Much to his frustration, David was often labelled ‘the anarchist anthropologist’. Aware of the way the term ‘anarchist’ was used to belittle him and his work, as Keir Martin tells us, David took this prejudice on head first. Anarchism is “not an identity”, his Twitter bio reads, it is “something you do”. In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David elaborates—challenging our traditional assumptions about ‘anarchists’ or ‘anarchism’, and urging us to apply anarchism to the way we do anthropology. As Ayça Çubukçu explains, David saw in anthropology and anarchism a natural fit: anthropology, with its “keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities”, and anarchism, with its confidence that a life more worth living could actually exist. Together, Keir and Ayça take seriously David’s invitation “to think and act towards an anarchist future”.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at
LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute
and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s
Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Keir Martin is Professor of
Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in
Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has
focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in
shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He
conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New
Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The
Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East
New Britain. He is currently leading a research project on the spread
of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has
published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of
academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The
Guardian.
Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.
A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021.
The Dawn of Everything’s central idea is
challenging. We are told that humans are politically adventurous and
experimental – so much so that after a spell of freedom and equality, people
are inclined to choose oppression just to make a change. History takes a rhythmic
form, oscillating between one extreme and the next. In recent times, however, we’ve
all got stuck in just one system and we must try to understand why.
All this is new and refreshing but hardly credible. I
prefer the standard anthropological view that the political instincts and
social emotions that define our humanity were shaped under conditions of
egalitarianism. To this day, all of us feel most relaxed and happy when able to
laugh, play and socialize among companions who are our equals. But
instead of building on this experience so familiar to us all, Graeber and
Wengrow (henceforth: ‘G&W’) oppose the whole idea that our hunter-gatherer
ancestors were egalitarians. In their view, they would just as likely have
chosen to be oppressed.
As they put it: ‘If the very essence of our humanity
consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore
capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean
human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements
over the greater part of our history?’ Among these possibilities, as the
authors readily acknowledge (pp. 86-7), were abusive dominance hierarchies like
those of chimpanzees. G&W seem to be arguing that if our ancestors were
so adventurous, then surely, they would have experimented not only with
egalitarianism but also with harassment, abuse and domination by aggressive,
bullying males.
Image 1: Dawn or teatime? The new book by David Graeber and David Wengrow (photo: Chris Knight, 2021)
G&W make these points in the context of a
consistent attack on any idea that we became socially and morally human during
the course of a revolution. All my academic life, I have been exploring the
idea that human language, consciousness, kinship and morality evolved in a
process of gradual evolution which culminated in an immense social and
political revolution. My motivation was always to challenge the popular
prejudice that socialism is impossible because by nature we humans are selfish
and competitive – and ‘not even a revolution could change human nature’.
I would always answer this way. Yes, we are a species of great ape. Yes, like our primate cousins, we have competitive, selfish, aggressive and often violent instincts. But these were not the ones responsible for our success. Everything distinctively human about our nature – our capacity to be brilliant mums and dads, to care for one another’s children and not just our own, to establish moral rules, to see ourselves as others see us and to use music, dance and language to share our dreams – these extraordinary capacities were precisely the products of the greatest revolution in history, the one that worked.
Chris Boehm’s theory of the human revolution
Nearly a decade after the appearance of my own book
detailing the complexities of this ‘human revolution’ (Knight 1991), the anthropologist
Christopher Boehm (1999) published a version of the theory that, despite its
insights, played safe in political terms by omitting any mention of the most
important element – the dynamics of sex and gender. It is this abstract, unisex
version of human revolution theory that G&W consider safe enough to mention
explicitly in order to discredit it.
Boehm points out that our earliest ancestors were neither one-sidedly cooperative nor one-sidedly competitive. Instead, they were psychologically disposed to dominate others while forming alliances to resist being dominated in turn. This collective resistance from below eventually culminated in everyone coming together to prevent any would-be leader from dominating the group. Our ancestors’ chimpanzee-style dominance was now turned on its head, culminating in ‘reverse dominance’ – rule by a morally aware community committed to an egalitarian ethos.
G&W go along with the idea that humans ‘do appear
to have begun … with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do’ (p.
133). In this context, they agree that extant hunter-gatherers display ‘a whole
panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and
bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning …. none of which have any
parallel among other primates’ (p. 86). What they’ve no interest in is the idea
that such tactics played a crucial role in shaping human nature during our
evolutionary past.
Summing up their objection to Boehm’s account, they
describe any suggestion that hunter-gatherers consistently preferred
egalitarianism as an ‘odd insistence’ that ‘for many tens of thousands of
years, nothing happened’. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors were consistently
egalitarian, their political lives must have somehow been frozen, stuck in
time. G&W conclude with these words: ‘Before about 12,000 years ago, Boehm
insists, humans were basically egalitarian . . . according to Boehm, for about
200,000 years [these] political animals all chose to live just one way.’ (p.
87)
The only problem is that this isn’t what Boehm wrote.
His actual words are worth quoting:
‘Once one band, somewhere, invented an egalitarian order, this radical change in social ways of doing things would become visible to its neighbors. The advantages would have been evident wherever subordinates were ambivalent about being dominated, particularly in bands with very aggressive bullies…. One would expect a gradual cultural diffusion to take place, with attractive egalitarian traditions replacing despotic ones locally. … Over time, migration patterns over longer distances could have fairly rapidly spread this political invention from one continent to another.’ (Boehm 1999: 195)
This is how successful revolutions work. Plainly,
Boehm’s argument was not simply that until 12,000 years ago ‘humans were
basically egalitarian.’ Instead, he suggests that early humans developed a
variety of different political systems while gradually converging around one
particularly successful model – egalitarianism.
The Teatime of Everything
Quite unfairly, The Dawn of Everything conflates
modern evolutionary theory with social evolutionism – the nineteenth century
narrative of a ladder of stages progressing from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’
to ‘civilization’. Darwinism claims to be scientific, we are told, but in reality,
is pure myth. Quixotically, G&W expect readers to give serious
consideration to a perspective on human origins that does not acknowledge
evolutionary theory at all.
The only science these authors do recognize is
‘archaeological science’, and then only if the archaeology doesn’t go too far
back. They justify dating ‘the dawn of everything’ to a mere 30,000 years ago
on the basis that nothing about politics or social life can be gleaned from
archaic human ‘cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint’(p.
81).
This excuse no longer works in the light of recent
evidence that our species’ most unique trait – art and symbolic culture –
emerged in Africa three or four times earlier than was previously thought. By
no means limited to bones and stones, this evidence consists of beads,
geometric engravings, burials with grave goods and artefacts such as
grindstones and paint pots, all invariably found in association with red ochre
(Henshilwood et al. 2009, 2011). G&W do notice one or two of these
discoveries (pp. 83-4) but show little interest – despite the fact that when
cutting-edge Darwinian theory is applied to the ochre record, the possibilities
for generating predictions about social dynamics, patterns of ritual
performance and gendered alliances become very real (Power 2009, 2019; Power et
al. 2013; Power et al. 2021; Watts 2014).
Unfortunately, these authors won’t go near Darwinism in any shape or form. They concede that someone whom they term a ‘feminist’ (actually the highly respected founding figure in primate and human sociobiology Sarah Hrdy) has come up with a ‘story’ about the critical role of collective childcare in shaping our human instincts and psychology (Hrdy 2009). Commenting that ‘there’s nothing wrong with myths’, they describe this particular myth as ‘important.’ They then immediately cast doubt on it by quipping that ‘such insights can only ever be partial because there was no garden of Eden, and a single Eve never existed’ (p. 82). Tricks of this kind – in this case ignoring the fact that Hrdy’s groundbreaking work is focused on the emergence of the genus Homo some 2 million years before the dating of our common mitochondrial DNA ancestor – are clearly aimed at undermining the very idea that human origins research is worth pursuing at all.
Readers interested in Mesolithic and Neolithic
archaeology will find plenty of intriguing speculations in this book. But if
you are interested in how we became human – how we developed our unusually
revealing eyes, our extraordinarily large brains, our distinctively social
emotions, our laughter, our innate capacity for music and language – you won’t
find anything at all!
The title is seriously misleading. The Dawn of
Everything? ‘Teatime’ would be more accurate. The story begins with the
European Upper Paleolithic, best known for those spectacular cave paintings in Ice
Age France and Spain. According to the authors, by that stage the archaeology
is at last getting interesting because it indicates the emergence of an
economic surplus allowing elites to arise. For the first time, we begin to see
evidence for social complexity, hierarchy, sumptuous burials etc.
‘Tiny hunter-gatherer bands’
For G&W, the fact that our hunter-gatherer
ancestors established an egalitarian lifestyle much earlier in Africa is of
limited interest. They concede that extant hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza
of Tanzania share their resources, but instead of admiring this, they complain
that resistance to accumulation obstructs the emergence of ‘social complexity’,
using this term where others might have spoken of ‘class’. The authors, it
seems, are averse to the concept of social class.
So, hunter-gatherers obstruct complexity – i.e.,
prevent class society from arising – by resisting the accumulation of wealth. G&W
invoke the authority of the hunter-gatherer specialist James Woodburn here.
They conclude from his work that ‘the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society
is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all’ (p.
128). This, they argue, rules out social complexity and – with it – the full
richness of human cultural and intellectual life.
Woodburn (1982, 2005) certainly did argue that
deliberate resistance to accumulation underpins hunter-gatherer egalitarianism
and represents a political choice consciously made. He observed that such
egalitarianism was a feature only of non-storage hunter-gatherers, concluding
that ‘immediate return’ was the original type of human economy. But Woodburn did not argue that such egalitarianism was
lacking in complexity. In fact, he viewed the binary contrast between ‘simple’
and ‘complex’ social forms as damaging and misleading. For Woodburn,
maintaining egalitarianism was a supremely sophisticated achievement –
demanding far greater levels of political intelligence and complexity than
simply allowing inequalities to arise. The
Hadza, he explained, have the intelligence to realize how dangerous it would be
to let anyone accumulate more wealth than they need.
Wealth inequalities not OK
According to G&W, however, wealth inequalities are
unproblematic. In support of their position, they invoke Kandiaronk, the
seventeenth century First American critic of European ‘civilization’ to whom
they devote an inspiring chapter. Somewhat unconvincingly, they assure us that
Kandiaronk and his First American co-thinkers ‘had trouble even imagining that
differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of
power’ (p. 130).
G&W accept that immediate-return hunter-gatherers
refuse to allow wealth inequalities to develop. But surprisingly, they regard
this whole situation as disappointing:
‘This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store?’ (p. 129)
What kind of future? They answer this by suggesting that activists who take inspiration from African hunter-gatherers are inviting modern city-dwellers to become ‘stuck,’ like the unfortunate Hadza, in the repetitive simplicity of life in tiny nomadic bands.
To be clear, I am no primitivist. I am in favor of
technological, social and political development. The Hadza illustrate that it
is fulfilling and enjoyable to share wealth on demand, to laugh and sing, to
‘waste time’ in play, to resist letting anyone dominate us – and to prioritize
caring for each other’s children over all other concerns. When it comes to
development, these politically sophisticated bow-and-arrow hunters can teach us
a lot.
In the beginning … private property?
G&W argue that private property is primordial
because it’s inseparable from religion. By way of illustration, they refer to
the trumpets and other paraphernalia used in some indigenous traditions during
boys’ coming-of-age ceremonies:
‘Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist… It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts…, so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.’ (p. 159)
Note how ‘absolute’ here gets translated as ‘private.’
The claim seems to be that if ritual property is sacred to an ‘absolute’
degree, then it qualifies by definition as ‘private property’.
The conflation is reinforced when the authors seek authority for their association of religion with private property. At this point G&W (p. 159) invoke Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’:
‘Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning “not to be touched”. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?’
The authors then describe how ethnographers working
with indigenous Amazonians discovered ‘that almost everything around them has
an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars,
liana groves and animals.’ (p. 161) A spiritual entity’s sacred ownership of a species
or resource sets it apart from the rest of the world. Similar reasoning, write
G&W, underpins Western conceptions of private property. ‘If you own a car’,
they explain, ‘you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from
entering or using it’ (p. 159).
It is quite breath-taking to find G&W conflating
traditional notions of spiritual ‘ownership’ with ideas about owning your own
car. On what planet are they when they view modern private ownership as ‘almost
identical’ in its ‘underlying logic and social effects’ with a supernatural
being’s ‘ownership’ of natural resources?
