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Júlia Fernandez: Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life

The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.

Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.

After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.

The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.

When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable.  Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.

In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?

At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.

‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).

‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?

The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.

Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash

In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.

As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power. 

On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.

In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?

That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.

Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.

References

Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.

Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558

Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.

Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2015): The politics of birth and the intimacies of violence against Palestinian women in occupied east Jerusalem. The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 55, No. 6, THEMED ISSUE: In the Aftermath of Violence: What Constitutes a Responsive Response?  pp. 1187-1206

Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156

Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.

Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/

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Markus Balkenhol: Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise

On 1 July 2021, 148 years after slavery ended in the Dutch West Indian colonies, Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, said: ‘For the active involvement of the Amsterdam City Council in the commercial system of colonial slavery and the global trade in enslaved people I, on behalf of the College of Mayors and Aldermen, apologize.’ Halsema was followed by the College of Mayors and Aldermen of Rotterdam (10 November 2021), Mayor Sharon Dijksma (Utrecht, 23 February 2022), Mayor Van Zanen (The Hague, 20 November 2022), and last but not least, Prime Minister Mark Rutte (19 December 2022). It is expected that King Willem Alexander will offer his apologies for the involvement of his family, the Oranje-Nassaus, in the slave trade in the Atlantic and Asia on this year’s (2023) abolition day (Keti Koti). Why, many wondered, should we apologize for slavery? It is so long ago, we are not guilty of it.

Memory politics

Before I get to the ‘why’ question, perhaps let me start with the question: why now? For many, the series of apologies may have come as a surprise. All of a sudden and out of nowhere, they may have thought, we need to apologize for something that has happened long ago and that has never been an issue before. Why should we make a point of it now? Although slavery has never before received as much public attention as it does now, the commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands is not new. In fact, that commemoration has had its own dynamic, and has changed in terms of the political message it carries. Already in the 1950s, African Surinamese students in the Netherlands celebrated Keti Koti, Abolition Day on July 1. In 1963 there was even a public manifestation in Amsterdam. More than ten years before Surinamese independence (1975), students in particular mobilized the commemoration in a framework of Surinamese nation-building. ‘Fri moe de’ (free we must be), in that sense, was not only a reminder of abolition, but also a claim to end colonial rule.

Image 1: Detail of the National Slavery Memorial, Oosterpark Amsterdam, 2009. Photo by the author.

The commemorations continued after independence, but for the main part remained private. That began to change in 1993, when a group of African Surinamese organized a public commemoration of ‘the shared history of the Netherlands and its colonies’ on Surinameplein in Amsterdam. That commemoration was meticulously modeled after the national memorial day on Dam square on May 4, commemorating the fallen in the war. Mirroring the national Committee 4/5 May, the group called itself the Committee 30 June/1 July. Like the Dam ceremony, the Surinameplein event also includes two minutes of silence at 8pm, the singing of the Dutch, Surinamese and Antillean anthems, and a performance by a child. Now, slavery had come to carry a different political message: no longer a plea for independence, but a claim for citizenship. Whereas many Surinamese in the 1970s had come to the Netherlands with the idea of returning to an independent and flourishing nation, political events in the 1980s (a coup d’état, civil war, and economic downturn) shattered these dreams. The 1980s therefore saw a re-orientation towards the Netherlands, stemming from a realization that the Netherlands would have to be a home for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, slavery was now re-framed as a claim to citizenship – hence the emphasis on a ‘shared’ history. Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s dictum: ‘we are here because you were there’ gained popularity. Their manifesto of 2002 also included demands about pensions, education, residency, radio and TV broadcasting licences, and health insurance. These demands, although they had been made throughout the 1990s, reached ever larger audiences after the unveiling of the national slavery memorial in Oosterpark, Amsterdam. This ceremony is usually attended by high-ranking representatives of the state, including the mayor, ministers, the Prime Minister, and the King.

Recent commemorations are increasingly embraced by young people of African-Surinamese descent (and to a lesser extent people of African Antillean descent), born in the Netherlands and exposed to racism in education, the housing sector, or work. They articulate slavery as a historical responsibility of the Dutch state and society at large.

