David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces that have led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the devastating impact of 1990s shock therapy in Russia to Russian reactions to NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 and NATO’s incorporation of new members in central and eastern Europe. As a response in real time to the full-scale invasion of a nation of 40 million people by a nuclear-armed great power, however, it is analytically inadequate and misleading and politically and ethically flawed.
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Michael Herzfeld: The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s “The Utopia of Rules”
David Graeber’s wide-ranging – and, appropriately, sometimes wildly swashbuckling – set of essays sketches his anarchist utopia by default, as a social world free of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he writes, is “stupid” and “absurd.” Stupid or otherwise, it represents the effect of a vast and powerful set of forces operating through the mechanisms of the modern state, of which the United States is both example and exceptional case. Its goal, in Graeber’s gloomy vision, is to destroy the stability and viability, both social and economic, of entire populations, while congealing ever larger portions of the world’s wealth into ever fewer hands; its stupidity lies in refusing all alternative interpretations to official Diktat (see especially pp. 80-81). Graeber largely ignores bureaucracy’s many non-state versions, a choice that reflects a bias toward current American uses of the term. Instead, he plays creatively and contrastively with the British self-view as anti-bureaucratic (p. 13). This distinction nevertheless entails excessive generalization and elides differing historical trajectories. It is hard now to write critically of Graeber’s provocative thought, grounded as it was in an uncompromising search for social justice and a becoming modesty about the originality of his own ideas, without sounding petty. The significance of his many projects, however, demands both generosity and critique.
To that end, it seems useful to begin by asking whether stupidity rather than (perhaps deliberate) tautology or ritualism, the latter explicitly acknowledged by Graeber (p. 50; see also Hinton 1992; Herzfeld 1992), is the basis of bureaucracy. In many societies, a clear distinction is made between sly cunning and intelligence of morally neutral (or even foolishly innocent) stamp (e.g., Schneider 1969). In his eagerness to debunk the crasser versions of pseudo- or meta-Foucauldian analysis, which at least attribute agency to state operators, Graeber seems to discount the slyness of those bureaucrats who realize that getting people to monitor themselves furthers the state’s rather than the public’s interests. As I have recently noted, the complexity and unpredictability of the various national COVID-19 testing requirements force nervous international travelers to monitor their own actions with ever-increasing unease (Herzfeld 2022a). Graeber also overlooks the helpfulness of some bureaucrats, who may even – indeed, often do – collude with their clients by shifting the interpretation of the rules.
Graeber does distinguish between the system and its operators, but one might wish for a more detailed exploration of where the two diverge. He tells us very little about how agile operators actually bend the system to meet their own and their clients’ exigencies – apparent exceptions that may actually confirm his argument since, by generating a sense of the obligatory gratitude of client to patron, they further weaken resistance to encompassing bureaucratic structures. This is implicit in his argument, but his broad generalizing prevents readers from seeing how the wiliness actually works. Within the utopia of rules, continual adjustment occurs in the form of supposed illegality lurking in the very implementation of legality (see, e.g., Little and Pannella 2021). Graeber’s observation (p. 214) that legality is born of illegal actions is also historically consistent with the crisis of legitimacy posed by the persistence of rebellious forces claimed as heroic forebears by nationalistic state regimes (see Herzfeld 2022b: 39-40). Graeber does nevertheless expose some real cunning, notably when he points out the discrepancy between the virtually flawless operation of ATMs and the deeply flawed operation of American voting machines (p. 35). It is hard to believe, he suggests, that such a glaring discrepancy could be unmotivated; both trajectories serve the same general politico-financial interests.
Graeber is on firmer (because more explicit) ground when he suggests an analogy, albeit an inverse one, between bureaucracy and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism: whereas bureaucratic logic suppresses insight, the equally narrow and schematic analyses of the structuralist master open up exciting new paths. This is surely a more productive comparison than dismissing one system as stupid and the other as genial. Both systems are concerned with classification, one to impose it and the other to decode it. But Lévi-Strauss would never have dismissed indigenous taxonomies as stupid; nor would any anthropologist since Malinowski have considered such a characterization as other than the expression of a colonial and racist contempt for “the Other.” In rightly up-ending power by treating bureaucracy as the Other, Graeber nevertheless refuses it the minimal respect that he surely would have demanded of his students for the taxonomies of other cultural traditions.
It is here that his activism seeps into his anthropology and exposes, as he surely must have desired, the difficulty of trying to do anthropology, especially activist anthropology, in one’s own milieu and at such an inclusive level. While calling bureaucracy stupid seems epistemically retrograde, it may eventually facilitate new political insights – if, that is, someone undertakes the necessary ethnographic labor. The gap between insight and demonstration is one of several tensions exposed, but not necessarily resolved, in Graeber’s book. Some of his more speculative leaps of faith are persuasive – but I found myself wondering whether that was simply because I was already predisposed to agree, and what unexpected subtleties a more ethnographic approach might introduce.
Graeber’s claim that technological advances were deliberately advanced by a capitalist cabal evilly intent on reducing humanity to a collective serfdom does appear to be on target for the period he describes. He provides convincing examples of how specific technologies, poised to take off in directions anticipated by science fiction and other fantasy literatures, have clearly faltered. Whether this remains true – whether his account is more than a conspiracy theory – has perhaps become more questionable even in the short time since his death. More problematic still is his confident attribution of collective intent on the part of neoliberal capitalists to condemn the entire world to servitude. While it is apparently true that during the current pandemic the super-rich have vastly increased their wealth while the numbers of the truly poor in the U.S. alone have soared (see Luhby 2021), the idea of a concerted intentionality risks reproducing precisely the kind of conspiracy theories that favor right-wing panic-mongering (although, unlike the latter, it stands a reasonable chance of eventual vindication). Here, too, he implies an unprovable ability to read collective minds. Moreover, I am unsure that animals are incapable of “creating self-conscious fantasy worlds” (p. 171). Indeed, how can he be so sure?
Such problems typically arise when anthropologists shift from familiar engagements with ethnographic detail to grapple with the big picture. Graeber, an anarchist activist for social justice, was skilled in both practices, but in this book the big picture, along with the speculative reasoning that it tends to generate, predominates. Although educated in the U.S. in what is there called cultural anthropology, and despite his scathing (and largely well-conceived) critique of “globalization,” Graeber does not attend to cultural differences that may affect bureaucratic habits. While too generously acknowledging my own study of bureaucracy, he complains that virtually all the anthropologists who have written about bureaucracy “almost never describe such arrangements as foolish or idiotic” (pp. 237-38n42; cf. Herzfeld 1992). There is, as I have just indicated, good reason for this apparent omission.
With regard to mind-reading, anthropologists do often report on a range of emotional reactions, from astonishment to contempt, that their informants display toward bureaucratic arrangements. It is expressed attitudes that they describe, not innermost thoughts. Indeed, they often also note their informants’ reluctance to read minds (Robbins and Rumsey 2008). The reported reactions and the accompanying skepticism are ethnographically revealing to a level that Graeber’s broad-brush descriptions of capitalism, bureaucracy, and globalization do not always achieve. His description of globalization, in particular, sweeps over cultural differences that – as, for example, James L. Watson (2006) argued so lucidly for consumption in Asian McDonald’s restaurants – may significantly affect how we understand the local significance of apparently global phenomena.
In this sense, all bureaucratic practices must be understood in terms of cultural values shared by bureaucrats and their clients. That argument also fits Graeber’s excellent debunking (pp. 166-174) of bureaucracy’s claim to pure rationality. When one side makes excuses that its interlocutors might indeed view as lamentably stupid, the other side accepts them, not necessarily because they are believable, but because they are conventional. They are a means for both sides to manage otherwise difficult situations, their effective performance always, from one situation to another, mediated by the tension between the conventions for excuse-making and the inventiveness of those involved. This illustrates what I have called “social poetics” (e.g., Herzfeld 2016), a concept that in some respects fits nicely with Graeber’s focus on imagination (see especially his illuminating analogy with the structure and playfulness of language, pp. 199-200, a passage that beautifully exemplifies the important but often-forgotten principle that an explanation based on language does not necessarily reduce all social phenomena to discourse).
An effective bureaucrat – though not necessarily a good one – manages, while appearing to insist on rigid adherence to the rules, to operate them with considerable ingenuity and, yes, imagination. Graeber barely considers the extent to which bureaucrats must deploy the unspoken local social rules in addition to the “stupid” requirements of the official system. While such seesawing between convention and invention is apparently common to all state bureaucracies, the specific modalities may vary enormously. The unfinished task Graeber has bequeathed to his successors is the ethnographic exploration of high-end bureaucratic management. Cultural specificities will loom large in such studies – all the more critically inasmuch as the managers invoke supposedly universal principles to justify their actions.
Let me illustrate with a simple example. During early sojourns in the Netherlands, I found an unsmiling bureaucracy that seemed obsessed with observing the rules. Gradually, however, I learned that, if I met the initial refusal to make an exception or interpret the rules creatively with polite sadness rather than anger, I would subsequently discover that the functionaries had done exactly what I wanted even after declaring it to be impossible; they were experts at identifying exceptions that ultimately validated the system of rules while allowing them to satisfy their clients’ needs. This pattern, I soon discovered, extended from relatively highly-placed officials to restaurant staff members. Other foreigners subsequently confirmed my impressions; some Dutch friends, perhaps bemused, nevertheless also largely agreed.
