Prof Helder Macedo is the emeritus Professor of Portuguese Literature at Kings College London. He is a highly regarded writer who has received many honors in Portugal. He was Secretary State for Culture in Portugal shortly after the Carnation Revolution. Portugal celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the revolution on the 25th of April 2024.
Prof Macedo lived in exile for many years in London where he is still based and remains active in the literature and culture of Portugal. Lyndall Stein a longstanding family friend and activist on social justice issues interviewed him for the historical record and with respect to his longstanding commitment to progressive causes and the culture and politics of Portugal.
Prof Macedo interviewed by Lyndall Stein
Cite as: Stein, Lyndall 2024. “Interview with Prof Helder Macedo: 50th anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution” Focaalblog April 29. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/04/29/interview-with-prof-helder-macedo-50th-anniversary-of-the-portuguese-revolution/
I would never have expected
Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this
past year has been somehow unexpected, from the coup itself, in the early hours
of 1 February, to the scale of the popular reaction. Friends who expressed little
interest in politics or protest during my fieldwork, only a few years ago, have
been in the streets. Striking has been the role of young women—women like Ruth,
a Christian born in the Chin Hills, who works at a church in Yangon where I did
much of my research.
As the uprising grew through
February, Ruth’s posts filled my Facebook feed: selfies in Covid-19 masks amid
swelling crowds around the Sule Pagoda; memes mocking the generals behind the
coup; photographs of victims shot by security forces. One thing not surprising has
been the brutality of the crackdown. As it intensified in late February and
early March, Ruth’s posts showed her wearing not just a face mask, but also a
helmet and goggles.
As Pentecostals, believers
like Ruth have also been praying. One video streamed via Facebook Live had
about twenty members of her church engaged in a session of collective prayer,
entreating God to protect Myanmar. Such prayers were commonplace during my fieldwork.
But this one resonated with the revolution then building momentum in the
streets: put to the rhythm of a familiar call-and-response chant made famous in
the 1988 uprising, the prayer replaced the usual rejoinder “do ayei! do ayei!”
(“Our cause! Our cause!”) with “Amen! Amen!”
What draws these Christians so fully into the revolution through protest and prayer? There’s been much said about how a decade’s experience of a more open public sphere makes return to military rule impossible to countenance. Many have also remarked on how this moment has transcended lines of difference that have long animated Myanmar’s politics, with Chin Christians and even Rohingya Muslims manning barricades alongside majority Burman Buddhists.
But maybe part of an
answer also lies in the imagination.
I say this, in part,
because of another question I’ve had, watching Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
unfolding from afar over social media: What would David Graeber make of this?
Graeber never wrote about Myanmar, but he was, of course, deeply interested, intellectually and practically, in revolution. And for him, the question of revolution was tied to the question of imagination. In one essay (2007), he distinguished a “transcendent” form of imagination, the terrain of fiction and make-believe, of “imaginary creatures, imaginary places … imaginary friends”, from an “immanent” form, one not “static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world … ”. It was the latter, for Graeber, that had revolutionary potential.
While Graeber never wrote
about Myanmar, had he not died in September 2020, that might not have remained
true for long.
Some years ago, he agreed to write the foreword to a new edition of Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma. The foreword was never finished, so we can’t know what Graeber would have written. We can’t know how he would have engaged with Raymond Firth’s original, laudatory foreword. We can’t know how he would have dealt with Leach’s later reappraisal, when he acknowledged that he had somewhat essentialised gumsa and gumlao, the Kachin categories famously at the heart of his analysis. We can’t know how he would have situated the book in relation to debates in anthropology in the decades since, or how he would have dealt with critiques that have been directed towards it, including from Kachin scholars (e.g., Maran 2007), and especially amid growing calls to meaningfully decolonise the study of Myanmar.
What we do know is that Graeber was a fan. “Edmund Leach,” he once wrote, “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Leach was, for Graeber, “a model of intellectual freedom”. References to Leach appear across Graeber’s body of work, including citations of the younger Leach and the older Leach following his so-called “conversion” to structuralism—a break which, as Chris Fuller and Jonathan Parry note, has probably been overdrawn. “Not only are there striking continuities in the sort of questions Leach asked of data,” they write, “and the sort of answers he offered, but more importantly he kept faith throughout his career with one broad vision of the anthropological enterprise” (1989: 11).
