is not about the facts but about belief. Conspiracy theorists do not assert
claims. They express beliefs. What does it mean to believe, for example, that
Trump won the election with 70% of the vote or that the US military blew up the
World Trade Center? What is belief all about?
I
decided to re-read a bunch of anthropological analyses of belief. Virtually all
of these were written to explain religious beliefs, as when
Evans-Pritchard wrote that the Nuer ‘believe’ that twins are birds. I think
that we can fruitfully apply the discussion of religious belief to secular,
conspiratorial beliefs as well. There are obvious overlaps between religious
and conspiracy belief systems: grand forces of good and evil; an apocalyptic
reckoning some time in an imminent future; scriptures and texts that provide clues;
esoteric interpretations and discussions of what the clues mean; struggles over
orthodox and deviant interpretations; and an institutional practice in which
communities of believers seek out converts, debate skeptics, and ex-communicate
apostates and perceived heretics. The conspiratorial universe thus contains conspiracy
producers, conspiracy consumers, and even conspiracy entrepreneurs (David Icke,
Alex Jones, etc.). It includes not only true believers and former believers (read QAnon causalities on Reddit), but also
anti-conspiracists, the debunkers.
Being in
a conspiracist community involves work, or ‘research’. The 9/11 truthers, for
example, include many students and retired academics who do internet googling,
organize evidence and hold conferences, even selling truther merchandise. The
QAnon community has gatekeepers who run the web portals, moderate chatrooms,
assemble narratives, sell merchandise, and retweet the preferred interpretations.
Like any religious community, conspiracy communities have their rites and rituals.
Long before January 6th, QAnon followers were appearing at
demonstrations, recruiting followers and arguing with skeptics and debunkers. We
need to recall the very banal, anthropological insight that conspiracy theory is
not just about a bunch of random facts and a set of outlandish, unfalsifiable
beliefs. It is also a set of practices. Conspiracists do not just stare at a
screen. They do things with the screen and in real life. They search for
confirming evidence, they connect the dots, they discuss their findings with
like-minded others, they try to unmask provocateurs, etc. It’s the doing that creates
that passion and the commitment behind conspiracism. The conspiracist ‘rabbit
hole’ is not a place of isolation, it is a community. This passionate community
explain the sense of exhilaration common to many true believers. It’s so
wonderful to know the truth and to share it with others, especially after
having experienced an adverse life event or a traumatic experience (as so many
QAnon followers have, according to surveys; see Jensen and Kane 2021).
So
perhaps the anthropological discussion of beliefs can help us understand the
power of beliefs in the conspiratorial universe of truthers, birthers, QAnon
followers, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, New World Order proponents, Holocaust
deniers, alien abductionists and similar groups.
Back to Needham
In 1972,
Rodney Needham published Belief, Language and Experience, a long
philosophical treatise on belief, much of it inspired by Wittgenstein. What do
we mean, asked Needham, when we say that members of tribe X ‘believe’
something? Needham stressed that ‘statements about belief’ made by our
informants should be distinguished from belief itself. Ethnographers love
eliciting such statements, but for Needham these are the result of informants’ effort
at introspection. For Needham, statements about belief are not belief. Belief is
an inner state. This inner state may be articulated as an accepted doctrine (‘I
believe that…’), as knowledge (‘I know the truth about…’) or as an emotional
conviction (‘I believe in …’). Needham concludes that we just cannot know what
is inside people’s heads. We can elicit statements, listen to what they say, we
can observe what they do, and at best try to infer some kind of inner state
that we call ‘belief’. Yet Needham is skeptical: the concept of belief is so
vague that it should be thrown out. Needham does not believe in belief.
Pouillon
(1982), in a widely cited essay, reminds us that we must distinguish between believing
in something versus believing that something. Expressions of belief
in reveal whom we trust, who has legitimate authority, in whom we have faith.
In contrast to ‘believe in…’ believing
that is about a coherent doctrine of propositions. If belief is ultimately about
faith, the project of debunking beliefs, e.g., showing conspiracy theories to
be based on incorrect facts or illogical arguments, is beside the point. Conspiracies
are not about facts or evidence. They are about ‘beliefs in’. And we cannot
disprove beliefs. People can articulate, adjust or renounce beliefs. As such, beliefs
are tied more to emotional commitment rather than facts. Conspiracy theories,
despite the quasi-scientific label of ‘theory’, are clearly of this kind. They
are beliefs, not theories in the scientific sense.
We often
assume that conspiracy theorists articulate a coherent, fundamental set of
propositions. Yet anthropologists have shown us that people can operate with
overlapping, fragmented, alternative and contradictory belief systems, what we
now euphemize as ‘syncretism’. Hence, J. Mair reminds us that ‘[not] every
believer […] is a fundamentalist or a systematic theologian’ (2012, p. 45). Our
analysis should therefore focus not so much on what people believe but rather how
they believe. We should focus on what Mair calls ‘cultures of belief’.
Studies of religious groups reveal how people can comfortably maintain two or
more sets of beliefs that are complementary or even logically contradictory.
Numerous studies of the anthropology of Christianity describe people who are
sincerely converted Christians, but who also interact with spirits, react to
witchcraft accusations or believe in reincarnation (Stringer 1996, Robbins 2007).
While these studies have been applied largely to religious believers and
converts, they are equally valid to those who have fallen down the ‘rabbit
hole’ of QAnon, 9/11 truther, Holocaust
denial, Great Replacement, alien abduction or other conspiratorial narratives. Like
religious groups, conspiratorial communities are also full of dual,
overlapping, contrasting and conflicting belief systems. An ethnographic approach to conspiracy
theories might therefore profit from a ‘situational belief’ approach (Stringer 1996).
The focus here should be less on who assents to certain propositions (‘I
believe that…’;) and more on what kinds of truths and authorities people commit
themselves to (‘I believe in….’ ‘I have
faith in…’).
Practicing conspiracism
The
QAnon belief system has its logical fallacies. Some may fully believe in the
pedophile plot, while others focus only on the Deep State. However, they are
united in their sources of authority (Q ‘drops’ and Trump statements,
supplemented by various authoritative interpretations that are then retweeted
and discussed). Exposing the cabal is both ‘research’ and an act of faith.