Despite such assurances, so sweeping a characterization of Dutch bureaucratic practices is unquestionably over-generalized. If that concern holds for a few sentences about one country, however, how much more it must apply to the Graeber’s far larger claim that bureaucracy is invariably stupid. Stupidity does not inhere in a system; it describes the alleged capacities of those who operate the system or the capacities they would like to produce in others (p. 95). To blame the stupid system is an almost proverbial excuse, in many cultural contexts, for failures of both bureaucrat and client. Adroit management of excuses may signal the exact opposite of stupidity.
Graeber’s image of bureaucracy is largely based on the American experience; he posits Madagascar contrastively as, for historical reasons, a place where bureaucracy has little impact on everyday life. But there are vast numbers of intermediate cases (as he recognizes, p. 22). While it is true that the American model threatens to dominate much of the world for reasons that Graeber ably lays out for us as he documents its seemingly inexorable, creeping expansion, it sometimes blinds us to the potentiality for pragmatic variation concealed within its systemic similarity. Hence the unresolved tension in Graeber’s text between the fine ethnographer-historian’s sensitivity to local detail and the political activist’s tendency to universalize local experience.
Some of the generalizations hold true for demonstrable historical reasons. Even then, however, the pandemic-like spread of bureaucratic practices – what Graeber (p.9) calls the Iron Law of Liberalism – is filtered through widely differing sociocultural expectations. Graeber’s Iron Law bears an uncanny (and unacknowledged) resemblance to “Parkinson’s Law” [Parkinson 1958], a similar elaboration of common knowledge; while Graeber may be right to argue (pp. 51-52) that anthropologists have been reluctant to tackle the boring paperwork aspects of bureaucracy, writers like Parkinson can perhaps be read as ethnographers if not as anthropologists in the strict sense. Yet the differences among bureaucratic systems are also important, even with regard to the paperwork (see Hull 2012). Anyone who has experienced the Chinese version of the academic audit culture, which superficially appears to follow the American model in its schematic numerology, quickly apprehends the huge difference in application and impact. Local actors play by local understandings of the rules, as Watson’s observations on globalization would lead us to expect.
In keeping with his critique of its reductionism and reliance on schematization, Graeber sees bureaucracy as the antithesis of imagination, which he identifies with revolution (pp. 92-93). This insight echoes the conventional understanding that bureaucracy often does repress imaginative practices. In reality, however, considerable inventiveness may go into bureaucratic management – something that Graeber repeatedly acknowledges, by showing how “interpretative labor” is carried out largely by the subaltern classes, including lower-level bureaucrats, since those with power feel no pressing need to interpret anything their supposed inferiors do. (The wealthy often don’t even bother to pay taxes; let the minions sort all that out – and, if fines are levied, they will only affect a tiny fraction of the offenders’ wealth.) It is not only the surveilled who must master interpretative techniques; those conducting the surveillance must do the same inasmuch as they will have to file reports with their superiors. This emphasis on the hierarchical positioning of bureaucrats accords with Graeber’s view – generously and convincingly attributed to feminist inspiration – of where interpretative labor occurs.
Ethnographic research on policing (e.g., Cabot 2018; Glaeser 1999; Haanstad 2013; Oberfield 2014) complicates – but does not entirely invalidate – Graeber’s generic intimations that police (whatever other goals they may pursue) rarely tackle crime directly (p. 73) and that bureaucracy precludes the exercise of intelligence. Graeber might have argued, reasonably enough, that it is not bureaucrats who are stupid but the bureaucracy. Eliding the actors into the abstract category, however, is a dangerous source of confusion – actually, in Graeber’s own terms, a bureaucratic one.
Graeber’s treatment of police is consistent with his anarchism. There can be no question but that in the American and British contexts it is, sadly, borne out by acts of racist and sexist brutality only recently acknowledged by the media and by the law. Here, however, we might ask whether the turning of the tide (if what we are seeing is more than a mere flash in the pan) parallels a potential recovery of technological mastery and inventiveness. If so, Graeber’s dystopian vision of a world increasingly dominated by a few ruthless, super-rich men, bent on thwarting scientific advances and socio-economic equality alike, might be an overstatement or, at least, a genuine insight into a situation that has nonetheless already begun to change. Agreed, evidence for a return to a more imaginative world is still remarkably thin. Graeber presumably entertained hopes, however, that the world might be re-enchanted, even, perhaps, acquiring a reconfigured and tamed bureaucracy (see p. 164). Only by means of such a conviction could he have sustained his passionate activism.
Here I am struck by the accuracy of the distinction he draws between his concept of imagination and Benedict Anderson’s (1991). While some contest his criticism of Anderson as too narrowly concerned with newspapers and nationalism, the difference is striking. Anderson’s use of imagination has more in common with the semiotic concept of iconicity (we imagine our co-nationals to resemble ourselves), whereas Graeber saw in imagination the recognition of radical difference and innovation. Here again, however, I worry that Graeber’s monochromatic portrayal of bureaucracy – its lack of cultural specificity – overlooks pre-existing and sometimes highly localized cultural predispositions as well as the presence of skilled and sympathetic actors.
Anthropology handed a poisoned chalice to the bureaucratic apparatus of the state in the nineteenth century: the concept of reified, bounded cultures. Historically, our discipline should be taking more responsibility than it has usually admitted for providing the instrument of ideologies that too easily morphed into racism and fascism. By talking about “the state,” Graeber skates around the deployment of the concept of national identity and the threat that this poses to the masses who get dragged into wars and humiliating labor conditions in the name of national redemption – a story that largely confirms his understanding of how capital works on the global stage. The ease with which the idea of the state gets fused with that of the nation-state has recently led me to express a preference for the intentionally clumsier term “bureaucratic ethnonational state” (Herzfeld 2022b). Ethno-nationalism is one of the dirtiest tricks perpetrated against the poor by a self-indulgent leadership. It both deploys local cultural features and is inflected by them; its appeal, framed as liberation, can reinforce local warlordism and global domination at the same time. Anthropological analysis threatens it precisely because it leads us back to the cultural specificities that give the global structures of power their local traction; it also shows that a unidirectional model of globalization is as facile as unidirectional models of social evolution (see, e.g., Tambiah 1989).
Graeber does display some affection for evolutionary conceptions of political life, as when he displays fascination with “heroic” histories. His historical vision of the heroic, however, has more in common with Vico than with Darwin; he does not see heroic societies as representing a single stage of past evolution. Rather, he seeks to recuperate from these exceptional historical moments the power of imagination, now divorced from aristocratic control, as an antidote to the numbing regularities of bureaucracy and as a path to the resuscitation of technological ingenuity.
Graeber describes vast areas of bureaucratic mismanagement with impressive, terrifying accuracy. He is at his best when he ethnographically describes the area of bureaucratic activity that he knows best, that of the academic world. Some other autobiographical moments are ethnographic gems in their own right, notably the sad account of his tussles with the health bureaucracy as his mother lay fatally stricken – a striking disproof of his contention (p. 52) that bureaucratic procedures cannot be subject to lively thick description. Moreover, no academic could seriously dispute his engaging account of how increasing amounts of scholars’ time, as well as that of doctors and other health professionals, are gobbled up by deadening, useless audits (Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000).
Yet resistance remains possible. Graeber correctly observes that no matter what we write, the rest of the world barely even notices. We should nevertheless try to find a way to make the world care; the effective suppression of our calling stifles an important and useful commentary on the state of the world at large. If that were not the case, why would Graeber have written this book? Why would anyone not simply down tools and give up? (Of course, some have; but theirs is a dispiriting surrender to what I call “vicarious fatalism” – the apparently axiomatic ascription of passivity to the underdog by those with power in virtually every social inequality known to humankind.)
Resistance is not easy; some of the impediments are present in our own educational and cultural backgrounds. Graeber’s use of classical Greek (and more generally European) history, for example, hints at the difficulty that all Western anthropologists experience in standing back from their own assumed intellectual and cultural heritage, as well as the intellectual rewards of making that effort. Note, for example, his Vichian emphasis on etymological links between the ancient Greek polis and the modern word “police” and its cognates in multiple languages (not, however, including modern Greek, in which the police is astinomia, the controller of urban space; see also Cabot 2018). The Latin-derived terms “civility” and “civilization” hold similarly rich and ambiguous implications.
“Polite,” on the other hand, probably does not, pace Graeber, share the Greek derivation of “police,” but from a Latin word denoting “cleansing” (with sinister echoes of Mary Douglas’ [1966] perennially useful analysis of purity and pollution). It, too, has a richly ambiguous etymology. “Civility” suggests, as does the Italian use of the adjective civile (see Herzfeld 2009: 182) or even the English “civil society,” that sometimes being civil demands facing the police down when they overstep the boundaries of decency. The polity (classical Greek politeia) may not be a polis or a police state. It may represent an archaic structure pushed aside by violent modernity or it may be a completely novel one such as those imagined by intentional communities. But the possibility of resistance to the bureaucratic ethnonational state, with its police enforcement of conformity to repressive cultural norms, is essential to ensuring a bearable future and is the best way of ensuring civility.