When indigenous activists tell us that a lake or
mountain is sacred to a powerful spirit, they are not endorsing anything
remotely equivalent to ‘private property’. If the ‘Great Spirit’ owns the
forest, the clear implication is that it is not for sale, not to
be privatized, not to be claimed by a logging company.
One of the most powerful of Durkheim’s insights was
that when people invoke Divinity, they are envisaging the moral force of their
community as a whole. So, if a mountain belongs to God, that’s a way of
declaring that it cannot be privatized. When G&W turn that round – claiming
that the concept of ‘private property’ emerged inseparably from the very idea that
some things are sacred – you can see what a crude misrepresentation this
is.
What Durkheim really said
For Durkheim (1963, 1965), ‘setting apart’ was the
antithesis of private appropriation. In his quest to explain the origin of the
world-wide cultural taboo against incest, he puzzled over traditional beliefs
investing women ‘with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the
masculine population at a distance…’ (1965: 72). In such belief systems,
Durkheim wrote, women’s segregating power is that of their blood, bound up
intimately with notions of the sacred. If divinity becomes visible in women
when they bleed, it is because their blood itself is divine. ‘When it runs out,
the god is spilling over’ (Durkheim 1965: 89).
For Durkheim, then, the primordial concept of ‘setting
apart’ had nothing to do with private property. The issue was what happened to
a young woman on coming of age (1965: 68-96). Alerted by her menstrual onset, her
kin would assemble as a body to lay claim to her – that is, to ‘initiate’ her –
setting her apart from male company and from the world. Her seclusion
was accomplished through a special ritual – her coming-of-age ceremony. This
established that her body was sacred, her choices with respect to it
accountable to her sisters and other kin. In association with such collective
action, the emergence of human consciousness, language and culture, for
Durkheim, was the point at which a new kind of authority – that of the
community – first came into being.
If only G&W had shown an interest in modern
evolutionary science, they would have recognized how these Durkheimian insights
anticipated the most recent and authoritative modern archaeological explanation
for the ochre record in human evolution, based on the idea that blood-red ochre
was used by women as cosmetic ‘war-paint’ to alert men to the newly-established
sacredness of the female body (Watts 2014, Power 2019, Power et al., 2021).
Seasonal or lunar?
Now we come to The Dawn of Everything’s central
idea. It is that we were all once free because we could choose how to live,
experimenting now with one political structure and now another – sometimes even
oscillating between utterly different social states.
Anyone who has studied anthropology will have come
across the Eskimo seal-hunters who traditionally practiced sexual communism
throughout the winter months, only to switch over to patriarchal family life
throughout the summer – returning suddenly to communism on a particular day
announced publicly as the onset of winter. G&W apply this pendulum or
oscillation model to the Ice Age cultures of the European Upper Paleolithic,
arguing that these complex hunter-gatherers deliberately set up vertical
hierarchies of elite privilege and power – only to enjoy the pleasure of tearing
them all down as the old season gave way to the new.
Because they enjoyed this revolution so much, these
Ice Age political geniuses realized that they shouldn’t hold on permanently to
their revolutionary gains. They understood that in order to keep enjoying
successive revolutions, they would have to fill the intervals with transient
counter-revolutions – doing this by allowing ‘special’ individuals to establish
dominance so as to present a nice target for the next revolutionary upsurge.
I love this idea. As it happens, it uncannily
resembles the oscillatory principle that we in the Radical Anthropology
Group have analysed as the inner secret of hunter-gatherer
egalitarianism ever since Blood Relations was published three decades
ago (Knight 1991). On the other hand, my oscillation model was not quite the
same. Because we evolved not in sub-Arctic conditions but in Africa, there were
good ecological reasons why monthly periodicities should take precedence over
seasonal rhythms. So, if power was seized and surrendered in the way G&W
imagine, then social life would have been turned upside-down on a monthly
schedule, oscillating with the waxing and waning moon (Knight 1991: 327-373).
A pendulum of power
G&W’s history is bursting with oppositions and alternations among
hunter-gatherers but its periodicities are one-sidedly seasonal. Don’t they
know that hunter-gatherers follow not just the sun but the moon? Their most
important rituals, bound up as these are with women’s menstrual ebbs and flows,
are scheduled by the moon.
In the rainforests of the Congo, writes Morna Finnegan (2008, 2009,
2012), women deliberately encourage men to display their courage and potential
for dominance – only to defy them in an all-female ritual known as Ngoku before
yielding playfully in a ‘pendulum of power’ between the sexes. G&W (pp.
114-15) allude to this but then claim that:
‘… there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alternation, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for “the origins of social inequality” really is asking the wrong question.
If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be “how did we get stuck?”’
This final question is a truly profound one. It can
only be answered, however, once we have developed some realistic notion of the
situation that previously prevailed. Was there ever a time when our prehistoric
ancestors were truly free, truly ‘unstuck’?
When marriage became permanent
Among the Central African Bayaka forest
people, the Moon is said to be ‘women’s biggest husband’ (Lewis 2008). From the
standpoint of any man, his wife in effect abandons him for her celestial
husband each time she bleeds. The reality behind this
ancient metaphor (Knight and Lewis 2017) is a tradition in which women
playfully ‘seize power’ for some part of the month before willingly handing
over to men once they have made their point, establishing what Finnegan (2008)
has termed ‘communism in motion’. Patterns of kinship and residence in such
societies set up a pendulum swinging between menstruation and ovulation,
brothers and lovers, kinship and marriage, communal solidarity and the
intimacies of sex.
Given the probable antiquity of such
patterns, G&W are right to view some kind of block on political oscillation
as something which really did happen during the course of history. But
accounting for the blockage will require us to deal with a topic that G&W
will not touch. It will mean respectfully approaching indigenous peoples’
practices around menstruation (Testart 1985, 1986. Knight 1991. Lewis 2008.
Power 2017). It is also important to understand variability in kinship patterns
and post-marital residence – again a critically important topic that G&W scarcely
mention in their book.
Among non-storage hunter-gatherers, women
generally insist on living with their own mother at least until after she has
had a couple of children (Marlowe 2004). Genetic studies have shown that in
Africa where our species evolved, this pattern extends far back into the past
(Destro-Bisol et al., 2004. Verdu et al. 2013. Wood et al. 2005). In place of
life-long marriage, ‘bride service’ typically prevails, each African
hunter-gatherer woman accepting her chosen lover while continuing to live in
her mother’s camp. Her temporary husband must make himself useful by bringing
back hunted meat to his bride and her household. If he doesn’t measure up – he
is out! Under such arrangements, everyone alternates between kinship and marital
life, in that sense switching between utterly distinct worlds.
Living with mum is a resilient pattern, but pressure from the husband can compel her to switch residence and live permanently with him and his kin. Where this happens, a young mother with her children may find it difficult to escape. As she loses her former freedom, her husband’s care for her may then morph seamlessly into coercive control. It was this disastrous outcome which Engels (1972 [1884]) described so eloquently as the ‘world-historic defeat of the female sex’. Across much of the world, the patriarchal forces that transformed marriage into a fixed bond correspondingly imposed fixity on social life as a whole.
How humanity got ‘stuck’
This looks like a promising answer to the
question, ‘How did we get stuck?’ So, what answer do G&W give to this
question? Their final chapter is so meandering that it is difficult to know. They
mention how care for a person may morph seamlessly into coercive control – but
for some reason don’t connect this with changes in postmarital residence or
family life. The nearest they get is when describing spectacles of execution
and torture in seventeenth-century Europe and among the North American Wendat.
We are reminded that the King’s right to punish his subjects was modelled on
the patriarch’s duty to discipline his wife and children. This political
domination was publicly represented as his duty of care. By contrast, when the
Wendat subjected a prisoner to prolonged torture, it was to make the opposite
point – publicly distinguishing dominance and control from loving care. Since
the prisoner was not part of the household he needed to be tortured, not loved.
And so it is that G&W find in the
distinction between care and domination their long-awaited explication of how
we got stuck:
‘It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by re-creating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck….’
Instead of exploring hunter-gatherer
research and gender studies, then, G&W confine their horizons to the
experiences of First American military leaders, torturers and European
monarchs, exploring how we ‘got stuck’ by imagining these peoples’
psychological conflicts. If the bewildering words quoted above mean anything,
they seem to suggest that we got stuck because certain power-hungry figures
confused caring for people with violently dominating them.
Is this a serious explanation? Did people
really get confused in this way? In place of an answer, G&W themselves seem
to have got stuck. We are just offered the same question in slightly different
words:
‘Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck?’
No further effort is made to answer the
most crucial question of the entire book.
Morgan and Engels
What is missing here is any real understanding of
human evolution. In Chapter 3, G&W criticize what they describe as the
mainstream anthropological consensus for likening our foraging ancestors to
extant African hunter-gatherers – simple folk living in ‘tiny mobile bands’.
Then in Chapter 4 they change their mind. The mainstream anthropological
consensus, they now tell us, is that hunter-gatherers such as Aboriginal
Australians:
‘… could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as “brothers” and “sisters” (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners.’
It was Lewis Henry Morgan (1877, 1881) who founded our
discipline on the basis of his discovery of so-called ‘classificatory’ kinship.
Its principle can be summed up as the ‘equivalence of siblings’. Two brothers,
for example, will step into one another’s shoes with respect to their
relationships. A woman will say to her sister: ‘Your children are mine and mine
are yours’. So, there’s no concept of ‘private property’ with respect to children.
Family life is not ‘nuclear’. Every child will be free to move between her
numerous different ‘mothers’ and other supportive kin, and she will continue to
enjoy such freedom throughout her adult life.
When life is structured in this way, the result is
extraordinary. Everyone can expect hospitality from ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’
treated formally as equivalents to one another in chains of connection
stretching across vast areas. One consequence of this is that the state has no
soil in which to grow. When people are self-organized, allied to one another
and where the joys of childcare, sex, dance and domestic life are more
communally experienced, then there are no dead spaces – no social vacuums – for
the state to enter and fill. You can’t abolish the state without replacing it,
and communal family life – in today’s world, self-organised neighborhoods and
other wider communities – is one way of doing this.
Curiously, Graeber and Wengrow say almost nothing
about kinship in their long book. Instead of critiquing the Morgan-Engels
paradigm, Graeber and Wengrow turn Engels’ vision in The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State (Engels 1972 [1884]) upside-down. In
the beginning, they say, was private property, religion and the state. To quote
the concluding words of Chapter 4, ‘If private property has an “origin”, it is
as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself.’
In an earlier book with Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (2017),
Graeber even suggested that since imagined supernatural agents such as divine
kings and forest spirits have always exercised authority over people, the
principle of the state is an immovable feature of the human condition.
It may seem paradoxical for an anarchist to accept the
inevitability of private property and the state. But The Dawn of Everything adds
weight to that message. Yes, say the authors, anarchist freedom can be implemented,
but only in precious moments or enclaves. Personally, I find it hard to imagine
what kind of ‘enclave’ might be found in a planet already beginning to burn up.
Graeber and Wengrow seem to have abandoned the revolutionary slogan that
‘another world is possible’. Instead, they offer only the sobering message that
‘hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together, as complements to one
another’. (p. 208) They seem to be saying that we cannot have freedom in one
place without accepting oppression somewhere else.
Where do we go from here?
Despite these criticisms, the one important point
about this book is its advocacy of oscillation. All living things have a pulse.
They live and they die, wake and sleep, breathe in and out in ways driven by
the changing seasons and the many other periodicities of our life-friendly,
earth-sun-moon orbital system.
We need to get Planet Earth turning once more, not
just physically but socially and politically, too. This will not be done by
telling people to stop confusing care with dominance and control. It will be
done by supporting the school strikes, singing on their picket lines, extending
the action to workplaces, dancing in the streets, blocking traffic, bringing
capitalism to a complete halt.
But once we’ve taken control, what next? If we stay on
strike too long, we’ll soon starve. So, let’s oscillate. Those weekly school
strikes, for example, could, perhaps, be lengthened, joined up and staged once
a month, spreading across the world until we’ve released all humanity from
wage-slavery. Carbon emissions immediately cut by 50 per cent. Then we go back
to work, re-organizing it as necessary. We can risk returning to work only once
we’re sure it won’t lead back to capitalism. And we can be sure of that only
once we’ve all sworn to be back with our children on their picket line next New
Moon. We keep doing this, seizing power and surrendering it, until the world is
rocking and breathing once more. Reclaim the future. Neither patriarchy nor
matriarchy but, something like, rule by the moon.