Anthropological
approaches to religious belief have always included descriptions of religious
practices, rites and rituals. Conspiracy adherents are no different. They also
have their rites and rituals. They meet on line, in hundreds of web
communities. They recruit followers and argue with debunkers. And they meet in
real life at demonstrations, political meetings, in anti-vaccine gatherings, and
of course, on January 6th. Conspiracists have been busy trying to
expose the Covid vaccine chip insertion plot (led by Bill Gates). They have
been digesting the shock of Trump’s defeat; promoting the narrative of the
Stolen Election and his imminent return; reading and interpreting the QAnon clues; and fighting the regulations to
wear masks. They do the work of textual interpretation. They re-tweet and add
comments. They discuss these messages with family members, argue with skeptics,
and end up in echo chambers of like- minded conspiracists who can confirm and
reinforce their ideas.
What all
this means is that we need to show how conspiratorial belief and conspiracist practice
interact, as we have done with the study of religious beliefs and practices. Regrettably,
conspiracy theory research has tended to focus on the psycho-social
vulnerabilities of the most radical believers. Certainly, these committed conspiracists
have from emotional ‘baggage’, social isolation or violent tendencies (as the
recent QAnon studies show). But most conspiracy adherents are only partially or
borderline committed; many view conspiracy theory adherence as more of a social
activity than an all-out ideological commitment, much like church attendance
can be more a social obligation than a religious act. Second, the focus on
individual vulnerability assumes some kind of coherent ideology among
conspiracists. It ignores the way people use religious belief in creative ways,
amalgamating, adapting and converting it to strategic ends. Conspiratorial ideas
have a political message: the evil plot by the sinister outsiders, but it is
also a personal project, a voyage of discovery that gives people new meaning in
their lives as they become part of history. Both religious and conspiratorial practice
are more than acting out an ostensibly coherent set of beliefs. Our
understanding of conspiracists is best served by observing what they do: how
they are recruited, how they participate, how they recruit others, and even how
they often exit or even express regret (see again the Reddit thread for ‘QAnon Casualties’;
or the testimonies of ex-Truthers).
From how to why
Let me
close with the question of why does one become a believer? Robbins (2007)
described how some converts to Christianity are truly sincerely converted, but
we also have examples of conversion for purely strategic reasons. This
distinction between sincere and instrumental conversion may be simplistic, but
it is worth recalling when observing why people might join the QAnon, truther,
anti-vaxx or alien obduction community. We join groups for many reasons: to resolve
existential problems, to gain some control over the world, to obtain social contacts
or to re-affirm our political beliefs. Conspiracy groups seem to solve all these
tasks at the same time. Moreover, joining one conspiratorial community seems to
lead to others: QAnon people form the core of Covid denial and anti-vaccination
resistance, as well as 5G-telephone skepticism and of course, they are
enthusiastic supporters of the stolen election theory. Since belief is an inner
state that we can never really know, the best we can do as ethnographers is to
listen to statements and observe behaviors.
What
then, is a believer? Believers here don’t just read tweets. They save them,
comment on them, retweet them, discuss them, embellish them, delete them,
switch platforms, go to meetings, participate in demonstrations, buy
merchandise, and spend hours of their day looking for further clues and reinterpret
these. Their closed groups can decide to ban or unfriend others. They may have
fallen down a rabbit hole but they are also actively exploring new paths,
routes, tunnels and dead ends. Conspiracy is not just about belief; it is also about
community.
If we
are to understand conspiratorial movements like QAnon or those following the
Deep State conspiracy, we anthropologists need to promote our own insights
about what belief is all about. While Needham
argued that the concept of belief was useless for anthropology, we still need
to explain what it means to be a believer. We need to go beyond the conventional
wisdom that every conspiracy theorist suffers from some kind of cognitive
deficiency, emotional damage or social isolation. The leaders and mobilizers
may be emotional, committed, even fanatic (as so many leaders of social
movements are), but the followers and adherents are much more like us than we’d
like to admit. Resorting to a psychological explanation is not sufficient. Who
among us has not suffered from anxiety, depression, loneliness or a traumatic
event that might lead us to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole? Who among us
has not spent hours on line immersed in some incessant search to solve a puzzle?
The conspiracy followers are hardly exotic. Take away their beliefs, and they
suddenly become just like us, ordinary men and women with family obligations,
precarious jobs, worried about their future and their place in it. They are
both strange and familiar at the same time. And it is this contrast that makes
them the perfect object of anthropological scrutiny. The task of anthropology,
after all, is to show that the strange is actually familiar, and that the familiar
has its exotic elements. We need more cabal anthropology.
Cabal
anthropology might therefore provide a corrective to the journalists,
psychologists and political commentators who so often classify conspiracy theorists
as lonely, alienated souls. The narratives being promoted by conspiracists (QAnon
anti-pedophiles, Deep State, Obama birther, 9/11 truth, stolen election, New
World Order, Covid anti-vaxxers) are clearly false and pernicious. But the
issue not just about the kind of evidence they use or the doctrines they
promote. They reflect new forms of commitment. We need to understand how
‘believe that…’ interacts with ‘belief in …’
In this
sense, QAnon and other conspiracy theories are secular forms of religious
revival. The search for Satanic forces, and the premonitions of a great
reckoning led by Trump are obvious parallels with religion. Alongside this are
the conspiracy theorists’ profound mistrust in our financial institutions, elite
universities, government institutions and in scientific expertise. Lack of
trust in these institutions is why the ‘stolen election’ discourse has stayed
with us. No amount of fact checking or debunking will solve the conspiracist
wave. This is because conspiratorial thinking is not about incorrect facts or
crippled epistemologies. It’s about the power of belief and the communities of
believers. What beliefs did QAnon replace? What bonds of trust have been
dismantled in order for QAnon to move in? How could these bonds be
reconstructed? How are conspiracy communities being manipulated by unscrupulous
conspiratorial entrepreneurs and political actors? Here is an agenda for cabal
anthropology. The rabbit hole awaits.
Steven Sampson is professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, Lund University (Steven.sampson@soc.Lu.se). He has done research on Romania and the Balkans, NGOs, the anti-corruption industry, conspiracy theory and business ethics. For a list of his publications with open access see: https://www.soc.lu.se/steven-sampson.