The bureaucratization of morality is decidedly uncivil. An example of audit culture that constrains civility (not to speak of academic freedom!) appears in the bureaucratization of research ethics – a confusion of true ethics (Graeber’s scathing discussion of value-free ethics, pp. 166-67, is especially pertinent here!) with its simulation (a term Graeber usefully derives from Baudrillard and Eco). This perversion of ethics is especially painful for anthropologists because the very unpredictability of their research defies the scientistic logic of bureaucracy (“proposal design”). That logic also ignores the cultural specificity of ethics – an instance of what Graeber (p. 75) calls “ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence” – and now, through the imposition of rules backed by fear of legal consequences, bids fair, if we fail to resist, to make ethnography itself impossible. Occasional revolts against the centrality of ethnography because of past ethical errors risk collusion in perpetuating the injustices of the present, much as segments of the Left, in Graeber’s account (p. 6), have sometimes colluded in spreading the miasma of bureaucracy-speak and its oppressive effects. Intensified bureaucracy is no solution to ethnography’s ethical dilemmas. On the contrary, here as much as anywhere it conforms to Graeber’s striking insight (p. 103) that bureaucratic violence is less about making people talk than forcing them to shut up. Ethnographers, too, must resist being silenced by the avalanche of paperwork.
Ethnography, in fact, can expose abuses of power. It therefore poses a genuine threat to the powerful; ethics regulations not only protect universities from being sued but provide a potential shield for powerful bureaucrats should the anthropologists get too nosy. These authority figures also have resources of their own. A few hardy anthropologists have nevertheless pushed forward with pathbreaking ethnographic studies of dominant financial institutions. Among these, Douglas Holmes (2013), examining the management practices of central banks, offers a clear demonstration of why, as Graeber saw (p. 20), the bourgeoisie so passively obeys the financial bureaucracy. Such studies usefully complicate Graeber’s claim that the weak necessarily perform more interpretative labor than the powerful; they also pierce the iron shield of ethics, with its talk of confidentiality, transparency, and impartiality (otherwise, significantly, called indifference; see p. 184). Holmes, for example, examines the methods with which bank officials study the public – all of them virtual anthropologists, and with nary an ethics committee to restrain them.
Graeber’s book is in every sense a tour de force. I have focused this discussion on a set of interlocking points that strike me as particularly timely for the discipline and for the current state of the world. The book’s main provocation lies in Graeber’s critical reading of both the dominant economic system and the mass-produced and imitative critiques of it that sometimes pass muster as serious academic commentary (or at least satisfy audit-culture assessments for tenure and promotion). Its potential weaknesses lie in his avoidance of specificity where critics could easily find counter-factual examples in local contexts. Offsetting its occasional narrowness of cultural focus is the corrective that it offers to assumptions about universal value and globalization. A good ethnography is always more than simply a description of a local society. The Utopia of Rules is much more – and at times rather less – than an analysis of bureaucracy. It is a challenge still waiting to be taken up “in the field” – wherever that may be. It retains the potential to contradict its own pessimism and affect the trajectory of human society in the years, even decades, ahead.
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus at the University of Leiden, is the author of twelve books, most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, and also including Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology and The Making of Modern Greece and The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of crypto-colonialism.
This text was supposed to be presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bureaucracy”, but the seminar was canceled by the LSE faculty strike for better working conditions in academia.
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso.
Cabot, Heath. 2018. The Good Police Officer: Ambivalent Intimacies with the State in the Greek Asylum Procedure.” In Kevin G. Karpial and William Garriott, eds. The Anthropology of Police (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 210–29.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Glaeser, Andreas. 1990. Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haanstad, Eric J. 2013. Thai Police in Refractive Cultural Practice. In William Garriott, ed., Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Police in Practice (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillian), pp. 181-205.
Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Oxford: Berg.
Herzfeld, Michael. 2009. Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Herzfeld, Michael. 2016. 2016. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions. 3rd edition. New York: Routledge.
Herzfeld, Michael. 2022a. Pandemia, panico e paradossi della politica di salute pubblica. Atlante, Storie corali. https://www.treccani.it/magazine/atlante/societa/Storie_corali_Pandemia_panico.html
Herzfeld, Michael. 2022b. Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Hinton, Peter. 1992. “Meetings as Ritual: Thai Officials, Western Consultants and Development Planning in Northern Thailand.” Pp. 105–24 in Patterns and Illustrations: Thai Patterns of Thought, edited by Gehan Wijewewardene and E.C. Chapman. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Holmes, Douglas R. 2013. Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley.
Little Walter E., and Cristiana Panella, ed. 2021. Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Luhby, Tami. 2021. “As Millions Fell into Poverty during the Pandemic, Billionaires’ Wealth Soared. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/07/business/global-wealth-income-gap/index.html
Oberfield, Zachary W. 2014. Becoming Bureaucrats: Socialization at the Front Lines of Government Service. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Parkinson, C. Northcote. 1958. Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. London: John Murray.
Schneider, Peter. 1969. Honor and Conflict in a Sicilian Town. Anthropological Quarterly 42: 130-54.
Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 1999. Audit Culture and Anthropology: The Rise of Neoliberalism in Higher Education. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5:557–75.
Strathern, Marilyn, ed., 2000. Audit Culture: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. London: Routledge.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1989. Ethnic Conflict in the World Today. American Ethnologist 16:335–49.
Watson, James L. 2006. Introduction: Transnationalism, Localization, and Fast Foods in East Asia. In James L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, (2nd edition; Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 1-38.
Cite as: Herzfeld, Michael. 2022. “The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/09/michael-herzfeld-the-slyness-of-stupidity-a-commentary-on-david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules/
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bureaucracy
Chair: Alpa Shah
Discussant: Michael Herzfeld
If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy. The first instalment of David’s thought on the topic came in his 2006 Malinowski lecture at the LSE – ‘Dead zones of the imagination’ – where he described a fundamental link between the blindness of bureaucracy and the nature of structural violence. The lecture later became an essay in ‘The Utopia of Rules’ (2015). The book significantly expanded the discussion to cover technology and popular culture, making a case for the stupidity of bureaucracy that anticipated his later work on bullshit jobs. Here, Michael Herzfeld dissects the merits and flaws of Graeber’s thought-provoking ideas on bureaucracy and examines whether they hold up to ethnographic scrutiny. For this week only, we have the papers, but not the videos, of the seminar. On the scheduled day of the seminar, the LSE faculty went on strike to fight against poor working conditions in academia that are compounded precisely by the kind of bureaucratic structures that David attacked in the 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.
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus at the University of Leiden, is the author of twelve books, most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, and also including Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology and The Making of Modern Greece and The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of crypto-colonialism.
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Anarchist Anthropology
Chair: Alpa Shah
Discussants: Keir Martin & Ayça Çubukçu
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.
Chris Knight: Wrong About (Almost) Everything
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.
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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Power, Camilla. 2009. Sexual selection models for the emergence of symbolic communication: Why they should be reversed. In The Cradle of Language R. Botha and C. Knight (eds). Oxford: Oxford University press, pp.257-280.
Power, Camilla, Volker Sommer and Ian Watts. 2013. The seasonality thermostat: Female reproductive synchrony and male behaviour in monkeys, neanderthals and modern humans. PaleoAnthropology 2013: 33-60. doi:10.4207/PA.2013.ART79
Power, Camilla. 2017. Reconstructing a source cosmology for African hunter-gatherers. In C. Power, M. Finnegan and H. Callan (eds), Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology. New York & Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 180-202.
Power, Camilla. 2019. The role of egalitarianism and gender ritual in the evolution of symbolic cognition. In T Henley, M Rossano, E Kardas (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology. Routledge, pp.354-374.
Power, Camilla, Ian Watts and Chris Knight. 2021. The Symbolic Revolution: a sexual conflict model. In N Gontier, C Sinha, A Lock (eds) Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution Oxford UP, 2nd edition. Online Publication Date: Mar 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198813781.013.13
Testart, A. 1985. Le communisme primitif. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Sahlins, Marshall and David Graeber, 2017. On Kings. London: HAU Books.
Testart, A. 1986. Essai sur les fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Townsend, Cathryn, 2018. The Evolution Egalitarianism. In Hilary Callan (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London: John Wiley.
Verdu, P., et al., 2013. Sociocultural behavior, sex-biased admixture and effective population sizes in Central African Pygmies and non-Pygmies Mol Biol Evol, first published online January 7, 2013 doi:10.1093/molbev/mss328
Watts, Ian. 2014. The red thread: pigment use and the evolution of collective ritual. In D. Dor, C. Knight and J. Lewis (eds), The Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 208-227.
Watts, Ian., Michael Chazan and Jayne Wilkins 2016. Early evidence for brilliant ritualized display: Specularite use in the Northern Cape (South Africa) between ~500 and ~300 ka. Current Anthropology, 57(3).
Woodburn, James. 1982. Egalitarian Societies. Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(3): 431-451.
Woodburn, James. 2005. Egalitarian societies revisited. In T. Widlok and W. G. Tadesse (eds), Property and Equality, vol. 1: Ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 18-31.