That would be to repeat the class and gender dynamics of the original human revolution, but this time on a higher plane. Might any of this be possible or practical? Let’s open up the debate to everyone and see what we can do. That surely is what the activist-anthropologist, David Graeber, would have wanted.
Chris Knight is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London, where he forms part of a team researching the origins of our species in Africa. His books include Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991) and Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016).
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Let me
begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and
I find useful.
In
this talk I’d like to propose an approach to Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011) that connects the book
to David’s earlier work on Fragments of
an Anarchist Anthropology (Graeber 2004) and his latest work—with David
Wengrow—on The Dawn of Everything (Graeber
& Wengrow 2021). I think there are many different readings of the book on debt.
My own reading of David’s work is in light of ten years of ethnographic
research with Latin-American migrants in Spain, who became involved in the
country’s largest movement for the right to housing—the Platform for People
Affected by Mortgages—or La PAH for its short Spanish acronym (Suarez 2017,
2020). My research focuses on the relationship between political mobilization,
mortgage debt, and transnational migration.
My
interlocutors were being foreclosed and evicted from their homes, which were
bought during the housing bubble. On average they owed over 250,000 euros. They
joined La PAH in despair and out of guilt for not paying their debts. The
movement helped them transform their guilt into outrage by shifting the grand
narrative from individual failure into a counter-narrative on massive financial
fraud.
In
what follows I engage with David’s concepts of debt and freedom, as I try to
illuminate some of the challenges I ran into while theorizing what debt meant
to my interlocutors and fellow activists.
It was
January 11th, 2012. I had just returned to London from a preliminary field
visit to Barcelona. David was on leave that year and in New York but was on a
short visit to London. His mind, however, was still in New York, where he had
inspired and was collaborating with the Occupy movement. As we ate delicious
Thai food, one of his favorite activities, David detailed his time with Occupy.
Meanwhile, I was trying to get a word in to figure out my own research.
In
between dishes of prawn panang, charcoal duck, lots of white rice, and Thai iced
tea, David turned around and said: “What’s interesting here is not only why has
debt become the focus of this movement, but why it has been so effective. It’s
notorious that debt is very hard to organize around. We keep talking about debt
strikes, debt this, debtors that… and everybody keeps trying to come up with a
formula but it’s incredibly difficult. Part of the reason why is because this
sort of old morality is very hard to, like, convince people it’s not their
fault … What’s interesting here is you have a really effective broad grassroots
movement focusing on [debt]. You could ask: why debt becomes a focus and why
it’s worked in a certain way?” (In discussion with the author, January 2012).
The question is: in what way?
So,
let me begin with Fragments and its
relation to Debt. In Fragments, David describes several
“invisible spaces” where direct forms of democracy are already taking place. To
him, it is in these spaces that “the potential for insurrection, and the
extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in
revolutionary moments actually comes” (Graeber 2004, 34). In Debt, on the other hand, David defines
the principle of communism as “the foundation of all human sociability” (2011,
96). Communism implies spaces free of debt in which all people can contribute
to a common project given the abilities they already have. Unlike hierarchy,
communism is not based on relationships of precedent or status, but of
cooperation. And, unlike exchange, communism does not intend to end
relationships by paying back what is owed, but rather builds a sociality in
which one aspires to live in. Communism would then be the moral principle of
economic life operating at the heart of the “invisible spaces” suggested by
David in his anarchist anthropology.
Now I
want to give you an ethnographic vignette to analyze how this moral principle
organized the everyday realities lived by Latin American migrants to complicate
David’s theorizing.
Hector
was forty-eight at the time of our interview and his family was able to get
what many families desired at La PAH: cancelling their mortgage debt after
being foreclosed. In Spain, mortgage law dictates that a mortgaged home is not
the sole collateral to a debt. A bank can collect on any remaining debt after
the house is auctioned. The predatory nature of this law translated into debts
in the hundreds of thousands for my interlocutors after having lost the property. So, full cancelation of a mortgage
debt felt, indeed, like a “victory”—as Hector put it. Oddly then, most
Latin-American migrants end up celebrating losing their house to the bank in
exchange for a full debt cancellation. However, Hector came to another
realization right at the same time: he and his family had no place to live. His
wife’s monthly income of 600 euros could not pay for a place to rent, not if
they wanted to pay the bills and have enough to live. They were left with one
option: La PAH’s Obra Social, a project based on the re-occupation of buildings
belonging to banks rescued with public funds and which sat empty for years. The
idea was to relocate families like Hector’s. The name of La PAH’s project is a
play on words. Every large bank in Spain has an ‘Obra Social’, a philanthropic
entity supporting cultural events or alleviating social problems. In Catalonia
for instance, they often funded Catalan language promotion or similar social
events. La PAH thought it would establish its own strategy for solving real
social problems by occupying empty buildings and using them for what they saw
as its intended purpose: to house people.
La
PAH’s Housing Reoccupation project for evicted families was criticized by both
the left and the right. For leftist and long-term squatters, it was not radical
enough because the strategy was not a permanent reappropriation. For
conservatives, occupation was a crime and a threat to private property. For my
interlocutors, it was a respite but not an optimal solution. Hector’s family is
just one example. There were a significant number of single-mothers and their
children, unemployed or in low-paid jobs, which constituted the greater portion
of subprime mortgages in Spain (and other places like the US). When I
interviewed Hector and his family, they had been living in the occupied
building for four months. The experience had been very difficult for them, and
they hoped to buy an apartment again in the future. Hector was just one case
among many people for whom homeownership was still the preferred housing option
and a marker of success.
Why
did my interlocutors want to own a house or an apartment rather than occupying
one or even renting it? To answer this question, I’d like to connect Debt with The Dawn of Everything. One of David’s most important invitations
in Debt is to move away from an
omnipresent language of debt. Thinking with David means questioning why people
narrate their lives in the idiom of debt and examining whether and how an
alternative approach is even possible. David goes to extraordinary lengths to
illuminate the very mechanisms that prevent us from living without debt. The
biggest endeavor of this book—to my mind—is showing us a path to freedom, real
freedom we can already access if we choose to recognize that many “big
theories” are in fact forms of reproducing a ruling class or the legitimacy of
the state. David knew wholeheartedly that anthropology is uniquely well placed
to document these sites of moral and monetary indebtedness.
In The Dawn of Everything, David along with
David Wengrow, characterize freedom as the potential for doing things otherwise
(something they see taking three primary forms). First, freedom to move or
relocate, the idea of being free to leave a place in the face of danger or
otherwise. Then, freedom to refuse orders or how not to be bound by hierarchy.
Finally, freedom to shape new social realities by choosing what is at the
center of our existence. I’m interested in following here the first freedom,
freedom of movement, as it is key in understanding why Latin-American migrants
became indebted in the first place and why they would consider doing it again
today. There are two key moments in Latin Americans’ migratory journey in which
debt is essential for moving. First, when they decide to travel (irregularly)
to Spain. The trip required anything between 4,000 and 5,000 US dollars which
were almost invariably a debt acquired in their countries of origin to move to
Spain. The second moment is buying a mortgaged property. To bring their
families from Latin America to Spain, migrants needed to show adequate proof of
housing, buying a home was the fastest route to reunifying with their loved
ones, mainly moving children from Latin America to Spain. Let me illustrate
this with another ethnographic vignette.
“The
thing is I didn’t even want to buy a flat, I was trying to rent one,” said
Juan. He had been trying to rent a flat in order to bring his wife, Paulina,
and their three children from Ecuador to Spain under a family reunification
scheme. They had been apart for nearly two years. It was his reunification
application that pushed him to look for a new place to live since he needed to
demonstrate to immigration services proof of suitable accommodations for his
family in Spain. Like many other migrants, Juan was aware that it was not
possible to accommodate family life in small bedrooms that were often no more
than lined, adjacent mattresses on the floor, or a few bunked beds in a room.
Migrants’ usual shared rentals were legally (and physically) inadequate for
bringing families to Spain.
Juan
wanted to rent a flat because he thought he would not qualify for a mortgage loan.
To him, private property was a superior form of housing. But in addition, he
was aware of the ease private property meant when faced with Spanish
immigration services. Each autonomous community has its own process of showing
proof of adequate housing. In Catalonia, the regional government, through its
Department of Family and Social Wellbeing, was responsible for providing a
report asserting the quality of housing. According to Juan, if one had a rental
agreement, the Department sent someone to check your home to know that it was
indeed as you described, that no other people lived with you, and that you were
able to house others—particularly children. However, as Juan explained, if one
had proof of property, they never sent anybody to check anything at all.
Reading
David’s three books together allows me to reflect upon this double-bind of debt
as the absence of freedom and its condition of possibility. I want to circle
back to David’s initial question: why was this movement so effective in
organizing around debt? As an activist of La PAH but also as an anthropologist,
I believe the movement was effective because it stuck with the problem of debt.
It never tried to solve it but showed when it became excessive and violent. The
basic requirements that the movement has long advocated for include stopping
home evictions without proper rehousing, making mortgaged properties the sole
collateral to a loan, implementing rental caps, and increasing social housing
availability.
Although
the Spanish movement for the right to housing does not seek a debt jubilee,
which David advocated for in his book, it offers us a space to politicize debt
relations. David never dismissed the PAH as a bunch of reformists, which
several leftist activists and scholars did and continue to do. David was more
interested in how people organized around debt collectively than what people
did with debt individually. It’s important to highlight that in over a decade,
La PAH has gone from a small group of activists meeting weekly in 2009 to becoming
the largest movement for the right to housing with over 220 nodes around Spain,
and weekly assemblies that gather—to this day—thousands of individuals to
discuss mortgage debt and political mobilization. La PAH is an effective
intervention into a growing reality of financial predation, a movement that has
learned to respond to injustice collectively, and a socially diverse space
where ideological conceptualizations (of debt or occupation and others) can
change.
La PAH
is not an example of how David thought we should deal with debt, and yet David
was always ready to learn from other people’s experiences and strategies. This
was very much David. A self-absorbed but incredibly generous activist, mentor,
scholar, and friend. While at Goldsmiths and the LSE, I often thought I had
gone in for a supervision but came out knowing about Occupy, Rojava, or his
friendship with Anton Newcombe—the lead singer from the Brian Jonestown
Massacre. Yet, upon listening back to each one of our conversations – I
recorded many – I found detailed guides for thinking differently about what I
was working on. They didn’t seem terribly evident at the time because he was
never telling me how to think. Rather, David was thinking with me based on his
own ethnographic examples and political aspirations. This, I believe, is a
perfect reflection of how he thought and wrote. He was never trying to tell
people how to think but was inviting us into his own way of connecting
seemingly disconnected phenomena, often going back several thousand years to do
that.
I’d
like to thank Jorge Núñez for thinking with me about many of the ideas advanced
here, and Alpa Shah for the opportunity to engage with David’s legacy at a time
when his ideas are greatly needed, and he is so dearly missed. To everyone here
today thank you for choosing to do exactly what David said occurs in mourning
and other acts of memorialization, these are an essential part of the labor of
people-making. Let’s continue making our relationships to each other matter in
ways that shape the futures we want to build. Thank you!
Maka
Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos, Center for Interdisciplinary
Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.
Graeber,
David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press: Distributed by University of Chicago Press.
Graeber,
David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.
Graeber,
David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of
Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.
Suarez,
Maka. 2017. “Debt Revolts: Ecuadorian Foreclosed Families at the PAH in
Barcelona.” Dialectical Anthropology 41 (3): 263–77.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9455-8.
Suarez, Maka. 2020. “‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona.” Ethnos, February 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687539
Cite as: Suarez, Maka. “Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH.” FocaalBlog, 21 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/21/maka-suarez-thinking-about-debt-with-david-graeber-and-la-pah/
David Graeber’s Debt: The First
5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year,
he took part in the first New York City General Assembly that formed the Occupy
Wall Street movement. Much of the contemporary world revolves around claims we
make on each other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and payment
of taxes, wages, rents, fees etc. David addressed these through a focus on debt
in broad historical perspective. It is a central issue in global politics
today, at every level of society. The class struggle between debtors and
creditors to distribute costs after the long credit boom went bust in 2008 is
universal.
David held that the social
logic of debt is revealed most clearly when money is involved (Hart 2012). Following
Nietzsche, he argued that money introduced the first measure of unequal
relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Indeed, one school of
thought holds that “money is debt”. This includes the French and German
traditions. Money was always both a commodity and a debt-token, giving rise to
much political and moral contestation, especially in the ancient world. Whereas
Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he located the roots
of human bondage, slavery, tribute, and organized violence in debt relations.