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Cite as: Sampson, Steven. 2021. “Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism.” FocaalBlog, 13 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/13/steven-sampson-cabal-anthropology
In 2021 a modest long-haired Sakha man named Alexander Gabyshev was arrested at his family compound on the outskirts of Yakutsk in an unprecedented for Sakha Republic (Yakutia) show-of-force featuring nine police cars and over 50 police. For the third time in two years, he was subjected to involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Some analysts see this medicalized punishment, increasingly common in President Putin’s 4th term, as a return to the politicized use of clinics that had been prevalent against dissidents in the Soviet period. Alexander’s hair was cut, and his dignity demeaned. By April, his health had seriously deteriorated, allegedly through use of debilitating drugs, and his sister feared for his life. A private video of his arrest (possibly filmed by a sympathetic Sakha policeman) shows police overwhelming him in bed as if they were expecting a wild animal; he was forced to the floor bleeding, and handcuffed. Official media claimed he had resisted arrest using a traditional Sakha knife, but this is not evident on the video. By May, a trial in Yakutsk affirmed the legality of his arrest, and a further criminal case was brought against him using the Russian criminal code article 280 against extremism. Appeals are pending, including one accepted by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
What had elicited such official vehemence
against an opposition figure who had dared to critique President Putin but
whose powers and influence were relatively minor, compared to prominent
Russians like Aleksei Naval’ny? How did a localized movement in far-from-Moscow
Siberia become well-known across Russia and beyond?
In his 2018–2019 meteoric rise to national
and international attention, Alexander Prokopievich Gabyshev, also called
“Shaman Alexander,” “Sasha shaman,” and “Sania,” came to mean many things to
many people. For some, he is a potent symbol of protest against a corrupt
regime led by a president he calls “a demon.” For others, he has become a
coopted tool in some part of the government’s diabolical security system, set
to attract followers so that they can be exposed and repressed. Some feel he is
a “brave fellow” (molodets),
“speaking truth to power” in a refreshingly articulate voice devoid of egotism.
Others see him as misguided and psychologically unstable, made “crazy” by a
tragic life that includes the death of his beloved wife before they could have
children. Some accept him into the Sakha shamanic tradition, arguing his
suffering and two–three years spent in the taiga after his wife’s death qualify
him as a leader and healer who endured “spirit torture” in order to serve
others. Others, including some Sakha and Buryat shamans, reject him as a
charlatan whose education as an historian was wasted when he became a welder,
street cleaner, and plumber.
These and many other
interpretations are debated by my Russian and non-Russian friends with a
passion that at minimum reveals he has touched a nerve in Russia’s body
politic. It is worth describing how Alexander, born in 1968, describes himself
and his mission as a “warrior shaman” before analyzing his significance and his
peril.
Alexander’s Movement
Picture
Alexander on foot pushing a gurney and surrounded by well-wishers, walking a
mountainous highway before being arrested by masked armed police for
“extremism” in September 2019. Among over a hundred internet video clips of
Alexander’s epic journey from Yakutsk to Ulan-Ude via Chita, is an interview
from Shaman on the Move! (June 12, 2019):
I asked, beseeched God, to give me witness and insight….I went into the taiga [after my wife had died of a dreadful disease ten years ago]….It is hard for a Yakut [Sakha person] to live off the land, not regularly eating meat and fish….I came out of the forest a warrior shaman….To the people of Russia, I say “choose for yourself a normal leader,… young, competent”….To the leaders of the regions, I say “take care of your local people and the issues they care about and give them freedom.”…To the people, I say “don’t be afraid of that freedom.” We are endlessly paying, paying out….Will our resources last for our grandchildren? Not at the rate we are going… Give simple people bank credit.. . Let everyone have free education and the chance to choose their careers freely.. . There should not be prisons….But we in Russia [rossiiane] have not achieved this yet, far from it…Our prisons are terrifying….At least make the prisons humane…. For our small businesses, let them flourish before taking taxes from them. Just take taxes from the big, rich businesses….For our agriculture, do not take taxes from people with only a few cows….Take from only the big agro-business enterprises.[1]
In this interview and others, Alexander made
clear he is patriotic, a citizen of Russia, who wants to purify its leadership.
“Let the world want to be like us in Russia,” he proclaimed, “We need young,
free, open leadership.” While he explains that “for a shaman, authority is
anathema,” he has praised the relatively young and dynamic head of Sakha
Republic: “Aisen [Nikolaev] is a simple person at heart who wants to defend his
people, but he is constrained, under the fear of the demon in power [in the
Kremlin].” Alexander acknowledges the route he has chosen is difficult, and
that many will try to stop him. Indeed he began his “march to Moscow” three
separate times, once in 2018 and twice in 2019, including after his arrest when
he temporarily slipped away from house arrest in December 2019, was rearrested
and fined.
Alexander’s 2021
arrest, described in the opening paragraph, was hastened by his refusal to
cooperate with medical personnel as a psychiatric outpatient, and further
provoked when he announced he would once again try to reach Moscow, this time
on a white horse with a caravan of followers. His video announcement of the new
plans, with a photo of him galloping on his white horse carrying an old Sakha
warrior’s standard, mentioned that he would begin his Spring renewal journey by
visiting the sacred lands of his ancestors in the Viliui (Suntar) territories,
“source of my strength.” He encouraged followers to join him, since “truth is
with us.”[2] A multiethnic group of followers launched plans to gather
sympathizers in a marathon car, van and bus motorcade. Their route was
designated to pass through the sacred Altai Mountains region of Southern
Siberia. What had begun as a quirky political action on foot acquired the
character of a media-savvy pilgrimage.
At moments of peak
rhetoric, Alexander often explained that “for freedom you need to struggle.”
Into 2021, he hoped to achieve his goal of reaching Red Square to perform his
“exorcism ritual.” But his arrests and re-confinement in a psychiatric clinic
under punishing “close observation” conditions make that increasingly unlikely,
especially given massive crackdowns on all of President Putin’s opponents,
including Aleksei Naval’ny and his many supporters. One of Alexander’s most
telling early barbs critiqued the “political intelligentsia,” who hold “too
many meetings” and do not accomplish enough. He told them: “It is time to stop
deceiving us.” Yet he repeated in many interviews that numerous politicians in
Russia, across the political spectrum, would be better alternatives than the
current occupant of the Kremlin.