If the same might be said of Graeber, it’s not the only way in which the two men were similar. Both thought across relatively long stretches of time: 140 years in the case of Leach’s study of the oscillations in Kachin political systems; millennia in the case of Graeber’s work on debt and his recent collaboration with David Wengrow. Both were also prolific and lucid writers, eager to engage audiences beyond anthropology—including, incidentally, via the BBC, which broadcast Leach’s Reith Lectures in 1967 and Graeber’s 12-part series on debt in 2016.
What James Laidlaw and
Stephen Hugh-Jones (2000:3) write about Leach could just as easily be said of
Graeber, that “the lessons of anthropological inquiry were relevant to the
everyday moral and political questions that were being debated all around him …”.
Both were interested in the micro and macro forces that impacted the production
of knowledge in anthropology, and both reflected on how their own biographies
and albeit very different insider/outsider positions in the discipline shaped
the work they produced (Leach 1984; Graeber 2014).
There are, however, few
references to Political Systems in Graeber’s corpus, which raises another
question: What would he have written in this foreword?
It’s impossible to attempt
a definite answer. Graeber was far too creative for that. But it’s probably not
going too far out on a limb to suggest that imagination might have been a
central theme. For what are the political categories of gumsa and gumlao
analysed by Leach if not products of the “immanent” mode of imagination that
interested Graeber? One reference that does appear at several points in
Graeber’s writing is to a point Leach made in his short 1982 treatise simply
titled Social Anthropology. There, Leach suggests that the distinction
between humans and non-humans is not that the former have a soul, but that they
are able to conceive—or imagine—that they have one, and thus, that it is
imagination, not reason, that sets humans apart. On this point, Graeber also
(e.g., 2001: 58) cites Marx’s observation that, unlike a spider weaving its web
or a bee building its nest, “the [human] architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality.”
If imagination is, for
Leach and Graeber, a general feature of the human condition, it’s also one
thrown into relief at certain moments, like moments of revolution. “When one tries to bring an
imagined society into being,” Graeber wrote, “one is engaging in revolution”
(2001: 88). It’s maybe
not too much of a stretch, then, to also imagine that, if he had been writing
the foreword to Political Systems this past year, Graeber would be
attending to the revolution underway in the valleys and the highlands that
feature in Leach’s book: a revolution whose participants, like Ruth, imagine
not just a political system in Myanmar with the military no longer in charge,
but a society transformed in myriad other ways.
Image 2: Book cover of Political Systems of Highland Burma by Edmund Leach
Around 2011, as Myanmar started to emerge from five decades of military rule, Ruth’s church and other Pentecostals intensified their evangelism efforts, seeking to win converts in a country where about 90 percent of the population are Buddhist. Taking advantage of the political opening, and with an eye to the spiritual rupture it was thought to herald, these Christians began to preach more energetically than they had in years.
But even before the coup, there was evidence that the rupture might not be forthcoming: a sense that liberalisation was benefitting only well-connected cronies; new forms of censorship impinging on what was supposed to be a newly open public sphere; an ascendent Buddhist nationalism rendering increasingly precarious the position of minorities, and playing out horrifically in the treatment of the Rohingya. There were also few signs that Buddhists were suddenly interested in Jesus. This did little to dent my friends’ commitment to evangelism, however. “God works in his own time,” was the frequent refrain.
How, in this understanding,
to make sense of the coup?
The immediate days after the military seized control, detaining elected leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, were strangely quiet. Healthcare workers and teachers were among the first to go on strike. Garment workers followed soon after. As the civil disobedience movement took shape, more people took to the streets. By the middle of February, tens of thousands of protesters were assembling each day in Hledan, a busy commercial neighbourhood near Yangon University.
Ruth was among them. We’d
been in touch since the hours following the coup. She sent photos and videos of
the swelling crowds. In one image her white sneakered foot stamps on a poster
of the face of Min Aung Hlaing, the general behind the coup, taped to the
pavement for protesters to walk over. In another she holds up a placard with
the words #justiceformyanmar alongside an image of Aung San Suu Kyi, the
imprisoned NLD leader. “Young people will not be turning back,” she wrote in one
message.