Wood, E. T et al., 2005. Contrasting patterns of Y chromosome and mtDNA variation in Africa: evidence for sex-biased demographic processes. Eur J Hum Genet 13: 867-76
Further Readings
‘The Evolution of Egalitarianism,’ in The International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)
‘Did communism make us human? On the anthropology of David Graeber,’ Brooklyn Rail, June 2021, Chris Knight (https://brooklynrail.org/2021/06/field-notes/Did-communism-make-us-human)
‘A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history”,’ Libcom.org, Camilla Power (https://libcom.org/history/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-cou)
‘What is Politics’ reviews of ‘The Dawn of Everything’, YouTube, (https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featured)
Cite as: Knight, Chris. 2021. “Wrong About (Almost) Everything.” FocaalBlog, 22 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/
Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his scholarly legacy is slowly emerging. I want to contribute to such a critical assessment of his oeuvre by concentrating on his book “Utopia of Rules” published in 2015. This assessment has resulted from my participation in the roundtable “On David Graeber’s Work: Potentialities for a Radical Leftist Anthropology” at the conference of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA) in Bremen on 28.9.2021, the stream of which can be watched on Facebook.
I propose that a scholarly book can be evaluated according to three criteria:
- Does it present new facts—that is, results of research according to accepted research protocols, be they ethnographic or others?
- Does it engage with theory, and the body of existing knowledge, in a novel way?
- If that is not the case, does it present new ideas, even if only in a more essayistic way, e.g. without the necessity to give evidence; or does it present old ideas in a better way than they have already been presented elsewhere.
Even if a book is written for a larger audience, as this book clearly is, it should still stand the test of at least one of these criteria. This is in fact in line with what Graeber himself (in a highly unusual six-page response to a five-page negative review of his book) demanded—i.e., that the book should be judged “according to the actual arguments and the evidence assembled to support these arguments” (Piliavsky 2017; Graeber 2017: 118). These criteria can be summed up in the question of whether I would put the book, or parts of it, in a list of core readings, say for a course on the anthropology of bureaucracy.
I will limit myself to the introduction to the book and the central essay on structural stupidity (ch. 1). The chapter – the only one with an anthropology pedigree – first came into being as the 2006 LSE Malinowski lecture under the title “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity” (https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos). Later, however, Graeber did not want the lecture to be cited any longer. He replaced it by the text “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture,” which he published in HAU (a journal that he co-edited) and which, in a strangely bureaucratic turn of phrase, he declared “the official one” (Graeber 2012: 105 fn. 1; https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau2.2.007). It finally turned into a 2015 book chapter. Each time the text became longer. I have found lots of praise of the book, but predominantly from outside anthropology (but see Piliavsky 2017) and mainly from journalists (see the praise page of the book).
The central argument seems to be that the world is faced with an increasing bureaucratisation whereby public and private bureaucracies, as well as neoliberal capitalism melt into each other and form a total structure of oppression and exploitation which furthermore relies on technology and sheer physical violence. This over-bureaucratisation of the world stifles creativity and imagination, in particular revolutionary imagination, so the left needs to reflect on how to get out of this trap (which according to Graeber it has not done, therefore the need for his intervention).
I say this “seems to be” the argument, as Graeber’s writing is not very structured. He writes more by way of analogy, and about whatever comes to his mind. His style of writing has been called “ruminative” by a reviewer; the author resembles a happy deer strolling across a sunny alpine meadow, picking a weed here, plucking a shamrock there, and then chewing the whole thing several times over. So, to give the reader a selection of topics touched upon: the two chapters jump from huge generalisations on « the » Germans, Americans, and British (p. 13), to Graeber’s experiences as a customer of an American bank (p. 15), student debt, again in the US (p. 23), chats with a World Bank economist at a conference (pp. 25-26) as well as with a British bank employee at another occasion (note 15 p. 231), newspaper opinion pieces which he presents as results of ethnographic research (p.22), the shape of bank buildings “when I was growing up” (p. 33), surprising but unsubstantiated references to Goethe as a supporter of Prussian bureaucracy (p. 39), similarities between refugees and female applicants to London music schools (p. 41), a visit to an occupied factory in Marseilles (p. 43), his mother’s death (pp. 45-50), problems of registering his car in New York (p. 48), to academics complaining about too much paperwork (pp. 53-54), why a thick description of a bureaucratic document is impossible (p. 52, but see Göpfert 2013), violence as the weapon of the stupid (p. 68), gender roles in American situation comedies of the 1950s (p. 69), stories about American teenagers that somebody told him but he doesn’t remember who it was (note 59 p. 242), to what a friend told him about degrees in library science (note 26 p. 233), what “most of us” think about the police (p. 73), to vampires (p. 77), Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (p. 78), and American prisons (p. 102).
Now my criterion 1: where is the evidence, and what about new knowledge? Graeber has a remarkably cavalier use of what is habitually called evidence. I can only give two examples here: In the beginning of the introduction, he claims that “we” (a pronoun, like “us” and “ours”, he frequently uses but never defines) are increasingly faced with paperwork. He then presents three graphs to prove his point (pp. 4-5). At closer inspection, however, the graphs – presented without any source – rather show how often “paperwork” or associated terms like “performance review” have appeared in English language books over time, which of course is different from the thesis it is supposed to illustrate, and rather refutes his other thesis, that “nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy” (p. 3). In fact, Graeber admits that he is purely “imagining” graph no. 2 (his words, p. 4; see also p. 15) which supposedly shows that people spend ever more time filling out forms. In any case, he has a penchant, throughout the text, for terms like “apparently”, “I suppose”, “we all know that”, “most of us believe”, “apparently”, the subjunctive form of the verb, and what “everybody knows” (p. 27).
Apart from these imagined figures, Graeber’s main type of evidence are personal anecdotes, which for him apparently assume the function of explanations. He starts off chapter 1 with the problems he had when, after a life mostly spent as a “bohemian student” (p. 48), he was suddenly faced with different bureaucratic hiccups when his mother had a stroke, the problems being caused by a particularly incompetent notary. Like this coming-of-age story, all the other anecdotes are also taken from his immediate personal experience, almost exclusively concern the US and the UK and not rarely relate to narcistic insults he suffered from some apparently stupid bureaucrat who did not recognize his, Graeber’s, intelligence (e.g., p. 48, p. 64). In fact, he also has six pages on Madagascar where he essentially says that outside the capital city, state bureaucracy is practically absent, but then immediately nuances this statement with respect to schools (pp. 61-66; one would wonder what this evaluation would say about health centres, for example, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and more generally, also). As an Africanist, that doesn’t surprise me (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1997), but Graeber does not consider the fact that this widespread absence of state bureaucracy in the highlands of Madagascar might in fact invalidate his general thesis of total bureaucratization as a planetary phenomenon.
What about criterion 2, the engagement with existing knowledge and theory? Graeber clearly is somebody who does not like reading but prefers writing up and sharing with the world whatever comes to his mind. In the introduction, he claims that despite the increasing importance of bureaucracy, nobody is interested in analysing it, so that is why he must do it. This sounds a bit overly self-confident, as there is a huge body of social-science literature on bureaucracy and organisation since the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in sociology, but from the 1980s increasingly also in anthropology (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2021). Graeber simply does not know this literature. And when, here and there, he does mention selected topical works, he does not engage with them (e.g. note 44 p. 238).
What about theory? The book cover claims that we are faced with “a powerful work of social theory in the traditions of Foucault and Marx”. This might be discounted as commercial overselling but then Graeber himself sees his book as “an exercise in social theory” (p. 75). However, throughout the book, he is very eclectic in his theoretical references. He likes neither Weber nor Foucault, but dislikes Foucault more than Weber, and sees both as intellectual frontmen of neoliberal bureaucratic capitalism, in passages on the history of ideas, which he himself qualifies as “caricaturish” (p. 57). On the other hand, and surprisingly, Graeber likes Lévi-Strauss, and structuralism in general (pp. 76 seq.). As for Marx, he prefers to lie low, but stresses repeatedly that he was a man of his times (e.g., p. 88). Many of his renderings of theorists, say Weber, appear somewhat crude to the educated reader, if not outright wrong. In the passages where that is the case, and when you turn to the footnotes, you are then puzzled to read from Graeber’s pen a sentence like: “I am aware this (i.e., his own [Graeber’s] claim about Weber in the main text, p. 74) is not really what Weber said.” (fn. 64 p. 243). Elsewhere, he admits that his reflections are not new but have already been formulated somewhere else, and possibly better (e.g., by feminist standpoint theory or critical race theory, p. 68). But he admits to this only in passing and shares his inspirations with the reader anyway. It is also interesting to reflect upon what social theory Graeber leaves out. To name only a few authors who immediately come to my mind as they clearly resonate with Graeber’s concerns but are absent from his book: Hegel’s and Sartre’s theorem on the dialectics of the master-servant relationship, Gramsci’s writings on hegemony, the whole Frankfurt school of critical theory, and in particular Herbert Marcuse’s One-dimensional Man, or the sociology of critique of Boltanski. So, in sum, the happy ruminator, in this book, has confidently waded into areas where he didn’t have many bearings, and not surprisingly, he got lost.