Among Alexander’s most controversial actions before he was arrested was a rally and ritual held in Chita in July 2019, on a microphone-equipped stage under the banner “Return the Town and Country to the People.” After watching the soft-spoken and articulate Alexander on the internet for months, I was amazed to see him adopt a more crowd-rousing style, asking hundreds of diverse multiethnic demonstrators to chant, “That is the law” (Eto zakon!) even before he told them what they would be answering in a “call and response” exchange. He bellowed, “give us self-determination,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” He cried, “give us freedom to choose our local administrations,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” His finale included “Putin has no control over you! Live free!” Only after this rally did I begin to wonder who, if anyone, was coaching him and why. Had he changed in the process of walking, gaining loyal followers, and talking to myriad media? The rally, with crowd estimates from seven hundred to one thousand, had been organized by the local Communist Party opposition. Local Russian Orthodox authorities denounced it and suggested that Alexander was psychologically unwell. Alexander himself simply said, after his arrest, “It is impossible to sit home when a demon is in the Kremlin.”
How and why was
Alexander using discourses of demonology? He seemed to be articulating Russian
and Sakha beliefs in a society that can be undermined by evil out of control.
When he first emerged from the forest, he built a small chapel-memorial in
honor of his beloved wife and talked in rhetoric that made connections as much
to Russian Orthodoxy as to shamanic tradition. He wore eclectic t-shirts,
including one that referenced Cuba and another the petroglyph horse-and-rider
seal of the Sakha Republic. Once he began his trek, he wore a particularly
striking t-shirt eventually mass-produced for his followers. Called “Arrive and
Exorcise,” it was made for him by the Novosibirsk artist Konstantin Eremenko
and rendered his face onto an icon-like halo.
Image 1: Shaman Alexander in t-shirt called “Arrive and Exorcise” by K. Eremenko, December 16, 2019. Used with permission by Konstantin Eremenko.
Another popular image depicts Alexander as an angel with wings. He has called himself a “Holy Fool,” correlating his brazen actions and protest ideology directly to a Russian iurodivy tradition that enabled poor, dirty, beggar-like tricksters to speak disrespectful truths to tsars. His appeals to God were ambiguous—purposely referencing the God of Orthodoxy and the Sky Gods of the Turkic Heavens (Tengri) in his speeches. During his trek, and in some of his interviews, he has had paint on his face, a thunderbolt zigzag under his eyes and across the bridge of his nose that he calls a “sign of lightning,” derived from his spiritual awakening after meditation in the forest. He has claimed, as a “warrior shaman,” that he is fated to harness spirit power to heal social ills. While his emphasis has been on social ills that begin with the top leadership, he also has been willing to pray and place healing hands on the head of a Buryat woman complaining of chronic headaches, who afterwards joyously pronounced herself cured.
During his trek, on camera and off at
evening campsites, Alexander fed the fire spirit pure white milk products,
especially kumys (fermented mare’s
milk), while offering prayers in the Sakha “white shaman” tradition that he
hoped to bring to Red Square for a benevolent ritual not only of exorcism but
of forgiveness and blessing. He chanted: “Go, Go, Vladimir Vladimirovich
[Putin]. Go of your own free will . . . Only God can judge you. Urui
Aikhal!” He expressed pride that some of the Sakha female shamans and elders
have blessed his endeavor.
Resonance and Danger
Russian observers, including well-known politicians and eclectic citizens commenting online or on camera, have had wildly divergent reactions to Alexander, sometimes laughing and mocking his naïve, provincial, or perceived weirdo (chudak) persona. But some take him seriously, including the opposition politician Leonid Gozman, President of the All-Russia movement Union of Just Forces. Leonid, admiring Alexander’s bravery, sees significance in how many supporters fed and sheltered him along his nearly two-thousand-kilometer trek before he was arrested. Rather than resenting him for insulting Russia’s wealthy and powerful president, whose survey ratings have plummeted, Alexander’s followers rallied and protected him with a base broader than many opposition politicians have been able to pull together.
As elsewhere in Russia,
civic society mobilizers, whether for ecology protests, anti-corruption
campaigns or other causes, are becoming savvy at hiding and sharing
leadership. By 2021, Alexander had
become one of many imprisoned oppositionists, whose numbers throughout Russia
have swelled beyond the prisoners of conscience documented when the great
physicist Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky in 1985.[3]
Alexander, despite being subdued beyond recognition after multiple arrests, has affirmed that he was hoping for “neither chaos nor revolution, [since] this is the twenty-first century.” He advocates for his followers an “open world, [of ] peace, freedom and solidarity,” one where all people believing in benevolent “higher forces” can find them. His significance is that he is one of the credible politicized spiritual leaders to emerge from Russia in the post-Soviet period, when in the past twenty years the costs of independent leadership have become increasingly dire, self-sacrifice is increasingly necessary, and multi-leveled community building with horizontal interconnections is increasingly risky.
Whether or not
defined as religious or shamanic, the bravery and force of individuals willing
to risk everything to change social conditions is awesome, transcending and
human wherever we find it. Far from insane, these maverick societal
shape-changers, tricksters and healers may represent our best
power-diversifying hopes against systems that pull in directions of
authoritarian repression. Perhaps once-populist power consolidating leaders
like Vladimir Putin, who warily watch their public opinion ratings, are
insecure enough to understand the deep systemic weaknesses that oppositionists
like Alexander Gabyshev and Alexei Naval’ny expose, using very different styles
along a sacred-secular continuum. President Putin’s insecurities magnify the
importance of all political opposition, creating vortexes of violence and
dangers of martyrdom in the name of stability.
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is a Faculty Fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. At Georgetown since 1987, she is co-founder of the Indigenous Studies Working Group https://indigeneity.georgetown.edu and has taught as Research Professor in the School of Foreign Service and anthropology departments. She is editor of the Taylor and Francis translation journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia and is author or editor of six books on Russia and Siberia, including Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Cornell University Press, 2021).
The
space where I live and work is described and prescribed by its past, by what it
no longer is: post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, post-conflict,
some even claim post-colonial. This world is rarely framed in terms of
what it is or what it might become. Stef Jansen in his
ethnography of residents in a block of flats in Sarajevo wrote of „yearnings in
the Dayton meantime“ (Jensen, 2015), capturing a liminal space framed by a
craving for the possibility of hope and the seeming impossibility of ‘returning
to normal’ within the dystopian governance arrangements in Bosnia-Herzegovina
deriving from the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995. In focusing on
Bosnia-Herzegovina here, I reflect on the temporalities of (failed) external
political engineering, the proliferation of (failed) projects and the
performative practices of everyday life, refusing a deterministic narrative of
the absence of hope without talking up the possibilities of repoliticisation.