What is changing now, is that slavery is less and less presented as a ‘Surinamese’ or ‘Antillean’ thing, but as something that concerns Dutch society as such. More and more, white Dutch citizens come to the realization that commemorating slavery is not only about someone else’s pain (although clearly that is also important), but that it concerns Dutch society as a whole. Now, one might argue that there are many ways of taking responsibility for that past. Why apologies? Why that particular form?

Apologies

In fact, apologies are notoriously difficult, especially when they concern collectives. As Michel Rolph Trouillot (2000) argued, in order for apologies to work one must establish the identity, or the self-sameness of two fundamentally different entities: a collective in the present and a collective in the past. One must show that the collective perpetrating an act is actually the same as the one apologizing – an impossible task according to Trouillot. Indeed, it is easy to dismiss this, as for instance the populist politician Pim Fortuyn has done: those who suffer from traumas should visit the psychiatrist, instead of sitting at a negotiating table, he wrote in 2002. Apologies may even be the flipside of this kind of right wing populism. Take, for instance, Rita Verdonk, who upon launching her political movement ‘Proud of the Netherlands’ (Trots op Nederland) in 2007, exclaimed that the Netherlands had been a hospitable country for centuries, and that it is not in the Dutch nature to discriminate. Verdonk imagines a nation characterized by unwavering goodness, a kind of völkische idea of an essentialized people characteristic for populist ideology.

In legal terms apologies are less of an issue. The present Dutch government and city councils are the legal successors of historical governments. This is why many apologies have been made by sitting governments on behalf of their predecessors. Think, for instance of Willy Brandt’s famous ‘Warsaw genuflection’, a gesture of both commemoration and apology in the context of the 1943 uprising in the Wasaw Ghetto (which at the time only 41 per cent of West Germans approved of).

Abortive rituals?

Nevertheless, Trouillot argues that apologies should be seen as ‘abortive rituals’: ‘collective apologies are meant not to succeed – not because of the possible hypocrisy of some of the actors but because their very conditions of emergence deny the possibility of a transformation’ (Trouillot 2000, 185). I’m not sure I agree with Trouillot that apologies are necessarily ‘abortive’. I do recognize the danger of essentializing collectives, and indeed, the slavery debate in places like the Netherlands does generate presumably clear cut identities of blackness and whiteness, victim and perpetrator, oppressor and oppressed. Looked at ethnographically, the picture becomes much more complex. Relations between African Surinamese and Ghanaians, for example, can sometimes be as tense, if not more, as those between African Surinamese and white Dutch; African Surinamese in Suriname think and feel differently about slavery compared to African Surinamese in the Netherlands; political outlook can be more important than racial-ethnic identification as black or white, and so on.

However, as an anthropologist I do not want to dismiss the power of rituals so easily. Trouillot argued that collective apologies are rituals that have a demonstrative and a transformative dimension. The goal of a ritual in general is to transform a person or collective from one state to another. Rituals of collective apology, according to Trouillot, fail to achieve such a transformation because these rituals rely not on transformation but on durable identities. My sense is that Trouillot was too quick to dismiss apologies purely based on their structural premises. It remains interesting to ask how such rituals may work in practice.

Collective rituals, to speak with Benedict Anderson, are also a space to imagine oneself. Collectives, one might say, do not exist outside of, or prior to these rituals, but they emerge out of these rituals in the first place. This means that collective rituals also present opportunities to imagine a collective subject in a new way. This is precisely what has been happening around the issue of slavery in places like the Netherlands in the past two decades.

Image 2: Winti priestess Marian Markelo pouring libation to the ancestors at the National Slavery Memorial, 2010. Photo by the author

Two examples may show this. The first is from the year 2006. During the Algemene Beschouwingen, a parliamentary debate about the government’s plans for the coming period, then Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, a Christian Democrat, said in reply to the critique by Femke Halsema, then a member of the oppositionof the GreenLeft: ‘I don’t know why you are being so negative and annoying about this. … Let’s be happy together! Let’s be optimistic! Let us say: Once more, The Netherlands can do it! This VOC-mentality, looking past borders, dynamism! Right?!’ By ‘VOC mentality’ he referred to what he perceived as the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit as embodied in the Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (United East India Company), a mindset that supposedly had made The Netherlands a great economic and political power in the world. Like Verdonk, he cherished Dutch colonialism.  