The spokesperson for the
parallel government established by the parliamentarians deposed by the coup has
been a prominent Chin Christian doctor, Dr Sasa. At certain points protest signs
featuring his face seemed to eclipse those featuring Aung San Suu Kyi’s. In
late February Ruth posted an old photo of her with Dr Sasa, with the caption,
“May the Lord bless you and use you for our nation and His kingdom.” Dr Sasa’s
role has been particularly important to my Chin friends, accustomed, like other
ethnic minorities, to being treated like second class citizens, if citizens at
all, by a state whose leadership has been dominated by Burman Buddhists.
The literature on ethnicity
in Burma has often been in dialogue with Leach, for better and for worse. His
arguments in Political Systems are so well known to anthropologists that
they barely need repeating. His analysis of oscillations between political
categories—the hierarchical gumsa and the egalitarian gumlao—is
deployed to attack the equilibrium assumptions of his structural-functionalist
colleagues, and their allied tendency to treat ethnic groups as bounded units. Social
systems, Leach argues, do not correspond to reality. They are models used, by
the anthropologist and those they study, to “impose upon the facts a figment of
thought”.
Such models find their
clearest expression, for Leach, in myth and ritual, which present the social
order in its ideal form, conjuring it by acting “as if” it already existed. Such
a model, importantly, does not float freely from the messy world of social facts;
it “can never have an autonomy of its own” (1964: 14).
Critics of Leach have homed
in on his nonchalant confession, toward the end of the book, that he is
“frequently bored by the facts” (1964: 227). This attitude, they charge, means
that his analysis floats more than a little too freely. “[O]ne might with
justification,” write Mandy Sadan and Francois Robbine, “accuse Leach of
reducing the Kachin sphere to a kind of intellectual laboratory without any
expression in reality because of the way in which he moulded his case study to
a theory, rather than the other way round” (2007: 10-11).
I’m sure Graeber would
have dealt with these criticisms in his foreword, but less certain what he
would have said about them, or how his own view of the relationship between
facts and theory would have shaped his assessment. My main hunch, though, is
that Graeber would have devoted much of his foreword to what Leach tells us
about the “as if”—the otherwise glimpsed in ritual and myth but still tethered
to social action. Such an otherwise, the space of the immanent imagination,
drew Graeber’s attention throughout his anthropology, even when he wasn’t using
the term.
Consider his foreword to
another book, The Chimera Principle by Carlo Severi, which deals with
the relationship between ritual objects, memory, and the imagination. Graeber praises
the book for showing that “imagination is a social phenomenon, dialogic even, but
crucially one that typically works itself out through the mediation of objects
that are … to some degree unfinished, teasingly schematic in such a way as to,
almost perforce, mobilize the imaginative powers of the recipient to fill in
the blanks” (p. xv). When communicated in the subjunctive mood of myth or
ritual, such an imagination can, to use a term of which Graeber was fond, prefigure
realities to come.
The crackdown in Myanmar grew more brutal through March. Protesters like Ruth continued to be in the streets. By late February, we’d shifted our conversation from Facebook Messenger to Signal because of the safer encryption that app offered. Still, Ruth continued to post on Facebook, using a private VPN to access the site in the face of the junta’s effort to block it, and, periodically, the internet altogether. Her content grew more graphic. In early March she posted a widely circulated video of three paramedics being beaten by security forces. Videos of shootings followed daily. Posts were often accompanied by the slogan, “The revolution must succeed”.
It’s now been one year since the coup, and Myanmar’s revolution has continued to evolve. Just as the country ought to be considered world historical, so those involved in the uprising continue to make history, through their ongoing resistance amid a military assault that has been especially vicious in Chin State and other ethnic areas.
What would Graeber have
made of this unfolding revolution?
Unfolding is the operative term. “Every real society is a process in time,” Leach famously writes in the introduction to Political Systems. And, as Tambiah (2002: 443) suggests, there is much in Leach that resonates with—prefigures, perhaps—Fabian’s (1983) critique of anthropology’s routine “denial of coevalness.” There’s an irony, then, that many of the strongest critiques of the book focus on Leach’s elision of the historical circumstances in which his study occurred, something about which Graeber would have no doubt remarked, especially if his treatment of another major figure in British anthropology, Evans-Pritchard, is anything to go by.