I do not think I need to dwell much on criterion 3 as the reader will not be surprised by my negative answer. One could ask why, after all, the book has been rather successful even if much less successful than the Debt book (Graeber 2011). I have two answers to that, one of which I will present later. My main charge against the book is that it essentially confirms middle-class readers and fellow academics from the Global North, in particular the Anglo world, in their clichés about and grudges against bureaucracy. In fact, in Germany which remained rather untouched by the hype around Graeber, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), a left-wing daily, titled its review of the book “cliché as scholarship” (Klischee als Wissenschaft) and notes the author’s “love of the commonplace” (Walter 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/). It is true that there are interesting ideas in the book, which are not, however, developed (for example, was Foucault a neoliberal thinker? In fact, I wonder if Graeber is not a neoliberal thinker himself.). Other propositions are pure reinventions of the wheel. How many books and articles have been written about the bureaucratisation of the world? (See for example the solidly researched Hibou 2015). Other statements are truisms, like that all banks are regulated (p. 16) or commonplaces like “most human relations … are extremely complicated” (p. 58). Again others are outright wrong. All this is woven into a text with no discernible structure, and basically from a perspective, which implicitly makes the claim that a middle-class perspective from the Anglo-academic world describes the global default situation.
In sum, I would not give the book to anthropology undergraduates to read. It would be embarrassing if they got the impression that this is what anthropology is about, and it would be wasting their time. Anthropology is, I propose, about creating new, and preferably counterintuitive knowledge. It is about discovering the unknown, putting question marks behind common sense, and not about confirming what “we” anyway believe we know. The book may have clicked with many people because it resonates with widespread uneasy feelings especially among fellow academics that “we” are wasting our time in meetings and with paperwork. However, that a book confirms common sense is certainly not a sufficient criterion for its scientific quality.
We should realize (Graeber does not) that criticism of bureaucracy is as old as bureaucracy itself; since its invention in 18th century France, it has been criticised from the left (not acknowledged by Graeber), but more prominently from the right (Fusco et al. 1992). This criticism from the right came in two kinds, and not just one, as Graeber claims: there was and is indeed the bourgeois right which is concerned with red tape over-regulating the market and thereby diminishing profits. But there also have been aristocratic critics who were more concerned about being restricted by rules, rules which may be appropriate for the lower classes, but which inhibit the freedom of the gentleman to do whatever he pleases. Graeber’s critique is dangerously close to the latter position; as he admits himself in passing, it is a critique from the positionality of somebody who likes to see himself as a bohemian.
Which brings me to Graeber’s theory of revolution, as far as it can be ascertained from this book. Graeber is an anthropologist who is not only interested in what is, but also how to make the world a better place “without states and capitalism” (p. 97). In other words, he aims at an emancipatory theory of revolution. The classic model here is Marx, who analysed not only the way capitalism functioned – after having spent years in the British library reading the whole body of political economy of his time – but also the internal contradictions of capitalism, which in the long run would lead to its transformation, and, most relevant for the point I want to make, which the social actors were best positioned to bring about these transformations. Graeber is silent, at least in this book, on the first point (the transformational dynamics of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism) and very short on the second (the social carriers of revolution). He only speaks of “social revolutionaries” who profess immanent—i.e., practically grounded—conceptions of utopianism, and who act “as if they are already free“, in alliance with avantgarde artists (p. 89, 97). There is nothing about the class positions of these revolutionaries. Who are they? US-American and European anthropology students under the guidance of their enlightened teachers? Here, again, the figure of the bohemian lurks in the wings. Neither do we read much about realistic strategies, necessary for any successful revolution, of how to seize the masses, to paraphrase Marx (“The weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons; material violence must be overthrown by material violence; theory alone also becomes material violence as soon as it seizes the masses”, Marx 1843/44, p. 385). The catchy phrase “we are the 99 percent,” which Graeber is often said to have coined (regarding whether that is true or not, see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html), is not very helpful in this respect. It is pure populism, coupled with a nostalgic over-reading of the impact of the global justice movement of his youth.
Finally, I want to come back to why the book has sold well. I think the cover explains that. I have already referred to the über-promotion on the back cover, while on the front cover, Graeber is presented as the author of a previous, highly successful book. As Wikipedia explains, after the success of the previous book (Graeber 2011), the same editor quickly entered into a new contract with the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules; see also Walther 2016). Obviously, both the commercial editor and author were trying to capitalize on Graeber’s acquired reputation and his having “captivated a cult following” (Roberts 2020). The mechanism is well known, and thereby the book is a very good example of the capitalist economics of reputation, which govern the academic book market and which function according to a winner-takes-all logic (similar to international soccer, social media, and investment banking). The expression of this logic is the star cult, which in the academic world takes the form of the cult of the genius, and it explains how an altogether, from a scholarly perspective, bad book becomes a required citation. One may detect a slight contraction here between the anti-capitalist substance of the book and its capitalist form. So, while I do not recommend the book for an undergraduate course on the anthropology of bureaucracy, it would make fascinating case material for a postgraduate course on the political economy of the academic world.
Thomas Bierschenk is professor emeritus at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz/Germany. He has worked on development, the state, bureaucracy, and the police in Oman, Central and West Africa, as well as Germany, and has co-edited, together with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill 2014). More about his work at: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/prof-dr-thomas-bierschenk/
References
Bierschenk, Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 1997. Local powers and a distant State in rural Central African Republic. Journal of Modern African Studies 35(3): 441-468, https://www.jstor.org/stable/161750.
Bierschenk, Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 2021. The anthropology of bureaucracy and public services. In Guy Peters and Ian Thyme, eds., Encyclopedia of Public Administration (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2005.
Fusco, Sandro Angelo, Reinhart Koselleck, Anton Schindling, Udo Wolter, and Bernhard Wunder. 1992. “Verwaltung, Amt, Beamter (Administration, office, functionary).” In Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-historischen Sprache, vol. 7, pp. 1-96. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt. The First 5000 Years. London: Melville House.
Hibou, Béatrice 2015. The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era: An International and Comparative Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Göpfert, Mirco. 2013. “Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie.” American Ethnologist 40(2): 324-334, doi: 10.1111/amet.12024.
Graeber, David. 2006. “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity. LSE memorial lecture.” https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos).
Graeber, David. 2012. “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor.” The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 105–28, doi: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau2.2.007.
Graeber, David. 2015. The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. London: Melvin House.
Graeber, David. 2017. “A Response to Anastasia Piliavsky’s The Wrong Kind of Freedom? A Review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 30(1): 113-118, doi: 10.1007/s10767-016-9248-0.
Marx, Karl. 1843/44. Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts-Philosophie, 1843-1844 (Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels – Werke. Band 1), Berlin/DDR 1976, pp. 378-391, http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me01/me01_378.htm#S385.
Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2017. “The wrong kind of freedom? A Review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 30: 107-111, doi: 10.1007/s10767-016-9246-2.
Roberts, Sam. 2020. “David Graeber, caustic critic of inequality, is dead at 59.” The New York Times, 4 September 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html.
Walther, Rudolf. 2016. “Klischee als Wissenschaft” (“Cliché as scholarship”). TAZ (Die Tageszeitung), 6 March 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/.
Cite as: Bierschenk, Thomas. 2021. “On Graeber on bureaucracy.” FocaalBlog, 19 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/10/19/thomas-bierschenk-on-graeber-on-bureaucracy/.
Steven Sampson: Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism
QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever so reflective anthropologists are being inundated with one conspiracy theory after another. A May 2021 survey reveals that 15% of Americans and 23% of those who call themselves Republicans believe that ‘the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation’ (PRRI 2021). The evil conspirators are often termed a ‘cabal’ (a word derived from the Hebrew ‘kabbalah’/esoteric teachings). This subversive cabal is viewed as embedded in our governments, collaborating with the global financial elite and the Davos crowd, within the US and European Left, the Hollywood elite, the mainstream media, and with transgender activists and Critical Race Theory proponents, even with the West European welfare states with their Covid-19 lockdown/vaccine policies. Cabals are the secret agents of conspiratorial plots. To study conspiracy theory is to do cabal anthropology.
Conspiracy theories are stigmatized knowledge. This has led some anthropologists to view conspiracy theorists as ‘contesting’ power. Conspiracism becomes a form of resistance by the powerless against the arrogant elites and elite institutions (Pelkmanns and Machold 2011, Dean 2000, Fassin 2021). So, what do we anthropologists do about the kind of stigmatized knowledge promoted by the QAnon believers? Who assert that America is threatened by a Satanic, pedophile cult from which only Donald Trump can save us? What do we do about the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who say that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by the U.S. government, or the ‘birthers’ who assert that Obama (whose mother was an anthropologist!) was born a Muslim in Kenya? Should we view Holocaust deniers, the Stolen Election crowd and the racist Great Replacement adherents as ‘contestation’?
We all like ‘speaking truth to power’, but what about those who speak untruth to power? Are there good and bad forms of contestation? Are we anthropologists in danger of becoming what the philosopher Cassam called ‘conspiracy apologists’? What, in fact, can we anthropologists add to the now frantic discussion of conspiracy theories?