Although Mark Rutte, from a liberal party that has similarly been proud of Dutch imperial history, has long argued that you that you cannot hold people in the present responsible for what happened in the past, he now imagines the nation differently. In his apology speech, he said: ‘We, living in the here and now, can only recognize and condemn slavery in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity. … And we in the Netherlands must face our share in that past. … [The national archives are] the place for national examination of conscience.’ It was a rare moment of vision for this Prime Minister – a liberal to the bone – who has notoriously claimed that those who want vision should visit a doctor.

So, have these apologies been transformative? There are many who did not think so, especially because after years of rejection and hesitation, they came very suddenly, without consultation of societal partners, and deliberately on a date without any ritual significance in any of the countries involved. Nevertheless, many agree that it was a moment in which the Prime Minister showed unexpected statesmanship. In spite of considerable societal backlash, he chose to imagine the Netherlands differently, turning away from the classic nationalist narrative of a glorious imperial past to a certain humility, mindfulness, and care. It remains to be seen whether the cabinet will not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk, but it is possible that an important step has been made in the process of re-imagining the Netherlands.

Markus Balkenhol is a social anthropologist at the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam. He specializes on colonialism, race, citizenship, cultural heritage and religion. His 2021 book Tracing Slavery: The Politics of Atlantic Memory in the Netherlands is published by Berghahn Books.

References

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2000. “Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era.” Interventions 2 (2): 171–86.

Cite as: Balkenhol, Markus 2023 “Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise” Focaalblog 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/06/28/markus-balkenhol-apologizing-for-slavery-notes-on-a-dutch-surprise/

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Valentina Napolitano & Kristin Norget: Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State

At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, travelled to Maskwacis, Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Iqaluit on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America), an historic visit intended to allow for “forgiveness” for the heinous acts at Catholic Residential Schools which for over almost a century (1885-1996) separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities and subjected them to awful physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

The event earned some attention in the media internationally and in Canada, where it monopolized national and local airwaves and the Internet. The media drummed up popular fascination, in “will he, or won’t he?” fashion, with the potential Apology from the Pope – a possibility planted earlier this year in March when a delegation of members of 32 First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities visited the Vatican and met with the Pope to share their experience in residential schools and express the importance of a formal papal declaration of apology in their homeland. Part of the delegation’s aim was a call for the rescinding of the 1492 Treaty of Tordesillas and its accompanying “Doctrine of Discovery”, which originally endowed early Christian explorers the legal authorization to occupy and extract from a supposed ‘terra nullius’.

We draw attention to the need for anthropologists and other scholars to recognize the importance of what is at stake in this papal event as a culmination of colonial histories and processes that are not merely “religious”. While many may read the papal visit as simply an enactment by an archaic religious institution breathing its last breaths on the global stage, there is much more at work here that touches on the most pressing issues of our day concerning (self-)sovereignty, governance and decolonization, and the powerful hidden theopolitical economy of bodies, blood and soil, and the commons that underlies them. As such, this papal visit and other prominent public Church performances also invoke, implicitly though distinctly, themes familiar to many anthropologists in our thinking and research: debt and guilt, capitalism and care, denizen-ship and vulnerability.

A Pope is never a single story, nor a truly singular individual. Technically, the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, in straight lineal descent from Saint Peter, making him a unique combination of the historical person, the geopolitical configuration of the Church (as sovereign of the Vatican City State), and the liturgical, “God-manifested” investiture of the Pontificate. While many regarded the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as marking a pivotal rejuvenation of the Church and a welcome modernizing shift toward reform and social engagement, the two pontificates that followed Vatican II dampened any such hopes. Both Pope (and now Saint) John Paul II (1978-2005) and Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013) manifested ambiguous stances toward Indigenous people and the deep histories of violence, neglect, and exploitationin the Americas.