There are certainly important
differences between Graeber and Leach, political and otherwise, but one other
thing they had in common is that they were not just prolific writers, but
prolific readers too. There’s been much said about the place of the imagination
in the writing of anthropology, but less, perhaps, about imagination’s role in
its reading. If all ethnography is “fiction”, as Leach claimed in one of his
final lectures, and even if it isn’t, what imaginative faculties are engaged in
reading it?
What modes of speculative reading do we pursue, though gaps, from afar, of Facebook posts, of texts that don’t, really, exist? In his foreword to Severi’s book, Graeber pushes against the “utopian ideal” of a text produced by a “single, unique” genius. Instead, he argues, “everything turns on a tacit complicity, whereby the author leaves the work, in effect, half-finished so as to ‘capture the imagination’ of the interpreter” (2015: xx-xxi).
How do we read with an imagination
that is a “social phenomenon, dialogic even,” one that works through the
mediation of things unfinished and incomplete?
Unfinished, unfolding, incomplete—like
Myanmar’s revolution. Ruth is also working in the presence of something that
doesn’t, really, exist, and didn’t even in the years of so-called transition: a
democratic Myanmar that is both politically—and, for her, spiritually—saved. But
in continuing to defy the military, just as she continued to evangelise in the
face of indifference, she and others act “as if” they live in a world not just where
“the revolution must succeed,” but in which it already has, and in imagining
that world, they work to bring it into being.
Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research
fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism in
the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.
Fuller, Chris and Jonathan Parry. 1989. “Petulant
Inconsistency? The Intellectual Achievement of Edmund Leach”. Anthropology
Today 5/3: 11-14.
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward
and Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New
York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David. 2007. Revolutions
in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. London:
Minor Compositions.
Graeber, David. 2014. “Anthropology and the rise of
the professional-managerial class”. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
4/3: 73–88.
Graeber, David. 2015. “Concerning Mental Pivots and
Civilizations of Memory.” Preface to The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology
of Memory and Imagination. Chicago: HAU Books.
Laidlaw,
James and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 2000. The Essential Edmund Leach, Volume 1.
Anthropology and Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Maran, La Raw. 2007. “On the continuing relevance of
E. R. Leach’s political systems of Highland Burma to Kachin studies”. In M.
Sadan and F. Robbine (eds.) Social Dynamics in the Highlands of South East
Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden:
Brill
Leach, Edmund. 1964
[1954]. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press.
Leach, Edmund.1984.
“Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology”. Annual
Review of Anthropology 13: 1-23.
Sadan, Mandy and Francois
Robbine (eds.) 2007. Social
Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems
of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden: Brill.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 2002. Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cite as: Edwards, Michael. 2022. “Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar.” FocaalBlog, 27 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/27/michael-edwards-graeber-leach-and-the-revolution-in-myanmar/
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his scholarly legacy is slowly emerging. I want to contribute to such a critical assessment of his oeuvre by concentrating on his book “Utopia of Rules” published in 2015. This assessment has resulted from my participation in the roundtable “On David Graeber’s Work: Potentialities for a Radical Leftist Anthropology” at the conference of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA) in Bremen on 28.9.2021, the stream of which can be watched on Facebook.
I propose
that a scholarly book can be evaluated according to three criteria:
Does it present new facts—that is, results
of research according to accepted research protocols, be they ethnographic or
others?
Does it engage with theory, and the
body of existing knowledge, in a novel way?
If that is not the case, does it
present new ideas, even if only in a more essayistic way, e.g. without the
necessity to give evidence; or does it present old ideas in a better way than
they have already been presented elsewhere.
Even if a
book is written for a larger audience, as this book clearly is, it should still
stand the test of at least one of these criteria. This is in fact in line with
what Graeber himself (in a highly unusual six-page response to a five-page
negative review of his book) demanded—i.e., that the book should be judged
“according to the actual arguments and the evidence assembled to support these
arguments” (Piliavsky 2017; Graeber 2017: 118). These criteria can be summed up
in the question of whether I would put the book, or parts of it, in a list of
core readings, say for a course on the anthropology of bureaucracy.