Theories of conspiracy versus conspiracy theory
In the ordinary forensic sense, a conspiracy is simply a secret plot to do something bad, such as robbing a bank or political subversion. Conspiracies require secret plans, malevolent motives and a group of conspirators. Forensic conspiracies are commonplace. Some succeed, others are discovered and in most cases the plotters exposed, caught and punished. The bombing of the World Trade Center garage in 1993, and the suicide plane hijackings of September 11, 2001 were both forensic conspiracies.
What we call ‘conspiracy theories’ are also secret plots, to be sure, but the plotters tend to be all-powerful, sophisticated, and diabolical. Their project is more than robbing a bank, tapping phones or a terrorist attack. It is nothing short of total control and world domination. Conspiratorial plots of this kind do not occur alone. They are connected to other plots over space and time (Illuminati, Freemasons, Jews, Communists, Trilateral Commission, Icke’s ‘lizard people’, alien abduction, ‘New World Order’, the Neocons, the Deep State, etc.).
Because the conspirators are considered to be so deeply embedded among us, the work of a conspiracy theorist is to expose their deception. The 9/11 truthers, for example, believe that the Bin Laden-based, ‘Official Conspiracy Theory’ is one such deception, what they call a ‘false flag operation’. They believe that the World Trade Centers collapsed because U.S. military/intelligence organs, perhaps helped by the Mossad, planted explosives in the buildings. Somehow, these explosives detonated precisely when the planes flew into the buildings, and it is assumed that a third building close by, Building no. 7, also collapsed not due to fire but due to explosives. How and why this was done remains unexplained.
Of course, no conspirator has ever been found. The truthers believe that the U.S. government decided to murder thousands of its own citizens in order to achieve some nefarious end, presumably connected to domination of the Middle East and its oil and to create a military/security state in the U.S. The QAnon conspiracy theory is even more elaborate, with narratives of child kidnapping and blood libel in a plot that has long anti-Semitic roots, but which now brings together the Clintons, the Democratic party left, and their Hollywood friends. Whether 9/11 truth or QAnon, conspiracy theorists see themselves as ‘truth tellers’ or ‘truth-seekers’ (Toseland 2018). They are not just propounding theories; they are on a mission.
Conspiracy theory: the state of research
Conspiracy theory research has focused on the logical structure of conspiratorial explanations and why these are so attractive to so many. For the cultural theorist Michael Barkun (2014), all conspiracy theories revolve around three premises: Nothing happens by accident, Nothing is at it seems, and Everything is connected. Conspiracy is thus the reverse side of transparency. Anything on the surface is false or misleading. Hence the need to look deeper in search of the real, more significant truth. According to the philosopher Karl Popper, who was the first to coin the idea of a ‘conspiracy theory of society’, conspiracy theory begins with the death of God. When God was around, all disasters and misfortunes could be attributed to this higher power. With the Enlightenment, however, disasters and misfortunes are now blamed on human actors (secret cabals in the King’s court), newly powerful social groups such as the Freemasons, or outsider groups such as Jews or Roma. During the Enlightenment, conspiratorial thinking becomes a theory of total agency (Wood 1982). Bad things happen because secret sinister groups of people intend them to happen.
Social psychologists have speculated on the attraction of conspiracy theory, based on the premise that conspiratorial beliefs are a danger to society. Clearly, conspiracy theories give believers a simple, all-encompassing explanation for adverse developments or disasters. We obtain a ‘who’ behind a complex or chance event. For ardent conspiracy believers, this also gives them a mission, and the chance to enter a community of fellow believers seeking to expose the sinister cabal. The Trump ‘stolen election’ conspiracy – whose culprits are corrupt inner city Black voting officials, Democratic Party swindlers and evil voting machine companies with ties to Venezuela – has now become the latest ‘cabal’. In this narrative, political power was stolen from the American people, and Mr. Trump will help them get it back.
Part of the conspiracists’ mission is to connect the dots. For conspiracies do not occur alone. The death of JFK junior, Covid-19, faked moon landings, the ‘stolen election’ plot, transgender activism, Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory can now be related to a secret elite and their lackeys in government, in Silicon Valley, in the media, etc. This is the QAnon project. Outside observers have described this mission as falling down the ‘rabbit hole’. Hence, a recent book on QAnon adherents invokes the ‘rabbit hole’ imagery no less than 22 times (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021).
The work of the conspiracy theorists is to uncover and interpret ‘evidence’, to discover the truth. They are truth-seekers who do research (googling) by ‘connecting the dots’, interpreting the evidence and communicating their interpretations to others in meetings, forums and chat rooms. Like others involved in political advocacy projects, conspiracy theorists – be they truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, anti-Covid activists — are emotionally engaged and articulate. They are ready, willing and able to promote their views and defend the most minute points, armed with ever more evidence along. This is because conspiracy theorists are not simply propagating ‘theories’. Their explanatory theories are ‘unlikely’, their premises are ideological, and their mission is political, as the philosopher Quassim Cassam has argued (2019).
The QAnon community, heavily overlapping with ardent Trump supporters and right-wing extremist, is typical. QAnon revolves around the cryptic tweets, called ‘drops’, issued every few weeks by ‘Q’, someone supposedly deep inside the U.S. government (for a discussion of who Q might really be see Bloom and Moskalenko 2021, ch. 1; on QAnon see also CBS News 2020, Quandt 2018, and further references below). These texts are then interpreted, and often associated with tweets by Trump or his followers, and connected to signs of an impending ‘storm’ or ‘awakening’ that will come but never does (that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, that Trump would assume power in March, now in August). The QAnon narrative is continually expanding, with any attempts at refutation viewed as part of the plot to destroy its followers.
Populist expertise as Latourian matters of concern; but why?
The 9/11 truthers and QAnon are forms of ‘populist expertise’. Imitating experts, they assemble facts, assess evidence, pass on newly found explanations for enigmatic or troubling events (Marwick and Partin 2020). If Latour and STS described the ‘social construction of scientific facts’, we now have a populist construction of ‘alternative facts’. Latour’s ‘matters of concern’ have outrun us (Latour 2004).
QAnon, the 9/11 truthers, the birthers, the 5G telephone protesters, the antivaxxers who believe a chip is being implanted in their bodies, they are Foucault run wild. To the extent that QAnon followers and other conspiracists question established knowledge regimes and authorities, they are certainly ‘critical’. This generates some sympathy among those who see conspiracists as performing a valuable function for society, what Cassam calls ‘conspiracy apologists’. But the conspiracists’ critique is based upon a profound and yet naïve distrust of established institutions, a resistance to any kind of falsification or data that would contradict their ‘findings’, and a vicious anti-Semitism and racism that the apologists tend to overlook (Byford 2015). Conspiracy theorists may be naïve or sympatico as individual human beings, but conspiracism is a pernicious masquerading as science.
With the rise of QAnon pedophile blood libel conspiracy, the Trumpian ‘Big Lie’ and anti-Covid protests, we now face a presumed ‘rise of conspiracism’. The fear of conspiracism, a veritable ‘conspiracy panic’ is nothing new (Bratich 2008, Thalmann 2016). Past or present, one overarching question takes center stage, a question posed by the media and addressed by various experts who view conspiratorial thinking as dangerous: Why do people believe this stuff?
The search for an answer forms the basis for the entire conspiracy research industry, from ERC research projects to panels among our own tribe of anthropologists (including a panel that I co-organized at EASA in 2018), to EU policy papers and government reports proposing various counter-conspiracy measures (Institute for Public Affairs 2013, European Commission 2021; Önnerfors 2021). My own fascination with conspiracism began with my research in Romania, long before 1989, where I noticed how people believed in all kinds of outlandish rumors and conspiracies about domestic and foreign enemies (including me as spy; Sampson 1984). I then followed conspiracies about the EU, the Soros Mafia and the Western NGO industry, which led me to years of following the 9/11 truthers, many of whom are older male, end-of-career academics, taking similar positions in society as myself and other anthropologists.
Indeed, the 9/11 truther activists share with us in anthropology that they search for ‘evidence’. Many are familiar with the protocols of the peer reviewed journal article; as I have argued for the pretentious Journal of 9/11 Studies and its truther editorial board (Sampson 2010). Indeed, conspiracy producers, consumers and conspiracy entrepreneurs are not just lonely ‘losers’ sitting in a basement staring at a screen all day. They are active members of a community who ‘produce content’, and keep abreast of events, even in mainstream media. So why indeed do people believe this stuff?
Conspiracism as epistemology
Early theorizing on the ‘why’ question begins with Hofstadter (1964), who depicted conspiracy believers as acting out a ‘paranoid style’, perhaps socially disoriented, isolated and even cognitively disabled. Recent surveys of those arrested in the January 6th riots at the U.S. Capitol finds that a sizeable percentage of participants have (had) a variety of mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression and PTSD, and estrangement from their children (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021, who also highlight the propensity of ‘truther’ women for some of these sufferings). Along with the mental instability argument, Sunstein and Vermeule (2009) argue that conspiracism is based on a ‘crippled epistemology’. This individualized understanding, based on the psychological or cognitive characteristics of ‘the conspiracy believer’, or the conspiratorial mind-set, focuses on conspiracists as somehow irrational, as overly fearful as frantically searching for someone to blame for their personal troubles or social deroute.