The contradictions of indebtedness, escalating class conflict between creditors
and debtors fed by money and markets, led the first world religions to
articulate notions of freedom and redemption, often involving calls for debt
cancellation.
The book contrasts “human
economies” with those dominated by money and markets (“commercial economies”). These
societies are not necessarily more humane, but “they are economic systems
primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation,
destruction, and rearranging of human beings”. They use money, but mainly as
“social currencies” which maintain relations between people rather than being
used to purchase things.
“In a human economy, each
person is unique and of incomparable value, because each is in a unique nexus
of relations with others”. Yet money forms make it possible to treat people as
identical objects in exchange and that requires violence. Brutality is
omnipresent. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most
“human” of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is
commonplace. This is taken to another level when they are drawn into systems
like the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery and freedom — a pair driven by a culture
of honour and indebtedness — culminate in the ultimate contradiction of modern
liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially
isolated.
David Graeber then organizes
the world history of money in four stages: the first urban civilizations; the
“axial age” of world religions; the Middle Ages; and “the great capitalist
empires” that ended in 1971 when the US dollar abandoned gold. Money oscillates
between two broad types, “credit” and “currency” (bullion), between money as a
virtual measure of personal relations, like IOUs, and as impersonal things made
from precious metals. The recent rise of virtual credit money may indicate
another long swing in money’s central focus. Ours could be a multi-polar world,
more like the Middle Ages than the last two centuries. It could offer more
scope for “human economies” or at least “social currencies”. The debt crisis
might provoke revolutions. Perhaps the institutional complex based on states,
money, and markets (capitalism) will be replaced by forms of society more
directly responsive to ordinary people and their reliance on “everyday
communism”. David’s historical vision has no room for a Great Transformation in
the nineteenth century.
Most anthropologists of the
last century conceived of a world safe for fieldwork-based ethnography; another
minority interest co-existed with this. I call this “the anthropology of
unequal society”. Rousseau’s Discourse on
Inequality (1754) launched modern anthropology as the critique of unequal
society. Morgan (1877) and Engels (1884) were heavily indebted to him when they
reconstructed human history as the evolution of society from a kinship matrix to
states based on class divisions. This genre was continued by Lévi-Strauss (1949),
Sahlins (1958) and Wolf (1982), but with less explicit political content. Overlapping
the millennium, its main exponents have been Jack Goody (1976, 2013; Hart 2006)
and David Graeber (2011).
Goody sought to undermine
Western claims to superiority over the main Asian societies. He downplayed the
industrial revolution that allowed Europeans to take over the world in the
nineteenth century. Following Braudel (1975), Goody (2013) preferred to point
to the similarities between industrial capitalism and the “merchant cultures”
of pre-industrial civilizations. He claimed that Marx (1867) misread merchant
capitalism, but did not address his case for treating industrial capital as strategic.
Weber (1922) too gets short shrift for suggesting that modern capitalism
differs from its predecessors. Given their common origins in the Bronze Age
urban revolution, modern European capitalism diffused faster to Asia than the
Italian renaissance to Northwest Europe.
Despite a barrage of
propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and
democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization —
territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism,
bureaucracy, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue,
world religion, and the nuclear family (Hart 2002). The rebellion of the
bourgeoisie against the Old Regime was co-opted by “national capitalism” in a
series of political revolutions of the 1860s and 70s (Hart 2009). This severely
set back humanity’s emancipation from inequality. Consider the shape of world
society today. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, “the men
in suits”, rule masses who are predominantly poor, darker, female, and young.
The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, vainly try to stem
the inflow of migrants. Our world resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime
in France before the revolution (Tocqueville 1859). Goody may have a point in asking
us to reconsider how exceptional our societies are.
I have taken part in a
conference and book, Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East
(Weisweiler 2022), which was inspired by David’s Debt book. He drew
attention to the political economy underpinning a sequence of ancient empires
in western Eurasia from the Persians and classical Greeks through Alexander’s
conquests to republican and imperial Rome and the Arab conquest of the
Mediterranean. Its logic hinged on the need to provision vast armies on
prolonged marches. That meant using precious metal coinage, sustained by a
network of mines, states and mercenary soldiers, then converting conquered
peoples into slaves to be sold for the money needed to complete the cycle.
There seems little doubt that western empires from 1500 to 1800 relied on a
similar logic. But they were unable to take over the world until industrial
capitalism raised their technological competence to a far higher level than the
rest.
Marxists and liberals agreed
that a world-change was taking place in nineteenth-century Britain. Hegel’s
(1821) historical model, however, was very different from Marxism’s successive
stages (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism). His three phases were based
on the family and the land, the market economy of urban civil society and the
modern state respectively. These now co-existed under the coordinating guidance
of the state. Both Polanyi (1944) and Marx missed the revolutions of the 1860s
and 70s that installed a new class alliance in the leading countries, the
partnership between capitalists and the traditional enforcers that I call
“national capitalism”. This new alliance soon spawned the legal conditions for
modern corporations, as well as a massive expansion of state property and a
bureaucratic revolution at all levels of the economy. Mass production and
consumption was the result.
Image 1: Book cover and economist Thomas Picketty, photo by Frontieras do Pensamento/Greg Salibian (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Thomas Piketty’s (2014) book
on capital was the smash hit of our times. It was based on serious economics,
up to two centuries of national income accounting for a few rich countries. An
economist who can quote Balzac can’t be all bad. I identify three reasons for
his success. First, Piketty brought inequality back onto the mainstream agenda,
just as Occupy Wall Street did — “we are the 99 percent”; and this touched a
nerve after three decades of neoliberal responses to the financial crisis that included
bailing out the rich and making the poor pay. Second, Piketty’s argument rests
on two simple equations describing the relationship between capital and labour
over the last 200 years; he uses these to demonstrate that capital’s share of
national income must always increase. It is unlikely that teeming historical
diversity can be captured by timeless categories and equations. Third, against
the notion that capitalists make their money by producing competitively for
profit, Piketty claimed that property was a growing component of wealth; inheritance
and rent are neglected factors in distribution today.
There is something special
about the plutocracy built up in recent decades. The rise of modern
corporations comes from their being granted the rights of individual citizens
by the US Supreme Court in 1884; and they now combine those rights with their
long held special privileges, like limited liability for debt (Hart 2005). Even
the Romans, not noted as champions of democracy, limited the spending of the
rich on political campaigns. The US Supreme Court recently refused to accept
any restriction on corporate political spending since it would infringe their
“human rights” and allowed companies exemption from government rules on
religious grounds.
These corporations once built
their wealth by producing industrial commodities for profit at prices cheaper
than their competitors. Now they rely on extracting rents (transfers sanctioned
by political power) rather than on producing for profit in competitive markets.
Thus “Big Pharma” makes more money from patents granted by Congress than the
entire Medicare budget. Sony makes 75% of its revenues, not from selling
machines, but from DVDs which are reproduced, almost without cost, from movies
sold in cinemas; they call duplicating movies “piracy” (Johns 2009). Goldman Sachs
retrieved from the US Treasury at full face value the $90 billion lost by
insurance giant, AIG in the 2008 crash. These rent-seekers are not punished for
stealing from the public, but are bailed out by our taxes and held up as shining
examples of super-rich consumption to a public that has exchanged equal
citizenship for bread and circuses (reality TV). This is decadence: there are
no longer any national political solutions to economic problems that are global
in scope.
Marx held that industrial capitalist
profit subordinated rent and interest to its logic. This is why he and Engels
thought that Victorian England held the future of the world economy. New phases
of capitalist development and decline have been identified ever since. The
American macro-economist, Dean Baker (2011) provides much insight into rentier
capitalism in the US today. Selling stuff for profit means adding value through
production. Rent-seeking is “…an attempt to derive economic rent
by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic
activities occur, rather than by adding value”. Rent and interest (banking) no
longer take their scale, form, and function from industrial capitalist production
for profit, as Marx insisted in Capital. Has the focus of political
economy tipped away from industrial production (in the broadest sense) towards
rents derived from political privilege? It is hard to see how the richest 1%
could have done so well in the last four decades otherwise, given the overall stagnation
of production and real wages in this period.
The digital revolution in
communications is highly relevant, since many intangible commodities can now be
copied easily at no cost. If you steal my cow, I can no longer milk it, but
no-one loses out if I copy your song. Entertainment is the fastest-growing
sector of the world economy after finance. National capitalism’s rise to
dominance after the First World War is central to understanding today’s
economic crisis, since it has been eroded since the early 1970s. Digital Retail
Management regimes now being installed around the world illustrate the dominance
of political and legal coercion in the economy now.
Rent-seeking now trumps value-added through
production. The war over intellectual property escalates to ever higher levels
of absurdity; and the rise of Big Tech, in extending corporate command and
control, undermines our ability to make society in the interest of the American
Empire. Like Marx and Engels, I believe that the machine revolution can be a
force for greater economic democracy; but the open source and free software
movements have lost the influence they once promised. Our main hope is to
mobilise global networks to develop democracy, knowing that the multitudes are
faster than they are. That was certainly David Graeber’s project.
Image 2: Economist Dean Baker, photo by CEPR (CC BY 4.0)
David’s book is or will be
the biggest best-seller by an anthropologist, even over Ruth Benedict’s Patterns
of Culture (1934), the previous frontrunner. In 2011, he spent a sabbatical
leave from Goldsmiths in New York where he was able to promote the book heavily
before becoming a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was
invited by the German President to debate on national television with the
leader of the Social Democratic Party and Debt sold 30,000 copies there
in two weeks. In the last two decades his books have been translated into many
languages. He has a strong following in Japan, Korea, and China.
Debt’s phenomenal success was not
an accident or freak of creative genius (Hart 2020, 2021). Anthropology
narrowed its scope in the last century to meet the needs of academic
bureaucracy and lost its public appeal in the process. David set out to write a
big book with big ideas that allowed readers to place themselves in history.
Anthropologists, in adopting fieldwork-based ethnography as their standard
method, settled for narrow localism and a truncated version of their own history,
finding in ethnography a replacement for racist colonial empire, while ignoring
the fragmentation of world society into myopic nationalisms. David by-passed
all this to resurrect the Victorian polymath and the world thanked him
profusely for it. But there were other strings to his methodological bow, chief
of them the ability to combine academic life with revolutionary politics when most
of his colleagues were trapped in universities committed to bureaucratizing
capitalism (Hart 2021). From the time he was a graduate student, he trained
himself to write accessibly for the general public. He wrote each piece twice,
once for himself and once for everyone else.
David’s
intellectual success in a curtailed lifetime drew on self-conscious methods: vision,
imagination and endurance through hardship, for sure; reading with no bounds;
love of comparative ethnography; writing “to be understood rather than admired and
not for knowing and over-acute readers” (Nietzsche); active participation in democratic
politics; and returning to anthropology’s original mission as the study of
humanity (Hart 2020). Call that genius, if you like; I prefer to call it a
personal synthesis built on disciplined hard work over an extraordinary range
of human activities. If only we could each aim to emulate him in some respects.
Keith Hart is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London and a full-time writer based in Paris and Durban. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes will be published in Spring 2022.
Baker, Dean. 2011. The End of Loser Liberalism: Making markets progressive. Washington
DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Braudel, Fernand. 1975. Capitalism and Material Life. New York:
Harper Collins.
Engels, Friedrich. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: Pathfinder.
Goody, Jack. 1976. Production
and Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, Jack. 2013. Metals, Culture and Capitalism: An essay on
the origins of the modern world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. Brooklyn,
NY: Melville House.
Hart, Keith. 2002. World society as an old regime. In: C. Shore and S. Nugent (eds.), Elite Cultures: Anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge, 22-36.
Hart, Keith. 2005. The Hit
Man’s Dilemma: Or business, personal and impersonal. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press.
Hart, Keith. 2006. Agrarian civilization and world society. In: D. Olson and M. Cole (eds.), Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 29-48.
Hart, Keith. 2009. Money in the making of world society, C. Hann and K. Hart (eds.), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91-105.
Hart, Keith. 2014. Jack
Goody: the anthropology of unequal society. Reviews
in Anthropology, 43(3): 199-220.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich. 2010 [1821]. The Philosophy of
Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johns, Adrian.
2009. Piracy:
The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon.
Marx, Karl. 1970 [1867]. Capital Volume 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Morgan, Lewis H. 1964 [1877]. Ancient Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Polanyi, Karl. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984
[1754]. Discourse on Inequality.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia.
Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2004
[1859]. The Old Regime and the Revolution.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, Max. 1961 [1922]. General Economic History. Piscataway,
NJ: Transaction.
Weisweiler, John. Ed. 2022.
Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money and Social
Obligation in David Graeber’s Axial Age (c.700BCE–700CE) Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Cite as: Hart, Keith. 2021. “Comment on Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/keith-hart-comment-on-debt-the-first-5000-years/
In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major contemporary critics of our current economic paradigm. Around the same time, he contributed to the creation of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that made the book all the more timely and important. Debt is a sweeping historical account of ‘human economies’ and an exposé of the moral foundations of modern economics. In dialogue with a range of influential economic thinkers, Keith Hart critically assesses the significance of the book as an exemplary work of ‘anthropology of unequal society.’ Maka Suarez weaves the theoretical insights of Debt into her own ethnography of Spain’s largest movement for the right to housing (La PAH), analysing how La PAH exposes the kind of politicised debt relations that are the historical focus of David’s book.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at
LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute
and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s
Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE, Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and co-director of the Human Economy Programme. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. His latest book is Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes.
Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.
The last two decades in
anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given
David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and with the Western
Left more generally, this is even true for the Western world at large. With the
publication of his debt book (Graeber 2010) – also exactly a decade ago – as
Keith Hart once said, David became the most famous anthropologist among the
general public of our age, taking that long empty seat next to Margaret Mead
(and Levi Strauss perhaps). With the launch of the ‘Society for Ethnographic
Theory’, the HAU journal and the turn towards Open Access publishing, David,
now world famous, once more stirred up anthropology as well as academia more
broadly. It feels a bit weird to say this about an anthropologist of the gift,
but David literally made history by attacking established centers and practices
of power and wealth.
While some in this series of
seminars knew him well as a direct colleague or friend, I only ran into David a
couple of times. I felt it was not easy to get to know him. He seemed a bit
solipsistic, drawn into conversation with himself, sometimes mumbling and
laughing privately about the sudden insights he seemed to run into while doing
so. If you had not been introduced to that intimate conversation before, it was
not so easy to enter it, I felt. He and I never had the time to get to that
point, for which I am sorry.
I remembered these few moments
of mutual awkwardness while rereading Toward an Anthropological Theory of
Value (Graeber 2001). Its style of writing reminded me of David’s internal
conversations and his moments of private enjoyment. The narrative of this book
meanders, feels sometimes elliptic (as it does in all his books). The flow of
the argument regularly gets punctuated. Jolts of joyful energy seem to pull the
author in multiple unexpected directions. The possible connections that emerge
from the words that he happened to choose, seem to seduce him to leave the path
and get into the bush around it. David, who celebrates creative freedom, is
certainly the Zizek of anthropology. As with Zizek, things can become very
detailed within a narrative that was already far from linear. As a reader you may
feel you are being unduly slowed down, even taken advantage of. But David can also
take you by the hand while making a reckless jump, allowing you for a moment to
tower over a conceptual landscape where most people would normally be lost, and
you are struck by the sudden clarity of perception. I now imagine that such apparently
reckless jumps produced his moments of private enjoyment.
My discussion here of Toward
an Anthropological Theory of Value must be short. I will leave the bush aside
– the book has long chapters on gift giving societies in Melanesia, Madagascar
and among Amerindians, some of it very interesting, some of it less compelling
for non-specialists – and I will focus on the landscapes that emerge during those
conceptual jumps. This book is not just representative of his writing style and
his counterintuitive rhythm of discovery. It also partly lays out the tool kit
of concepts, perspectives, and issues that was going to dominate his later work.
In fact, it offers in embryo his full program of research. What is then David’s
theory of value? How do Marx and Mauss cohabit in it? How do his very outspoken
Chicago teachers, Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, figure? What are its
possibilities and blind spots?
David developed his
‘anthropological theory of value’ against the intellectual and political
background of what he calls ‘the bleak 1990s’. He is very explicit about it:
neoliberal hegemony, globalized capitalism, economics as dominant social
imaginary, post-structuralism, and the reduction of politics to ‘creative
consumption’ and identity, both in anthropology and other social disciplines.
While structure and history had gone out of fashion, he writes, action and
agency had become cynically equated in social theory to mere individual market
choices. Before 1989, Bourdieu had worked out ‘habitus’ as the connecting
concept between structure and agency (and Giddens had been busy with similar
issues). Graeber swiftly passes him by for the focus on dominance and power games
that underlie Bourdieu’s project, in David’s eyes another symptom of the
cynicism that he saw around him. For David, at this point in his career, it
still seemed paradigmatic that anthropologists are dealing with people in relatively
egalitarian societies and with people who desire (a core concept for him) to precisely
escape such power games. David proposes ‘value’ as the point where structure
and agency meet. After an interesting interlude on Roy Bashkar (and critical
realism) and his thinking in terms of forces, tendencies, and processes rather
than objects he emphasizes that his value does exactly that: setting open-ended
dialectical processes in motion. What is this value and what are the
anthropological traditions that help him shape it up?
The shortest way to answer
that question is to bring in that concept that is all but foundational for David’s
work: ‘constituent imagination’. While he borrows that term from Italian
autonomous Marxism (Virno and Negri), he links it to a long anthropological
pedigree that connects Klyde Kluckhohn, Marshall Sahlins, Terence Turner, Louis
Dumont, and others, all of whom are discussed in interesting and original ways
here. Value then emerges as what people tell themselves they find important in
the realization of their lives, not very different from the common-sense
meaning of value in various European languages. David’s value is emic,
idealist, and dynamic. While his notion seems initially not very different from
let’s say Talcott Parsons, David wouldn’t be Graeber if he didn’t loudly refuse
the implied structural functionalism: David’s value emphatically doesn’t work
to solidify stable social reproduction. On the contrary, it feeds the social
imagination, both collectively and individually, and it is both agonistic and
liberating. In the social processes that it sets in motion people die, strive,
love, compete, believe, pray, moralize, estheticize, sacrifice, fetishize, and
whatnot. Value is about making differences, and about ranking and proportioning
them. De Saussure’s structuralism may be essential for how our language and imagination
works, but David, following his teacher Terence Turner, adroitly embraces Vygotsky’s
‘generative structuralism’ and shifts the weight from langue to parole
and towards ‘signifying material action’. Hence his interest in ethnohistory
and the telling and remembering of histories. Stories become part of
‘constituent imagination’ in action, the practiced struggle for individual and
collective autonomous becoming and in how these struggles are being remembered.
In the end he concedes that his
foundational notion of value is perhaps not that different from Dumont, a student
of Levi Strauss and the ultimate theorist of hierarchy, except for its emphasis
on process, action, and agency. And while the structure of our social
imagination is certainly ‘a totality’ of the Saussurian kind and as such fully embedded
in the existing structuration of our societies, as well as fundamental for how
we teach our children and reproduce ourselves, it is clear to David that this
is a totality ridden by ambivalence and contradiction. There are inevitably
contradictions between desires and pragmatic realities. ‘Constituent
imagination’ often seems more the property, desire, and practice of individuals
or groups and moieties within societies than of societies as a whole.
Where is Marcel Mauss here,
David’s most basic theoretical and political inspiration? Mauss appears at all
levels of David’s approach. David spends some very interesting pages introducing
him as the key thinker for a non-cynical anthropology and for a humanist Left,
who famously rejected the Bolsheviks for their recourse to state terror,
authoritarianism, and bureaucratic diktat. In the book, Mauss of course appears
as the quintessential theorist of the gift and of egalitarian societies, which,
as I said, are for David at this point still the self-evident object of
anthropology. David may criticize him for his romanticism, but he fully embraces
his notion of ‘everyday communism’ as the glue of human sociality. Then there
is also the basic methodological notion of the ‘total prestation’ where the
full quality, the core values, of a whole society are reflected in each and
every of its parts, including the imaginations and actions of its members.
David does not discuss it explicitly, but if I’m not mistaken, he does seem to
think that Mauss’ approach may be too static for his purposes. The constituent values
for which people once congregated as a distinct group or society, may become corrupted
over time and people seek repair, interpretations will differ, agonistic and
liberating conflict will ensue. Holism, for David, therefore, does not take
away the dialectics. On the contrary, it feeds them and is fed by them.
In all this Graeber seems to
follow Terence Turner closely. And indeed, in a much later preface to a
collection of Turner’s essays (2017) David remarked that he wrote his value
book to make the notoriously complex texts of Turner understandable for a wider
public. The book was thus originally intended as a gift to Turner.
But Turner was strong on Marx,
indeed perhaps the most outspoken Marxist in the anthropology of the 1990s. And
Marx was strong on totality and dialectics too, but of a less idealistic kind. David
in this book sets a Turnerian Marx into a dynamic conversation with Mauss. How
does that work out? A Marxist will immediately wonder how the thoroughly
idealist concept of value as constitutive imagination that Graeber is on to
will relate to Marx’s similarly dialectical but certainly not idealist
conceptions of (use, exchange, and surplus) value. Most importantly, how does
it relate to Marx’s ‘law of value’, which is Marx’s short formula for talking
about the social relations of capitalist accumulation.
Graeber is sympathetic to the
young Marx who wrote on behalf of the emancipation of humans from their
self-constructed religious fetishes which he wanted them to begin to see as the
mere products of their own powers of creative imagination rather than as the gods
that they had to obey. This indeed corresponds perfectly to David’s own agenda
as his long and interesting discussions of fetishism show. But the post 1848 Marx
of capital and labor receives rather short shrift. David repeatedly complains
about the ‘convoluted language’ of Marxists. He does not like the Marxian
vocabularies and prefers for example to talk about ‘creative powers’ rather
than about labor (a concept that hardly appears in this book on value). Marx
for David is mainly interesting, he says, for his approach to money – and here
we find an early announcement of the coming book on debt. So, not capital, not
labor, but money. He emphasizes that for Marx value and money are not the same,
but in the next pages Marx’s value disappears and David gets stuck with money
and prices, which are of course a holistic system too. With Terence Turner, he
embraces the idea that ‘socially necessary labor time’ – a core element of
Marx’s ‘law of value’ – is also inevitably a cultural construct but the
discussions about that centrally important concept for Marx are not referenced
in this book as they are by Turner (2008). Nor does David seem aware that this concept
helps Marx to discover a particular relational form of value under capitalism
that consistently operates behind people’s back and is therefore ontologically
something rather different than a self-conscious ‘constituent’ value choice. In
Chicago David was apparently not exposed to Moishe Postone. He also does not seem
aware of the important value debates among Marxist theorists of the 1970s (in
particular Diane Elson 1979, whom Turner had read closely). Considering the
number of pages dedicated to such discussions in this book, Marx’s value appears
intellectually far less compelling then Kluckhohn’s, Parson’s or Dumont’s
value. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in David’s handling is then in the next
moment reduced to a rather static cultural concept for determining, via prices,
how important we find particular items of consumption as compared to other
items of consumption (cars: 7% of yearly consumer expenditures in the US in the
late nineties). David’s Marx, surprisingly, seems in the end not to be about
capital and labor but primarily about consumption, not unlike the way David’s
teacher Marshall Sahlins looked at capitalism in ‘Culture and Practical Reason’
(1976).
It is also as if David at once
forgets about his discussion of Roy Bhaskar and his own declared embrace of
forces, tendencies, and processes. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in Marx is a
dynamic dialectical relation between abstract capital and abstract labor that
produces immanent tendencies and is indeed also a dynamic dialectical cultural
construct. It is the basis for Marx’s ‘law of value’, which Marx knew well was
not a law but a tendency. As labor does its daily work for capital, labor productivity
would systematically be driven up because of the competition among capitals and
of the class struggle with labor, via mechanization, automation, and the
overall capitalization of life. Over time labor would lose any sovereignty over
its own conditions of life and social reproduction. Apart from being
disciplined in its wage claims and lifestyles, lest capital would move to
cheaper and more hardworking places, labor would also be forced into (paying
for) ever more education or face devaluation and degradation. And of course, it
would have to face the inescapable uncertainties of life and status. The same
would be true for cities, regions, and states that failed to compete within a
globalizing capitalism and would therefore literally be up for grabs. All of
this, including the geographically uneven and war-mongering repercussions, is a
logical part of Marx’s ‘law of value’. David could have used Mauss and the gift
to give a deeper anthropological and relational twist to Marx’s rather flat
notion of use value. But Marx is never allowed in this book to play on his own
unique strengths: in the end both capital and labor, the two elementary
positions whose combination produces not just use values and exchange values
but, crucially, surplus value, the very returns to capital that are the key
driver of social change in a capitalist world, simply disappear. According to
David Harvey (2018), Marx sees capital as ‘value on the move’. But in this book
that sort of value is just moved out – only to be rediscovered big time and with
‘anarchist concreteness’ in David’s later work on debt and bullshit jobs.