I will limit myself to the introduction to the book and the central essay on structural stupidity (ch. 1). The chapter – the only one with an anthropology pedigree – first came into being as the 2006 LSE Malinowski lecture under the title “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity” (https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos). Later, however, Graeber did not want the lecture to be cited any longer. He replaced it by the text “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture,” which he published in HAU (a journal that he co-edited) and which, in a strangely bureaucratic turn of phrase, he declared “the official one” (Graeber 2012: 105 fn. 1; https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau2.2.007). It finally turned into a 2015 book chapter. Each time the text became longer. I have found lots of praise of the book, but predominantly from outside anthropology (but see Piliavsky 2017) and mainly from journalists (see the praise page of the book).
The central
argument seems to be that the world is faced with an increasing
bureaucratisation whereby public and private bureaucracies, as well as
neoliberal capitalism melt into each other and form a total structure of
oppression and exploitation which furthermore relies on technology and sheer
physical violence. This over-bureaucratisation of the world stifles creativity
and imagination, in particular revolutionary imagination, so the left needs to
reflect on how to get out of this trap (which according to Graeber it has not
done, therefore the need for his intervention).
I say this “seems to be” the argument, as Graeber’s writing is not very structured. He writes more by way of analogy, and about whatever comes to his mind. His style of writing has been called “ruminative” by a reviewer; the author resembles a happy deer strolling across a sunny alpine meadow, picking a weed here, plucking a shamrock there, and then chewing the whole thing several times over. So, to give the reader a selection of topics touched upon: the two chapters jump from huge generalisations on « the » Germans, Americans, and British (p. 13), to Graeber’s experiences as a customer of an American bank (p. 15), student debt, again in the US (p. 23), chats with a World Bank economist at a conference (pp. 25-26) as well as with a British bank employee at another occasion (note 15 p. 231), newspaper opinion pieces which he presents as results of ethnographic research (p.22), the shape of bank buildings “when I was growing up” (p. 33), surprising but unsubstantiated references to Goethe as a supporter of Prussian bureaucracy (p. 39), similarities between refugees and female applicants to London music schools (p. 41), a visit to an occupied factory in Marseilles (p. 43), his mother’s death (pp. 45-50), problems of registering his car in New York (p. 48), to academics complaining about too much paperwork (pp. 53-54), why a thick description of a bureaucratic document is impossible (p. 52, but see Göpfert 2013), violence as the weapon of the stupid (p. 68), gender roles in American situation comedies of the 1950s (p. 69), stories about American teenagers that somebody told him but he doesn’t remember who it was (note 59 p. 242), to what a friend told him about degrees in library science (note 26 p. 233), what “most of us” think about the police (p. 73), to vampires (p. 77), Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (p. 78), and American prisons (p. 102).
Now my criterion
1: where is the evidence, and what about new knowledge? Graeber has a
remarkably cavalier use of what is habitually called evidence. I can only give
two examples here: In the beginning of the introduction, he claims that “we” (a
pronoun, like “us” and “ours”, he frequently uses but never defines) are
increasingly faced with paperwork. He then presents three graphs to prove his
point (pp. 4-5). At closer inspection, however, the graphs – presented without
any source – rather show how often “paperwork” or associated terms like
“performance review” have appeared in English language books over time, which
of course is different from the thesis it is supposed to illustrate, and rather
refutes his other thesis, that “nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy”
(p. 3). In fact, Graeber admits that he is purely “imagining” graph no. 2 (his
words, p. 4; see also p. 15) which supposedly shows that people spend ever more
time filling out forms. In any case, he has a penchant, throughout the text, for
terms like “apparently”, “I suppose”, “we all know that”, “most of us believe”,
“apparently”, the subjunctive form of the verb, and what “everybody knows” (p.
27).
Apart from
these imagined figures, Graeber’s main type of evidence are personal anecdotes,
which for him apparently assume the function of explanations. He starts off chapter
1 with the problems he had when, after a life mostly spent as a “bohemian
student” (p. 48), he was suddenly faced with different bureaucratic hiccups
when his mother had a stroke, the problems being caused by a particularly
incompetent notary. Like this coming-of-age story, all the other anecdotes are also
taken from his immediate personal experience, almost exclusively concern the US
and the UK and not rarely relate to narcistic insults he suffered from some apparently
stupid bureaucrat who did not recognize his, Graeber’s, intelligence (e.g., p.