Their anxiety both reflects and results in an intense distrust of institutions, authorities, or established science and thus a susceptibility to conspiratorial explanations of suspicious events, disasters or other misfortunes, ranging from 9/11 to Covid-19 to Trump’s election loss. Moreover, since they trust no institution, imploring them to ‘believe the science’ is useless. Scientific experts and institutions are themselves suspect. Conspiracists must do the research themselves, on the internet, encouraged by like-minded conspiracy theorists and amateur experts who can parlay their academic expertise from one field into another: the leading 9/11 truther, David Ray Griffin, is a professor of religion. This distrust of authorities has a derivative effect: conspiracists can be easily manipulated by populist politicians (Bergmann 2018).
The conspiratorial mindset was also depicted in a famous study by Leon Festinger and his colleagues (1956) when they described how a UFO cult that predicted the end of the world was only more reinforced in their belief when the disaster did not happen. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance approach seems to be supported by the hardcore support for Trump and his ‘stolen election’ theory, culminating in Trump supporters’ invasion of the U.S. Congress on January 6th 2021, and the election of QAnon supporters to political office. The consensus among conspiracy theory researchers is that conspiracy theorists cannot be combatted by any kind of fact-checking enterprise. People do not get converted, nor do they see the light, simply because they are confronted with contradictory evidence, new facts or sophisticated counter-arguments. The conspiracy mindset is not about facts and evidence. It is about social engagement, political projects, and belief.
The problem with explanations of conspiracy followers as people who are somehow socially, emotionally or cognitively disabled is that these explanations are far too general. After all, who among us does not at times feel disempowered, confused, uncertain, insecure or distrustful of institutions and science, most especially in this Covid-19 era? How much should we ‘trust science’ when scientific explanations are contested or change? If we all suffer from ‘confirmation bias’ or other such psychological syndromes, then why aren’t we all conspiracy theorists? Could it be that a healthy scepticism about the scientific enterprise is a core theme in the work of STS and anthropologists of policy? Are the conspiracy theorists just another form of institutional critique? Do we regard Holocaust deniers, Great Replacement adherents or QAnon activists as fellow compatriots ‘contesting authority’? What indeed is the difference between an outrageous conspiracy theory and hard-hitting critique of subtle powers and hidden agendas in state institutions and global capitalism?
What is belief?
Let me come back to the question of “Why people believe this stuff”?
Anyone who has argued with a conspiracy theorist, a religious zealot or political true believer of any kind knows that refutation of their evidence is fruitless. You point out contrary facts or illogical arguments and your remarks are simply cast aside as irrelevant or confirmation of the conspiracy. This is because the conspiratorial narrative is in fact an expression of belief. The problem, then, is not about the facts but about belief. Conspiracy theorists do not assert claims. They express beliefs. What does it mean to believe, for example, that Trump won the election with 70% of the vote or that the US military blew up the World Trade Center? What is belief all about?
I decided to re-read a bunch of anthropological analyses of belief. Virtually all of these were written to explain religious beliefs, as when Evans-Pritchard wrote that the Nuer ‘believe’ that twins are birds. I think that we can fruitfully apply the discussion of religious belief to secular, conspiratorial beliefs as well. There are obvious overlaps between religious and conspiracy belief systems: grand forces of good and evil; an apocalyptic reckoning some time in an imminent future; scriptures and texts that provide clues; esoteric interpretations and discussions of what the clues mean; struggles over orthodox and deviant interpretations; and an institutional practice in which communities of believers seek out converts, debate skeptics, and ex-communicate apostates and perceived heretics. The conspiratorial universe thus contains conspiracy producers, conspiracy consumers, and even conspiracy entrepreneurs (David Icke, Alex Jones, etc.). It includes not only true believers and former believers (read QAnon causalities on Reddit), but also anti-conspiracists, the debunkers.
Being in a conspiracist community involves work, or ‘research’. The 9/11 truthers, for example, include many students and retired academics who do internet googling, organize evidence and hold conferences, even selling truther merchandise. The QAnon community has gatekeepers who run the web portals, moderate chatrooms, assemble narratives, sell merchandise, and retweet the preferred interpretations. Like any religious community, conspiracy communities have their rites and rituals. Long before January 6th, QAnon followers were appearing at demonstrations, recruiting followers and arguing with skeptics and debunkers. We need to recall the very banal, anthropological insight that conspiracy theory is not just about a bunch of random facts and a set of outlandish, unfalsifiable beliefs. It is also a set of practices. Conspiracists do not just stare at a screen. They do things with the screen and in real life. They search for confirming evidence, they connect the dots, they discuss their findings with like-minded others, they try to unmask provocateurs, etc. It’s the doing that creates that passion and the commitment behind conspiracism. The conspiracist ‘rabbit hole’ is not a place of isolation, it is a community. This passionate community explain the sense of exhilaration common to many true believers. It’s so wonderful to know the truth and to share it with others, especially after having experienced an adverse life event or a traumatic experience (as so many QAnon followers have, according to surveys; see Jensen and Kane 2021).
So perhaps the anthropological discussion of beliefs can help us understand the power of beliefs in the conspiratorial universe of truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, New World Order proponents, Holocaust deniers, alien abductionists and similar groups.
Back to Needham
In 1972, Rodney Needham published Belief, Language and Experience, a long philosophical treatise on belief, much of it inspired by Wittgenstein. What do we mean, asked Needham, when we say that members of tribe X ‘believe’ something? Needham stressed that ‘statements about belief’ made by our informants should be distinguished from belief itself. Ethnographers love eliciting such statements, but for Needham these are the result of informants’ effort at introspection. For Needham, statements about belief are not belief. Belief is an inner state. This inner state may be articulated as an accepted doctrine (‘I believe that…’), as knowledge (‘I know the truth about…’) or as an emotional conviction (‘I believe in …’). Needham concludes that we just cannot know what is inside people’s heads. We can elicit statements, listen to what they say, we can observe what they do, and at best try to infer some kind of inner state that we call ‘belief’. Yet Needham is skeptical: the concept of belief is so vague that it should be thrown out. Needham does not believe in belief.
Pouillon (1982), in a widely cited essay, reminds us that we must distinguish between believing in something versus believing that something. Expressions of belief in reveal whom we trust, who has legitimate authority, in whom we have faith. In contrast to ‘believe in…’ believing that is about a coherent doctrine of propositions. If belief is ultimately about faith, the project of debunking beliefs, e.g., showing conspiracy theories to be based on incorrect facts or illogical arguments, is beside the point. Conspiracies are not about facts or evidence. They are about ‘beliefs in’. And we cannot disprove beliefs. People can articulate, adjust or renounce beliefs. As such, beliefs are tied more to emotional commitment rather than facts. Conspiracy theories, despite the quasi-scientific label of ‘theory’, are clearly of this kind. They are beliefs, not theories in the scientific sense.
We often assume that conspiracy theorists articulate a coherent, fundamental set of propositions. Yet anthropologists have shown us that people can operate with overlapping, fragmented, alternative and contradictory belief systems, what we now euphemize as ‘syncretism’. Hence, J. Mair reminds us that ‘[not] every believer […] is a fundamentalist or a systematic theologian’ (2012, p. 45). Our analysis should therefore focus not so much on what people believe but rather how they believe. We should focus on what Mair calls ‘cultures of belief’. Studies of religious groups reveal how people can comfortably maintain two or more sets of beliefs that are complementary or even logically contradictory. Numerous studies of the anthropology of Christianity describe people who are sincerely converted Christians, but who also interact with spirits, react to witchcraft accusations or believe in reincarnation (Stringer 1996, Robbins 2007). While these studies have been applied largely to religious believers and converts, they are equally valid to those who have fallen down the ‘rabbit hole’ of QAnon, 9/11 truther, Holocaust denial, Great Replacement, alien abduction or other conspiratorial narratives. Like religious groups, conspiratorial communities are also full of dual, overlapping, contrasting and conflicting belief systems. An ethnographic approach to conspiracy theories might therefore profit from a ‘situational belief’ approach (Stringer 1996). The focus here should be less on who assents to certain propositions (‘I believe that…’;) and more on what kinds of truths and authorities people commit themselves to (‘I believe in….’ ‘I have faith in…’).
Practicing conspiracism
The QAnon belief system has its logical fallacies. Some may fully believe in the pedophile plot, while others focus only on the Deep State. However, they are united in their sources of authority (Q ‘drops’ and Trump statements, supplemented by various authoritative interpretations that are then retweeted and discussed). Exposing the cabal is both ‘research’ and an act of faith.
Anthropological approaches to religious belief have always included descriptions of religious practices, rites and rituals. Conspiracy adherents are no different. They also have their rites and rituals. They meet on line, in hundreds of web communities. They recruit followers and argue with debunkers. And they meet in real life at demonstrations, political meetings, in anti-vaccine gatherings, and of course, on January 6th. Conspiracists have been busy trying to expose the Covid vaccine chip insertion plot (led by Bill Gates). They have been digesting the shock of Trump’s defeat; promoting the narrative of the Stolen Election and his imminent return; reading and interpreting the QAnon clues; and fighting the regulations to wear masks. They do the work of textual interpretation. They re-tweet and add comments. They discuss these messages with family members, argue with skeptics, and end up in echo chambers of like- minded conspiracists who can confirm and reinforce their ideas.