Constituent imagination is
David’s core concept. It was a concept that came from Italian Marxist
post-operaismo authors who were impressed by labor’s refusal to work for
capital in the Italy of the seventies and eighties after they had lost a series
of violent confrontations. Young workers now preferred to seek the creation of
autonomous worlds of life and labor outside the wage nexus. This is shortly
mentioned by Graeber, and he imagines, like James Scott, that his egalitarian kinship
groups similarly refused to further engage with hierarchical power centers and simply
moved out to constitute their own desired societies inspired by constituent
egalitarian imagination. Clearly, this is a further radicalization of the
original concept, which talks about evading the wage nexus but does not carry any
hint at a mass exodus out of Egypt towards a promised land and a new separate
society, to use an image. David even argues that all societies at some point
were formed out of such mass rejection of earlier power centers and were
therefore always founded on constituent imagination. This to me seems like an
extravagant claim, largely untestable, and suspiciously supportive of David’s
theoretical purposes. However, Italian Marxists such as Antonio Negri always
kept the development of capital and the state in dynamic tension with the
autonomous desires of his multitudes, which were indeed urban subjects rather
than spread out kin-groups in marginal spaces. In Graeber’s Value book that dynamic
tension disappears. David’s egalitarians are on their own, engaging in a
similar constitutive mytho-praxis that has inspired Marshall Sahlins’s work
(see also Jonathan Parry’s discussion of Lost People for a similar
disappearance of the IMF and therefore of global capital in David’s analysis of
recent Malagasy histories).
Image 2: Screenshot of David Graeber’s tweet responding to Arjun Appadurai’s critique of his book on debt.
David in this book firmly dismisses Appadurai’s ‘regimes of value’ notion (1986) for his neoliberal fixation on consumption. Appadurai recently returned the compliment by claiming that David’s anthropology was an entirely traditional one. David did a fantastic job in giving 21st century anthropology a new pride in focusing on egalitarian desires and popular values of autonomy in rejection of the rule of capital. But Appadurai is unfortunately right in one way: the values David envisions are emic, singular, particular, idealist, and deeply place-based and return us to classic bounded fieldwork and a bounded notion of culture. The book has no references to Wolf, Wallerstein, or anyone else dealing with space and multiscalar dynamic analysis of the dialectical value processes associated with globalized capital and the ensuing popular counter politics and desires. Except for a journalistic type of political economy, there is in fact hardly any serious political economy at all here, not even an anthropological political economy – a school that traces itself back to leading scholars like Wolf, Mintz, and Leacock, always largely ignored by both Graeber and Sahlins. David later improved marvelously on that lack with the Debt book (but see for example Kalb 2014), which, importantly, also brought long run and deep global histories back into anthropology. But while that book appears to have been incubated during the writing of this text on value via David’s interest in Marx and money, it is not yet conceptually or methodologically anticipated, and I do wonder how David later looked back on this very traditional anthropological theory of value he develops here.
David was a magnificent and
creative utopian and moralist. He was uniquely in tune with the resistant
Western mood of the times, from the alter-globalists to Occupy, including in
his embrace of the ethos of the mass refusals and moral outcries that we have
seen in the last twenty years, often driven by the desire for autonomy and the
condemnation of the overall bleakness of things. But he did not at all
anticipate the rise of the populist right, which is also very much about value
and values, and indeed loudly proclaims a desire for the resurrection of
(white, male, majoritarian etc.) hierarchy (see Kalb 2021 for further
discussion). The rise of the right in many places after the failed rebellions
of 2011 must be understood from within the failures of the ‘horizontalist’
mobilizations of which David and many of us were a part and which at that point
seemed to have an elective affinity with the anthropology of egalitarianism. Nor
does David’s book on value anticipate a situation where core central bankers
and enlightened economists write books about the economics of the green
transition with ‘value’ prominently in the title while making a claim to the
heritage of the value-driven popular risings that David sees himself part of (Carney
2020; Mazzucato 2019). And finally, in the excitement of retrieving some pride
for the traditions of the discipline, in David’s book on value we also seem to
have forgotten some of the earlier advances in ‘the anthropology of complex
societies’ and of ‘world society’, including some Marxist ones which are very precisely
about value.
Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and FocaalBlog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986.
“Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-36. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Carney, Marc. 2020. Value(s):
Building a better world for all. William Collins: Dublin.
Elson, Diane. 2015 (1979). Value:
The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: Verso
Graeber, David.
2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our
own dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David.
2010. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House.
Harvey, David. 2018. Marx,
Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. London: Profile books
Kalb, Don. 2014. “Mavericks:
Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world
anthropology.“ Focaal 69: 113-134.
Kalb, Don. 2021. “The
neo-nationalist ascendancy: further thoughts on class, value and the return of
the repressed.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 316-328.
Mazzucato, Mariana. 2019. The
Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London:
Penguin.
Sahlins, Marshall.
1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Terence Turner.
2008. “Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.” Anthropological Theory 8 (1): 43-56.
Turner, Terence. 2017. The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago: HAU Books.
Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2021. “Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’.” FocaalBlog, 13 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/13/don-kalb-constituent-imagination-versus-the-law-of-value-on-david-graebers-anthropological-theory-of-value.
I confess that the
first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in
Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to become his Debt
book. He covered 5,000 years in 50 minutes, and this was in an era when the
Grand Narrative was very much out of fashion. His presentation struck me as
rambling and incoherent.
Over the past 15 years
I have come to change my mind about him completely. I have just published an
article (Gregory, 2021) where I have argued that Sahlins and Graeber should
have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. For many, this is high praise,
but I can’t be sure that David would accept it. His approach to the theory of
value stands opposed to everything the so-called ‘Nobel Prize’ for Economic
Science symbolises.
My brief today is to
discuss his book Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001). I
shall keep to that brief as best I can. I must say, however, it was only after
reading his books on Anarchism (2004), Direct Action (2009), Debt
(2011), and Bullshit Jobs (2019) that I began to get my head
around the central arguments of his Value book, by far his most difficult
book. What struck me about all these books was the extraordinary unity of theme
and content. I see them as a five-volume study of the value question. I am not
saying that this is the best way to interpret what he has done. There are many
ways to approach his work. This is the one I find most useful.
In the acknowledgements to his Value book David thanks everyone at Palgrave except the editor who made him switch around his title. If we restore the order he wanted, the main title of his book becomes, The false coin of our own dream, and the subtitle, Toward an anthropological theory of value. This inversion gives us a different angle on his work. The word ‘toward’ suggests a movement, not yet completed, from an old theory to a new one. It also brings the expression ‘the false coin of our dreams’ to front and centre. The origin of this expression can be traced back to Mauss and Hubert in their General Theory of Magic (1902-03; 1972), but David gives the metaphor a 21st century twist. As I see it, the phrase false coin of our own dreams defines a paradox that is the central organizing metaphor of all five volumes of his books on value. But what does he mean by this paradox?
My short answer to this
question is that he is referring to the political battle over those big ideas
that can change the world. For him the value question is, first and foremost,
the battle over competing images of wealth. The false coins are the images
of wealth produced by the dreamers of yesterday, the false coiners of an image that
has become adulterated and debased through excessive use over time. David the dreamer
wants to recoin these debased images of wealth to create a new image of what
could be. His dream is not a fantasy. It is a real possibility grounded in
economic history, cultural geography, and the political present. Graeber the dreamer,
then, is a political activist who wants to appropriate the false coins of the
ruling elite, melt them down, and forge something new in collaboration with
those who have a hopeful image of the future. He wants to join them in the
streets as they ‘shout, clamour and make joyful noises’ in the now obsolete
sense of the word ‘dream’ (OED).
What is this new image
of wealth?
David, we must never
forget, was born in New York and raised in Chelsea, just four miles from Wall
Street. He has a New York-centric view of the world he has never lost. This
visual image captures the essence of his approach as I understand it. It shows
the Charging Bull sculpture that artist Arturo Di Modica secretly
installed near Wall Street in 1989 in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock
market crash. In 2017 Kristen Visbal installed her sculpture of Fearless
Girl facing down the Charging Bull, but following complaints, the Fearless
Girl was relocated to a different part of Wall Street, totally transforming
Fearless Girl’s symbolic power. She now represents, Google Maps tells
us, the fight for female equality inside the boardrooms of Wall Street. The
original juxtaposition of images admits of a very different interpretation,
especially when we overlay with the lyrics of the ‘blah, blah, blah’ song the
rebellious young sing.
Image 1: Fearless girl statue by Kristen Visbal, New York City, Wall Street, by Anthony Quintano is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Greta’s ‘blah, blah, blah’ is a quote from a song very popular among the young. The other line of the song goes ‘Ja, Ja, Ja.’ The language of this song is not double Dutch, even though the elite might think so given that the composer, Armin van Buuren, was a Dutchman. A Dr Sev from Poland has mixed Greta’s speech and Armin’s song. It was premiered on YouTube 30 September 2021. The sonic image, created to excite the passions of the young, raises a serious question: What does ‘No more blah, blah, blah’ mean? What is the message the young are trying to convey to those in power with lyrics of this kind?
Enter David Graeber,
the bilingual Wall Street ethnographer. Not only has he has learned the
language of the bulls and the bears inside the offices of Wall Street, but he
has also learned the language of the young protestors on the streets outside in
New York, London and elsewhere. In May 2019 he attended the Extinction Rebellion in London. He duly
recorded what they said and reported it (Graeber 2019). The following is my
very brief gloss on how he might re-present their point of view.
‘No more blah, blah, blah’ is a polite way of saying: ‘tell us the
truth about climate change. Stop lying. Stop talking bullshit. Don’t give us
bullshit jobs to do. We, too, are capable of imagining different possibilities
for life on earth. If you old folks in power don’t listen to our dreams, we are
all finished (one imagines that the protestors may have used different F-words
in this final sentence).
The distinction here
between the liar and a bullshitter, which David (2018: Ch 1, fn 10) notes but
does not develop, is very important
one. The bullshitter, Frankfurt (1986) notes in his classic essay, is one who
exaggerates or talks nonsense to bluff or impress. The liar, by contrast,
deliberately sets out to mislead with falsehoods. In other words, it is one thing for an academic to talk
nonsense unintentionally to impress, but quite another for a politician like
Trump who knows the truth to deliberately propagate falsehoods. Bulls can also
produce manure, which is to say that the academic bullshitter can produce
something very useful.
We are dealing here with two quite distinct values. The ambiguous
quality of academic bullshit requires that it be handled with the greatest of
care and respect. David does precisely this in his writings. However, his
unique meandering rhetorical style takes some getting used to. I can now see
some virtues in it, but it is not one that I would urge my students to imitate!
Let me now move to
David’s analysis of the language of those on the other side of the barricade.
The bulls and the bears of Wall Street who excite the emotions and imagination
of academics and well as sculptors, singers, and other creative artists. On the
one side we have academics from the schools of business and economics who
crunch the numbers and give advice, for a price, to the politicians and
shareholders who run the show. On the other side, we have academics like David
who occupy the streets and call for radical change, often at some cost to their
careers.
Academics, then, can be
divided into three categories: those who work for Wall Street, those who work
against it, and those interested in other questions. It is a quaint feature of
the English language that those who work for Wall Street are called ‘policy
advisors’ whilst those who work against it are called ‘political activists.’
Henceforth I shall refer to both as political activists. It is obvious, then,
that the schools of business and economics and law are full of political
activists whilst anthropology has very few. This raises the uncomfortable
question for us non-activists of the political implications of our inaction.
Activists in the
schools of Economics and Business come in many different stripes and political
persuasions defined by their approach to the theory of value: Neo-Smithian,
Neo-Ricardian, Neo-Marxist, Neo-Keynesian and Neo-classical among many others. Most
belong to the mainstream neo-classical school epitomised by the work done by
the economists of the Chicago School of Economics, a school that has produced
ten Nobel Prize winners, two short of Harvard, the top school.