John Paul II, personally invested in a post-cold war politics of anti-communism, was a staunch defender of ‘human life’ as a universal value rather than something to be understood as mediated by social and cultural specificities. He travelled to some 120 countries and oversaw an unprecedented surge in the canonization of new saints, including in the Americas. Yet in this continent he also undid years of efforts by more ‘progressive’ Church factions in promoting participatory democracy, land rights advocacy, human and Indigenous rights, and in the fight against poverty and neoliberal policies of international structural adjustment – the broad canvas of programs that theologically and pastorally became known as part of the movement of Liberation Theology. John Paul II’s geopolitical orientation toward Turtle Island could be summed up by his words during a brief visit in 1984 where, in Ste. Anne de Beaupré, he stated, rather elliptically, “We know that Jesus Christ makes possible reconciliation between peoples, with all its requirements of conversion, justice and social love. If we truly believe that God created us in his image, we shall be able to accept one another with our differences and despite our limitations and our sins.” Reconciliation for this pope was thus fundamentally a repairing enabled by the sweeping of vexing “differences” and past evils under the supposedly apolitical carpet of a transcendent universal (European) catholicity.

In contrast to his predecessor, Benedict XVI appeared more interested in the “Arab world” rather than the Americas, which he visited only briefly twice (Brazil in 2007, and Mexico in 2012, en route to Cuba). In travels to Lebanon, Syria, and Germany he worked to encourage, not always successfully, Christian-Muslimdialogue, visibly more at ease as a theologian rather than a pastor surrounded by a crowd. More generally, he had an infamous role in partly covering priestly sexual abuse before becoming Pope, but also, perhaps unknown to many, while Pope, tried to address the abuses committed within and by members of new 19th and 20th century religious Orders (such as the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ and their founder Marcial Maciel) that had been much in the grace of John Paul II.  The “traditionalism”–in both theological orthodoxy and disposition – of this German Pope also served to bolster the “old”, pre-Reformation Orders within the church and affirmed the Christian roots of Europe and its ‘civilization’. Yet when Benedict XVI met a First Nations delegation visiting the Vatican in 2009 (headed by then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Lafontaine), the pontiff expressed a heartfelt shame and sorrow for the suffering of those living with the tragic legacy of Catholic residential schools, and blessed sacred medicine brought by delegation members. However, the Pope’s utterance of remorse took place on Vatican soil, as part of a private visit, not an act of attempted reconciliation on Turtle Island.

When Francis became Pope, however, the world expected something different. As the first Latin American Pope, with a theological and pastoral proximity to the poor and the “peripheries” (though with an unclear association with Argentina’s military regime while Provincial of the Jesuits in Buenos Aires), it was thought he could open the magisterium of the Church to an embracing of the divorced, homosexuality, the ordination of women priests, and the tackling of priestly sexual abuses, while setting in motion a concrete system of reparation. Now, amid the ninth year of his pontificate, an opening on these matters has been only partial.

Nevertheless, Pope Francis has called attention to capitalism’s “culture of waste” and our universal denizen-ship on the earth as “our common home”; in 2015 he met for over three weeks with Indigenous communities in the Amazon toward mobilizing clergy and others for an “Integral Ecology” of “pastoral, cultural, and ecological conversion” in the interests of Indigenous survival. In addition, he has pointed to the aging, “grandfather”–like nature of European societies which he urges must rejuvenate their ancient cultural values by means of new immigrant blood.

These overtures have been appreciated especially by non-Catholics, attracted by their ethically driven politics of inclusion and active collective responsibility in a time of increasing individualist populist politics world-wide. Conservative Catholics, however, have portrayed Francis as a mere pastoral figure rather than one with true theological gravitas, a breaker of traditions rather than an architect of authentic intra-church alliances. Moreover, the ambiguity of this Pope from the Americas is precisely regarding its Indigenous peoples:  they are beloved as ‘primordial’ caretakers of the earth and holders of ancestors’ wisdom yet remain trapped in the romanticizing gaze of Francis in his own embodiment of an immigrant European in the New World.

The most striking image in the just-completed Turtle Island papal pilgrimage is the frail, wheel-chaired body of Francis as the agent of avowed penitence. The popular enthrallment with the highly mediatized story of the papal visit, not just in Canada but worldwide, points to a collective desire for a punctual, perlocutionary healing, as if the spoken apology “for deplorable evil” could perform the erasure of the stubborn stain of guilt not just for the Church. In this context, the Pope as the Church’s metonymic leader becomes the proxy for non-indigenous Canadian society at large (the latter, after all, tacitly accepted the colonial assimilationist system that allowed the unspeakable abuses of Indigenous children to take place).