The
governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton,
drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the
problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less
froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties
that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance
of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone
considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of
course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a
sovereign federal state, with a three-person Presidency and a rotating
President, based on what is referred to as “the ethnic key” with members
elected from Serbian-Orthodox, Bosniak-Muslim and Croatian-Catholic
constituencies. It remains a kind of semi-protectorate with many powers vested in
the Office of the High Representative, merged in 2009 with the EU
Representative’s office. It has a Central Bank that is carefully regulated and
there are a small number of symbolic Ministries and agencies at Federal level albeit
with very little power. Most power is vested in the two entities Republika
Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina – there is also an
autonomous Brčko District (total population 93,000) with its own foreign
administrator as the parties could not agree which entity the town should
belong to. The Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina is itself divided into ten
Cantons each of which has a Cantonal Governor and a full cabinet of Ministers.
If we just take health and social policy as one example, there is no Federal
Law, there are entity laws, and each Canton also passes its own Law.
Furthermore, financing is a municipal responsibility so that rights can vary
from one small part of the country to another. This means there are some 140
Ministries across the country, each with a Minister, a deputy, a couple of
Assistants, a large staff, many advisors, and a large number of official cars.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
remains something of a ‘crowded playground’ in which we find a proliferation of
diverse actors – Sarajevo was often referred to as ‘acronym city’ as all manner
of international organisations, NGOs, think tanks, agencies, consultants
(‘insultants’ in local parlance) and policy entrepreneurs had a presence there
(Stubbs, 2015). Indeed, as post-conflict aid money dwindled, the Sarajevo
central office would usually be the last to close, existing on scraps from the
donor table. Sometimes, as what became euphemistically known as an ‘exit strategy’,
an international NGO would create its own FrankeNGO, a local spin-off, with no
certainty as to what kind of monster might emerge. The distortions of an
immediate post-conflict economy could be observed at both a macro-level
(estimates of donor aid making up 15% of total GDP were being sprayed around a
while ago) and at the micro-level. You would be significantly better off as,
say, a university professor if you could retreat to your weekend house full-time
and rent your inner-city apartment to an NGO for an office or a flat for its
staff. You could also make ends meet by receiving honoraria from all manner of
agencies for writing reports, even those of questionable quality and
originality. Still, today, the crowded playground is populated and dominated by
all manner of flexians, in Janine Wedel’s terms (Wedel, 2009), blurring
boundaries between the public and the private, the national and the international,
the state and the non-state, and more. In crowded flex land, it is the army of
intermediaries, brokers, translators (literal and metaphorical), operating in
the cracks and interstices of governance, and almost completely
non-transparent, that possess the real power.
Central
to failed futures is ‘the project’ as an
organizational form; a managerial-bureaucratic process; a funding
modality and a practice of governmentality. ‘Projectification’ is a peculiar
assemblage of repertoires, processes and practices, drawing together material,
human, and non-human resources, calculative logics, consisting of temporalised
stages that, whilst highly contingent, serve to technocratise and depoliticise
the lifeworld and, in mundane ways, reproduce the everyday techniques of
neoliberalism (Scott, 2021). Projects operate at variegated speeds across
multiple sites and scales. They also come in waves or clusters: in
Bosnia-Herzegovina the first wave of ‘stand-alone’ projects was notable for
their sheer arbitrary diversity, short time scales, and rapid shifts from one
theme or target group to another. The
second wave were ‘pilot projects’ – as I was told in the late 1990s “Bosnia has
many pilots but no aeroplanes”. ‘Pilots’ were meant to have the potential to be
‘scaled up’ and become sustainable; that is to become long-term or permanent
features of the governance landscape. In a third wave, more explicit systemic
reform was prioritised, through ‘projects of strategic support’, aiding
Ministries and agencies to plan, implement and evaluate reforms, and introduce
new laws and regulations. Such projects were brought closer to centres of
policy making whilst also keeping a distance through sub-contracting arrangements,
a range of ‘implementing partners’ and, not unusually, the creation of new
parallel agencies, often with a chameleon-like character, to ‘drive reform’ and
‘bypass’ those likely to stand in the way of ‘progress’. A number of donors invested
a great deal in agencies that, often, became empty shells, literally and
figuratively.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
is marked by the absence of the kind of statecraft that provides what Jansen
refers to as ‘grids’, institutional frameworks that calibrate and order
individual, household and community concerns, providing a modicum of basic
orientation in terms of what to expect from the authorities. The state, along
with the family, is ‘semi-absent’, with state practices highly uneven, often
indifferent, or else over-punitive (Hromadžić, 2015). A study of mothers of
children with disabilities points to the erratic, ambiguous, fraught,
provisional, contingent, unpredictable, even ‘mysterious’ nature of care
services. Surviving, for anyone reliant on state support, is a constant
struggle to gain access to the right people who, if you are lucky, if all the
pieces fall into place, might offer help that is as far away from a structured,
system-based, ‘right’ as it is possible to get (Brković, 2017). One
conceptual entry point here is the ‘semi-periphery’, a deeply contradictory space, promoting ‘rapid modernization’ in conditions of deindustrialization,
desecularisation, repatriarchalisation and anti-intellectualism (Blagojević, 2009). Reforms are simultaneously
accepted and opposed, imitated and rejected, in thin, degridded, structural conditions.