48, p. 64). In fact, he also has six pages on Madagascar where he essentially
says that outside the capital city, state bureaucracy is practically absent,
but then immediately nuances this statement with respect to schools (pp. 61-66;
one would wonder what this evaluation would say about health centres, for
example, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and more generally, also). As an
Africanist, that doesn’t surprise me (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1997),
but Graeber does not consider the fact that this widespread absence of state
bureaucracy in the highlands of Madagascar might in fact invalidate his general
thesis of total bureaucratization as a planetary phenomenon.
Image 1: A utopia of rules? The bureaucratic embeddedness of ethnographic research (Photo: Thomas Bierschenk, 2009)
What about criterion 2, the engagement with existing knowledge and theory? Graeber clearly is somebody who does not like reading but prefers writing up and sharing with the world whatever comes to his mind. In the introduction, he claims that despite the increasing importance of bureaucracy, nobody is interested in analysing it, so that is why he must do it. This sounds a bit overly self-confident, as there is a huge body of social-science literature on bureaucracy and organisation since the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in sociology, but from the 1980s increasingly also in anthropology (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2021). Graeber simply does not know this literature. And when, here and there, he does mention selected topical works, he does not engage with them (e.g. note 44 p. 238).
What about
theory? The book cover claims that we are faced with “a powerful work of social
theory in the traditions of Foucault and Marx”. This might be discounted as
commercial overselling but then Graeber himself sees his book as “an exercise
in social theory” (p. 75). However, throughout the book, he is very eclectic in
his theoretical references. He likes neither Weber nor Foucault, but dislikes Foucault
more than Weber, and sees both as intellectual frontmen of neoliberal
bureaucratic capitalism, in passages on the history of ideas, which he himself qualifies
as “caricaturish” (p. 57). On the other hand, and surprisingly, Graeber likes Lévi-Strauss,
and structuralism in general (pp. 76 seq.). As for Marx, he prefers to lie low,
but stresses repeatedly that he was a man of his times (e.g., p. 88). Many of
his renderings of theorists, say Weber, appear somewhat crude to the educated
reader, if not outright wrong. In the passages where that is the case, and when
you turn to the footnotes, you are then puzzled to read from Graeber’s pen a
sentence like: “I am aware this (i.e., his own [Graeber’s] claim about Weber in
the main text, p. 74) is not really what Weber said.” (fn. 64 p. 243). Elsewhere,
he admits that his reflections are not new but have already been formulated
somewhere else, and possibly better (e.g., by feminist standpoint theory or
critical race theory, p. 68). But he admits to this only in passing and shares
his inspirations with the reader anyway. It is also interesting to reflect upon
what social theory Graeber leaves out. To name only a few authors who
immediately come to my mind as they clearly resonate with Graeber’s concerns
but are absent from his book: Hegel’s and Sartre’s theorem on the dialectics of
the master-servant relationship, Gramsci’s writings on hegemony, the whole
Frankfurt school of critical theory, and in particular Herbert Marcuse’s
One-dimensional Man, or the sociology of critique of Boltanski. So, in sum, the
happy ruminator, in this book, has confidently waded into areas where he didn’t
have many bearings, and not surprisingly, he got lost.
I do not think I need to dwell much on criterion 3 as the reader will not be surprised by my negative answer. One could ask why, after all, the book has been rather successful even if much less successful than the Debt book (Graeber 2011). I have two answers to that, one of which I will present later. My main charge against the book is that it essentially confirms middle-class readers and fellow academics from the Global North, in particular the Anglo world, in their clichés about and grudges against bureaucracy. In fact, in Germany which remained rather untouched by the hype around Graeber, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), a left-wing daily, titled its review of the book “cliché as scholarship” (Klischee als Wissenschaft) and notes the author’s “love of the commonplace” (Walter 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/). It is true that there are interesting ideas in the book, which are not, however, developed (for example, was Foucault a neoliberal thinker? In fact, I wonder if Graeber is not a neoliberal thinker himself.). Other propositions are pure reinventions of the wheel. How many books and articles have been written about the bureaucratisation of the world? (See for example the solidly researched Hibou 2015). Other statements are truisms, like that all banks are regulated (p. 16) or commonplaces like “most human relations … are extremely complicated” (p. 58). Again others are outright wrong. All this is woven into a text with no discernible structure, and basically from a perspective, which implicitly makes the claim that a middle-class perspective from the Anglo-academic world describes the global default situation.