Indeed, at the very start of his visit this unique (as both the first Jesuit and non-European) Pope could be seen solemnly and pensively cradling his chin and mouth in his hand as if hesitant about the words he would soon be expected to utter. Later, in Maskwacis, he was enveloped in a soundscape of sacred chanting and drumming, grinning as he donned an Indigenous ceremonial headdress. The moment displayed a willful audaciousness typical of the Church, justified by the familiar theological principle of Humanitas – a vitalization of ‘cultures’ under a universal umbrella that sees all members of those Cultures as children of God. Yet, the apparent seamlessness of this harmonious scene later became undone by the raw, devastating, impromptu spectacle of a lone woman, Si Pih Ko, powerfully singing, in Cree, her fist raised to the sky, an alternative version of Canada’s national anthem known as “Our Village”, rebuking the papal presence while protesting the death of her brother in prison.  

Image 1: Chief Wilton Littlechild and Pope Francis, Maskwacis, Alberta, July 26, 2022 (photo by Guglielmo Mangiapane, Reuters; the authors are grateful for the right to publish the image here)

If, as Carl Schmitt says, all political concepts are secularized theological ones, Pope Francis’s  recurring gestures of apology for “cultural destruction” came crashing to a ground of (missed) interpellations and apologies, while he continued to offer his fragile body for a performative Church and State healing of indigenous lives ravaged by the violence of genocide – a word the pontiff spoke only when he was safely on the plane back to Rome.

Thus, the concept of reconciliation by Pope Francis was affectively mobilized through the soil, commons, soundscapes, and bodies as these hinged on the ultimate sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion and a human/divine suffering that were, in this highly mediatized visit, notably devoid of Marian iconicity. In this framework, the singular yet communal suffering of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples becomes part of the ‘universal’ redemptive incarnation and blood of Christ, and, by extension, the healing sovereignty of the Canadian state.

The much-anticipated apology for the methodical cruelty of educational Catholic missions, and the Catholic Church’s role in past and ongoing colonialism, cannot be understood simply through an anthropological lens of battles for and refusal of modern state (self-)sovereignty. This 2022 papal journey through Turtle Island made glaringly evident that a colonial Church infrastructure is deeply engrained in a Christianity of the modern Canadian state, as the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops made clear by orchestrating, albeit not in line with Pope Francis’s will, an estranging Eucharistic Mass performed in Latin (an archaic norm abandoned post-Vatican II) in Edmonton’s Commonwealth stadium on July 26. Throughout this visit we beheld an aging papal body answering Indigenous calls for the dis-entangling of Catholic colonial violence through his encounter with the sacred soundscape, walking the soil (even if in a wheelchair), and in his public acts of listening.

‘True’ reconciliation remains a matter of the return of stolen gifts and livelihoods, requiring a new articulation between economies of suffering and indebtedness. From the perspective of Catholic theology, indebtedness is intrinsic to the tension between guilt and debt, where guilt is the unavoidable condition of being born as human (fallen from Eden), and debt is enjoined by God’s gift of life that cannot ever be fully repaid. The tension of guilt and debt in their eternal production of indebtedness is a “vital” theological hinge and a primary force of a capitalist market that functions as a never-ending fulfillment of drives and desires. Reconciliation then is also a much-needed breaking of precisely this theological hinge

Yet, in a way that was perhaps unperceived by many, this papal visit with and beyond the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island affords the possibility that “reconciliation” is not only a matter of voicing and representation, sovereignty and its ongoing unravelling, or retribution and (unmade) apologies. It also a political, theological, and cosmological matter of a mystery of incarnation, in its particular bodily forms of fragility—a fragility now more than ever common to all living beings. As potent as this mystery of incarnation may be for healing, it may not be enough.

Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto. Valentina Napolitano’s work weaves together anthropology, political theology, and Critical Catholic Studies.  She is currently focusing on a book on mysticism and politics in the 21st century.

Kristin Norget is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her current research interests are concerned with mediatization and contemporary strategies of evangelization of the Roman Catholic Church focused on Mexico and Peru. She has also published on issues of indigeneity and Catholic liberation theology in Mexico.