What all this means is that we need to show how conspiratorial belief and conspiracist practice interact, as we have done with the study of religious beliefs and practices. Regrettably, conspiracy theory research has tended to focus on the psycho-social vulnerabilities of the most radical believers. Certainly, these committed conspiracists have from emotional ‘baggage’, social isolation or violent tendencies (as the recent QAnon studies show). But most conspiracy adherents are only partially or borderline committed; many view conspiracy theory adherence as more of a social activity than an all-out ideological commitment, much like church attendance can be more a social obligation than a religious act. Second, the focus on individual vulnerability assumes some kind of coherent ideology among conspiracists. It ignores the way people use religious belief in creative ways, amalgamating, adapting and converting it to strategic ends. Conspiratorial ideas have a political message: the evil plot by the sinister outsiders, but it is also a personal project, a voyage of discovery that gives people new meaning in their lives as they become part of history. Both religious and conspiratorial practice are more than acting out an ostensibly coherent set of beliefs. Our understanding of conspiracists is best served by observing what they do: how they are recruited, how they participate, how they recruit others, and even how they often exit or even express regret (see again the Reddit thread for ‘QAnon Casualties’; or the testimonies of ex-Truthers).
From how to why
Let me close with the question of why does one become a believer? Robbins (2007) described how some converts to Christianity are truly sincerely converted, but we also have examples of conversion for purely strategic reasons. This distinction between sincere and instrumental conversion may be simplistic, but it is worth recalling when observing why people might join the QAnon, truther, anti-vaxx or alien obduction community. We join groups for many reasons: to resolve existential problems, to gain some control over the world, to obtain social contacts or to re-affirm our political beliefs. Conspiracy groups seem to solve all these tasks at the same time. Moreover, joining one conspiratorial community seems to lead to others: QAnon people form the core of Covid denial and anti-vaccination resistance, as well as 5G-telephone skepticism and of course, they are enthusiastic supporters of the stolen election theory. Since belief is an inner state that we can never really know, the best we can do as ethnographers is to listen to statements and observe behaviors.
What then, is a believer? Believers here don’t just read tweets. They save them, comment on them, retweet them, discuss them, embellish them, delete them, switch platforms, go to meetings, participate in demonstrations, buy merchandise, and spend hours of their day looking for further clues and reinterpret these. Their closed groups can decide to ban or unfriend others. They may have fallen down a rabbit hole but they are also actively exploring new paths, routes, tunnels and dead ends. Conspiracy is not just about belief; it is also about community.
If we are to understand conspiratorial movements like QAnon or those following the Deep State conspiracy, we anthropologists need to promote our own insights about what belief is all about. While Needham argued that the concept of belief was useless for anthropology, we still need to explain what it means to be a believer. We need to go beyond the conventional wisdom that every conspiracy theorist suffers from some kind of cognitive deficiency, emotional damage or social isolation. The leaders and mobilizers may be emotional, committed, even fanatic (as so many leaders of social movements are), but the followers and adherents are much more like us than we’d like to admit. Resorting to a psychological explanation is not sufficient. Who among us has not suffered from anxiety, depression, loneliness or a traumatic event that might lead us to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole? Who among us has not spent hours on line immersed in some incessant search to solve a puzzle? The conspiracy followers are hardly exotic. Take away their beliefs, and they suddenly become just like us, ordinary men and women with family obligations, precarious jobs, worried about their future and their place in it. They are both strange and familiar at the same time. And it is this contrast that makes them the perfect object of anthropological scrutiny. The task of anthropology, after all, is to show that the strange is actually familiar, and that the familiar has its exotic elements. We need more cabal anthropology.
Cabal anthropology might therefore provide a corrective to the journalists, psychologists and political commentators who so often classify conspiracy theorists as lonely, alienated souls. The narratives being promoted by conspiracists (QAnon anti-pedophiles, Deep State, Obama birther, 9/11 truth, stolen election, New World Order, Covid anti-vaxxers) are clearly false and pernicious. But the issue not just about the kind of evidence they use or the doctrines they promote. They reflect new forms of commitment. We need to understand how ‘believe that…’ interacts with ‘belief in …’
In this sense, QAnon and other conspiracy theories are secular forms of religious revival. The search for Satanic forces, and the premonitions of a great reckoning led by Trump are obvious parallels with religion. Alongside this are the conspiracy theorists’ profound mistrust in our financial institutions, elite universities, government institutions and in scientific expertise. Lack of trust in these institutions is why the ‘stolen election’ discourse has stayed with us. No amount of fact checking or debunking will solve the conspiracist wave. This is because conspiratorial thinking is not about incorrect facts or crippled epistemologies. It’s about the power of belief and the communities of believers. What beliefs did QAnon replace? What bonds of trust have been dismantled in order for QAnon to move in? How could these bonds be reconstructed? How are conspiracy communities being manipulated by unscrupulous conspiratorial entrepreneurs and political actors? Here is an agenda for cabal anthropology. The rabbit hole awaits.
Steven Sampson is professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, Lund University (Steven.sampson@soc.Lu.se). He has done research on Romania and the Balkans, NGOs, the anti-corruption industry, conspiracy theory and business ethics. For a list of his publications with open access see: https://www.soc.lu.se/steven-sampson.
Bibliographic Note: For a longer version of this article and a more extensive bibliography on conspiracy theory see my working paper at https://www.soc.lu.se/en/steven-sampson/publication/3ec05ab0-528f-40bb-92bd-7e7c3e47a8f2
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Jaime A Alves: F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.
Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame 2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).
While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600 youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.
Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).
In this following, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).
This article should be understood neither as a literature review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead, I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg 2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global antiblackness. Enduring global colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020; Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).
How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If, as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers] so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and abolishing the police state.
The Myth of Police Fragility
There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim, that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South, hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him, he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.
One may speculate: What led him to such an expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents? The film and the scene in particular aroused heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity” (Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others blamed it for ‘going too far left in its implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).
The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”. Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020: 654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).
By hijacking the meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?) in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality (e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure. Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.
Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing (I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s ‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015; Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,” an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally, there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788).
These and many other works (too many to be listed in a commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel patrolling the streets. By making ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making, statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin 2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).
My intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police (2018: 8).
In this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’ family and Christian values (Alves 2018).
While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work.
My analysis (and that of many of my colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror. Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali, Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.
Thus, my contention here is not so much to stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description, may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails. If we do not want our work to end up fueling and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the police!’ in studies of policing.
Maroon Anthropology
In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.
Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police – and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!
Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel 2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’, ‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes. Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of ‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (Spillers 1987: 68).
If the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s (incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police ‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James and Gordon 208:371).
I am not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph, 2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real) vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately, those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe 2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing. As Siegel and others have shown, one of the most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still, both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska 2007).
This is not a peripheral point. One has only to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson 2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is insane.
How might anthropologists challenge the asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying black beings? When one officer dies, it is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory violence by its victims.
There is no equivalence between blue lives and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false equivalency.
Based on her work with activists in the South African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see, how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).
If we consider current waves of demonstrations against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police? Although an insurgent anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.
Thus, f*ck the police! is not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice. It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!
Acknowledgments: This paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel, Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series, University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb, Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors and omissions are of course mine.
Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia. He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com
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Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after
the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.
The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs.
Renewables between liberalization and water-grabbing
The Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation. From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12 years. FITs are the means of subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of subsidized electricity prices
If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.
Investors and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources. The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through FITs.
Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).
In this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards, allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018). This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.
Struggles against SHPPs
I first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes through room rentals.
Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).
“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.
I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.
Unlike in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for some Serbian communities.
Whose market, whose energy transition?
SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.
These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.
While the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources. This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.
Such investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.
Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.
Bibliography
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Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara Mountain].
Ristić, Ratko, Ivan Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA, Vol. 50 [Derivate small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and unmeasurable ecological damage].
Bankwatch, 2019. “Western Balkans Hydropower: Who Pays, Who Profits?” Accessed February 23, 2021. https://bankwatch.org/publication/western-balkans-hydropower-who-pays-who-profits.
Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/
Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn
On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced. The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.
The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.
Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.
Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.
In the context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation, political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no surprise that they are being attacked first.
The Neoliberalization of Higher Education and Law 4777/2021
The efforts to alter the public, free, and open character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017, Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article 16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education over the past two decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’ degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack the prestige of public universities.
However, when Nea Dimokratia came to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum. If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world, in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses – unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th. Interestingly, this law was not introduced by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in educational affairs is unprecedented.
To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
The new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore, fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore, the law allows for many disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.
All of these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20 million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.
The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.
The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.
Towards a closed and authoritarian university
The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.
More generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship, and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in Parliament that, under the new law, “it is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.
Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.
References
Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera A., Heintz M. & A. Horolets (eds.), Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe: An Intricate Institutional and Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.
Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra 2000. “Disciples, Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp. 256–78.
Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online petition.
Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/