In sum, I
would not give the book to anthropology undergraduates to read. It would be
embarrassing if they got the impression that this is what anthropology is about,
and it would be wasting their time. Anthropology is, I propose, about creating
new, and preferably counterintuitive knowledge. It is about discovering the
unknown, putting question marks behind common sense, and not about confirming
what “we” anyway believe we know. The book may have clicked with many people
because it resonates with widespread uneasy feelings especially among fellow
academics that “we” are wasting our time in meetings and with paperwork.
However, that a book confirms common sense is certainly not a sufficient
criterion for its scientific quality.
We should
realize (Graeber does not) that criticism of bureaucracy is as old as bureaucracy
itself; since its invention in 18th century France, it has been
criticised from the left (not acknowledged by Graeber), but more prominently
from the right (Fusco et al. 1992). This criticism from the right came in two
kinds, and not just one, as Graeber claims: there was and is indeed the
bourgeois right which is concerned with red tape over-regulating the market and
thereby diminishing profits. But there also have been aristocratic critics who were
more concerned about being restricted by rules, rules which may be appropriate
for the lower classes, but which inhibit the freedom of the gentleman to do
whatever he pleases. Graeber’s critique is dangerously close to the latter
position; as he admits himself in passing, it is a critique from the
positionality of somebody who likes to see himself as a bohemian.
Which brings me to Graeber’s theory of revolution, as far as it can be ascertained from this book. Graeber is an anthropologist who is not only interested in what is, but also how to make the world a better place “without states and capitalism” (p. 97). In other words, he aims at an emancipatory theory of revolution. The classic model here is Marx, who analysed not only the way capitalism functioned – after having spent years in the British library reading the whole body of political economy of his time – but also the internal contradictions of capitalism, which in the long run would lead to its transformation, and, most relevant for the point I want to make, which the social actors were best positioned to bring about these transformations. Graeber is silent, at least in this book, on the first point (the transformational dynamics of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism) and very short on the second (the social carriers of revolution). He only speaks of “social revolutionaries” who profess immanent—i.e., practically grounded—conceptions of utopianism, and who act “as if they are already free“, in alliance with avantgarde artists (p. 89, 97). There is nothing about the class positions of these revolutionaries. Who are they? US-American and European anthropology students under the guidance of their enlightened teachers? Here, again, the figure of the bohemian lurks in the wings. Neither do we read much about realistic strategies, necessary for any successful revolution, of how to seize the masses, to paraphrase Marx (“The weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons; material violence must be overthrown by material violence; theory alone also becomes material violence as soon as it seizes the masses”, Marx 1843/44, p. 385). The catchy phrase “we are the 99 percent,” which Graeber is often said to have coined (regarding whether that is true or not, see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html), is not very helpful in this respect. It is pure populism, coupled with a nostalgic over-reading of the impact of the global justice movement of his youth.
Finally, I want to come back to why the book has sold well. I think the cover explains that. I have already referred to the über-promotion on the back cover, while on the front cover, Graeber is presented as the author of a previous, highly successful book. As Wikipedia explains, after the success of the previous book (Graeber 2011), the same editor quickly entered into a new contract with the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules; see also Walther 2016). Obviously, both the commercial editor and author were trying to capitalize on Graeber’s acquired reputation and his having “captivated a cult following” (Roberts 2020). The mechanism is well known, and thereby the book is a very good example of the capitalist economics of reputation, which govern the academic book market and which function according to a winner-takes-all logic (similar to international soccer, social media, and investment banking). The expression of this logic is the star cult, which in the academic world takes the form of the cult of the genius, and it explains how an altogether, from a scholarly perspective, bad book becomes a required citation. One may detect a slight contraction here between the anti-capitalist substance of the book and its capitalist form. So, while I do not recommend the book for an undergraduate course on the anthropology of bureaucracy, it would make fascinating case material for a postgraduate course on the political economy of the academic world.