Quite
deliberately, I want to end this essay in two alternative ways. In one, the
longing for normalcy breeds a kind of passivity, a resignation if you wish, an
erosion of the capacity to aspire and, at best, an ironic dismissal of the
absurdity of governing practices. The phrase bit će bolje can often be
heard uttered by South Slavic speakers but it means the exact opposite of its
literal translation – ‘things will get better’. This is captured in a quote
from Ivo Andrić’s novel Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina),
published in 1945, describing local responses to attempts by the
Austro-Hungarian Empire to modernise the town of Višegrad in the late 19th
century:
“The newcomers were never at peace; they allowed no one else to be at peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable but ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life … and to change and alter everything … Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. … The people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived.” (Andrić, 1995: 135)
Nebojša
Šaviha Valha (2013) discusses the phenomena of raja, referring to one’s
interlocking circles of trusted friends, often based around an activity (coffee
raja, skiing raja, hiking raja, …), where one can be oneself and practice zajebancia,
enjoying oneself in an uninhibited way. For Šaviha-Valha, raja is seen
by many Sarajevans, and Bosnians more generally, as that which was held onto
against all odds during the conflict and subsequently becomes a kind of
auto-ironic way of both critiquing the absurdities of the political elite but,
in the end, resting on that critique and settling for raja as quotidian
survival.
For my alternative ending, it is worth noting that as of 8 June 2021, Bosnia-Herzegovina had the third highest rate of COVID deaths per million population in the world, behind only Peru and Hungary. The first wave of the pandemic was marked by a corruption scandal in which a fruit-processing company with close links to political leaders secured a lucrative contract to import ventilators from China that proved to be deficient. Today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina is also policing the border with the EU and is a major holding centre for refugees and asylum seekers held in appalling conditions, many of whom have been violently pushed back by Croatian and Bosnian authorities. Localised acts of solidarity with the asylum seekers do still occur but not on the scale of responses along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ in 2015, when a kind of inter-generational geopolitics of solidarity saw grassroots activities offering practical and political support to migrants from Libya, Syria and elsewhere.
These
actions followed on from protests in February 2013, termed bebalucija when,
after a law on personal identification numbers was declared unconstitutional,
politicians from the major nationalist parties failed to reach agreement on a
new law meaning that new-born babies could not obtain a passport nor a health
insurance number. In a sense, it was precisely the absurdity of an impasse over
personal IDs that triggered the anger of the protesters, reaching a crescendo
when a three-month old child died in June 2013 because she was not allowed to
enter neighbouring Serbia for treatment. Later, several days of rioting began
in the industrial city of Tuzla in February 2014 when workers from several
factories who had lost their jobs clashed with police outside the Cantonal
Government building. The unrest spread to many other towns and cities, mainly
in the Federation and, although widely reported to have ‘run out of steam’ they
remain important for the experiment of direct democracy through plenums that
lives on today across the post-Yugoslav space. I will not try to formulate some principles regarding the
relationship between the everyday and the political in terms of which ending is
more likely. As Stuart Hall remarked (Hall, 2007: 279), such things are always “open
to the play of contingency”.
Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in
the post-Yugoslav space since 1993. He is Senior Research Fellow in the
Institute of Economics, Zagreb and a former Co-President of the Association for
the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association. His
edited book on Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement is due to be
published in 2022.
References
Andrić,
Ivo. 1995. The Bridge Over the Drina. London: Harvill.
Blagojević,
Marina. 2009. Knowledge Production at the Semi-Periphery: A Gender
Perspective, Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological
Research.
Brković, Čarna. 2017. Managing Ambiguity: How Clientlism, Citizenship and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, New York: Berghahn Books.
Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: through the prism of fan intellectual life,” in Brian Meeks and Stuart Hall (eds.) Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: the thought of Stuart Hall, London: Laerence & Wushart: 269-291.
Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. “Loving Labor: Work, Care and Entrepreneurial Citizenship in a Bosnian Town,” in Stef Jansen et al. eds. Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Farnham: Ashgate.
Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex, New York: Berghahn Books.
Stubbs, Paul. 2015. “Performing Reform in South East Europe: consultancy, translation and flexible agency”, in John Clarke et al Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage, Bristol: Policy Press: 65-94.
Šaviha
Valha, Nebojša. 2013. Raja: Ironijski aspekt svakodnevne komunikacije u
Bosni i Herzegovini i raja kao strategija života. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk.
Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite, New York: Basic Books.
Cite as: Stubbs, Paul. 2021. “Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” FocaalBlog, 17 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/17/paul-stubbs-liminal-temporalities-of-hope-in-bosnia-herzegovina/.
For the first time since El Salvador’s mid-20th century military dictatorship, a single political party dominates both the legislative and executive branches of the government, and by all accounts aims to control the judiciary soon as well. The Nuevas Ideas or “New Ideas” party, the political vehicle of populist president Nayib Bukele, recently used its new supermajority in the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to unconstitutionally expel five supreme court judges. It will soon replace them with new appointees, presumably picked by Bukele, in a move that social movement activists are denouncing as a “technical coup.”
Unlike the military dictatorships that dominated
El Salvador up until its bloody civil war, however, Bukele’s government is
nominally democratic. Bukele was elected president in 2018 and will serve a
five-year term, after which he is supposed to leave office for good.
Legislative and municipal elections in El Salvador delivered his party, branded
distinctively with a bold “N” the stands for both “Nuevas Ideas” and
“Nayib”, a resounding majority.
The elections marginalized both the centre-left FMLN, former communist guerrillas, and the traditional right ARENA, anti-communists organized by former military junta members. Bukele claimed to have “turned the page” on the postwar two-party system that characterized El Salvador’s political reality following the 1992 Peace Accords. Bukele has repeatedly claimed that he is “neither left nor right” and described both sides of the country’s bloody civil war as equally criminal, despite evidence to the contrary.
Yet in spite of a nominal democratic mandate (problematized by mass abstentionism in recent Salvadoran elections) and a post-ideological veneer, Bukele has much in common with other right-wing authoritarians in the region, such as Jair Bolsanaro – whose son and advisor tweeted supportively of the sacking of the supreme court. The instrumentalization of legislative proceedings to consolidate power also bears similarity to the tactic of lawfare used in Brazil and elsewhere by the Latin American far right. Bukele’s tendency to both issue government decrees and launch harassment campaigns against his perceived enemies via twitter has also prompted comparisons to Donald Trump.
Bukele has political power, and all signs suggest that the repressive elements of the state stand behind him – in some cases, literally, as when he stormed the legislature last year, attempting to force the assembly to approve his Territorial Control Plan and secretive US$109 million loan to upgrade the country’s police armaments. Yet in the name of security and order, he needs to consolidate more.