The image of wealth
that informs the thought of these people, I assert, is the false coin of
David’s dream, the anti-thesis that defines his thesis. Let me be clear. When it
comes to an image of wealth, there is a sense in which David is opposed
to the whole history of European economic thought from Adam Smith in 1776 to
the Nobel Prize winners of 2021. Everyone. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevon, Keynes,
Friedman. It is a different matter when it comes to concepts of value
and specific theories of value and, especially those of Marx. Some fine
conceptual distinctions between images, concepts and theories
are at stake here. I will come back to this trichotomy below. In the meantime,
it suffices to note that when a theory of value uses concepts to
make an argument it presupposes an image of wealth as a moral
precept.
What does this ‘false
coin’ of European economic thought look like? What image of wealth does
it excite in the mind of its beholders?
In 1895 Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to be awarded to those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.’ Five prizes are given each year: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace. In 1968 the Swedish Central Bank donated money for a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel. This award, which is administered by the Nobel Foundation, it not a Nobel Prize. However, by the operation of the Law of Contagious Magic, it is falsely called the Nobel prize in Economics when in fact its real name is the Swedish Reserve Bank [Sveriges Riksban] Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobel’s descendants are very unhappy about this situation. ‘Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being,’ said Peter Nobel, a great grandnephew. In 2001 they demanded, without success, that the Nobel name be dropped from the Swedish Reserve Bank award because, they said, Alfred Nobel was highly sceptical of economics and as such the existence of this award was an insult to his legacy.
David Graeber and Alfred Nobel obviously shared certain
assumptions about the ability of economic science to confer wealth and
happiness upon humankind. I feel, therefore, that while he would reject the
Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science, he would happily accept the Nobel
Prize for Peace. As Don Kalb (2014: 115) has correctly noted, David is a
political activist in the Gandhian tradition rather than the Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary tradition. Music, dance, and discussion are his preferred
weapons, not guns.
David has a very
interesting discussion of ‘dream tokens’ in his Value book, but I fault
him for not including a discussion of the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science as a token of
value. This is the true coin of the economic scientist’s dream, but the false
coin of David’s dream. For David, the token is a ‘false coin’ because it
epitomises an impoverished and debased Eurocentric image of wealth, one whose
use-by date has long passed.
David’s life’s work has
been the search of a better image. For inspiration he raided the cabinet of
ethnographic curiosities, the historical archives, and of course spoke to the
young. He has no new answers to old questions. His concern is to identify the
constraints that economic history and cultural geography impose on our capacity
to imagine new possibilities for life on earth. This enables him to pose new
questions and to change the terms of debate. He has no manifesto, no
commandments, just difficult questions that get to the root of the matter. He
is primarily concerned to excite creative debate about issues of pressing
importance for the human condition. If you are looking for simple answers to these
questions you will not find them in David’s work. He is no messiah. He teaches
us how to think, not what to think. He takes a few steps toward an
anthropological theory of value. He has not arrived at the final destination.
The theory of value is the most hotly disputed subject in economics. If you ask ten economists to define money, for example, they will give you ten different answers. However, when it comes to the question of an image of wealth, there is remarkable agreement. This can be found in the image they have selected for themselves to distinguish their discipline. I refer to the image of the horn of plenty, the symbol of abundance and nourishment found in European mythology that appears on the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science but not the real Nobel Prizes. All 89 Economic Science laureates have all proudly accepted this token as a symbol of the true coin of their dreams.
Image 2: Nobel Prize vs. The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize
David correctly notes that modern European economic thought has its origins in the secularisation of European economic theology. This image of the horn of plenty, which has its origins in a Greek myth, could not be a better illustration of his thesis.
For the economic
scientist the horn of plenty conjures up images of Adam Smith, their revered
founding ancestor, whose book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776) serves as the creation myth of their science. The
very first line of his classic text introduces the image of wealth that his
concepts and theories presuppose.
“The
annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all
the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which
consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is
purchased with that produce from other nations.” (Smith, 1776: 1)
What students in
Economics 101 don’t learn is that Adam Smith had a labour theory of value, one
that excited the thoughts of Karl Marx. Marx’s revised version of Smith’s
labour theory of value was published in 1867. Like Smith, the very first line
of Marx’s classic work introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and
theories presuppose.
“The wealth of
those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevail presents
itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.” (Marx, 1867:1)
What separates these
two images of wealth was, of course, the industrial revolution. This revolution
not only excited the thinking of radicals like Marx, but it also excited the
thinking of more conservative thinkers such as William Stanley Jevons and two
others who were independently working on a new theory of value that turned
Smith’s objective labour theory of value upside down. This was a subjective
marginal utility theory of the value based on the mathematical calculus of the
pleasure and pain derived from the differential consumption of goods. It
provided different answers to questions about wages, prices, and profit. Instead
of a class-based historically grounded theory of profit as exploitation,
Jevon’s theory was based on the figure of the abstract, ahistorical individual
making free choices in the marketplace. In came Smith’s doctrine of laissez
faire, out went his labour theory of value. This new theory of value was
informed by a radically new paradoxical image of the horn of plenty. As Robbins
(1932:47) put it, “wealth is not wealth because of its substantial
qualities. It is wealth because it is scarce.” Thus, wealth for the
conservative economist is not the material abundance produced by industrial
wage labour, but the subjective scarcity as perceived by the universal consumer
of consumption goods.
Marx’s political economy inspired the dreams of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others; Jevon’s economic science the dreams of the heretic Keynes, the true-believer Friedman, and others. At one extreme a very negative Smithian-inspired image of wealth as historically specific surplus value, at the other extreme a very positive Smithian-inspired image of wealth as universal scarcity value. The rest, as they say, was the history of the 20th century.
David concern is the quest for a 21st century image of wealth that enables us to put this Eurocentric image in its place and to imagine something that goes beyond it. David’s thinking was inspired by the comparative ethnographic literature which revealed to him the common ground of both sides of the debate between economists. Like Sahlins, he rejects the idea of universal scarcity and strives to extend Marx by looking at the ethnographic evidence on non-capitalist and pre-capitalist images in the quest for a 21st century post-capitalist image.
“Political economy”,
David (2007: 47) notes, “tends to see work in capitalist societies as
divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always
factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to
women.” Political economy gives primacy to abstract labour time on the
factory floor. David wants to turn this upside down and give primacy to the
creative thoughts and actions of people engaged in the process of reproducing
their society and their children in a culture of their own making.
As a contribution to thinking about the value
question in general, David’s work in not original. He is careful to acknowledge
his debt to the many anthropologists who have inspired him, especially his
teachers at Chicago: Terry Turner and Nancy Munn. He also acknowledges the work
of many others whose work he has critiqued such as Marilyn Strathern and me. Since
he published his book, many other anthropologists, such as Hart and Hann, have
developed important new approaches to economic analysis that put human beings
at the centre.
What distinguishes David’s contribution, it seems
to me, is that his five-volume study of value is the most radical and the most
ambitious. David’s life work—which now amounts to some fifteen books by my
count—is nothing less than a whole socio-economic history and cultural
geography of the human condition.
A defining characteristic of David’s approach is
his interest in the economic theology as well as the political economy of
wealth. He finds much economic theology in European political economy, and much
political economy in non-European economic theology. He is concerned with what
our image of wealth has become and with signs of hope of what it can become.
One of David’s projects, for example, was the deep cultural history of the secularisation of European economic theology, and the extent to which the secularisation was unfinished business. European political economy from Petty in 1662 to Marx in 1867, for example, is full of talk about Father Labour and Mother Earth as the creators of Wealth, but no mention of God the Son in the form of a wheat-God named baby Jesus or baby Zeus suckling their mother’s milk. This partial secularisation of the horn of plenty myth not only devalues women as mothers, but it also devalues males as sons as the supreme form of wealth. This is a truly great revolution in human thought, one whose English history the OED lexicographers have documented in painstaking detail. I know of no male-centric economic theology of wealth from the non-European world that goes this far. In 21st century India, for example, the quest for wealth in the Smithian laissez faire sense reigns supreme, but so too does the ideology of the son as a supreme form of wealth. As the census data on the sex ratio shows, this ideology is strongest in those areas of Northwest India where capitalism is the most advanced. Where I work in east-central India, by contrast, the economic theology of wealth assumes the ritual form of a rice goddess named Lakshmi, the daughter of Mother Water, not Mother Earth. The 31,000-line sacred poem priestesses sing celebrates Lakshmi as fearless daughter rather than dutiful wife. Indeed, her wedding to a wife-bashing husband leads to her demise. The story has a happy ending when wife-beating husband, and jealous co-wives realise the error of their ways. As political economy this theology is womb-centric, daughter-centric, rice-centric, and water-centric. But as David notes, comparisons like this enable us to perceive the phallo-centric, wheat-centric European images of wealth of Political Economy for what they are.
Concluding remarks
Theories of value
present themselves as descriptive accounts of the world that use a limited set
of concepts—such as ‘use-value’ ‘exchange-value,’ ‘reciprocity,’ and the
like—to develop general theories about what is. The flip side of these
descriptive accounts is a prescription of what should be. The difference
between a description and the prescription are the policy conclusions needed to
bring about the changes necessary to close the gap. When it comes to Political
Economy and Economic Science, the prescription is a very simple image of
wealth, one that has its origins in Adam Smith’s version of the Greek myth of
plenty. On the one side, an historically specific image of the abundance of
commodities, on the other side a universal image of scarce goods.
This Eurocentric dream, which has enabled millions of people the world over to escape from the material poverty of their forebears, has become the nightmare of us all. It has led to obscene wealth here, dire poverty there, and environmental destruction everywhere. David rightly identifies the image of wealth that informs Political Economy and Economic Science as the false coins of our dreams today. The anthropologically and historically informed concepts and theories that he develops in all his books are all concerned to reveal the debased and worn-out nature of this false coin. He wants to encourage collective thought about how to forge a new image of wealth. The concepts and theories in his Value book, his Debt book and his Bullshit Jobs book present us with alternative images of wealth from non-European, non-capitalist economies, pre-capitalist economies, and 21st century capitalist economies respectively.
The image of wealth
that informs David’s dreams, like all images of wealth, is very simple and
possible to achieve. He wants to move the focus of attention from the
production of commodities, and the consumption of goods, to the reproduction of
people, one where the children of today have a say in the world of tomorrow.
The task of re-imagining a world where people can reproduce themselves has
become a very urgent one. His writings reveal the huge gap between what is and
what could be. His non-violent political actions, and his optimism, remind us
that scholarly work is a necessary but not a sufficient means to achieve this
end. Political activists in the schools of Business, Law, and Economics who
give ‘policy advice’ to governments and the captains of industry have long
recognised this fact. The Fearless Girl who used to oppose the Charging
Bull on Wall Street reminds us that anthropology for David is not just
about taking a point of view, it is also about taking action. Anthropologists,
he might say echoing Marx, have only interpreted the world; the problem,
however, is to change it.
Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.
Gregory,
C. (2021). On the Spirit of the Gift that is Stone Age Economics. Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, LV (1), 11-34. doi: DOI: 10.26331/1131
Hubert,
H., & Mauss, M. (1902-1903). Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. L’Année
sociologique, 7, 1-146.
Kalb,
D. (2014). Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and
Marxism in world anthropology. Focaal:
Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (69), 113-134. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2014.690108
Marx,
K. (1867). Capital. Vol. I: A Critical
Analysis of Capitalist Production: Moscow: Progress.
Mauss,
M. (1972). A General Theory of Magic,
with a foreword by D. F. Pocock (R. Brain, Trans.). London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Robbins,
L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and
Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.
Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1970.
Cite as: Gregory, Chris. 2021. “What is the false coin of our own dreams?” FocaalBlog, 9 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/09/chris-gregory-what-is-the-false-coin-of-our-own-dreams.
David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in
Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis. It was
not for some years that it appeared in print. That was 2007, and by then he had
already published a considerable amount of other work, including a couple of
significant books. To my shame, I have to admit that I hadn’t read Lost
People until Alpa signed me up to comment on it today and that I should
never have accepted her invitation. I am neither a specialist on Madagascar,
nor expert in the literature on slavery or on narrative and history. But it’s
worse than that. Something I have always especially admired about David’s
writing is its clarity; his ability to state propositions that seem blindingly
obvious once he has set them out but were never obvious before. Several of Lost
People’s reviewers comment on its literary qualities, so I guess it’s just
me. For my part, however, I found it uncharacteristically heavy-going, its
narrative labyrinthine and its detail overwhelming. I was often unsure that I
was getting the point.