Cite as: Valentina Napolitano and Kristin Norget. 2022. “Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State.” Focaalblog, 12 August. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/08/12/valentina-napolitano-kristin-norget-pope-francis-reconciliation-and-the-state/

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

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

Image 1: Book cover of Lost People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Carlos E. Chardón: Masking Puerto Rican state failure

spcWith the recent default on debt payment (see Franqui Rivera and Colón-Garcia 2015), Puerto Rico became a failed state. State failure is the inability or incapacity of a government to provide services it determines are absolutely necessary to its population. Thus, if a government tries to provide services it deems necessary for its population and cannot pay for them or does not have the structure to deliver them, it can drive itself into failure. It is said it is overstretched and that it does not have the income to provide what it promised. This is the case of Puerto Rico—an island in the Caribbean that became a United States colony in 1898 and has been, since after World War II, a US territory with partial autonomy (all federal laws and regulations apply unless specifically exempted from them, but it is not a federal state and lacks any voting representation in the federal government).
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Lisa Jahn & Sarah Molinari: New developments in Puerto Rican economic readjustment?

This commentary comes from a discussion panel hosted on Tuesday, September 8, by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, featuring the authors of the recent FocaalBlog article “Puerto Rico Is NOT Greece: Notes on the Role of Debt in US Colonialism,” Ismael García-Colón and Harry Franqui-Rivera. The authors were joined by Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán on the panel moderated by Teresita Levy.
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FocaalBlog Event: CUNY Panel Discussion on Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis

On Tuesday, September 8, the City University of New York (CUNY) Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies is hosting a free panel discussion and presentation based on the recent FocaalBlog post “Puerto Rico Is NOT Greece: Notes on the Role of Debt in US Colonialism.”

Where: The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
Room 9100: Skylight Room

When: September 8, 6:30–8:30 p.m.

Contact Info: 212-817-8434

The blog authors Ismael García-Colón, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, and Harry Franqui-Rivera, Research Associate at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies, will participate in the discussion.

For more details, please visit the event page here.

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Ismael García Colón & Harry Franqui-Rivera: Puerto Rico Is NOT Greece

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Notes on the Role of Debt in US Colonialism

UPDATE: On Tuesday, September 8, the City University of New York (CUNY) Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies is hosting a free panel discussion and presentation based on this blog post. For more details, visit the FocaalBlog event page here.

Early July 2015, at an event discussing the Greek debt crisis hosted by the German Federal Bank in Frankfurt, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble talked about a sarcastic conversation he’d had with United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Responding to pressure from the US government for a resolution on the pending Greek debt talks, Schaeuble told Lew that the European Union could take Puerto Rico into the euro zone if the US was willing to accept Greece into a dollar union. In the video of the event, one can appreciate people laughing at Schaeuble’s remarks, made in front of a large projection of the event’s theme “Turning points in history: How crises have changed the tasks and practice of central banks.” Interesting enough, his comments say more about Germany’s intentions and its role in the Greek debt default than about Puerto Rico.
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Art and Visual Anthropology, Close-Ups

Massimiliano Mollona: Ethnographic filmmaking and the political imagination: A review of “Desert People” by Ian Dunlop (1967)

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Engaging Capitalism, Features

August Carbonella: Dispossession and Emancipation: Reframing Our Political Imagination

Everywhere we look, it seems, we are faced with the human and environmental devastation caused by contemporary processes of dispossession. How we are to confront this is the urgent political question of the day. Not surprisingly, this question has reinvigorated scholarly interest in dispossession, much of it inspired by the work of David Harvey (2003) on accumulation by dispossession and Peter Linebaugh (2008) on an expanded understanding of what constitutes the commons. These conceptual interventions are clearly both welcome and important, yet their explications of dispossession and commons, in the end, do not adequately address the political question. In brief, Harvey’s assignment of different political logics to the dispossessed in the Global North and South and Linebaugh’s evocative juxtapositions of different various commoning practices do not enable us to bring these struggles into a common relational frame. I suggest that a more sustained focus on uneven proletarianization—the end result of dispossession—will better serve our goal of understanding present protests and political possibilities.
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