Speaking in the aftermath of the move to overturn the judiciary, a participant told me, “This is a strategy that could be regionalized.” The move is consistent with the strategy of “autogolpe” or “self-coup” used by other civilian governments with close military ties to kneecap and paralyze opposition, often in the name of rooting out designated enemies. Turkish president and fellow right-wing populist Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have attempted a similar strategy in 2016, and if Eduardo Bolsanaro’s comments are any indication, there is potentially appetite for it in Brazil.
Bonapartism, Bukeleism
Bukele’s personalist leadership, claims to be post-ideological, and appeals to an abstract Salvadoran people, all reflect what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called “caesarism,” or what Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, called Bonapartism. Like these historical regimes, Bukele’s rise was precipitated by a crisis. El Salvador is a microcosm of the global economic, ecological, health, political and social crises that have prompted a meteoric rise of right-wing populism around the world.
Gramsci called these conditions, which can precipitate reaction or revolution, organic crises. Organic crises usually lead to a rejection of established political parties, economic policies, and value systems. Such crises are transnational in their origins but also intimately local. El Salvador’s domestic crisis reflects global and regional trends of collapsing party systems, increased securitization, and growing disaffection with globalization and accumulation-by-dispossession. Using the framework of an organic crisis, my research situates the rise of right-wing populism in Central America within the global rise of populism.
For populism experts in the liberal tradition, like Cas Mudde and Cristobal Kaltwasser, populism signals a degeneration of the health of liberal democracy and liberal institutions. Populism’s emphasis on majoritarianism leaves little room for liberal pluralism and reduces politics to a Schmittian dichotomy of “friends” and “enemies.” On the other hand, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, some on the Left see the rise of populism as a positive, calling for socialists to seize the “populist moment” to rally “the people” to a left-populism.
Both these perspectives focus on the ideological anatomy of populism, tracing its political reasoning and descriptive effects. This is insufficient to explain Bukele. On the one hand, if we rely on liberal accounts of populism, we end up reproducing simplistic narratives of democratic backslide and the Latin caudillo. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive analysis fails to make a link between the “superstructural” language of nation, sovereignty, order, and belonging that we find in right-wing populism, and the world of production, finance, and recessions.
El Salvador’s organic crisis
Bukele and his party, Nuevas Ideas, emerged out of the 2011 indignados protests, named after the Spanish mobilizations of the same name. While initially buoying the left, middle-class Salvadoran indignadosquickly became disillusioned by the FMLN. Bukele, an ex-FMLNista himself, in many ways capitalizes on the unfulfilled anti-corruption demands of the indignados. His response in office to this crisis, though punitive, also reflects this popular disillusionment with the postwar Salvadoran political system.
Out-migration has for the past three decades acted as a kind of release valve for social pressures in Central America, pushing peasants and workers dispossessed by capitalist development north towards the United States and buoying Central American economies with billions in remittances. But as William Robinson points out, mounting ecological, social, and economic dispossession, combined with slumping economic growth and rising foreign debt (even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only made the slump worse), and a labour market unable to absorb the remaining dispossessed population, have pushed the region towards implosion.
Organic crises lay bare fundamental contradictions in the system that the ruling classes are unable to resolve, provoking resorts to open force. Central American countries, aided by the United States through the Alliance for Prosperity and Regional Security Initiative, have responded to simmering unrest and growing social movements with escalating violence and repression. Military and police aid nominally supports anti-gang efforts and the regularization of immigration—favourite talking points of Bukele.
While in neighbouring Guatemala this stewing crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has escalated into anti-systemic protests, Bukele has kept a lid on the pot through a mix of emergency welfare provisions and increasing militarization. Bukele’s mixing of highly-publicized social supports and punitive populism is again a consistent Bonapartist strategy of weathering the interregnum by attempting to simultaneously reconcile and repress social conflict.
Image 1: Bukele receives the baton of command from the Armed Forces of El Salvador at an official event. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Crisis, protection, and sovereignty
Even as they are assailed by COVID-19 deaths, right-wing populists in Latin America are rebounding, signaling a potential future for right-wing populism in the ‘post-COVID’ world. Sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo recently argued that post-COVID politics will be defined by the theme of ‘protection’ – from epidemics, from climate change, from crime and instability. Don Kalb has argued on this blog that current protection measures are facilitating the formation of a new ‘techno-capital’ post-COVID regime of accumulation with new kinds of contestations.
Bukele’s El Salvador foreshadows a possible post-COVID political environment dominated by right-wing populism. Like his preceding controversial actions, Bukele’s autogolpe is being justified with a mix of militaristic and pseudo-religious language—demonizing his enemies and framing the fight against corruption and organized crime in terms of literal warfare to secure the sovereignty of the country.
Throughout the Global South, pandemic measures that prioritize repression over healthcare and bolster existing over-policing have led to the peripheralization of neighbourhoods and the stripping of meaningful citizenship from villainized populations. In the context of widespread dispossession in El Salvador, the state’s longstanding mano duro approach to crime, and now Bukele’s autogolpe, these measures signal an even more repressive kind of capital accumulation coming out of the COVID crisis.
Bukele also benefits from a demoralized left that has strained relationships with its base and social movements. El Salvador is thus also a cautionary tale when it comes to simplistic calls for a left alternative – be it to reclaim populism or reclaim the politics of protection. The marginalization of the leftist FMLN is not for lack of trying to appropriate populist or protectionist language – the outgoing FMLN government of Salvador Sanchez Ceren also attempted to combine punitive anti-crime legislation with progressive social programs, as well as symbolic gestures like refusing to take up residence in the presidential palace, converting it into a public venue.
The late Ralph Sprenkels and Hillary Goodfriend have both pointed out that the FMLN’s collapse was not due to being inadequately populist, but rather due to frayed internal organization, clientelism and corruption, and a strategy in power that prioritized pragmatism over a transformational program. Enthusiasm for left-populism or left-protectionism should thus be tempered by a serious diagnosis of the organizations, from grassroots to party leaderships, that are supposed to carry a left alternative to power.
Social struggles persist outside the FMLN, however. Bukele’s hostile attacks on public sector employees have prompted strikes, and at the time of writing, protests against the autogolpe, hunger movements and other mobilizations are beginning to make cracks in what Bukele insists is his popular mandate. Whether Bukele’s right-wing populism will totter like it has in neighbouring Guatemala or whether his autogolpe will consolidate a new authoritarian state remains an open question, one worthy of attention for anthropologists interested in the new contours and contestations of the present moment.