Thomas Bierschenk is professor emeritus at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz/Germany. He has worked on development, the state, bureaucracy, and the police in Oman, Central and West Africa, as well as Germany, and has co-edited, together with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill 2014). More about his work at: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/prof-dr-thomas-bierschenk/
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.
This post is part of a series on the Latin American pink tide, moderated and edited by Massimiliano Mollona (Goldsmiths, University of London).
After heading the pink tide in Latin America, the Bolivarian government in Venezuela has most recently experienced significant challenges (Bolton 2016). With oil prices sinking, inflation skyrocketing, and consumption goods chains being blocked by commercial networks sympathetic of the opposition, the government has started losing support in its base. Gloating over power cuts and “food shortages”—or more accurately, deficits of certain consumables—opposition-supporting international and Venezuelan private media are hysterically preparing for a pyrrhic victory of the free market over socialism. Scandalized by ever-stronger reactions against Dilma Rouseff’s presidency in Brazil, Venezuelan government supporters home and abroad take an ever more defensive stance shielding the government from internal and external critique alike. Continue reading →
This post is part of a series on the Latin American pink tide, moderated and edited by Massimiliano Mollona (Goldsmiths, University of London).
Does Obama’s visit herald the end of the Cuban Revolution? On Thursday, 18 December 2014, I received an urgent WhatsApp message from a Cuban friend, who was then in Spain with his Spanish girlfriend.[1]
“Pon CNN ahora mismo! Se acaba el bloqueo.” (Turn on CNN now! The blockade is over.)
Contrary to widespread opinion, Richard Wagner started off his career as the most revolutionary composer of the nineteenth century, not just in a musical sense but also in a more straightforwardly political manner. Contemporary obsession with alleged anti-Semitism in his dramatic works, aided and abetted by the de facto prohibition upon their performance in Israel, has tended to drown out all other controversy, of which there should be more, not less, both in quantity and in quality. Continue reading →
On 11 February 2011 I stood in Tahrir Square surrounded by millions celebrating the toppling of Mubarak following eighteen solid days of battle. Around me were people from all walks of life: Saʿidis (“Southerners”) who came all the way from villages in the south, street children turned rebels, family members of martyrs who were killed during the eighteen days, leftist feminist women, members from the Muslim Brotherhood—you name it. In between the shoving of the crowd and the incipient boredom with the monotony of the celebrations and the exuberating vibes, the chants were pretty standard: “down down with Mubarak,” “the people have toppled the regime,” and, from the more religious, “God has toppled the regime.” Continue reading →
The June 2013 revolution that shook Brazil last year took everybody by surprise. It started in Sao Paulo as a small gathering against a looming rise in the cost of public transport, and in two weeks it spread to 400 cities and towns, bringing millions of people (6 percent of the national population) to the streets and forcing President Dilma Rousseff to start a process of constitutional reform. For many political observers, this “movement of movements” was a labor movement, which brought together diverse forces of labor—the kind of Latin American “bricolage” socialist movements described by Göran Therborn (2012).1 But, are these bricolaged, working-class formations—to use the expression of Van der Linden—“atypical”? Atypical in relation to what? Are they not part of the same tradition of working-class “communing” described by Susser (2013) and Kalb (2014) for the United States and Europe? Contemporary urban struggles are complex and complicate traditional, factory-based, approaches to class. Below, I describe and analyze the struggles that took place in Rio de Janeiro in the summer 2013 and offer some ideas on how anthropology, geography, and political economy can be put in dialogue for a contemporary class analysis.2
Introduction With the rise of the Islamic State—ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah (“Da’ish”)—senior figures in the American and British establishment reportedly considered working with the Syrian government to “fight this threat.” As of 23 September 2014, such debates are academic—US bombs are falling over Aleppo and Raqqa. It’s unknown if the regime clandestinely offered its approval; what we do know is that—aside from stressing the need to respect international law, to cooperate with the Iraqi government, and to protect the lives of civilians—no official condemnation has been issued.1 In one year we’ve transitioned from debating strikes against the Syrian regime to a Western-led alliance now bombing the regime’s enemies. To some this might appear surprising, but for many opposition fighters engaged in the revolutionary struggle, these events were a long time coming. This post2 tries to explain why. Continue reading →