David himself describes its style as experimental, “a kind of
cross between an ethnography and a long Russian novel.” The aspiration was to
produce a ‘dialogic ethnography’ that would do away with the distance between
author and informants created – as David sees it – by so much social science
writing. As I’ll later explain, he here draws a sharp distinction between
social scientists and historians, and he identifies himself squarely with the
latter. His sympathies are with what he represents as old-style ethnography
where the objective is to provide a window on a way of life rather than to
deploy ethnography – as is currently usual – as a prop for some single
theoretical argument. He wants his Malagasy interlocutors to emerge “as both
actors in history, and as historians” (Graeber 2007, 379).
Despite the difficulties of his text, it’s relatively easy to say
what it’s centrally about and to summarise its main narrative. In case there
are people present who haven’t read it, or whose memories need refreshing,
that’s what I’ll do. It’s centrally about slavery, about its local history, and
more especially about its post-abolition legacy. Above all, that is, it’s about
the past in the present, about the ways in which history impinges on
contemporary relations between people of free and of slave descent in a rural
area in the western highlands of Madagascar, an hour or so drive from the
capital, Antananarivo. Betafo (his fieldsite) is in Imerina, the old kingdom of
the Merina people, who ruled most of the island in the nineteenth century, and
of whom Maurice Bloch has written with such distinction. David’s main window on
these relationships is through the narrative of an ordeal held in 1987, that
provoked the ancestors, resulted in disaster for the principal protagonists, and
ended by dividing the community even more deeply than formerly between people
of slave descent and the “nobles” who had been their erstwhile masters. This
narrative threads through the book with new interpretations, new perspectives
on it, and new details piling up over 400 pages.
Betafo, something like a parish, is made up of around fifteen
scattered hamlets which in total have a floating population of 300-500. It’s
locally notorious for witchcraft and sorcery, and for the hostility of relations
between its inhabitants – a major reason for selecting it, David reports. In
the 1980s, it experienced an epidemic of petty thefts. The village assembly
decided to hold an ordeal to identify the culprit(s). The villagers were to
drink water in which earth from the ancestors’ tombs had been dissolved. But
since they were not all of the same ancestry – there were nobles and ex-slaves,
who were in principle totally separate groups between whom marriage was
theoretically impossible – the earth should come from two separate tombs. And
even that was a political fudge because the ex-slaves weren’t in fact a single
descent group, though that is how the procedure adopted for the ordeal
represented them. Nor was this provocative mixing of earth the only dangerous
blunder. It turns out that both elders who had instigated and organised the
ordeal – one noble, one slave – had recently taken a wife from the other group.
They were guilty of mixing bodily fluids and bloods as well. No wonder disaster
followed. The rice had just been harvested and was still in the fields. A flash
flood swept it away. Actually, it later transpired that it was only the crops
of the two elders that were completely destroyed. This was 1987. David started
his research three years later and witnessed the aftermath. What had been
intended to reassert communal solidarity had provoked a definitive rift. Now
‘blacks’ (slave descendants) were avoiding ‘white’ (‘noble’) parts of Betafo
and were exploiting their reputations for magical powers and knowledge of local
taboos to harass and constrain Betafo nobles who had moved to the capital but
were now threatening to return and to resume their lands.
In parenthesis, it should perhaps be said that by standards
elsewhere, the levels of antagonism seem muted. Returnee nobles might be told
that there was a taboo on taking water from a particular spring. They weren’t
physically attacked or forcibly prevented from moving back home. Intermarriage
was anathematized, but we nevertheless hear of quite a few instances. None had
resulted in murder, nor even in serious boycott. Compare rural Bihar or Haryana
where couples who have contracted such serious misalliances could never be
sure of their safety.
Even in eighteenth century Madagascar, slavery and slave-trading
had a prominent role in many local economies. In the nineteenth, however,
slavery took off spectacularly in Imerina after the British did a deal with the
Merina king by which he agreed to halt the international trade of slaves for
guns on the understanding that the British would supply him with guns anyway
(and would not supply his rivals). That enabled the Merina state to dominate
most of the island and to capture more and more slaves. They were deployed on
public works and in agriculture in the Merina heartlands from where more and
more Merina went as soldiers. Later in the century, perhaps as many as half
Imerina’s population were slaves, according to Bloch. It was in any event an
enormous proportion and that had a profound impact on Merina society and
cultural representations.
The French annexed Madagascar in 1895. Slavery was abolished in
1897. From Betafo many nobles moved off to the capital to join the civil
service, a few to Paris. Their former slaves became their sharecroppers and
generally thrived. That was widely attributed to their manipulation of their
magical powers. The downward mobility of many nobles was put down to the sins
of slavery – even by nobles themselves. Nobles were increasingly deeply divided
between a rich elite (who largely moved out) and the poor (who largely
remained). David offers a vivid picture of just how opulent and aristocratic
these rich nobles were in the early years of the colonial period with their
twilit parties, music and dancing, and their colourful silk garments and golden
diadems. Still at the time of his fieldwork, émigré nobles would descend on
Betafo in numbers to collect a share of the harvest or to bury some kinsman in
their ancestral tomb. When a corpse was flown in from Paris, the paths were
jammed with cars and vans, and in their hundreds ‘everywhere around the tomb
were knots of grave-looking men in three-piece suits with expensive watches,
ladies in silk dresses, pearls, gold and silver jewellery.’ Within village
society itself, however, the most fundamental division – regardless of class –
remained that between andriana (nobles) and andevo (slaves).
Though the topic of slavery was avoided, nobody could ever forget it, and
slaves were still associated with pollution and ideas of contamination.
Crucially, however the situation of many of these émigré nobles became seriously precarious after the 1972 revolution. Subsequent to it, the peasant sector was badly neglected. The government took vast loans for development which it could not service, resulting in insolvency, dependence on the IMF, structural adjustment, the slashing of state budgets, the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside, a catastrophic collapse in living standards and widespread pauperization. The state largely withdrew from places like Betafo, leaving them as “temporary autonomous zones.” At the same time, many metropolitan civil servants were badly impoverished and were tempted to move back to their ancestral villages to resume the land that their ex-slave sharecroppers had been cultivating. And that, of course, is the essential background to the tensions that resulted from the Betafo ordeal at the heart of Lost People.
What that background significantly qualifies, as it seems to me,
is David’s claim to represent his informants as both actors in history and as
historians. Of course, they are the first in a limited sense, but as
actors they are highly constrained and have little autonomy. By that I mean to
suggest that the most important part of the story that explains why Betafo’s andriana
and andevo are at each other’s throats takes place off-stage between
the Malagasy state and the IMF in Antananarivo’s corridors of power. That is
what really drives the story and that bit of it is pure Graeber. It has no part
in his informants’ narratives, which are as it were epiphenomenal. They are a
derivative discourse that is somehow beside the main point. As historians, they
were severely limited by having no access to sources that would give them a
proper handle on that crucial background. That’s a no doubt rather crude way of
introducing a more general reservation about David’s preoccupation with
narrative. Nobody could possibly doubt its importance for history and politics,
but Lost People repeatedly seems to claim that that’s what history and
politics are. I worry that that leaves an awful lot out. If history is “mainly
about the circulation of stories,” what of all the ecological, epidemiological
and demographic influences on our lives of which we are often unconscious. If political
action “is action that is intended to be recorded or narrated or in some way
represented to others afterwards,” what kind of action is all the effort that
goes into ensuring that so many of the deeds and misdeeds of rulers are never
recorded. Representations, discourses and narratives are unarguably important,
but they should not in my view be allowed to occupy all the space in an
anthropological analysis.
In a podcast discussion of David’s Debt book chaired by
Gillian Tett sometime after his death, one contributor acutely observed that if
there is any one value that informed his work it is freedom. That made me
wonder how Lost People fits in. Though it says little about freedom
explicitly, the ethnography overwhelmingly suggests its absence. This is a
society that seems entirely unable to escape its past. In David’s other
writings, there is usually some possibility of escape from oppression that is
provided by other ideological alternatives. Here the past seems almost
inescapably tyrannical. The Merina are condemned to continually renew the
legacy of guilt and resentment that stems from the history of slavery. And
whether or not David intended us to put the two things together, his
ethnography shows that the burden of the past goes well beyond that. The Merina
ancestors play a significant role in the lives of their descendants, and in
Bloch’s writings their influence seems mostly benign. In Lost People
they come over as much more threatening. They are always telling the living
what they cannot do and they regularly attack them. That provokes the
resentment and hostility of the living, which are dramatically expressed in the
secondary burial when the ancestral remains are assaulted, their bones crunched
up, their dust bound tightly in wrappings, and they are securely locked up in
their tombs once more. History, it seems, is some kind of prison against the
walls of which the living can only bang their heads. Marx had already summed it
brilliantly: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare
on the brains of the living.”
All that prompts a series of comparative questions that I think are
important, but which David passes by – largely I suspect because they fall
outside the narrative frame of his informants. Crucially, why – well after a
century since manumission – are the Merina still so obsessed by slavery? Partly
no doubt on account of its scale and its cruelty, but there must be more to it.
Recent contributions to the regional literature have drawn attention to wide
variations between Malagasy societies in the degree to which slave descent
remains stigmatised, in the extent to which they appear haunted by its history
and in whether they are willing to speak of it at all. Margaret Brown (2004),
and Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda (2018, Regnier 2020), make brave stabs at
specifying the conditions that might explain that variation (differences in
social structure, resources, ethnic mixing and migration, and according to
whether the slaves were Malagasy or of African origin), while Luke Freeman
(2013) writes illuminatingly about the mandatory silence on the subject of his
Betsileo informants and of how that re-entrenches the stigma of slavery by
making it literally unspeakable.
Moving right across to the other side of the Indian Ocean, the
legacy of slavery in Sri Lanka is dramatically different. According to Nira
Wikramasinghe’s (2020) recent book, the collective memory of it has been all
but entirely obliterated. True, it was never on the same scale and was
abolished some decades earlier than in Madagascar, but on her analysis, on the
Ceylon side, the comparison would have to include the way in which the
creolization brought about by slavery seriously challenged doctrines of racial
purity in the south, and the way in which the enslavement of Tamil Untouchables
by high-caste Tamil Vellalars subverted later political projects of Tamil
nationalism in the north. But questions of that comparative order are not part
of David’s enquiry.
The broader terrain on which he does locate his study, my final observation, concerns rather the relationship between history and the social sciences. I confess I find his pitch a bit puzzling and am hoping that somebody might help me out. What he postulates is a broad contrast between the concerns of social science, which have primarily to do with patterns of regularity and predictability, and the concerns of history which deals with the irregular and unpredictable. It’s “the record of those actions which are not simply cyclical, repetitive, or inevitable.” Anthropology should align itself with history. That seems to be above all because it is “the very concern with science, laws, and regularities that has been responsible for creating the sense of distance I have been trying so hard to efface; it is, paradoxically enough, the desire to seem objective that has been largely responsible for creating the impression that the people we study are some exotic, alien, ultimately unknowable other.” Personally, I don’t believe any of that, but what interests me more is whether you will be able to tell me whether this disciplinary opposition has resonances in David’s other work. Or is it, as I suspect, an opportunistic answer to the requirement to justify and explain the literary style he adopted in writing this book? Certainly, Debt seems to be larded with “social science”-type propositions about repetitive, predictable patterns: slavery played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere; bullion currency predominates in periods of generalised violence; coinage, slavery, markets and the state go inexorably together. . . and so it goes on.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Brown, Margaret L. 2004. Reclaiming lost ancestors and
acknowledging slave descent: insights from Madagascar. Comparative
studies in society and history, 46(3), 616-645.
Freeman, Luke. 2013. Speech, silence, and slave descent in
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/
‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris Gregory delves into the core of what David meant by ‘false coin of our own dreams’, Don Kalb casts a critical lens of his conception of ‘value’ and the constituent imagination. As the first considers David’s work in relation to the economists and their images of wealth, the second looks at its place among the Marxists, drawing a combined picture that situates David’s most challenging book in a refined comparative perspective.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at
the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the
award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at
the University of NSW. He specialises in the political and economic
anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.
Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.
Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s colleagues at the LSE and engaged readers of David’s work. They carry us through the complexity of David’s arguments about history and narrative and raise important questions about whether he engages deeply enough with the socio-economic realities that Malagasy people faced at the time of his research.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at
the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the
award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Maurice Bloch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He has carried out long-term ethnographic research in Madagascar, is the author of In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theories of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, and writes more broadly on power, history, kinship, ritual, and cognition.