Abram Lutes is a graduate researcher at the Carleton University Institute of Political Economy in Ottawa, Canada. His research interests include Gramscian theory, world-systems theory, social movements, and populism. At the time of writing, he is conducting digital fieldwork on El Salvador and Guatemala.
Antonini, Francesca. 2020. The Concepts
of Bonapartism and Caesarism from Marx to Gramsci. Caesarism and
Bonapartism in Gramsci. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004441828_002.
Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to
Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American
Ethnologist 44 (2): 209–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12469.
Rey-Araujo, Pedro. 2019. “Grounding
Populism upon Political Economy: Organic Crises in Social Structures of
Accumulation Theory.” Science & Society 83 (January): 10–36. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.1.10.
Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “Populism and the
Economics of Globalization.” Journal of International Business Policy 1
(1–2): 12–33. https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-018-0001-4.
Torrez, Clara
Guardado, and Ellen Moodie. 2020. “La Línea, Los Indignados, and the
Post-Postwar Generation in El Salvador.” The
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
25 (4): 590–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12498.
Cite as: Lutes, Abram. 2021. “Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador.” FocaalBlog, 26 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/05/26/abram-lutes-anatomy-of-an-autogolpe-on-the-consolidation-of-nayib-bukeles-power-in-el-salvador/
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility.
The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals
is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by
police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of
Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization
helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the
fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put
their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.
Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate
that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian
Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them
off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with
the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed
in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has
very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing
levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of
police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading
cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame
2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).
While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do
occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it
is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed
by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is
not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In
Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths
are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600
youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks
against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in
order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.
Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.
In this following, I focus not so much on the
paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such
as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban
ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent
movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is
the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the
highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few
decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police
violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing
attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but
officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of
its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police
praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).
This article should be understood neither as a literature
review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview
see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead,
I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime
of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique
to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg
2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global
antiblackness. Enduring global
colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes
of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police
terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global
north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020;
Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).
How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence
and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If,
as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers]
so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic
process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization
without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What
does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place
of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black
studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream
institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the
antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically
compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of
ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s
critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is
to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing
structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what
the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and
abolishing the police state.
The Myth of Police
Fragility
There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim,
that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date
when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel
Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the
officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself
in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already
sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South,
hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s
story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter
protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me
features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With
fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him,
he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.
One may speculate: What led him to such an
expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps
the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop
the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents? The film and the scene in particular aroused
heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police
violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a
meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers
gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity”
(Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others
blamed it for ‘going too far left in its
implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by
reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law
enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).
The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and
its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United
States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be
read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”.
Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue
lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in
general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020: 654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better
explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the
vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).
By hijacking the
meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms
of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?)
in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements
and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality
(e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell
and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of
works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops
as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation
to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election
of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial
to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure.
Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work
on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.
Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing
(I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work
employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in
which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which
reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering
the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s
‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial
imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015;
Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in
contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as
drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and
Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions
have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters
with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully
portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo
broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see
also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,”
an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally,
there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among
anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the
disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of
corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788).
These and many other works (too many to be listed in a
commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying
this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last
decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s
theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel
patrolling the streets. By making
ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have
provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making,
statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin
2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).
My
intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate
within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what
anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice
and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited
volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian
Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political
stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one
could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over
and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying
police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question
by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend
to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness
embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the
world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police
(2018: 8).
In
this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own
positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues
such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the
normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate
to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually
themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve
and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate
apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically
supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching
themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’
family and Christian values (Alves 2018).
While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work.
My analysis (and that of many of my
colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with
individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror.
Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young
man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a
living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I
was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali,
Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a
local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between
my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the
global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle
class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black
youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.
Thus, my contention here is not so much to
stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of
power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description,
may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the
police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing
tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one
should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails. If we do not want our work to end up fueling
and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity
with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the
police!’ in studies of policing.
Maroon Anthropology
In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)
Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly
with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open
letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this
very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of
respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage
anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more
illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political
lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the
word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police
– and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist
in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again
and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are
the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a
smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What
has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of
the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!
Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured
scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their
work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel
2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a
public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in
performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’,
‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes.
Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of
‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see
Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in
promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of
the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and
scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us”
(Spillers 1987: 68).
If
the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s
(incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police
‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic
policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial
institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may
require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing
required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the
position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political
literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James
and Gordon 208:371).
I am
not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph,
2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s
tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point
for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the
wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the
reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real)
vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately,
those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought
to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as
ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical
of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that
necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend
to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive
to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et
al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by
political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached
to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That
is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are
state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state
sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the
state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say
that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the
military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil
and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe
2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain
of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing. As Siegel and others have shown, one of the
most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police
work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works
under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still,
both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police
operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy
terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska
2007).
This is not a peripheral point. One has only
to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier
and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the
neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the
contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson
2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their
profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring
antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its
paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is
insane.
How might anthropologists challenge the
asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying
black beings? When one officer dies, it
is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in
performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even
in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely
high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to
believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized
forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their
victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in
relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or
even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory
violence by its victims.
There is no equivalence between blue lives
and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in
the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of
anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of
anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that
while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence
as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false
equivalency.
Based on her work with activists in the South
African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility
to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of
historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author
deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing
violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the
oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She
opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective
eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is
positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally
committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see,
how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).
If we consider current waves of demonstrations
against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human
liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been
misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police? Although an insurgent
anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts
where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to
counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my
critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing
violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am
also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and
activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of
state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or
member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed
by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change
the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our
discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.
Thus, f*ck the police! is
not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations
to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation
to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives
Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny
on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice.
It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for
redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting
police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What
does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically
placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and
Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the
answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!
Acknowledgments: This
paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel,
Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from
engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series,
University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University
of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and
Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities
Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb,
Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors
and omissions are of course mine.
Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia. He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com
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Cite as: Alves, Jaime A. 2021. “F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 27 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/27/jaime-a-alves-fck-the-police-murderous-cops-the-myth-of-police-fragility-and-the-case-for-an-insurgent-anthropology/
